In August 1944 an uprising broke out in Warsaw, organised by the underground structures of the resistance movement. It was mounted as an attempt to liberate the city from within before the Red Army units stationed on the opposite bank of the Vistula could occupy it and install a puppet Communist government and thus subordinate Poland to the Soviet Union. The uprising lasted over two months, and ended in defeat. It was the biggest tragedy in the history of the city. Around 200,000 of its residents were killed and 600,000 deported, 150,000 of them to German concentration camps and forced labour. As a result of the deliberate destruction of the city by the Germans following the end of the uprising, 84% of the built fabric of the city was razed to the ground. It is estimated that barely 1,000 people remained in the ruins of the city, which before the war had been a 1.5-million strong metropolis. Warsaw practically ceased to exist.
These events are the subject of the highly moving, state-of-the-art multimedia exhibition at the Warsaw Rising Museum, at present the capital’s most visited museum. The exhibition charts the history of the Warsaw Rising from the German and Soviet aggression in September 1939, through the occupation, the preparations for the insurrection, its outbreak and progress, the situation on the international arena in 1944, the installation of the illegal Communist government, subordinate to the USSR, up to the persecution of the insurgents in postwar Communist Poland.