At 5 p.m., roughly 40,000 fighters of the Polish Home Army rose simultaneously across Warsaw, seizing key buildings and attacking German garrisons in a bid to liberate the capital before Soviet troops arrived. The uprising, ordered by General Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski, hoped to establish Polish sovereignty ahead of Soviet occupation — but Red Army forces halted their advance nearby and offered no support.
The uprising's timing, known as "W-hour," was chosen for the long summer evening light and to catch German forces off guard during a shift change. Fighters wearing improvised red-and-white armbands and armed largely with pistols, grenades, and captured weapons attacked police stations, bridges, and administrative buildings across the city within minutes of each other.
The insurgents' hope rested on a brutal calculation: Soviet forces under Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky had reached the eastern bank of the Vistula River just days earlier, and Polish commanders believed liberation was imminent. Stalin, however, had no interest in aiding a resistance movement loyal to the London-based Polish government-in-exile rather than his own client communist authorities, and Soviet troops made no move to cross the river for weeks.
What followed was 63 days of horrific urban combat. German forces, on Hitler's direct orders, subsequently leveled much of Warsaw as reprisal, block by block, after the uprising's collapse. An estimated 200,000 Poles, mostly civilians, died — a catastrophe that shaped Polish national memory and Cold War politics for generations.
Key people: Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski