Autor: FIR | 29. 7. 2024
The fascist armies could no longer stop the advance of the Soviet armed forces on the Eastern Front in the summer of 1944. Despite the tactic of “scorched earth”, large parts of the Ukrainian SSR and the Belorussian SSR were liberated. At the same time, the Red Army reached the Carpathian Mountains and the eastern regions of Poland. Under these conditions, the anti-fascist liberation struggle in all areas still occupied by German fascism gained significant momentum, as the partisans wanted to make their contribution to the military weakening of the occupying power and thus to the liberation of their own homeland.
A visible sign of this in Poland was the Warsaw Uprising on August 1, 1944. As early as 1943, the occupying forces had to witness the armed resistance of the Jewish internees in the Warsaw ghetto to their planned extermination. This uprising ended after a month with the final destruction of the ghetto district (Jürgen Stroop: “There is no longer a Jewish residential district in Warsaw.”). Now, with the approach of Soviet troops on the eastern side of the Vistula, the uprising began on August 1, 1944 under the leadership of the Armia Krajova (AK = Home Army). Despite the advance of the Soviet army, the timing of the uprising was poor from a military point of view, as the Soviet army units were still far away from Warsaw on the eastern side of the Vistula. When the AK fighters struck, the advanced Red Army leaders were in their consolidation phase, i.e. they were waiting for the main contingent of the unit to reunite with them. The Wehrmacht leadership used this period of standstill to place a military belt of strong SS units between the insurgent forces in the city and the Red Army troops.
In fact, the AK began the uprising without coordinating with the Soviet army in advance. This was a visible expression of the split in the Polish resistance movement. The Polish partisans of the Armia Ludowa (AL = People’s Army) saw themselves as part of the Soviet armed forces and integrated themselves into their combat operations. On July 22, 1944, they proclaimed a “Polish Committee of National Liberation” as their political framework. The fighters of the AK, who were linked to the Polish government in exile in Great Britain and were supplied with weapons and material by the British Air Force, had the goal of taking over the city of Warsaw before the approaching units of the Soviet army. This was also intended to give rise to a claim to political power for the future organization of Poland. The resistance of the AK against the superior military strength of the German troops was heroic, but ultimately doomed to failure. On October 3, 1944, the AK units were forced to surrender. The outcome was appalling: at least 15,000 AK fighters lost their lives. Over 100,000 civilians were murdered by shelling, bombing and punitive actions by German troops after the surrender, and the city itself was almost completely destroyed. The brutal suppression of the Warsaw Uprising led to massive political conflict in Poland after the liberation. Until the end of the 1940s, the country experienced sometimes violent internal political battles between supporters of the AK and the AL, which have led to ideological disputes to this day.
This act of anti-fascist resistance is deeply rooted in the collective memory of the people as a national contribution to the liberation of their own homeland from fascism. The fact that this action was carried out in opposition to the main military power of the anti-Hitler coalition is a possible cause of the defeat, but does not diminish its significance from the perspective of the European resistance struggle. The armed anti-fascist resistance played a significant role in the fact that the fascist troops were not only forced to oppose the Allied forces on the various sections of the front, but were also forced to use their military strength to suppress the anti-fascist forces in the respective occupied countries. This gave the fighting troops of the anti-Hitler coalition freedom of action on other sections of the front, which they could use to advance on the German Reich - and thus militarily crush German fascism.
