Sorry about the delay but getting to the subject shortly! Ukrainian SS volunteers in the Warsaw uprising in April 1943. A battalion of "Askari" - Ukrainian and Latvian volunteers, 337 men strong - had been brought in by the Germans to help storm the ghetto. Polish Home army during the first days of the uprising The Polish Home Army http://www.umich.edu/~iinet/crees/outreach/Poland%20Pics/Monument%20to%20the%20Warsaw%20Uprising%20of%208-1-44.jpg Warsaw Uprising Monument. The Warsaw Uprising lasted from August 1-October 2, 1944.
Still reading on this through some 40 or more sources to find about what happened. Anyway, something to think about from the sources: -------- After Katyn incident Stalin did not think that the Polish government in London was to be the "real" Polish government later on. And thus he formed a puppet government, giving it the misleading title ‘Polish Committee of National Liberation’ (PKWN), announcing its formation on 22 July 1944. Just wondering why? Home Army detachments ( under London based government ) took part in the liberation of Wilno (Vilna) and Lwow (Lvov), but following initial cooperation in the fight against the Germans, the Russians proceeded to arrest and deport the Polish troops into the interior of the USSR. Why, if Stalin had nothing against the Polish? As well on Aug 14, the Home Army units outside Warsaw seem to have been called for help but these units were intercepted by the Soviets ,disarmed and interned ( detachments of the 3rd, the 9th, the 10th, and the 30th infantry divisions ). Why would Stalin call the Warsaw uprising Home Army people "Power seeking criminals" and Churchill not? If the Russians claim that Home Army did not ask for help then why was Mikolajczyk ( London government "boss" ) in Moscow first on 31.7. and the last discussion with Stalin on 9.8. 1944? Did radio Moscow urge the people in Warsaw take their guns and start uprising? It certainly is true that the Russians were beaten on Aug 3 by Germans which propably means that Russians were not prepared for German counter attack. That would as well explain radio Moscow´s attitude towards possibly telling them to riot. Then again Stalin might have gotten angry because he wasn´t informed of the plans in Warsaw. Then again the Polish London government by then was something he didn´t want around... One source claims as well that TASS started with claims that there was no rising in Warsaw at all and ended with assertions that the High Command of the Home Army wanted no Help whatsoever. As well General Stemeko´s book "The last six months" claim that Home Army in warsaw did not ask for help.Instead Russians sent one man with a radio(!) to see if they needed help. Unfortunately Germans caught the radio man and Russians did not know what happened in warsaw. I believe as well that the stopping of Red Army forces came as a surprise to both sides:Tim Ripley and "Steel storm" tells very well of this aspect. Besides Ripley tells that Russians tried to encircle Warsaw from the north and by 4th August IV Panzer SS corps were in a blocking position, and the Russian storm burst on 14th August.For a week germans held off 15 Russian infantry divisions and two tank corps. Human wave attacks were repulsed on a daily basis, but Soviets poured in extra infantry divisions and hundreds more tanks. By 26th Aug Totenkopf had to fall back but a counter attack on 11th September drove the Soviets back. ( So the Soviets did have reserves to fight with ?) Why would Stalin refuse the flights over Warsaw to drop supplies? No idea. Or why didn´t he let his airfields be used? Propaganda wise not a good move as propably the supplies would not have ended to the Polish anyway because they did not have co-ordinates for this, I think. FDR unfortunately believed totally what Uncle Joe had to say about the Polish Home Army. -------- [ 14. May 2003, 07:04 AM: Message edited by: Kai-Petri ]
On one site this is said as the broadcast from Moscow: --------- On the 30th of July 1944, radio Moscow broadcasted this appeal: "People of Warsaw, to arms!... Attack the Germans!... Assist the Red Army crossing the Vistula... The more than a million inhabitants of Warsaw must become an army of a million men fighting for liberation and destroying the German invaders"! The source for this on this article mentioned as: THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON, 1947, T.S.ELIOT/HELENA SIKORSKA CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS http://www.fortfreedom.org/l33.htm
This is an interesting period in the war on the eastern front. It seems pretty obvious to me that the Soviets thought they were going to grab Warsaw very quickly, which is why they broadcasted that message July 30. Soon after they received a couple of counter-blows, and this combined with having advanced at a blistering pace since June 22, outrunning supplies and getting ground down in the process made the quick capture of Warsaw impossible. They certainly tried though. And to be honest they did eventually let Allied aircraft drop supplies. If I remember correctly they also started flying air cover when the Red Air Force had moved forward enough. Something similar happened during the Vistula-Oder advance when Stalin though Berlin would fall in February, but with the Red Army having outrun supplies, reinforcements and air cover the war lasted quite a bit longer before these could catch up.
