Monument to Victims of the Wola Massacre

Pomnik Ofiar Rzezi Woli

Poland had been under German and Soviet occupation since September 1939. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, eastern Poland was also occupied by the National Socialists. Years of brutal oppression followed. On 1 August 1944, the Polish Home Army (Polish: Armia Krajowa) rose up against the German occupiers in the Warsaw Uprising. SS and police units attempted to crush the uprising, in particular by massacring the civilian population. More than 50,000 people were killed in the Wola district between 5 and 12 August 1944. In terms of the number of victims, the massacre was the largest war crime committed on European soil during the Second World War. Nevertheless, the crime is hardly known outside Poland. The Monument to the Victims of the Wola Massacre was erected in 2004 to commemorate the murdered inhabitants of the district.

History

The Polish capital Warsaw was attacked by the German Luftwaffe on 1 September 1939, the first day of the Second World War. After a three-week siege, the city was captured by the Wehrmacht on 1 October. As a result, the National Socialists established a regime of terror against the Polish population. The Jews, who were imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto from 1940, were hit even harder. On 19 April 1943, they fought back in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. However, the uprising failed and the Jewish quarter of Warsaw was razed to the ground. Only a fraction of the city's Jewish population survived the German occupation and the systematic extermination.

A year later, on 1 August 1944, the Polish Home Army rose up against the German occupiers. They tried to liberate the city themselves before the Red Army marched in. After fierce house-to-house fighting, the Polish units took control of important parts of the city in the first few days. However, the Germans quickly gained the military upper hand and in the weeks that followed, SS and police units carried out countless massacres of the civilian population.

Shortly after the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising, Heinrich Himmler gave the order to storm the Wola district, which was occupied by Polish units. The »Kampfgruppe Reinefarth«, which was made up of SS units and divisions of the order police, was tasked with this. In the course of the fighting, the German units carried out numerous mass shootings of the population in addition to brutal assaults. Between 5 and 7 August, the Germans murdered around 30,000 Polish civilians. By 12 August 1944, it is estimated that up to 50,000 inhabitants of Wola had lost their lives.

Warsaw, 1944, Members of the Waffen-SS in a urban battle, Wikimedia Commons / Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-R97906 / Schremmer / CC-BY-SA 3.0

Warsaw, 1944, Polish civilians murdered by the Germans, Wikimedia Commons

Victims

In the seven days between 5 and 12 August 1944, German units murdered more than 50,000 inhabitants of the Warsaw district of Wola. By far the majority of the victims were civilians.

