Warsaw Rising Museum

Muzeum Powstania Warszawskiego

On August 1, 1944, the Polish resistance Armia Krajowa (AK, Home Army) launched an uprising against the German occupation in the Polish capital of Warsaw. The uprising was suppressed by SS units after 63 days and much of the city was systematically destroyed. In 2004, the Warsaw Rising Museum (Polish: Muzeum Powstania Warszawskiego) was opened; it commemorates the uprising and the victims.

History

At the beginning of World War II, Poland was attacked from two sides. After the victory of the German Wehrmacht in the autumn of 1939, Poland's western territories were incorporated into the German Reich and large parts of the population were expelled to the German occupied »Generalgouvernement«; political opponents were arrested and murdered, and hundreds of thousands were deported and deployed in forced labour. At the same time, the Red Army occupied large parts of eastern Poland in accordance with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Under Soviet occupation the Polish population was expropriated, hundreds of thousands were deported and Polish officers, policemen and intellectuals were murdered. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, these territories too fell under German occupation.
Hundreds of civilian and military underground organisations were established under the occupation – most of them were connected to the Polish government in exile in London. The military underground, united in the Armia Krajowa (AK, Home Army) in February 1942, was the largest in Europe.
At the end of July 1944, the Red Army reached Warsaw. The AK leadership wanted to liberate the capital on their own before the arrival of the Red Army in order to legitimise establishing a Polish state which would be independent of the Soviet Union. When the uprising was launched in August 1, 1944, the approximately 36,000 poorly armed insurgents took hold of large parts of the city. However, the SS troops were able to regain strategically significant districts, finally suppressing the uprising two months later. The city was subsequently destroyed on the orders of Heinrich Himmler. The Red Army did not extend any help to the struggling insurgents, even though they would have been able to. Weakening the Polish underground made it possible for Stalin to install the communist-dominated Lublin Committee, which had been founded in July 1944, as the Polish provisional government in January 1, 1945.

Warsaw, 2007, Reconstruction of a sewer canal to illustrate the flight of the insurgents, Muzeum Powstania Warszawskiego, Julia Sielicka-Jastrzębska

Warsaw, 2007, View of the exhibition, Muzeum Powstania Warszawskiego, Julia Sielicka-Jastrzębska

Victims

About 15,000 AK soldiers, including 2,000 women, were taken into German captivity after the insurgents surrendered on October 2, 1944. In total, at least 16,000 insurgents died in action, and about 150,000 civilians, among them many youths, perished. The SS carried out mass shootings, particularly in the first days of the uprising; approximately 40,000 fell victim to these killing operations. About 100,000 survivors were deported to the German Reich and deployed in forced labour, hundreds of thousands were expelled from the city. About 500,000 residents were forcibly evacuated from the city via the Pruszków transit camp near Warsaw. Some 60,000 Poles were deported to various concentration camps. Warsaw was almost completely empty when SS units destroyed the city's houses and streets, one after the other.

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

Poland became a communist dictatorship in the Soviet sphere of influence after the Second World War. The state discourse on history underlined the suffering under the German occupation, while the Soviet occupation was celebrated as a »liberation«. The symbol of the AK, an anchor combining the letters P and W which stood for »fighting Poland« (Polish: Polska Walcząca), was forbidden in post-war Poland. The communist government couldn't keep silent about the actual uprising simply because the destroyed city landscape was a constant reminder of the failed uprising. What's more, residents of Warsaw commemorated victims by laying down flowers, candles and memorial plaques on execution sites. The government, however, refused to erect an official monument.
The opposition, which grew in strength from the 1970s on and whose struggle in the 1980s brought about the transformation of 1989, wanted to address and deal with the complicity of the Soviets in the failure of the uprising. The foundation stone for the Memorial of the Warsaw Uprising was laid down in 1984. It is located on the site of the former entrance to the sewer system through which many insurgents and civilians fled. The idea of establishing a museum came about in the 1980s. In 1994, the foundation stone for an independent museum building was laid down, but its construction was halted due to unsolved property issues. In 2002, when future President Lech Kaczyński became mayor of Warsaw, he initiated building the museum at a different site. On July 31, 2004, one day before the 60th anniversary of the uprising, the museum was opened in a former street car power station. The exhibition, which covers 3,000 square metres, deals with the occupation, the uprising, insurgents' stories and civil involvement. The post-war fate of the survivors in communist Poland is also touched upon.

Warsaw, undated, Historical postcard of Warsaw, Stiftung Denkmal

Possibilities

Permanent exhibition, video archive with testimonies of former fighters, educational workshops, guided tours, lecture series, festivals, conferences

Open

Wednesday to Monday 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Closed on Tuesdays

Contact

http://www.1944.pl/

biuro@1944.pl

+48 22 539 79 05

Ul. Grzybowska 79
00-844 Warszawa

Warsaw, 2008, The Warsaw Rising Museum with the symbol of the AK, Roman Gładysz

Warsaw, 2006, A 156 metre long memorial wall with the names of insurgents who died in action, Museum Powstania Warszaskiego, Julia Sielicka-Jastrzębska

Warsaw, 1944, Polish fighters during the Warsaw Uprising, Yad Vashem

Warsaw, 2007, Museum building, Muzeum Powstania Warszawskiego, Julia Sielicka-Jastrzębska

Warsaw, 2013, View of the exhibition, Stiftung Denkmal

Warsaw, 2013, Large-sized colour pictures in the museum's garden, Stiftung Denkmal

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