For the 19th-century fortress in the Polish capital, see Warsaw Citadel.
A preserved Tobruk-type pillbox in Warsaw. It is one of 12 pillboxes built as part of the 1945 Festung.
In the German language, Festung Warschau ("Fortress Warsaw") is the term used to refer to a fortified and well-defended Warsaw. In the 20th century, the term was in use on three occasions during World War I and World War II. It was used when the Germans threw back the Russian advance in 1914, where Warsaw came within distance of the fighting in October. The term resurfaced during the September 1939 German invasion of Poland. Later in the second war, the term resurfaced between September 1944 and January 1945, when the retreating Germans tried to establish a defense in the city against the advancing Soviet Union.
During the invasion of Poland in 1939 the German troops reached the outskirts of Warsaw on 9 September. The Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH) assumed that the unfortified city damaged by countless terror bombing raids would be taken by German motorized units without any resistance and issued a press and radio release stating that the capital of Poland was taken. However, the German motorized assault was defeated and the advancing troops were forced to retreat with heavy casualties. From 8 September the city started to be referred to as Fortress of Warsaw in German broadcasts, which was to justify the aerial bombardment of civilian targets.[1]
The forces of the defenders, composed initially of only several battalions and various units of second-line troops, were soon strengthened by the soldiers of the Armies Poznań and Pomorze that reached the city in the aftermath of the Battle of Bzura. The Germans laid a siege to the city and started shelling it with heavy artillery located in the outskirts. However, the defending troops managed to defeat all assaults and until the end of September the Germans could not manage to break into the city.
After three weeks of constant aerial and artillery bombardment and assaults, the situation of the civilian inhabitants of Warsaw became dire. Food, water and medicine shortages as well as the Luftwaffestrafing inhabitants and refugees grouped within the city caused Warsaw's civilian authorities to request a cease-fire. Warsaw President Stefan Starzyński and Gen. Walerian Czuma, commander of the Warsaw garrison, decided that further resistance, although possible, would only expose the civilians to unnecessary hardship and signed the capitulation on 28 September 1939. The German text of the capitulation treaty as well as German propaganda used the term Festung Warschau to suggest that the failures of the Wehrmacht were due to heavily fortified terrain they had to cross. Warsaw, as a former Russian fortress, had several older fortifications, e.g. a ring of forts around the city and a citadel, built between 1835 and 1905. But those fortifications failed to prevent the city from being overrun in World War I, as Warsaw was occupied by German and Austro-Hungarian troops in 1915.
By 1944, the German Eastern Front's situation became hopeless. Adolf Hitler who took over personally many duties in the OKW and OKH ordered the no step back policy in an attempt to halt the Soviet offensives which could not be contained by open field battle anymore. Following this policy, several cities were declared Festungen (Fortresses) and were to be held by the German army at all costs, even if surrounded and with no hope to break the siege. Examples of this policy were the Festung Stalingrad and Festung Kiev.
Later in the war, the "Festung" concept that was to be illustrated by the propaganda filmKolberg which reminds of Kolberg's defense against Napoleon in 1807, was also applied to German cities like Königsberg, Breslau, Frankfurt (Oder) and Berlin. Often even the civil population was supposed to support the rather suicidal attempts of defense, as the cities were largely destroyed in the course of the fights.
On 27 July 1944, Adolf Hitler ordered the Festung Warschau to be created and defended at all cost. The same day the governor of the General Government, Hans Frank, called for 100,000 Polish men between the ages of 17–65 to arrive at several gathering places in Warsaw the following day. They were to be employed at construction of fortifications for the Wehrmacht in and around the city. This move was viewed by the Armia Krajowa as an attempt to neutralize the underground forces, and the underground urged Warsaw inhabitants to ignore it. Fearing that the city would be turned into ruins and share the fate of Stalingrad and Kiev, General Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski ordered Operation Tempest to be started in Warsaw, which resulted in the Warsaw Uprising that lasted from August through September.
After the Uprising, during which the Soviets troops had arrived near the Vistula, the Germans razed the city to the ground and continued the construction of concrete bunkers that were to defend Festung Warschau against the Red Army for four months. However, when the Soviets finally crossed the Vistula on 17 January 1945, the city was captured in several hours with little resistance from the remaining German garrison. The Chief of the Operational Branch of the German Army General Staff (Generalstab des Heeres), Colonel Bogislaw von Bonin, gave permission for the retreat of German Heeresgruppe A from Warsaw on 16 January 1945, throughout the Soviet Vistula-Oder Offensive and was imprisoned on 19 January 1945 by the Gestapo at Flossenbürg concentration camp and Dachau concentration camp as he rejected a direct command of Adolf Hitler by this action.
K. Sobczak (1966). ""Festung Warschau" według koncepcji dowództwa niemieckiego jesienią 1944 (>>Festung Warschau<< according to plans of the German high command in the autumn of 1944)". Studia i Materiały do Historii Wojskowości. 12 (1). ISSN0562-2786.
J. Olecki "Wojenne tajemnice Warszawy i Mazowsza" część 1 rok 2007 Wydawnictwo CB
J. Olecki "Wojenne tajemnice Warszawy i Mazowsza" część 2 rok 2011 Wydawnictwo CB
The Oberkommando des Heeres was the high command of the Army of Nazi Germany. It was founded in 1935 as part of Adolf Hitler's rearmament of Germany. OKH was de facto the most important unit within the German war planning until the defeat at Moscow in December 1941.
The Warsaw Uprising, shortly after the war also known as the August Uprising, was a major World War II operation by the Polish underground resistance to liberate Warsaw from German occupation. It occurred in the summer of 1944, and it was led by the Polish resistance Home Army. The uprising was timed to coincide with the retreat of the German forces from Poland ahead of the Soviet advance. While approaching the eastern suburbs of the city, the Red Army halted combat operations, enabling the Germans to regroup and defeat the Polish resistance and to destroy the city in retaliation. The Uprising was fought for 63 days with little outside support. It was the single largest military effort taken by any European resistance movement during World War II.
Operation Bagration was the codename for the 1944 Soviet Byelorussian strategic offensive operation, a military campaign fought between 22 June and 19 August 1944 in Soviet Byelorussia in the Eastern Front of World War II, just over two weeks after the start of Operation Overlord in the west, causing Nazi Germany to have to fight on two major fronts at the same time. The Soviet Union destroyed 28 of 34 divisions of Army Group Centre and completely shattered the German front line. It was the biggest defeat in German military history, with around 450,000 German casualties, while 300,000 other German soldiers were cut off in the Courland Pocket.
Kolberg is a 1945 Nazi propaganda historical film written and directed by Veit Harlan. One of the last films of the Third Reich, it was intended to bolster the will of the German population to resist the Allies.
The siege of Warsaw in 1939 was fought between the Polish Warsaw Army garrisoned and entrenched in Warsaw and the invading German Army.
The Warsaw Uprising occurred at a stage of the Second World War when it was becoming clear that Nazi Germany was likely to lose. The Uprising ended in capitulation, the deaths of over 250,000 civilians, and only 15% of Warsaw intact; with the benefit of hindsight, many people have argued that it should never have been started. Others have argued that it was inevitable and even crucial for Poland to prove its commitment to the Allied cause. Although Stalin was later to describe it as a "criminal enterprise", just two days prior to its initiation, Radio Moscow had called for the Polish people to rise in arms.
Festung is a generic German word for a fortress. Although it is not in common usage in English, it is used in a number of historical contexts involving German speakers:
German fortressesduring World War II were bridgeheads, cities, islands and towns designated by Adolf Hitler as areas that were to be fortified and stocked with food and ammunition in order to hold out against Allied offensives.
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The siege of Breslau, also known as the Battle of Breslau, was a three-month-long siege of the city of Breslau in Lower Silesia, Germany, lasting to the end of World War II in Europe. From 13 February 1945 to 6 May 1945, German troops in Breslau were besieged by the Soviet forces which encircled the city as part of the Lower Silesian Offensive Operation. The German garrison's surrender on 6 May was followed by the surrender of all German forces two days after the battle.
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The Battle of Kolberg or Battle of Kołobrzeg was the taking of the city of Kolberg, now the city of Kołobrzeg, in Pomerania by the Soviet Army and its Polish allies from Nazi German forces during the World War II East Pomeranian Offensive. Between 4 and 18 March 1945 there was major urban fighting of the Soviet and Polish forces against the German army for the control over the city. The Germans succeeded in evacuating much of their military personnel and refugees from the city via sea before it was taken by the Poles on 18 March.
The Battle of Poznań during World War II in 1945 was an assault by the Soviet Union's Red Army that had as its objective the elimination of the Nazi German garrison in the stronghold city of Poznań (Posen) in occupied Poland. The defeat of the German garrison required a month-long reduction of fortified positions, urban combat, and a final assault on the city's citadel by the Red Army, complete with medieval touches.
The Pabst Plan was a Nazi German urban plan to reconstruct the city of Warsaw as a Nazi model city. Named after its creator Friedrich Pabst, the Nazis' "Chief Architect for Warsaw", the plan assumed that Warsaw, the historical capital of Poland and a city of 1.5 million inhabitants, would be completely destroyed and rebuilt as a small German town of not more than 130,000 inhabitants.
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