Sirens wailed across Warsaw at 5pm on Thursday, bringing the Polish capital and its residents to a standstill to remember the uprising against Nazi occupation 75 years earlier.
It was the largest resistance uprising of its kind during the second World War, sparking joy and hope among the civilian population of an end five years of Nazi rule.
But after 63 days of brutal street battles that claimed up to 150,000 lives, the rising was crushed. The Nazi occupying forces drove survivors from their city, then razed it to the ground. When the Nazis retreated, the Red Army moved in to “liberate” the smoking ruins, having watched the uprising from the opposite bank of the city’s Vistula river.
The 1944 uprising, and the revolt a year earlier in the Warsaw Ghetto, remain touchstones in Polish cultural memory and colour bilateral relations with its western neighbour.
Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki said the rising was a “fight against the German beast that dug its fangs into Warsaw” and that the push-back was “not just a fight for the future of Poland . . . but for a better world”.
Among the ceremonies in Warsaw, Polish and German foreign ministers laid wreaths at a monument commemorating the “Wola slaughter”, a massacre in a western district that saw 50,000 people murdered in one week.
Lowest point
In a speech Mr Maas said the uprising – “and particularly the gruesome massacre of innocents” – marked the “lowest point” of the second World War.
“It was a conscious blow to erase everything that makes up Polish identity,” he said. “I am ashamed about what was done to your country by Germans and in the name of Germany.”
He praised Polish civilians and members of the home army, in Warsaw and elsewhere, who showed “unbelievable resistance energy” during the rising and throughout the country and the entire war.
Mr Maas insisted Germany’s moral responsibility, and its work to preserve the memory of its crimes against Poland, would never end. But he dismissed revived Polish claims for compensation for Nazi destruction and war crimes during the occupation. Germany believes that two previous Polish renunciations of compensation have settled the matter, but the national conservative Law and Justice (PiS) government in Warsaw disagrees.
Foreign minister Jacek Czaputowicz said compensation remained a matter of public debate and that a special parliamentary committee would continue its work to assess reparations levels.
“Poles have a sense of a certain injustice, and also a lack of compensation for the harm, the losses incurred as a result of war activities,” he said.
Symbolic gesture
Mr Czaputowicz also pressed for a monument in Berlin to Polish victims of the second World War as an “important symbolic gesture and a signal showing German empathy for Polish historical sensitivity”.
Under communist rule, all memory of the Warsaw Uprising was suppressed. Since the transition to democracy in 1989, however, the events of 1944 have become a cornerstone of Polish identity.
There is an Uprising Museum, home army battalions have streets in their name and the city is filled with monuments including the statue of a boy in an adult helmet, a reminder of the children who assisted the rising.
“There’s a lot more public engagement now,” said Leszek Zukowski, president of the World Association of Home Army Soldiers, who fought as a 15-year-old. “Marking the day is a reminder for the younger generations that freedom has to be fought for.”
For the next 63 days – the length of the rising – a fire will burn on a 121m hill towering over the Mokotow district, built entirely of the rubble from the destroyed city.
