Talk:Warsaw Uprising

An event mentioned in this article is a August 1 selected anniversary

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Warsaw Uprising is a featured article, which means it has been identified as one of the best articles produced by the Wikipedia community. If you see a way this page can be updated or improved without compromising previous work, feel free to contribute.

Old material has been moved to Talk:Warsaw Uprising/Archive1 the archive since it discussed an old update project. Mozzerati 19:19, 2004 Aug 23 (UTC)

Contents

1 Potential sources

2 Copy editing

3 Suggestions for forther work

4 Soviets stopping??

5 Fixup caption

6 Additional Resources

7 Quotes

8 Categories

9 More pics

Potential sources

I've been looking for sources online. I think that these could be valuable particularly for maps etc. some things

http://www.polishresistance-ak.org/4%20Article.htm

Is that an acceptable license for Wikipedia? Reference has to be given anyway to track sources.

http://www.princeton.edu/~poland/uprising/

I've emailed the author to see about copyright status / permission. Some of the maps look good, though I'm not sure where they are from.

The author replied, we can use the materials, but they come from a Polish book from the 1970s. I'm not sure what that means for the coypright status. Certainly, copies taken prior to the 1980s are probably out of copyright in the e.g. the US (since Poland wasn't signatory to copyright treaties at the time.)Mozzerati 07:19, 2004 Jul 30 (UTC)

"The Polish Underground State: A Guide to the Underground, 1939-1945" Stefan Korbonski, pages 187-193 according to internet sources there is a fair amount of analysis of Stalin's position on Warsaw.

The maps seem to be scanned from Jerzy Kirchmayer's book and as such are subject to copyright laws (Poland, contrary to the USSR, did sign the conventions and the book had several reprints lately). However, the maps on polishresistance-ak.org come from their own publication and could be used as fair use, with source cited.

As per Korboński's book, it's really great. Unfortunately I don't have it at home. Anyone? Halibutt 07:32, Jul 30, 2004 (UTC)

Copy editing

Because of a suggestion in WP:FAC, I've been doing some small copy editing. More and better work could be done, but I've removed some over-wikification and cleaned up some verb tenses.

Some question always arise in ythis sort of edit. For instance, did the Allies really send missions to all the other resistance movements? The problem is whether to remove the "all" or change it to "all the other". Also, "At the same time the government asked ...several times" is unclear, since asking several times usually takes a while. A little clarification of the timing would be in order from someone who knows the data. Oh, and is it accurate that these other missions had already been dispatched at that time?

The Soviet propaganda "underlined" that the Home Army was, so to speak, sitting on its hands while the Red Army fought. Implicitly that sentence agrees that the Soviet claim was true. If that's not conceded, "claimed" would be better, but I can't assess the facts of the case. Dandrake 03:37, Aug 11, 2004 (UTC)

hi; thanks for your help. Please be aware of the page split (discussed just before). it's appreciated if you can do most of the copy editing in the split pages (doing both is even better :-) since the main page should soon have many of it's longer sections replaced with summaries. Best of all would be helping to move material around and, having checked that it's stored somewhere, summarising it in the main page.Mozzerati 06:45, 2004 Aug 11 (UTC)

I dont feel competent to work with the content or even the structure of the article, but I'm editing again, and will get to the split pages afterward. Question: In "Reasons for failure" it says "This is consistent with Soviet later treatment of many Home Army soldiers, who were usually imprisoned, tortured and executed." I'm fairly sure we want "frequently" rather than "usually"; the latter would mean that most or nearly all the soldiers were treated that way, while the text says that "many" were. But I don't know the facts. Dandrake 00:10, Aug 18, 2004 (UTC)

