World War II: Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

All but a 30 of fighters died. Anielewicz and his staff committed suicide, a tragic resort that proved to be unnecessary shortly afterward, when the survivors discovered an exit route and made their way to safety through a series of cellar tunnels and finally through the city sewer system. The survivors of Mila 18 were then carried through the sewers by a group of 50 escapees. On May 10, after a 30-hour exodus, the first 34 escapees emerged from the sewer system outside the ghetto and were driven by the Guardia Ludowa to join their comrades in the Lomianki forest. Before the truck could return for the rest of the group, however, the remaining fugitives were discovered by SS troops and Lithuanian auxiliaries, who killed them all. Those who made it to the Lomianski forest formed a partisan unit named in Anielewics’ honor.

By May 13, the ZOB no longer existed as a cohesive organization in Warsaw, but Stroop noted in his report that fighting had flared up anew. That night, the Soviet air force made an unexpected appearance. Responding to a radio appeal from the Polish Workers Party and guided to their targets by the fires in the ghetto, Soviet bombers raided the German staging areas around the ghetto between midnight and 2 a.m. Several Jewish fighting groups tried to take advantage of the confusion caused by the raids to break through the German cordon, but they were only partially successful.

The scattered pockets of Jewish resistance now had two alternatives–die fighting, or surrender and die later in the gas chambers. Stroop, who was now in virtual control of the situation, noted in his after-action report: ‘While it was at first possible to catch the Jews, who are by nature cowards, in great numbers, this became increasingly difficult as the action went on. Fighting groups of 20 to 30 or more Jewish youths, aged 18-25, kept turning up, sometimes with a corresponding number of women who kindled fresh resistance. These fighting groups had been ordered to defend themselves to the last and, if need be, to escape capture by suicide. The women belonging to the fighting groups were armed in the same way as the men. Sometimes these women fired pistols from each hand at once. It happened time and again that they kept their pistols and hand grenades hidden in their bloomers till the last minute, and then used them against the armed SS, police and Wehrmacht.‘

Of his own men, Stroop wrote: ‘The longer the resistance lasted, the more implacable became the men of the SS, the police and the Wehrmacht, who continued untiringly in the fulfillment of their duties in the true comradeship in arms….Only by the continued and untiring efforts of all our forces did we succeed in achieving a total of 56,065 Jews captured and proved killed….The action was completed on May 16, 1943,’ concluded Stroop, ‘with the blowing up of the Warsaw Synagogue at 8:15 p.m. All the ghetto buildings have been destroyed.’

Despite continuing reports of fighting, Stroop reported to his superiors on May 16 that ‘the former Jewish residential district in Warsaw no longer exists.’ Stroop claimed that casualties among the Germans and their collaborators totaled 16 dead and 85 wounded–a highly doubtful statistic. In its underground publication Glos Warszawy, the Polish Guardia Ludowa estimated that the ghetto fighters had killed about 360 Germans and wounded more than 1,000 in the first week alone.

Whatever the truth of the German losses, the Jewish resistance had been an embarrassment to the ‘Master Race.’ Himmler had expected the destruction of the ghetto to be completed in three days. The task had taken 28–about as long as it had taken the Germans to conquer all of Poland in 1939. Nor was the ‘victory’ absolutely complete. Pockets of resistance continued to emerge from the rubble to attack the Germans for months thereafter. Many of the surviving Jewish resistance fighters who had managed to escape the ghetto came out of hiding to fight alongside the Polish AK during the Warsaw Rising of August 1944, only to be driven underground again after its collapse the next month.

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