The Second World War began in September 1939 with the invasion of Poland and the occupation of the west of the country by German troops and the east of the country by the Red Army. Persecution and terror directly followed the invasion in both parts of the country. German units massacred members of the intelligentsia, Jewish and non-Jewish civilians as well as hospital patients. At the end of 1939 the German administration established ghettos where the Jewish population was forced to live in cramped and horrendous conditions. Following the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, eastern Poland also fell under German control. SS Einsatzgruppen started to systematically murder Jewish men, later also women and children. In autumn 1941, local German authorities in the former west of the country began to prepare for the mass murder of Jewish ghetto prisoners using poison gas. By 1945, some three million Polish Jews had been murdered in the extermination camps at Chelmno, Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek or Auschwitz, starved to death in the ghettos or shot dead. In 1943 the Jews living in the Warsaw ghetto staged an uprising, which was brutally crushed by the SS. Polish soldiers fought with the Allies on all fronts during the Second World War. Polish partisan groups, including the patriotic »Armia Krajowa« (Home Army), formed the largest resistance movement in occupied Europe. August 1, 1944 saw the start of the Warsaw Uprising, the most extensive civilian campaign against the Germans in occupied Europe. It failed also because the Red Army, already standing on the opposite side of the Vistula River, chose not to intervene. It is estimated that up to 250,000 people lost their lives in the uprising. A total of around three million non-Jewish Poles met a violent death during the German occupation. Once the Red Army had arrived on (East) Polish soil in January 1944, the troops of the Armia Krajowa were stripped of their weapons by the Soviet secret service and the officers were either shot or deported. The millions of deaths during the occupation, the permanent Soviet annexation of eastern Poland, the incorporation of former eastern German territories and the ensuing population transfers all left a traumatic political and social legacy in Poland. Remembrance of the murder of European Jews in German extermination camps was initially marginalised in the Polish culture of memory. Although Auschwitz soon became an international symbol of the Holocaust, in Poland it was viewed for decades above all as a »site of Polish martyrdom«. However, the start of the 21st century brought about changes in this respect, due in part to the fierce debates over the Jedwabne massacre in eastern Poland. The massacre of around 340 Jews on July 10, 1941 was originally attributed to the »Gestapo and Hitler police« but had in fact been carried out by Polish »neighbours« without orders from the Germans. Debates in Poland and abroad on Polish perpetration resulted in the Polish President Aleksander Kwaśniewski (*1954) issuing an apology to the victims in 2001. There were increasing calls from experts, such as those from Poland’s Institute for National Remembrance, for the country to confront the most difficult chapters in its history, which also include the anti-Jewish pogroms in 1946-47 and state anti-semitism in communist Poland during the post-war period. The Polish invests extensively in memorial culture, including grand projects with international ambition. The Warsaw Rising Museum was opened already in 2004. The POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews was opened in 2013 on the territory of the former Warsaw Ghetto, a new museum dedicated specifically to the Warsaw Ghetto will follow suit in 2024. Since 2017, there is a major Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk. Since the turn of the millennium, the sites of the former German extermination camps have also been converted into modern memorial sites. An ever-growing preoccupation with Poland’s Jewish and multicultural heritage can be observed in the field of culture as well.

Remembrance

The commemoration of the victims of the Wola massacre was suppressed by Poland's post-war Communist regime, as was the entire memory of the Warsaw Uprising. Although the »Warsaw Insurgents Cemetery« was established in the Wola district a few months after the end of the war, the cemetery was hardly maintained by the regime and all symbols commemorating the uprising were removed. It was not until 2023 that a new memorial with a wall bearing the names of the identified victims was inaugurated on the site of the cemetery.

The only widespread form of commemoration of the victims of the German occupation in Warsaw in communist Poland were the so-called »Tchorek memorial plaques«. Designed in 1949 by the Polish sculptor Karol Tchorek (1904–1985), they are made of sandstone and can be found in many places in Warsaw. They always bear an inscription in front of a Maltese cross with the number of those murdered at the respective location. There are also many of these memorial plaques in Wola, but they often contain incorrect information and do not adequately record the total number of execution sites.

The most important memorial to the victims of the Wola Massacre was unveiled on 27 November 2004 on a small square between Aleja Solidarności and Ulica Leszno. This place is not directly connected to the massacre. The monument was designed by the sculptor Richard Stryjecki in collaboration with the architect Olaf Chmielewski and the sculptor Mieczyslaw Syposz and is made of Finnish granite. On the east side of the memorial, ten pits are set into the granite surface, reminiscent of the silhouettes of people who were placed against a wall to be shot. Above them is the inscription: »In memory of the 50,000 inhabitants of Wola who were murdered by the Germans during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944«. On the west side is a list of places with the number of people murdered there.

Warsaw, 2015, The back of the monument, Wikimedia Commons / Adrian Grycuk

Warsaw, 2019, Commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the Wola massacre, Wikimedia Commons / Adrian Grycuk

Contact

al. „Solidarności” 98
01-016 Warszawa

Warsaw, 2011, Memorial plaque in front of the monument, Wikimedia Commons / Szczebrzeszynski

Warsaw, 2010, The Monument to the Victims of the Wola Massacre, Wikimedia Commons / Szczebrzeszynski

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