Photos of Warsaw during and after WW2

Bonobo, thank-you for sharing these photos.

If anyone else wants to look through the images in the LIFE archive, here is the link:

images.google.com/hosted/life

This photo presents Warsaw Main Rail Station, finished in 1939. It was then the most modern rail station in Europe, excellently designed in modernist style with art deco ornamentation. It was the first railway station built to serve as a multi-functional city building, idea now widespread and popular worldwide. It was spacious, housed many shops, restaurants, cafes etc. The trains and paltforms were under the surface of the ground, obvious today new then. The building survived German invasion 1939 and the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. It was completely demolished by retreating Germans in January 1945, just prior to entry of the Soviet Russian Army.

Zygmunt Walkowski, the researcher who put together the new "Warsaw from Above" exhibit in the Polish capital, points to a picture of Warsaw taken by the Luftwaffe during World War II, in Warsaw, Poland, Tuesday, April 7, 2009. The exhibit puts on display for the first time in Warsaw aerial photographs taken by the Luftwaffe that show Warsaw's gradual destruction during World War II, from the early days of the Nazi occupation to the brutal street fighting of the ill-fated Warsaw Uprising.



04/08/09 04:16 AM


Exhibit of Luftwaffe photos shows Warsaw's demise
By RYAN LUCAS
Associated Press Writer

Aerial photographs taken by the Luftwaffe showing Warsaw's gradual destruction during World War II have gone on display for the first time in the city, showing the progression from the early days of the Nazi occupation to brutal street fighting of the ill-fated Warsaw Uprising.

The two dozen or so black-and-white pictures in "Warsaw from Above" give visitors an eagle's eye view of the Polish capital as the densely packed, almost honeycomb-like city of tenement buildings, townhouses and palaces of 1940 was pounded by fighting into a landscape of rubble and roofless, hollowed-out shells by 1945.

"These photographs chronicle an incredibly dramatic and important time for Warsaw," said Zygmunt Walkowski, the researcher who discovered the photographs at the U.S. National Archives in College Park, Maryland, in 2007.

Some of the exhibit's most dramatic photographs come from the Warsaw Uprising in the late summer of 1944. Thick plumes of smoke billow over the city, while the broad swath of neighborhoods that made up the ghetto are nothing more than a white blotch, the buildings having been razed to the ground during the Ghetto Uprising a year earlier.

In another photo, barricades block intersections of downtown streets, and swastikas painted on the roof of the central post office alert German bombers not to attack the building.

Around 85 percent of Warsaw was reduced to rubble during the war, with most of the damage coming in pitched street battles during the 1943 Ghetto Uprising and a year later between Polish insurgents and the Nazi occupiers in the Warsaw Uprising. After crushing the 1944 revolt, the Germans systematically dynamited most of the remaining buildings and shipped many of the surviving residents to concentration camps.

On opening day, the exhibit attracted a mixed crowd of young and older Poles, many of whom tried to trace the lines of the old streets, and shook their heads in wonder at the scale of the city's destruction.

"For me, the shots from the destroyed ghetto, which the Germans flattened to the ground, make the strongest impression," said Piotr Wojciechowski, a 44-year-old clerk from Warsaw. "What also is frightening is the scale of destruction after the Warsaw Uprising was crushed - the systematic destruction of the city, its palaces, cathedrals and cultural institutions."

Today, modern Warsaw is a mix of the few buildings that survived the war, concrete communist apartment blocks and glistening new skyscrapers from the country's post-communist period.

That contrast between contemporary Warsaw and the prewar city, notes Walkowski, who as a 71-year-old native of Warsaw can remember the brutal fighting that raged in the city during the war, gives the exhibit much of its power for visitors.

It allows them to see not only the Warsaw's destruction, he said, but also provides a window on "a city that no longer exists."

The open-air exhibit opened Tuesday and runs through May 24th.

This building is a part of Warsaw that wasn't rebuilt. It beared a name 'pasaż Simmonsa'. The building was one of the hallmarks of prewar Warsaw (now the region is on the margin of the downtown) and was often recalled in the stories of my ancestors. It house the shoppping galleries and was one of the precursors of a modern-day shopping-centres (malls in USA) but downtown of the Trocadero in London type. It was destroyed by the Germans in 1944. Presently preliminary plans are being discussed to rebuild this beautiful and 'meaningful' building.

These are very moving and very interesting just the kind of material to show my son when he his old enough to understand which will be a long time off yet but he will able to see what his grandfather and his family went through as they say the camera never lies many thanks!

This is very sad, and must hurt many to see it. We here in the USA must make sure this never again happens to Poland. I for one, won't let it, and will do anything to stop it, even if, at my age, must go to fight.
But Warsaw, after being rebuilt, is one of the greatest cities in the world.

Mike

I agree totally.
Indeed shocking incredibly.

The famous photos of Julien Bryan, an American photographer.

Julien Hequembourg Bryan (1899 in Titusville, Pennsylvania – 20 October 1974) was an American documentarian and filmmaker. He is best known for documenting the daily life in Poland, Soviet Union and Nazi Germany between 1935 and 1939.Following the outbreak of World War II he authored numerous films documenting the Siege of Warsaw and the terror bombing of the city by German Luftwaffe. He is credited as the only foreign journalist in Warsaw at that time.[1] Through Polish Radio he also made an appeal to the American president Franklin Delano Roosevelt to help the Warsaw's civilians targeted by enemy bombers.[2] During his stay in Warsaw he lived in the abandoned Consulate of the United States. He left Warsaw on September 21 and smuggled his films out to America,[1] where some of them were put together in 1940 as a short documentary Siege, released by RKO Radio Pictures.[3] The film was nominated for Academy Award the following year for Best Short Subject, One-reel.[4] Some of his pictures from war-torn Poland were also published in the December 5, 1939 edition of Look magazine.[1][5]

In 1958 he revisited Poland and met some of the people he filmed 20 years before.[1][2] Many of his works are currently held by the Library of Congress and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive.[6] In 2006 Siege was named to the National Film Registry of the USA by the Librarian of Congress as "a unique, horrifying record of the dreadful brutality of war".[4][7]

His World War II experiences in Warsaw were fictionalised in the 1978 film ... Gdziekolwiek jesteś Panie Prezydencie (Wherever you may be, Mr. President) by Andrzej Trzos-Rastawiecki. The role of unnamed American journalist based on Julien Bryan was portrayed by Jack Recknitz.[8]






























































See his documentary film, nominated to Oscar in 1940.

www.dhm.de/ausstellungen/deutsche-polen/der_ueberfall.html#video

New photos of Warsaw 1945 have surfaced. Made by American - Michael Cobb whyen he was 21.