Uprising – The 1944 Warsaw Uprising – Sabaton History 076 [Official]

there are times when the struggle is so monumental that you know you will not win you know you will not survive and you know you will not even make great change and yet you still make that fight and our song uprising is about that [Music] this is sabaton history and i'm spartacus also i'm sitting in for indie today because the current pandemic has left many of us stuck in different places over the past months and thrown our recording schedule around a bit but i'm also the host and lead writer of the subseries war against humanity on our world war ii channel where i cover resistance partisan warfare war crimes and crimes against humanity during the second world war which are also the topics of sabaton song uprising okay so it's july 1944 the eastern front is in motion german army group center has collapsed in the face of repeated offensives by the soviet first yellow russian front now striking deep into poland it is widely expected that capturing warsaw will be the next thing on the list of the red army objectives with the end of the german occupation literally on the horizon the leaders of the polish underground resistance the armya crayola or home army meet for a secret meeting after nearly five years of occupation humiliation and suffering the resistance of warsaw is eager to rise radio calls are made to the exiled polish government in london who in turn appeal to the british and american authorities for help the time has come the poles will now fight to take back their cattle however the western allies are hesitant to promise help outright they welcome resistance against the germans sure but they do have logistical problems with the fight in france and italy in full swing at the same time but mostly this is the soviet theater of war and they don't want to step on any toes so the poles will have to rely on soviet cooperation first and foremost however the position of the home army towards the soviet union is one of uncertainty and mistrust as memories of the pact between hitler and stalin that had swallowed and divided poland are still pretty fresh if the polls do nothing then the red army will overrun poland and the government and exile will be powerless in the newly communist poland but if the rising is successful then warsaw will be in the hand of democratic polls then they hope that the autocratic soviet union can't simply impose its will on poland so the polls have everything to win and everything to lose however the germans still have strong forces in the region if the resistance rises up before the wehrmacht there can be wholly engaged with the red army the germans would most certainly crush them so the polish home army has to wait for the last possible moment when the red army is on the outskirts of warsaw then with logistical help from the west and cooperation from the red army the insurgents could drive the germans out of the city at least one of those two last things has to happen or the rising is doomed on poland back in february the resistance fighters outside of warsaw had made contact with soviet marshal rokosovsky's spearheads rokosovsky agreed to principal tactical cooperation but refrained from promising anything beyond that and when the home army then begins revealing itself to the soviets they are greeted with unexpectedly hostile behavior the available reports of the nkvd the soviet interior ministry and secret police paint a clearer picture of the situation they call the polish home army illegal formations rebels and bandits they are white poles allied to great britain and are an old enemy see although they currently fight the same enemy polish nationalism is contradictory to stalin's plan and of course it's only been a bit more than 20 years since the polls won the polish soviet war and one of the people really responsible for the loss of the battle of warsaw back then was joseph stalin the nkvd makes it clear that they will not allow any irregular or partisan actions in the rear of their armies soon any polish resistance fighters caught behind the frontline is arrested disarmed and removed by july more than 30 000 home army fighters have been interned by the red army inside warsaw the home army is caught between the desire for action need for caution the atmosphere in the city is tense and pole and german alike feel that something is about to go down by august the soviet front draws close while the revere mark prepares to halt soviet attacks across the vistula the home army decides to risk everything on the night of august 1st groups of armed young men break curfew and gather throughout the city at 0-500 they strike german trucks are bombed german patrols gunned down they stormed the railway office the post office and the major power station most importantly they capture storehouses taking german helmets of weapons camouflage jackets and even ss uniforms to distinguish themselves from their enemy they wear their white and red armbands or eagle in signals around 2500 insurgents fall the first day and many civilians are caught in the crossfire but although they are not able to make the police district or the airport the day is considered a success they have been able to free many jews from the ss concentration camp known as goose farm even managed to capture a tank large parts of the city are now under their control so they must continue the fight until help arrives they inform london by radio but the fight for warsaw has begun the night of the fourth the first british bombers are spotted over the skies of warsaw the poles rejoice as crates filled with weapons and supplies are parachuted in they have not been forgotten by their allies the germans however are now reacting as well anti-insurgency