On the Eastern Front, Zhukov’s Operation Bagration was successful beyond his wildest ambitions. By the end of July 1944, Soviet tanks had reached the Vistula River and the eastern suburbs of Warsaw. On 1 August 1944, the Polish Underground Resistance, otherwise known as the Home Army, launched Operation Tempest to seize their capital from the Germans in order to assert their authority as the legitimate Polish government after the impending Soviet liberation. Stalin and Hitler never let that happen.

Starting on 1 August and for the next two months, 40,000 members of the Home Army fought the German 9th Army in desperate street battles in Warsaw. Despite assurances from FDR and Churchill, Stalin refused to support the uprising and ordered his troops not to cross the river. Most Soviet units could not have directly supported the Poles since they spent from the offensive, but no serious attempt to supply the Poles was even tried, despite their proximity and air superiority. The only support the Home Army received were supply drops from the RAF that landed in German hands as often as Polish. Destruction of postwar Polish leadership not under Stalin’s control was too convenient for the Soviet dictator.

Once Hitler was sure there would be no Soviet intervention, he ordered Warsaw destroyed. Heinrich Himmler, leader of the SS, declared “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.” Hitler told his generals that Warsaw was to be “wiped from the face of the Earth, all the inhabitants were to be killed, there were to be no prisoners.”
In compliance, the SS sent in special extermination units with the task of murdering anyone of Polish descent: man, woman or child. They averaged about 10,000 a week. German tactics against the civilians were so brutal, 200,000 of the Warsaw’s 700,000 civilians soon stood with the Home Army to fight. Like the Jewish Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943, the Germans realized that only the total obliteration of the city could root out the resistance. They began a systematic destruction of the city neighborhood by neighborhood, block by block, street by street, and house by house.

On 13 September, Stalin began a token supply effort to the uprising after several near mutinies by Polish troops in the Soviet Army, but by then the damage was done. The leadership of the Home Army was dead, and Warsaw was utterly destroyed. On 2 October 1944, the remaining Polish defenders surrendered. 15,000 of them were sent to the gas chambers in the nearby death camps, along with 60,000 civilian defenders. 200,000 Polish civilians died during the two months of brutal street fighting, and 350,000 were expelled from the city and sent to labor camps across Germany.

3½ months later, the Soviet controlled 1st Polish Army occupied the city on 17 January 1945 after the Soviet Vistula/Oder offensive. They immediately began consolidating the power of the Soviet sponsored Polish Worker’s Party: a communist organization made up of those Polish communists that survived Stalin’s purges of Poles in the Communist International in 1938 and 1939. The Soviet dominated Polish Worker’s Party ruled Poland for the next 45 years until it was defeated by Solidarity in 1989.