Wola massacre

Memorial with the list of mass execution sites

The Wola massacre (Polish: Rzeź Woli, "Wola slaughter") (August 5-August 8, 1944 in Wola, Warsaw) was the systematic killing of 40,000 to 100,000 people by Nazi German troops during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. Polish civilians along with captured resistance fighters were indiscriminately shot or killed in organised mass executions throughout Wola in Warsaw. The action was designed to crush the Poles' will to fight and put the uprising to an end without having to commit to heavy city fighting.

However the Germans soon found that the atrocities in Wola only stiffened Polish resistance. Germans authority over the city was only achieved after more than two months of heavy fighting and the total destruction of Warsaw.

Uprising

Polish civilians murdered by the SS and police troops in Warsaw, August 1944

On August 2, two days after the start of the fighting in Warsaw, SS General Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski was placed in command of all German forces in Warsaw. By then several parts of the city were now held by units from the Polish Home Army. Following direct orders from SS-Reichfuhrer Heinrich Himmler to show no mercy, his strategy was to use terror tactics against all inhabitants of Warsaw to decisively end the uprising and destroy the Poles will to fight. No distinction would be made between Polish insurgents and civilians.

Mass killings

On 5 August, three attack groups started their advance westward along Wolska and Górczewska streets toward the main East-West communication line of Jerusalem Avenue. The units were from the Wehrmacht, SS Police Battalions and the SS-Dirlewanger Brigade. The cadre from this infamous unit, led by Oskar Dirlewanger, was formed from military prisoners, POWs and criminals including rapists, child molesters, murderers and those that had been committed to asylums for the criminally insane. But when their advance was halted by heavy fire from Polish fighters the regiments began carrying out their orders to go from from house to house, shooting the inhabitants regardless of age or sex and burning their bodies. Estimates of civilians killed in Wola and Ochota range from 20,000 to 50,000, 40,000 by 8 August in Wola alone, or as high as 100,000. Most of the civilian victims were the elderly, women and children. Patients and personnel at the local hospitals were also killed and even burned alive when the buildings were destroyed. The main perpetrators were Oskar Dirlewanger and Bronislav Kaminski, whose forces committed the cruelest atrocities.

Martin Gilbert, in his book The Second World War: A Complete History, page 565, (see Google Books page view) describes the event:

More than fifteen thousand Polish civilians had been murdered by German troops in Warsaw. At 5:30 that evening, General Erich von dem Bach gave the order for the execution of women and children to stop. But the killing continued of all Polish men who were captured, without anyone bothering to find out whether they were insurgents or not. Nor did either the Cossacks or the criminals in the Kaminsky and Dirlewanger brigades pay any attention to von dem Bach Zelewski's order: by rape, murder, torture and fire, they made their way through the suburbs of Wola and Ochota, killing in three days of slaughter a further thirty thousand civilians, including hundreds of patients in each of the hospitals in their path.

At the same time, the insurgent Zośka and Wacek battalions managed to capture the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Warsaw concentration camp. The area became one of the main communication links between the insurgents fighting in Wola and those defending the Warsaw Old Town. On August 7, 1944, the Nazi forces were joined by tanks, with civilian women being used as human shields. After two days of heavy fighting, they managed to cut Wola in two and reach the Plac Bankowy.

The massacre was halted on August 12, when von dem Bach ordered the captured civilians to be sent to concentration camps or directed to forced labor. Selected Polish civilians were detained by the SS, formed in a Verbrennungskommando and forced to collect most of the victims' bodies and then burn them in order to destroy the evidence of the German crimes.

Aftermath

Postwar mass graves, each containing remains of dozens of mostly unidentified civilians killed in the Wola massacre

Up until mid September, the Nazis were shooting all captured insurgents on the spot. After SS-Obergruppenführer Erich von dem Bach arrived in Warsaw (August 7, 1944), it became clear that atrocities only stiffened the resistance and that some political solution should be found, considering the limited forces at the disposal of the German commander. The aim was to gain a significant victory to show the Armia Krajowa the futility of further fighting and make them surrender.

This did not immediately succeed, but from the end of September on, some of the captured Polish fighters were treated as prisoners of war and civilians were spared, and in the end the districts of Warsaw still held by insurgents capitulated on 3 October 1944.

The main perpetrators were Heinz Reinefarth and Oskar Dirlewanger, who presided over the most cruel atrocities. Dirlewanger was tortured to death by Polish military guards after the war, but Reinefarth was never prosecuted. A list of several former Dirlewanger members still alive and never prosecuted was made by the Warsaw Uprising Museum in May 2008. After the end of war no German soldier involved in Wola and Ochota massacres during Warsaw Uprising was prosecuted for their crimes.

See also

• List of massacres in Poland
• Military description of the Warsaw Uprising
• Nazi crimes against ethnic Poles
• Ochota massacre - August 1944 atrocities in Ochota district of Warsaw, committed mostly by Russian collaborators led by Bronislaw Kaminski

External links

• Waffen-SS im Einsatz: The Rape of Warsaw
• Witness testimony on German massacre of Polish hospital patients
• Witness testimony on German massacre of Polish civilians in Wola
• (German) Nacht über Wola, Der Spiegel