The Uprising after the fall of the Old Town

Five weeks after the outbreak of the Uprising, Warsaw was still fighting, but it was now a different fight from the one in August. On 2 September the Germans took the Old Town, which for almost four weeks had tied down the main forces of SS-Gruppenführer Heinz Reinefarth’s battle group. The insurgents still held Śródmieście (the city centre), Powiśle, Czerniaków, Mokotów and Żoliborz – cut off from one another and crammed with hundreds of thousands of civilians. Colonel Adam Borkiewicz, one of the first historians of the Uprising, called the period from 3 September to the capitulation the “struggle for survival”. The first days of September brought the loss of Powiśle and the power station, the expulsion of the inhabitants of further districts, and the first talks about ending the fight. Just as the Home Army High Command was already considering capitulation, the Red Army launched an attack on Praga on 10 September.

Out through the sewers

In the last days of August the defence of the Old Town was reaching its limit. Group North under Colonel Karol Ziemski (“Wachnowski”) lost the State Securities Printing Works building and the ruins of the cathedral on 28 August, and during the night of 30–31 August an attempt to break through to Śródmieście across plac Bankowy and the Saxon Garden failed. The district, squeezed into a few hundred square metres of ruins, was bombed without respite by dive-bombers and shelled by heavy mortars. There was a shortage of ammunition, water, food and dressings for thousands of wounded.

On 1 September the command decided to evacuate through the sewers. From the evening of 1 September until the morning of 2 September some 4,500 people, mainly Home Army soldiers, made their way through the underground sewers to Śródmieście, and about 800 to Żoliborz, among them soldiers of the People’s Army and surviving members of the Jewish Combat Organisation. The passage – hours long, in darkness, waist-deep in sewage, beneath manholes into which the Germans dropped grenades – became one of the symbols of the Uprising. Left behind in the Old Town were some 2,500 seriously wounded men unable to make the journey through the sewers, some of the medical staff and about 35,000 civilians. The retreat was covered by the last units, including men of the “Wigry” and “Czata 49” battalions.

The massacre of the wounded on 2 September

On the morning of 2 September German aircraft dropped leaflets calling on the population to leave the district within two hours. Reinefarth’s units, including the regiment of Oskar Dirlewanger, which a month earlier had taken part in the Wola massacre, entered the Old Town cautiously, clashing with the last rearguards. According to the findings of the historian Antoni Przygoński (PL), some 1,500 wounded lay in the hospitals and dressing stations: the largest number, about 450, in the central insurgent hospital in the Raczyński Palace (PL) at ul. Długa 7, about 200 in St Hyacinth’s Church, about 150 at ul. Miodowa 23, and the rest in cellars on Podwale, Kilińskiego and Freta streets.

In several hospitals the first soldiers behaved relatively correctly, and some officers even promised food and dressings. Around midday the situation changed. Przygoński believed that the decision to kill the wounded was taken by Reinefarth, possibly in agreement with Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, who commanded the German forces in Warsaw. At Długa 7 the SS men ordered the staff and the walking wounded to leave within ten minutes, then killed the seriously wounded with grenades and machine-gun fire, and shot some of those led out in the courtyard and on the way to Castle Square. According to estimates cited in Polish literature, some 430 patients were killed in the hospital at Długa 7 alone. In the hospitals at Podwale 25 (“Pod Krzywą Latarnią” – “Under the Crooked Lantern”), Podwale 46 (“Czarny Łabędź” – “the Black Swan”) and Kilińskiego 1/3 the Germans set the buildings on fire, and the wounded were burned alive or shot as they tried to escape. Nurses were raped, and some of the staff were murdered. The exception was the hospital at Miodowa 23: according to survivors, the insurgents lying there were protected from execution by wounded German soldiers being treated in the same hospital, although during the expulsion the Germans shot four members of the staff – Greek Jews freed in August from the camp on ul. Gęsia.

The inhabitants driven out of the Old Town were “selected” along the way. By the defensive walls on Wąski Dunaj between 70 and 100 people, mainly wounded insurgents, were shot, and on Castle Square about 55. The total number of victims of the liquidation of the Old Town hospitals is estimated at nearly a thousand wounded prisoners and several thousand civilians; the highest estimates speak of 7,000 dead, more cautious ones, also adopted in general histories, of at least 3,000. The surviving population was marched through Wola to the transit camp at Pruszków (Dulag 121), from where men and women fit for work were sent to the Reich, and some to concentration camps.

The fall of Powiśle and the power station

After taking the Old Town, the German command made its most urgent task the recapture of the Vistula bank and the opening of a through route along Aleje Jerozolimskie. It feared that the Red Army, which had been standing on the approaches to Praga since August, would resume its offensive, and that insurgents on the river would make its crossing easier. The first target was Powiśle, defended by the Krybar Group (PL) and units of the Róg Group. On 3 September the district was smothered by artillery fire and bombs, and on 4 September the infantry attacked, supported by assault guns.

