@Fido,
Quote:You should try to consider that the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto did much to disarm the Jews, and in the end went in the same RR cars as the rest to their deaths... There were just to many of them unwilling to stand up for themselves who later called for revengeThey made possible their extermination by cooperation
The Warsaw Ghetto uprising was one of the bravest acts of despair and poorly arm starving men and women in the history of the human race facing one of the best military forces in the history of the human race.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Ghetto_Uprising
The Ghetto fighters (numbering some 400 to 1,000 by April 19) were armed primarily with pistols and revolvers. Just a few rifles and automatic firearms smuggled into the Ghetto were available. The insurgents had little ammunition, and relied heavily on improvised explosive devices and incendiary bottles; more weapons were supplied throughout the uprising or captured from the Germans. Some weapons were hand-made by resistance: sometimes such weapons worked, other times they jammed repeatedly.
Nazi forcesUltimately, the efforts of the Jewish resistance fighters proved insufficient against the German forces. The Germans eventually committed an average daily force of 2,090 well-armed troops, including 821 Waffen-SS Panzergrenadier troops (consisting of five SS reserve and training battalions and one SS cavalry reserve and training battalion), as well as 363 Polish Blue Policemen, who were ordered by the Germans to cordon the walls of the Ghetto.[22]
Stroop Report original caption: "Askaris used during the operation."The other forces were drawn from the Ordnungspolizei (Orpo) "uniformed order police" (battalions from the regiments 22rd and 23rd), the SS Sicherheitsdienst (SD) "security service", Warsaw Gestapo, one battalion each from two Wehrmacht railroad combat engineers regiments, a battery of Wehrmacht anti-aircraft artillery (and one field gun), a battalion of Ukrainian Trawniki-Männer from the Final Solution training camp Trawniki, Lithuanian and Latvian auxiliary policemen known by the nickname Askaris (Latvian Arajs Kommando and Lithuanian Saugumas), and technical emergency corps. Polish fire brigade personnel were ordered to help in the operation. In addition, a number of criminals and executioners from the nearby Gestapo Pawiak prison, under the command of Franz Bürkl, volunteered to "hunt the Jews".
German assaultOn April 19, 1943, on the eve of Passover, the police and SS auxiliary forces entered the Ghetto planning to complete their Action within three days. However, they suffered losses as they were repeatedly ambushed by Jewish insurgents, who aggressively fired and threw Molotov cocktails and hand grenades at them from alleyways, sewers and windows. Two German vehicles: A French-made Lorraine 37L armoured fighting vehicle and an armoured car were set on fire by ŻOB petrol bombs, and the German advance was bogged down.[24]
Stroop Report original caption: "The leader of the grand operation."As the battle continued inside the Ghetto, Polish resistance groups AK and GL engaged the Germans between April 19 and April 23 at six different locations outside the ghetto walls, firing at German sentries and positions. In one attack, three cell units of AK under the command of Kapitan Józef Pszenny ("Chwacki") tried to breach the Ghetto walls with explosives, but the Germans repulsed this attack.[16]
Following von Sammern-Frankenegg's failure to contain the revolt, he lost his post as the SS and police commander of Warsaw. He was replaced by SS-Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop, who rejected von Sammern-Frankenegg's proposal to call in bomber aircraft from Kraków and proceeded with a better-organized ground assault.
The longest-lasting defense of a position took place around the ŻZW stronghold at Muranowski Square from April 19 to late April. In the afternoon of April 19, two boys climbed up on the roof of the headquarters of the Jewish Resistance there and raised two flags: the red-and-white Polish flag and the blue-and-white banner of the ŻZW (blue and white are the colors of the Flag of Israel today). These flags were well-seen from the Warsaw streets, and the Jews managed to hold off the Germans for four entire days in their attempts to remove them. Stroop recalled:
The matter of the flags was of great political and moral importance. It reminded hundreds of thousands of the Polish cause, it excited them and unified the population of the General Government, but especially Jews and Poles. Flags and national colors are a means of combat exactly like a rapid-fire weapon, like thousands of such weapons. We all knew that - Heinrich Himmler, Krüger, and Hahn. The Reichsfuehrer [Himmler] bellowed into the phone: "Stroop, you must at all costs bring down those two flags."[29]
Another German armoured vehicle was destroyed in a Jewish counterattack, in which ŻZW commander Dawid Moryc Apfelbaum was also killed.
