Warsaw Uprising - Background

Background

By July 1944, Poland had been occupied by the forces of Nazi Germany for almost five years. The Polish Home Army, which was loyal to the Polish government-in-exile, had long planned some form of insurrection against the occupiers. Germany was fighting a coalition of Allied powers, led by the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States. The initial plan of the Home Army was to link up with the invading forces of the Western Allies as they liberated Europe from the Nazis. However, in 1943 it became apparent that the Soviets, rather than the Western Allies, would reach the pre-war borders of Poland before the Allied invasion of Europe made notable headway. The Soviets and the Poles had a common enemy—Nazi Germany—but other than that, they were working towards different post-war goals; the Home Army desired a pro-Western, democratic Poland, but the Soviet leader Stalin intended to establish a communist, pro-Soviet regime. It became obvious that the advancing Soviet Red Army might not come to Poland as an ally but rather only as "the ally of an ally".

The Soviets and the Poles distrusted each other, and Soviet partisans in Poland often clashed with Polish resistance increasingly united under the Home Army's front. Stalin broke off Polish-Soviet relations on 25 April 1943 after the Germans revealed the Katyn massacre of Polish army officers, but Stalin refused to admit to ordering the killings and blamed the Germans for propaganda. Afterwards, Stalin created the Rudenko Commission, whose goal was to blame the Germans for the war crime at all costs. The alliance took Stalin's words as truth to keep the Anti-Nazi alliance. On 26 October, the Polish government-in-exile issued an instruction to the effect that if diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union were not resumed before the Soviet entry into Poland, Home Army forces were to remain underground pending further decisions. However, the Home Army commander, Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski, took a different approach, and on 20 November, he outlined his own plan, which became known as "Operation Tempest". On the approach of the Eastern Front, local units of the Home Army were to harass the German Wehrmacht in the rear and co-operate with incoming Soviet units as much as possible. Although doubts existed about the military wisdom of a major uprising, planning continued.