On top of that over 200,000 children were kidnapped from Poland during WWII, most of which never returned:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_of_children_by_Nazi_...
Warsaw, August 1947
21–30 of 86 posts
Re: Warsaw, August 1947
#22Interesting how many buildings were clearly hit by bombs, burned out and still didn't collapse into their own footprint as tall buildings are known to do.
Re: Warsaw, August 1947
#23Very interesting pictures. Most photographs I have seen have been taken in black and white, and show the destroyed city in 1944/'45. My family had many tragic memories of the ruins of Warsaw, for they were bound with the jewish ghetto uprising and the following uprising by the AK (armia krajowa, underround army). On another note, many cities still show signs of the destructive effect on war on the jewels of our civil…
> the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
Let's not forget that MOST of the Japanese cities were actually destroyed, not just Hiroshima and Nagasaki. US army used incendiary bombs on Japanese cities, causing massive fires (and according death tolls in civilian populations, largely exceeding the people who died from atomic bombs) across the country in all large cities. The whole country was effectively destroyed.
Re: Warsaw, August 1947
#24It doesn't seem like the world has changed that much in 60 years!
Why the downvotes? This just reminded me about the ruins in Syria I saw earlier this week!
Re: Warsaw, August 1947
#25For comparison, the same city in 1935: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5ea_396LPo
Re: Warsaw, August 1947
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
TL;DR The city must completely disappear from the surface of the earth and serve only as a transport station for the Wehrmacht. No stone can remain standing. Every building must be razed to its foundation. —SS chief Heinrich Himmler, October 17, SS officers' conference Warsaw has to be pacified, that is, razed to the ground. —Adolf Hitler, 1944[2]
The appalling behavior of the Red Army and of the USSR in general at the time is briefly covered in the Wikipedia entry. Churchill in particular seems to have tried very hard to do the right thing.
>Churchill in particular seems to have tried very hard to do the right thing.
I'm not saying what's right and what's wrong but your sentence made me think of the age old quote "history is written by the victors".
Re: Warsaw, August 1947
#27I apologize for being nit-picky here, but please upload it somewhere other than Facebook. (It's just a personal policy to not visit Facebook and give them any data about me, and I'm sure there are others like me here).
It wasn't the HN poster who uploaded these pictures. Here you go, mostly same content from another source: http://pokazywarka.pl/hi4dlh/
Warsaw is happy to have any walls - Minsk was reduced to runis completely (you could say, bombed to be like moon ground).
Re: Warsaw, August 1947
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
It wasn't the HN poster who uploaded these pictures. Here you go, mostly same content from another source: http://pokazywarka.pl/hi4dlh/
Warsaw is happy to have any walls - Minsk was reduced to runis completely (you could say, bombed to be like moon ground).
War is shit in general, when looking at pictures like that I really understand hippies.
Re: Warsaw, August 1947
#29All these flat areas covered in rubble hills used to be housing estates (usually 5-6 stories high) in the Warsaw Ghetto. It was blown up, bulldozed, razed to the ground. As you may see, other parts of the city survived in a slightly better state.
Born and raised in Warsaw I sometimes feel I'm literally walking on history. There are hundreds of commemorative plaques/stones everywhere you go in the downtown and neighbouring districts.
Re: Warsaw, August 1947
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being curious I looked up the numbers. UK death toll: 326,000 military and 62,000 civilian. Russia: 10 million each. "Absolutely titanic" is about right.
While it doesn't compare to Russian deaths, 388,000 UK deaths is a staggering number in its own right.
Compare it to US deaths in Vietnam (60,000) and in Iraq/Afghanistan (~7,000).
The irony is that for all the warmongering politics of the US, the population are highly sensitive to actually losing soldiers in battle. There were single days in WWI (and the US Civil War) that saw single countries having more combat deaths than the US has seen this century in total. The US public wants wars it can win effortlessly (conscription anyone? rationing perhaps?) but has no stomach for the realities of war.
Hell, every time Australia lost a soldier in Afghanistan, the papers would do a double-page spread with portraits of all the soldiers lost so far. It's not a particularly difficult war if you can fit portraits of all the lost soldiers after 10 years in the field on a newspaper page. We've lost 40 soldiers... and in the same timeframe, we've lost 36 police officers in the normal course of civilian duty.
We really have no idea what it's like to actually be a society at war.