Warsaw will come to a standstill at 5pm on Thursday – the so-called W-Hour – as wailing sirens across the Polish capital recall the start of the largest revolt against Nazi occupation.
On August 1st, 1944, a 50,000-strong underground Home Army launched a surprise attack that sparked civilian hopes that five years of Nazi rule was ending.
But after 63 days of bloody street battles that left about 50,000 dead and injured, the rising was crushed. In retaliation, the Nazis first expelled Warsaw’s remaining 500,000 residents and then levelled 80 per cent of the city as they retreated. In total, about 180,000 Warsaw civilians died in German mass executions and bombings. By May 1945, Warsaw, once a thriving metropolis of some 1.3 million people, was a ruined home to fewer than 1,000 people.
Like the revolt a year earlier in the Warsaw Ghetto, the 1944 Warsaw Uprising remains a proud touchstone of Polish cultural memory – and its anniversary a bellwether of relations with its German neighbours.
Former president Lech Walesa broke a taboo in 1994 by inviting his German counterpart Roman Herzog to speak at the 50th anniversary ceremonies. That started a fresh reconciliation push between the two countries.
By contrast, the last decade was often a tense time for bilateral relations, with a steady stream of recriminations from Warsaw’s national conservative government. It was voted out of power last autumn by Poles who now are following closely the visit of German president Frank Walter Steinmeier.
After meeting the last uprising survivors on Wednesday afternoon, Steinmeier said his country “must not and will not forget what immeasurable suffering we Germans inflicted on our neighbouring country”.
“Even today, as I know, the suffering and the grief live on in the memories of many families here in Poland,” he said in an official address at the striking Warsaw Uprising monument.
More than conciliatory words, however, many Poles want the German president to make concrete announcements: on new historical projects and additional compensation for remaining wartime survivors.
Last month in Warsaw, German chancellor Olaf Scholz insisted that “we Germans are aware of our guilt and responsibility for the millions of victims of the German occupation”. A representative survey published last January by the Polish Institute of International Affairs suggests otherwise.
In the survey of 2,073 Germans, just one in five guessed correctly Poland’s wartime death toll of more than five million people. The most common guess: one million.
The same survey showed that one-third of Germans either do not know who started the second World War – Nazi Germany, invading Poland on September 1st, 1939 – or think other nations were involved.
Finally, while three-quarters were aware of the previous Polish government’s demands for compensation, only 8 per cent of Germans surveyed viewed the claim as justified.
That was a nod to a 2022 diplomatic note, signed by Poland’s ex-foreign minister Zbignew Rau, demanding €1.3 trillion in wartime reparations.
Berlin dismissed the note, saying all such legal claims had been settled. First in 1953, when Poland’s postwar socialist government relinquished all claims to war reparations. And again in 1990 as part of the Two-plus-Four Treaty allowing for German unification.
The former Law and Justice (PiS) government insisted the issue was not settled. Warsaw was not able to negotiate on its own behalf in the past, its officials said, in particular because of postwar pressure from the Soviet Union.
The new Polish administration has softened that official line and, last month, prime minister Donald Tusk conceded that the reparations issue “has been addressed in a legal sense, in [various] decisions and government treaties”.
Behind the scenes, however, Polish officials continue to push for greater engagement from Germany on preserving historical memory of the period.
Germany has already agreed to erect a monument in Berlin commemorating Polish victims of the Nazi occupation as well as the establishment of a Polish-German house of memory. But details remain as scant here as on promises of additional financial support for war survivors, many of whom live in poverty.
Steinmeier is likely to be pressed to offer more detail on Thursday when he meets his Polish counterpart.
President Andrzej Duda is the last remaining representative of Poland’s former national conservative administration and, in front of his German visitor, is likely to dispute Tusk’s decision to drop the reparations claim.
[ Political tensions overshadow Warsaw Ghetto anniversary ceremonyOpens in new window ]
On Wednesday Duda said the Warsaw Uprising was “one of the fundamental milestones of our freedom and independence and… something that has probably never happened before in history”.
In Poland, where the battle for historical memory is always emotional and often politicised, remaining survivors warned their politicians on Wednesday not to hijack what is likely their last major anniversary.
“The value of the Warsaw Uprising is to show heroism but we need to be careful,” said Andrzej Frydryszak, now 96, who was a 16-year-old Home Army veteran. “We must be careful not to go too far, not to make a patriotic theatre out of this… instead young people need to be shown the possibilities free Europe gives.”
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