specialist s.s arrives in warsaw he reports back to s commander heinrich himmler the real scale of the rising and himmler flies into a violent rage he orders from the bach to not only crush the insurgency but to obliterate warsaw the home of polish history and culture is to be liquidated once and for all however had their hands full fighting red army so himmler orders his own ss troops to warsaw what arrives at that city is an assortment of some of the most notoriously undisciplined criminal and murderous ss units the nazis have to offer the ss brigade dialevanga the russian ss rohna brigade kozak and azerbaijani auxiliary regiments several einstein scotland and military police units and for a few days these units take himmler's orders literally fighting the insurgency almost becomes a secondary objective as they kill every man woman and child in sight and systematically set their homes on fire tens of thousands of people are slaughtered it becomes so bad with so many reports of rapes and looting that fondembach has officers shot to try and reign in the men he has to issue orders to not summarily shoot women and children anymore the city becomes an urban battlefield loudspeakers urge the insurgents to give up before they are all killed the luftwaffe and german artillery bombed the rebel district but the insurgents prove resilient they hide in warsaw's deep sellers and use the destroyed buildings to entrap the enemy they lure them into killing zones where snipers and grenadiers await them the ruined city denies the ss their numerical advantage and after two weeks of fighting neither side has that advantage the poles fight from the street barricades and fortified cellars connected by trenches and sewers women and children work tirelessly in underground kitchens hospitals and makeshift workshops days turn to weeks by the end of august though even as the spirit of the insurgency is still high the outside world is eerily quiet even contemporary german sources expect the soviets to try to link up with the insurgents as quickly as possible red army advances towards the baltics and the balkans but not on the vistula wisdom churchill is among the first to make the assumption that this pause during the most critical moment of the rising where any soviet attack might have tipped the scale is deliberate kosovsky stands just 20 kilometers away from warsaw how come since the end of july not one soviet aircraft has been seen flying over warsaw no drop has been made no shelling of german positions did stalin condemn the rising to its fate for historians it's impossible to know stalin's exact inner motives many of the records regarding poland are still sealed tightly in russian archives reliable intelligence was certainly scarce and the reports from the nkvd portrayed the insurgency as a reckless adventure by a gang of criminals and bandits polish nationalism has no place in stalin's great strategy the british will cancel their airlifts as well because of the inefficiency of sending planes from italian air bases 1300 kilometers away there are actually over 200 u.s air force planes stationed in poltava but stalin denies them airspace over poland inside warsaw losses are heavy on both sides the germans have been forced to reinforce the ss with crack units like the hammer gurgling panzer division and slowly but surely the insurgents are pushed back into the city center fighting continues unabated in the cemeteries the suburbs form a ghetto by september the situation grows desperate they have held out far longer than expected but they cannot win the battle of attrition down to a quarter of their fighting strength and with food and medical supplies dwindling negotiations for surrender begin but just then in mid-september the soviets suddenly attacked the eastern outskirts of warsaw it is general belling's army made up of polish communists and collaborators who attacked the german garrisons soviet planes now drop supplies and soviet artillery shells the city all surrender negotiations are broken off and the polish spirits rise volunteers swim the vistula to greet their allies but they never return reports soon reach the home army that those volunteers are arrested and interrogated about their holdouts and their officers and some are even tortured and shot berlin's attempt is not the long-awaited soviet offensive ronkosovsky does not move and the insurgency is doomed on september 18th a large fleet of flying fortresses make one last supply one but it is too late nearly all of the crates parachute into german territory as the insurgents are by now pressed into a small area in the city center left with only a handful of blocks and streets the home army has no real choice they can either surrender to the nazis who will probably murder them or try to escape to the soviets who will likely turn on them as well the final shot of the uprising is fired on october 2nd has lasted 63 days civilians and insurgents alike are arrested and sent to concentration camps the ruins of the western part of the city are now once again occupied by the germans in the east just across the river the soviets stand and watch poland once again is divided between the germans and the soviets but not forever for the old words ring true poland is not yet lost as long as we live [Music] [Applause] you know we've talked about a lot of stuff from from different songs of yours that have to do with the second world war because you have a bunch of them and stuff and you've met people and relatives like audie murphy's relatives and stuff and back and stuff have did you guys ever meet anybody that actually had anything to do with the uprising itself yeah several actually i remember the first couple of people we met obviously we're talking about people who are