The same day the Luftwaffe bombed the Warsaw Power Station (PL) in Powiśle. Captured on 1 August mainly by its own workers, organised in underground platoons, it had supplied electricity to the insurgent-held part of the city for five weeks, though only one turbine set and two boilers were still running. The bombs destroyed the control room, the turbine hall and the boiler house; power generation could not be resumed. After heavy fighting, on 5 September the defenders withdrew from the power station up ul. Tamka, and on 6 September the units from Powiśle fell back to the line of Nowy Świat and joined the defenders of Śródmieście. The staff of the German Ninth Army reported that “every metre of ground had to be wrested” from a determined enemy. In captured Powiśle, as earlier in the Old Town, the Germans murdered some of the wounded in the insurgent dressing stations and shot civilians, and drove out the remaining inhabitants; the expulsion from the district went on until 9 September.

On 4 September bombs also fell on Śródmieście. Among the buildings destroyed were the Hotel Victoria, which housed the headquarters of the Home Army’s Warsaw District under Colonel Antoni Chruściel (“Monter”), and the printing works on ul. Szpitalna, where many insurgent papers were printed. For six days, from 5 to 10 September, the Germans attacked the trench across Aleje Jerozolimskie – the only link between the northern and southern parts of Śródmieście – but failed to cut it. Dirlewanger’s regiment, attacking along ul. Świętokrzyska, reached Bracka and Mazowiecka streets on 8 September, where it was stopped.

A city in the cellars

Śródmieście, to which the soldiers from the Old Town and Powiśle had come, was overcrowded. Alongside its own inhabitants it was packed with refugees from Wola, Ochota, the Old Town and Powiśle. Life went on in the cellars, linked by trenches and holes knocked through walls, because the streets were under fire from mortars and artillery and under air attack. After the destruction of the power station there was no electricity; the water mains had long since stopped working, and water was drawn from wells dug in the courtyards, with queues beside them. Food was running out: the staple became barley from the warehouses of the Haberbusch and Schiele brewery, from which a soup known as “spit soup” was cooked. The hospitals worked without medicines or dressings, and whole families perished under the rubble of their houses. Among the civilians, who for five weeks had borne the heaviest losses, weariness was growing, and attitudes towards the Uprising and its commanders were becoming increasingly divided.

The Home Army command and the underground civil authorities looked for ways to ease the inhabitants’ plight. Through the Polish Red Cross, ceasefires were agreed with the Germans during which civilians could cross to the German side. In this way, between 7 and 10 September, some 10,000 people left Śródmieście according to Polish sources, and as many as 30,000 according to German ones. Most were sent via Pruszków to forced labour in the Reich. On 8 September Heinrich Himmler ordered that only men who had fought with weapons in hand were to be sent to concentration camps, while those who had surrendered voluntarily with their families were to be sent to ordinary work in Germany. In practice, as historians of the expulsion have established, these guidelines were often bent to the detriment of those expelled.

The first talks about capitulation

After the fall of the Old Town and Powiśle, the Home Army High Command feared that the defence of Śródmieście would collapse. No help was arriving from outside: the supply drops from Italy were few and costly, and the Soviet Union was still refusing to let Western aircraft land on its airfields. On 1 September the Commander-in-Chief, General Kazimierz Sosnkowski, issued Order No. 19 to the soldiers of the Home Army, in which he sharply reproached the Allies for leaving Warsaw without help; the order, read out on the radio, provoked British outrage, and Prime Minister Stanisław Mikołajczyk demanded the general’s dismissal.

On 9 September envoys of General Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski, acting through the Red Cross, made contact with General Rohr, who commanded one of the German battle groups in the city, proposing talks on ending the fighting. The Home Army commander wanted combatant rights for his soldiers and protection for the civilian population. At that point, however, the situation changed. News arrived from London of a major American air operation being prepared over Warsaw, and on 10 September Joseph Stalin, after weeks of refusals, agreed that Allied aircraft could land in territory occupied by the Red Army. That same day troops of the 1st Belorussian Front attacked the German bridgehead in Praga, and the sound of artillery began to be heard from the right bank of the Vistula. On 11 September Bór-Komorowski broke off the talks with the Germans.

Place in the war

The first days of September closed the period in which the insurgents, though on the defensive, held extensive districts of Warsaw that mattered to the Germans. The loss of the Old Town and Powiśle cut them off almost entirely from the Vistula – apart from a narrow strip in Czerniaków – and from the bridges, while the destruction of the power station and the expulsion of tens of thousands of inhabitants showed that time was working in the Germans’ favour. The fall of the Old Town also brought another crime against the wounded and civilians, after those in Wola and Ochota, which went unpunished for many years after the war. Reinefarth was never convicted for it; after the war he was mayor of Westerland on the island of Sylt and a member of the Schleswig-Holstein state parliament.

The suspension of the capitulation talks on 11 September prolonged the fight by three weeks. On 14 September Soviet and Polish troops took Praga; from the night of 13–14 September Soviet aircraft appeared over the city dropping supplies; on 18 September a great formation of American bombers flew over Warsaw; and between 16 and 23 September soldiers of the Polish 1st Army crossed the Vistula to Czerniaków, Powiśle and Żoliborz. This help did not change the outcome of the Uprising. After the fall of Czerniaków, Mokotów and Żoliborz, Bór-Komorowski returned to talks with the Germans, and on 2 October an agreement on the cessation of hostilities in Warsaw was signed at Ożarów. The population of the capital was expelled, and over the following months the Germans systematically demolished the left-bank city, including the ruins of the Old Town. The Old Town, rebuilt after the war, was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1980.