In just two months, 200,000 Warsaw citizens were dead

The carnage that followed the doomed Warsaw Uprising of 1944 raises the question what was it all for — and who was responsible for its failure, writes Geoffrey Roberts.

THE controversial drama of the Warsaw Uprising and the unbridled brutality of the Nazi response keep alive memories of this tragic event during the Second World War. In August 1944 the Polish Home Army (the AK) rose in revolt against the Nazi occupation of Poland’s capital. In two months of ferocious fighting, 200,000 citizens of Warsaw were killed and a quarter of the city was destroyed. Not since Stalingrad had the Germans experienced urban warfare of this intensity and they would not do so again until the Red Army stormed Berlin in April 1945.

When the AK finally surrendered on October 2, the Germans razed the Polish capital to the ground and expelled 800,000 civilian survivors. Many were to end up in Auschwitz, while others were shipped to Germany as slave labourers. The epic battle was immortalised by Polish director Andrzej Waida’s award-winning 1956 film Kanal, which memorably depicted an AK’s unit’s attempt to escape from the German onslaught through the city’s sewers.