Usually would would apply to "imprisoned". E.g. "on one single night in February 1949, up to 5000 people were arrested" (Norman Davies, English Paperback, P568). It would also apply to "tortured" where some form of torture was standard in any NKVD prison/prison camp/concentration camp/gulag as part of "interrogation". The death rate in Gulags around this time was 80%, so I really wonder if, of those who were available to them, the NKVD didn't kill more than 50% of the AK soldiers they could access; (remember, many of the survivors survived because they were liberated in the west of Germany and were never available for the Soviet forces to kill). Still I can't find any more exact reference to clear that up. We should try to find some statistics. You should remember that, actually the concentration camps were NOT closed at the end of the war. They were used for Nazi and AK prisoners (sometimes more or less together).

insurgents	40 000 [1] (http://www.warsawuprising.com/timeline.htm) (ND) (well known)
pre existing members of AK
killed in uprising	15 000
killed before end of war	???
liberated in the west
"liberated" by Soviet forces
stayed in Poland
returned to Poland

and also the fate of civilans

residents in warsaw in 1944	1 000 000
Killed in uprising (inc. insurgents)	250 000
civilians deported from Warsaw	700 000
(of which) sent to concentration camps	50,000 [2] (http://www.warsawuprising.com/timeline.htm)
(or) sent to labour camps	150,000 [3] (http://www.warsawuprising.com/timeline.htm)

Suggestions for forther work

I think that some new articles could be useful:

Civilians in the Warsaw Uprising covering in much more detail what happened to civilians, how massacres made them support the uprising, what they did to supported the uprising, what happened to them afterwards. The statement that 700,000 went to concentration camps is probably wrong since Norman Davies states that many were released into the countryside. How many, exactly, were killed in concentration camps and how many used for slave labour is an important question showing the level to which the Germans kept their promises.
Political Manoeuvring around the Warsaw Uprising covering exactly how the American and British politicians reacted to requests for help and how Soviet politicians managed to block this.

Also important is to add material about the way newspapers, especially in Britain, represented the uprising and how that was linked to Soviet propaganda.

Mozzerati 19:19, 2004 Aug 23 (UTC) (actually taken from an old comment)

Soviets stopping??

This was added recently:

It is also worth mentioning that due to the Warsaw Uprising, the Soviets stopped their offensive in Poland to let the Germans suppress the uprising. Some historians speculate that if they hadn't done so, they would have occupied all Germany rather than the eastern part only.

First important point, this should be attributed. Please name at least one of "some historians", preferably a well respected one.

I think there's a valid point there in that the Soviets, with Polish support, were in a very reasonable situation to end the War earlier since they were extremely well equipped and armed, so moving forward, in an easy fasiion, would have been likely to let them take more territory before the Germans had had a chance to regroup and destroy large portions of the local German forces. However, there are two other sides to this; it is likely that Stalin had already accepted an agreed division of Germany with the other Allies and as such, he didn't want to expend effort on taking parts of the country that he might have to give back (at this time, the Soviet war effort had a very high level of American funding and supplies, meaning that the Soviets/Stalin had to take into account issues America felt strongly about, one of which was not Poland). The other part of the second side is that the Warsaw uprising gave Stalin the protection from a counter attack that he needed in order to be able to concentrate on the Balkans where "facts on the ground" were likely to matter more than in Germany. Note the American's lack of support in attacks on the East of Germany because "this would be in the German sphere of influence" (quote from memory, so inaccurate).

I propose a more full section be added to the legacy article which discusses speculation on the effect of the Warsaw uprising on the war. It's impossible to be historical in this case and we can only document the points of view of different experts. Mozzerati 06:27, 2004 Aug 20 (UTC)

Fixup caption

How do we fix the formatting of the following caption: "During the Uprising much of Długa street was reduced to ruins. The Bank Polski redoubt can be seen to be one of the few buildings in the street still standing in the 1944 photograph shown here on the left. The image on the right shows the bank still bearing the scars of the Uprising in 2004"? The spacing is all wrong and the font-face appears to be courier... - Ta bu shi da yu 10:41, 4 Sep 2004 (UTC)

hmm looks reasonable to me on both Konqueror and Mozilla; It comes out with a proportional (though quite small) font, the same one as the body text. The main bad thing is the lack of a proper margin. Mozzerati 17:11, 2004 Sep 4 (UTC)

Improved, though a perfect solution would use the appriopriate CSS classes, rather than putting the CSS in the article. Richard Taylor 01:11, 10 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Additional Resources

Good original source material for this article should also include General Bor-Komorowski's own account--"The Secret Army" The Macmillan Company, New York, 1951. Another good first hand account of Polish Resistance in WWII is "The Story of a Secret State" by Jan Karski, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1944.