After Stroop's ultimatum to surrender was rejected by the defenders, the Nazis resorted to systematically burning houses block by block using flamethrowers and blowing up basements and sewers. "We were beaten by the flames, not the Germans," resistance leader Marek Edelman said in 2007.[2] In 2003, he recalled:The sea of flames flooded houses and courtyards... There was no air, only black, choking smoke and heavy burning heat radiating form (sic) the red-hot walls, from the glowing stone stairs.[30]
The ŻZW lost all its leaders and, on April 29, 1943, the remaining fighters escaped the ghetto through the Muranowski tunnel, and relocated to the Michalin forest. This event marked the end of the organized resistance, and of significant fighting.
The remaining Jewish civilians and surviving fighters took cover in the bunker dugouts which were hidden among the ruins of the Ghetto. The German troops used dogs to look for the hideouts. Smoke grenades, tear gas and reportedly even poison gas were used to force people out. In many instances, the Jewish fighters came out of their hiding places and shot at the Germans, while a number of female fighters lobbed hidden grenades or fired concealed handguns at the Germans after they had surrendered. Small groups of Jewish insurgents attacked German patrols at night. However, German casualties were mostly minimal after the first few days of the uprising.
On May 8, 1943, the Germans discovered the ŻOB's main command post, located at Miła 18 Street. Most of its leadership and dozens of remaining fighters were killed, while others committed mass suicide by ingesting cyanide. The dead included the organization's commander, Mordechaj Anielewicz. His deputy, Edelman, escaped through the sewers on May 10 with a handful of comrades. Two days later, the Bundist Szmul Zygielbojm committed suicide in London in protest, citing a lack of assistance for the insurgents on the part of Western governments:
I cannot continue to live and to be silent while the remnants of Polish Jewry, whose representative I am, are being murdered. My comrades in the Warsaw ghetto fell with arms in their hands in the last heroic battle. I was not permitted to fall like them, together with them, but I belong with them, to their mass grave. By my death, I wish to give expression to my most profound protest against the inaction in which the world watches and permits the destruction of the Jewish people.
The suppression of the uprising officially ended on May 16, 1943. Nevertheless, sporadic resistance continued. The last skirmish took place on June 5, 1943 between Germans and a holdout group of armed insurgents without connection to the resistance groups.
[edit] Death toll13,000 Jews were killed in the ghetto during the uprising (some 6,000 among them were burnt alive or died from smoke inhalation). Of the remaining 50,000 residents, most were captured and shipped to concentration and extermination camps, in particular to Treblinka.
Jürgen Stroop's internal SS daily report for Friedrich Krüger, written on May 16, 1943, stated:
180 Jews, bandits and sub-humans, were destroyed. The former Jewish quarter of Warsaw is no longer in existence. The large-scale action was terminated at 20:15 hours by blowing up the Warsaw Synagogue. (...) Total number of Jews dealt with 56,065, including both Jews caught and Jews whose extermination can be proved. (...) Apart from 8 buildings (police barracks, hospital, and accommodations for housing working-parties) the former Ghetto is completely destroyed. Only the dividing walls are left standing where no explosions were carried out.[22]
On May 24, 1943 Stroop reported 621 Bunkers had been destroyed.
According to the Stroop's report (both causality lists and separate daily reports), his forces suffered 17 killed in action (16 listed by name) and 93 wounded (86 of them listed by name); these figures included over 60 members of Waffen-SS, and did not include the Jewish collaborators). The real number of German losses, however, may be well higher if unknown (by Edelman's estimate about 300 casualties). For the propaganda purposes, official German casualties were announced to be only a few wounded, while bulletins of the Polish Underground State claimed that hundreds of Nazis died in the fighting.