May 15, 2003 Days of remembering, vigilance Resistance fighter ensures community recalls Holocaust Photo by Larry Sorcher Brenda Senders, a Jewish resistance fighter during World War II, speaks during the Days of Remembrance ceremony May 1 at the Fort Detrick Chapel. As a young girl, she escaped from a ghetto and helped fight Nazis with weapons and ammunition her group seized from German conveys it attacked. by Karen Fleming-Michael Standard Staff Writer In the chapel lined with large photos of skeletal concentration camp survivors and barbed-wire-enclosed ghettos and death camps, one sepia-tinted shot stood out at the May 1 Days of Remembrance ceremony. The portrait shows a smiling young woman with close-cropped hair and dressed in military uniform. She poses with her instrument as comfortably as a violinist with a beloved Stradivarius. As part of a Russian resistance group that fought the Nazis in World War II, however, Brenda Senders' instrument was a gun her group seized from German convoys. "We saw our families and homes destroyed," she said. "We did whatever it took to kill our enemies, with any trick the human mind can create." If not for the help of her enemy, Senders may not have lived to share her tale with the Detrick community. Along with the exiled townspeople of Sarny, Ukraine Poland, she and her family were summoned to their ghetto's gathering place for a roll call. Surrounded by German and Ukraine police armed with handguns and machine guns, those whose names were called were told they would be relocating to a work camp. A German guard with a daughter Senders' age told her, "Run from here. They'll kill you all." Hearing that, and learning the ghetto's barbed wire was going to be cut, Senders decided to run. Resistance for the Jews during this time of "unimaginable terror" was a heart-wrenching prospect, said Carolyn Tebo, a former volunteer with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. The Germans used the tactic of "collective responsibility" so if one person resisted, the entire group suffered. In staging uprisings, like the one in the Warsaw ghetto in April 1943 in which 750 Jews fought Germans for a month, Jews knew their resistance would be severely punished. Of the 56,000 Jews captured, 7,000 were shot and the rest sent to concentration camps or gas chambers, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's Web site. This year's Days of Remembrance honors the Warsaw ghetto resistors. Not all resistance during the war was armed, Tebo said. In addition to keeping covert political organizations, newspapers and radio stations going, prayers said while entering the gas chamber, too, were a form of resistance she said. "Keeping your humanity in the midst of inhumanity is a form of resistance," she said. "Just the act of waking up when one is destined to be murdered is an act of resistance." During Senders' time with the 1,500- to 1,600-strong partisan group, the petite woman said she learned to shoot a gun and throw a grenade "just like a man." When the group discovered a German spy was coming too close, the group shot him at night "to get rid of danger," she said. When given a horse for the first time, Senders taught herself to ride and was saddle sore for two days. When her unit needed ammunition, she delivered it under gunfire. And when she learned in 1944 the fight was over, she didn't know whether to laugh or to cry. But she did know she needed to fulfill a promise she made to her mother. As she said hurried goodbyes to her family before she escaped the ghetto, she said her mother's parting words were, "If you survive, promise you'll never forget." Today, Senders keeps her vow by speaking to groups about the Holocaust and the resistance fighters. "For Your Freedom and Ours" is the 2003 theme for the Days of Remembrance, an annual commemoration of the victims of the holocaust. "What happens over and over again, in the name of religion or the name of efficiency, we try to do away with individual rights," said Maj. Gen. Lester Martinez-Lopez, commanding general of the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command. "Even when we don't agree with a dissenting view, that does not give us the right to take away an individual's right to exercise his or her freedom. "We have to have the vigilance so that what happened in Europe before and during the Second World War never happens again."