After the war General Bor-Komorowski was a very angry and hurt man--he felt betrayed by the Western Allies. In his own words...

"But it was entirely incomprehensible to us why the Allies were giving up to slavery and partition their most faithful and oldest ally of the war.

Their decision erased and tore to bits all the principles of the Atlantic Charter and allowed brute force and violence to be inflicted on Poland--the 'inspiration of nations'--and to prevail over right and justice. Poland was to give up 46 percent of its pre-war territories, while a clique of usurpers and Kremlin agents, 'supplemented' by 'members of other parties' in a manner devoid of any practical effect or meaning were to be imposed on the nation as a government by the three signatories of the Yalta Pact. Moreover, these decisions were made with complete disregard for the existence of the body of legal Polish authorities, as well as of the wishes of the nation itself.

It was clear to us that Yalta was-tantamount to blotting out our country's independence. This blow, so heavy and unexpected, shook us to the core."

Get his book. It is a great read and brings to life the story related in the main article.

Quotes

It appears my quote section has been lost in all the recent changes. Where do you think it should be moved then? --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus 11:18, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC)

before the Uprising:

- More then 1,000 members of German Ordnungspolizei and Sicherheitspolizei had died in the course of their normal police duties, this does not include the losses during the participation of any special operations. Alongside those losses, the number of 500 casualties among the various officials of all administration sectors deserves a separate mention - from the speech of Hans Frank on 18 November 1943

first section of main article

- If not for Warsaw in the General Government, we wouldn't have 4/5 of our current problems on that territory. Warsaw was and will be the center or chaos and a place from which opposition spreads throughout the rest of the country - Hans Frank in 14 December 1943, Cracow

first section of main article

during the uprising

- Contrary to our expectations, the enemy has halted all of their offensive actions alongside the entire front of the 9th Army. - from the operations journal of German 9th Army on 16 August 1944, entry shows the German amazement with Russian response to the Warsaw Uprising

added into lack of support article.

- The 9th Army has crushed the final resistance in the southern Vistula circle. The insurgents fought to the very last bullet. - from the German report on 23 September (T 4924/44)

this is the only one which seems to be still missing; It should go in the middle of the battle, but in the right section; not sure which Mozzerati 21:19, 2004 Sep 8 (UTC)

after the uprising

- one the most deadly fights since the beginning of the war, as difficult as the fight for Stalingrad - Heinrich Himmler to other German generals on 21 IX 1944

this is in the caputulation section

I distributed them through the article(s) (preserving them all, I hope). I think that they have the most effect backing up the statements which they are related to and that having a separate quotes section tends to expand the article too much. If there should be such a section, it should probably be in the article about the media and should discuss also places where these quotes have been used. Mozzerati 20:25, 2004 Sep 6 (UTC)

I dont mind them being distributed in the text, but I think all but the first 2 have been since edited out. Do you think we should put them back in the text? The 'during the uprising' first quote belong in 'Lack of outside support' section, second is for the middle of the 'Batt'e and 'after the uprising' can be put either at the very start or somewhere after 'The capitulation'. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus 20:19, 7 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I've tried to check them. There's only one I wasn't able to put in place (see above) Mozzerati 21:20, 2004 Sep 8 (UTC)

More pics

I uploaded some pics from the Polish wiki, I think they might be useful here. You can check them in the Szare Szeregi article. Halibu tt 12:45, Jan 24, 2005 (UTC)