Monday, August 14, 2006

Museum of the Polish Uprising

Today was a good day for History...and shopping. We went to the cool multimedia museum for the Polish uprising in World war 2. Warsaw was half under German occupation and half under Russian, so in August 1944 Poles decided to free Warsaw. After a lot of fighting and many people dead the poles were defeated and the punishment was the complete destruction of Warsaw:

"On August 1, the Polish Home Army General Bor-Komorovski, with a force of between thirty-five and fifty thousand partisans, attacked the Germans in Warsaw. Joined in the fight by the city's Polish population, they took control of most of the city by August 4. But the Germans sent reinforcements: S.S. police units, a brigade of Russian ex-prisoners, and a brigade of ex-convicts, all of whom Hitler had previously ordered removed from the front because of their excessive brutality. The Polish forces became fragmented and isolated. The Germans pursued the cut-off fighters into the city's refuges--burned out buildings, and sewers--where virtually all the Polish forces perished.
During the sixty-three days of fighting the Red Army, encamped within sight across the Vistula, never attempted assistance. The Soviets refused permission to the Americans and British to use their airfields to drop ammunition and relief supplies. In September, when a German victory seemed certain, the Russians allowed a small amount of ammunition to be dropped in, but it was useless: it was made for Soviet armaments and did not fit the Poles' weapons.
When hostilities ceased, eighty-five percent of the city was razed, and the Polish Home Army annihilated . The Germans deported the remaining population. When the Germans were eventually defeated there were no forces left to oppose Soviet political domination in Poland."

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home