The “Warsaw Rising”, which began on 1 August 1944, is the focus of the exhibition. The Polish Home Army, supported by other underground groups and the civilian population, rose up against the German occupation. The uprising lasted 63 days before it was conclusively put down by the SS, police and Wehrmacht. Almost 200,000 Poles were killed during the uprising, many of them civilians.
Some 150,000 people were transported for forced labour in the German Reich or to concentration camps and some 350,000 “resettled” inside the General Government. After the expulsion of the inhabitants of Warsaw, German groups destroyed broad swathes of the Polish capital.
The exhibition, created on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the uprising by the Muzeum Powstania Warszawskiego (Warsaw), was first shown in 2014 in the Topography of Terror Documentation Centre.
The exhibition will now be shown again on the site where, in 1944, orders were issued both for the military suppression of the uprising and for the subsequent retaliatory measures.
The current presentation is made under the patronage of the President of the Republic of Poland, Andrzej Duda, and the Federal President of Germany, Frank-Walter Steinmeier.