Dimitri’s Reviews > Warsaw 1944: The Fateful Uprising > Status Update

Quote: "The beauty built up through centuries of Polish history was burning to ashes before our bloodshot eyes... the slenderness of the 14th century Cathedral of St. John... and the polychrome of the Ancient Market place...I cried in helpless rage."

Anecdote: on 28 August 2012 a gigantic shell was found in a construction site in central Warsaw. A 'large chunk of the city' was evacuated as it was carefully disarmed. It was the shell from a Karl Mörser Gerät, a weapon which still has the power to terrorize nearly 70 years on.

One gruesome feature of the cemetery fight at Wola was the impossibility to move unseen through the sewers, a common tactic dating back to Stalingrad. These were impassibly filled up with the corpses of the former inhabitants of the nearby Jewish Ghetto who had fought to the death the previous year.

Life in the Old Town continued as before, an incredulous feature of the whole Uprising that baffled refugees from Wola & Ochota.
Allied drops from Brindisi 1300 km away because Stalin withheld the use of Soviet territory, were but a drop in the sea for the underequipped AK.
With the governor in the palaca besieged, Dirlewanger & the SS pushed on through the old Wola cemeteries by 10 August.

Postscript on the Kaminski's Roma Brigade: the titular commander himself was executed, most of his men were wiped out in a large AK attack on the outskirts of town and the survivors were welcomed with open gulags after the war.

8 days of static plunder left RONA with a large number of civilians on their hands.The establishment of a literal concentration camp in the Zieleniak Market can be seen as an early symptom of a shift in German policy. Notwithstanding Hitler's apocalyptic Warsaw Order or Erich Von Dem Bach's humanitarian defence at Nuremberg, bitter experience had shown it was infeasible to dispose of an entire city population.

The Kaminski unleashed its own orgy of violence on the fashionable Ochota district, with an outspoken taste for alcohol & loot that did much to slow its progress towards the nearest Poniatowski bridge to a crawl, much to the displeasure of the Waffen SS command which had to use the regular Galacia Division to storm the AK redoubts at Kalinska and Wawelska.

The Kaminski or RONA brigade of Slav collaborators had by contrast graduated cum laude against Soviet partisans on the territory occupied by Army Group Centre, escaping the wrath of Bagration around Minsk in the nick of time, to be incorporated into the Waffen SS.

It's a small comfort that in its clashes with AK strongholds, the Dirlewanger brigade had to replenish 2712 casualties of its own, with often reluctant replacements, who hadn't been through the brutal Banditenkrieg school but were kept in line by the threat of exemplary execution.

"But the most terrible proof [of the Wola district massacre by the Nazis] lies in the mosaleum in Sowinski Park , where 1120 kg of human ash are buried. All that remains of the more than 40.000 people killed in that area in the first week of August 1944"

Mental note: see on next visit...