At 5:00 PM on every August 1st, all of Warsaw comes to a standstill to remember the so-called “W Hour,” the start of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. It was the last act of Polish resistance against the German occupation of the country. The Red Army was already occupying the eastern part of Poland taken from the Germans and had reached the Vistula River, directly across from Warsaw. The fighters of the Armia Krajowa (AK – Polish Home Army), linked to the Polish government-in-exile, undertook actions against the German occupiers intended to demonstrate the Polish right to freedom and sovereignty: this was the so-called “Operation Tempest.” AK actions were carried out across several regions that were still occupied.

The Warsaw Uprising

The most significant act of struggle by the Poles for independence during World War II was the Warsaw Uprising, aimed at liberating the capital before the arrival of the Red Army. In this way, they sought to prevent Moscow from establishing the Soviet-imposed communist government in Warsaw.

Despite their numerical and material inferiority, the insurgents initially captured large areas of the city center and resisted the attacks. Fighting took place street by street, between buildings, basements, and the sewers beneath the city. Unfortunately, the air-dropped supply of arms and provisions provided by Allied aircraft was insufficient. Meanwhile, the Red Army stationed on the eastern bank of the Vistula did not intervene, waiting to occupy the Polish capital after the defeat of the insurgents. The resistance lasted sixty-three days, until October 2. In two months of heroic fighting, approximately 15,000 fighters died; the number of civilian deaths was estimated at 150,000; the survivors were expelled from the city.

Hitler’s Order: Annihilate the Polish Capital

For Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler, the Warsaw Uprising became the pretext to execute their plan for the total destruction of the Polish capital. Warsaw was to be demonstratively destroyed as a warning to all nations of occupied Europe. Hitler’s order entailed not only the reconquest of the city, but its complete annihilation. German troops were ordered to kill all inhabitants, take no prisoners, and raze the city to the ground.

General Erich von dem Bach was put in command of the entire operation. He arrived in Warsaw on August 5, 1944, and on the same day the Germans initiated the massacre in the district of Wola. During the massacre, which culminated between August 5 and 7, 1944, thousands of Polish men, women, and children—including patients and staff from three Wola hospitals—were killed in numerous mass and individual executions. Entire families were pulled from their homes and mowed down with machine-gun fire. Others were locked inside buildings and burned alive. Within three days, the death toll reached tens of thousands.

The massacre was accompanied by rapes, plundering, and arson. The total number of victims remains difficult to determine. In Polish historiography, estimates generally range between 30,000 and 65,000. Many scholars consider the Wola massacre to be the largest single massacre of civilians ever perpetrated in occupied Europe, as well as the greatest crime against the Polish nation in history.

The Unpunished Architects of the Civilian Extermination

Erich von dem Bach assumed command of all forces tasked with suppressing the uprising, including Heinz Reinefarth’s group, Oskar Dirlewanger’s units, the RONA brigade, and police and Wehrmacht units. Von dem Bach was no ordinary general. He was one of the architects of German terror in occupied Eastern Europe, a specialist in pacification, mass executions, and counter-insurgency. Over the years, he gained experience in operations against civilians using methods that, from a military standpoint, had nothing in common with conventional warfare. These were extermination operations.

Under von dem Bach’s command, Heinz Reinefarth and Oskar Dirlewanger created a terror machine whose objective was not to defeat the insurgents, but to physically exterminate the inhabitants of Warsaw.

As historians emphasize, Reinefarth (a lawyer and notary before the war) was held responsible for the actions of his units, having made no attempt to stop the killing of civilians. “I have less ammunition than prisoners”—this statement by Reinefarth during a conversation with General Nikolaus von Vormann bears witness to the scale of the crimes committed by the Germans against civilians, all of whom were meant to be eliminated.

However, the most brutal figure in this terror machine was a man feared even by some SS officers: Oskar Dirlewanger. He was a criminal and a rapist. In 1934, he was imprisoned for the rape of a thirteen-year-old girl and later deported to a concentration camp. But thanks to the intervention of one of Himmler’s closest associates, he regained his freedom. Dirlewanger proposed the creation of a special penal unit whose core would consist of murderers, rapists, repeat offenders, and prisoners convicted of the most serious crimes. His unit was synonymous with brutality and barbarism. Wherever Dirlewanger’s soldiers went, houses were burned, civilians were shot, and hospitals were destroyed. And this rapist and sadist, for his role in suppressing the Warsaw Uprising, was awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross.

What is most shocking, however, is that two of the three main individuals responsible for the massacres in Warsaw were never brought to trial for their crimes.

Von dem Bach was taken prisoner by the Allies, but he quickly realized he could use his knowledge as a bargaining chip. At the Nuremberg trials, he appeared as a prosecution witness against the top leadership of the Third Reich. In practice, this meant he was not extradited to Poland or the Soviet Union, despite being responsible for crimes committed in German-occupied territories, including Warsaw. Only many years later was he convicted by a West German court, but not for crimes committed against Poles. The convictions pertained to his participation in political murders committed before World War II, in the early 1930s. He died on March 8, 1972, in a prison hospital in Munich.

Reinefarth, on the other hand, was captured, but he claimed to the Allies that he had not joined the SS intentionally, but had been automatically accepted as a police officer. Furthermore, with the onset of the Cold War, the U.S. Military Intelligence Counterintelligence Corps was interested in prominent figures from the German Reich with experience in eastern territories, and Reinefarth was recruited as an informant and protected. He even managed to pass through the denazification process unscathed and was ultimately cleared of all charges, allowing him to return to practicing law and enter politics. He was elected mayor of Westerland and later a member of the state parliament of Schleswig-Holstein.

For years, legal proceedings against him were underway in the Federal Republic of Germany. But in the 1960s, the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising was classified in West Germany as a military event. Furthermore, when Reinefarth was asked about his actions during the suppression, he responded that he was merely doing his duty. In this way, he never paid for his crimes: he died in 1979.

Unlike Reinefarth and von dem Bach, Dirlewanger did not live long enough to see the end of the post-war period. After the capitulation of the Third Reich, he was arrested by French troops. A few days later, he died under mysterious circumstances in an Allied prisoner-of-war camp.

The fate of the “butchers” of Warsaw’s civilians shows that in the Federal Republic of Germany, the denazification process was never completed, and Hitler’s servants, including those responsible for heinous crimes, continued to live with impunity.

War Reparations Never Paid to Poland

The photographs of Warsaw—a European capital reduced to a desert of ruins by German troops after the uprising—stand as a symbol of the wounds inflicted on Poland by Germany during World War II. As a result of the German occupation, the country lost nearly 6 million citizens, more than half of whom were Polish Jews. The Germans devastated Poland economically, destroying industrial, energy, transport, and service infrastructure; looting equipment from factories and workshops; confiscating agricultural products and livestock; and stealing the savings of millions of people. Not to mention the losses of cultural heritage: the Germans looted and transported more than half a million works of art to Germany.

Yet the most shocking fact, largely unknown to the global public, is that to this day, Germany has never paid war reparations, including those for the destruction of Warsaw. These losses are estimated at around 1.3 trillion euros (100 billion euros for Warsaw alone), without taking into account damages related to the loss of human life or public health; nor has the value of museum losses been estimated. The world needs to know this!