really old yeah quite possibly dead now this was back in 2010. um a lot a lot got lost in translation it was a emotional experience but it was really hard because you know speaking through a translator adam you see and we were at the worst uprising museum but a few days later we were still in poland then we heard of a woman who had fought in the uprising her name was anna wow and she had moved to sweden actually after everything happened there at the end of the war at the end of the war but it was really one of those moments that i will never forget in my life because we were speaking swedish old people in poland for obvious reasons aren't very good in english yeah yeah yeah swedish in general yeah but she she lived in sweden from i guess somewhere in the 40s until 2006 i think it was 2009 back so she just recently moved back when her husband died i think it was okay and speaking with her and her experiences and it is so far away from the action movies and everything i mean her main main role in the uprising being a young woman or a young girl maybe wasn't you know frontline combat but of course she had to they captured a tank a german tank i can't remember it was a leopard or something they actually captured it core yeah and the story she would tell it is nothing like the movies her stories of yeah delivering messages through the sewers and how cramped and tiny it was i have no idea how it was but at the warsaw uprising museum in warsaw they have sort of reconstructed those sewers so you can walk through them and they start out pretty big then they get pretty small and you can you know try and you know how they would move how far you could do it oh man if you if you're even slightly claustrophobic you're [ __ ] yeah her tail how such an obviously extreme circumstance or circumstances living under those circumstances and still life goes on that's you know i'm glad that you put that out here that it's not that that the warsaw uprising or any war or any combat that you sing about and that we talk about is not what it looks like in the movies because i think people misunderstand that and i think people lose track of that that this is um the stuff we talk about on this channel and the stuff that they sing about it's very interesting and it's important to remember these things for a variety of reasons but it's not cool no it's not what you see in the movies the movies movies they want you to watch the story great but they also have to give you entertainment value and war is not entertainment value it's not cool no it's so much boredom i mean how fun would it be a movie about world war one somebody getting sick in a trench going back to a hospital going back to the trench taking one step up dead and and that's your video game and that's three weeks you've been playing the game yeah and that's your first time over well i mean think of even some people we've covered like uh simo heihei right i mean he would spend days iced in with i said to make a say there's nothing exciting or romantic about that it is specifically mechanical and is specifically you can overcome the boredom i couldn't i i i i'd have to pee yeah i would i'd have to pee at some point you know but in a sense i mean i'm not comparing uh a warrior's life however there is one similarity what we are doing as musicians yeah is sort of the hollywood version because what you guys see is us going on stage or hearing the album yeah you're not seeing the rehearsals you are not seeing the songwriting the retakes the you know all of that um by no means com dragging the comparison but it's a natural thing i mean no movie would be interesting uh if it was like the trench trenches in world war one i think you're right and and but people you know especially with world war one world where two people say what's the most realistic video game or what do you think would be the most realistic the most realistic video game is that you spend three or four weeks hastily training as an 18 year old or a 17 year old who lied about his age in england and stuff and you get sick and you meet some new people and you hurt yourself and then you go and all you get for another three weeks and you rotate it through the lines and stuff and yeah and you you get killed in the first 20 seconds and then you have to start the game all over and you just spent well you spent like eight weeks playing that character that's as far as you got you're lucky because you get to start over that's true they didn't well um well you know what this um episode it is a hard-hitting episode and to her to anna and to all the other annas and all the other uprisings that were literally hopeless situations but were still illustrative of the depths of the human spirit way to go [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh [Applause] [Music] all right everyone thank you very much for watching and thank you so much for the support with the community all the patreons everyone who's helping sharing this we really love doing this and thanks to you we can keep on doing it so keep on doing what you do and we will keep on doing what we do thank you [Music]

Channel: Sabaton History

Views: 149,885

Keywords: Sabaton, Sabaton History, TimeGhost, Indy Neidell, World War Two, Documentary, Historian, History, War, Powermetal, Band, Pär Sundstrom, Joakim Broden, Uprising, Polish Rising, Polish insurgency, Rising 1944, Home Army, Armia Krajowa, Polish Underground, Polish resistance, 1944, Red Army, Rokossovsky, Berling Army, Warsaw, Warsaw Uprising, Powstanie Warszawskie, Stalin

Id: VB_E-gjnZ7A

Length: 20min 41sec (1241 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 16 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

nice nickname

[u/Soap_Mctavish101]

Really a heart wrenching story