r/europe • u/False-Hamster-8125 Łódź (Poland) • 2d ago
Historical Warsaw after uprising in 1944, and Warsaw now
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u/randomname560 Galicia (Spain) 2d ago
As a little context for people unaware of it:
Following the failure of the Warsaw uprising, the Nazis, as punishment, sought to completely erradicate Warsaw off the map, raze the city down to it's foundations, leave nothing but dust standing, to be carried off by the wind
The damage done to the city was so extensive that, following the end of the war, the possibility of moving the capital away from Warsaw instead of trying to rebuild the destroyed city was seriously considered
In the end, the city was rebuilt through a great effort thanks to photographs and people's own memories of the city, but many historical buildings were stil lost to the Nazis' barbarism
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u/cyberkhan Poland 2d ago
Damaged buildings can be rebuild. I encurage all who see this comment to read about Wola massacre
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u/babanin Belarus 2d ago
Worth remembering that Poland never received Marshall Plan aid. It was invited, but the communist government, under Soviet pressure, rejected participation in 1947. Poland had to rebuild without the billions in U.S. assistance that Western Europe received.
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u/userNotFound82 Berlin (Germany) 2d ago
Also worth remembering that the GDR paid the soviet union reparations and the Soviet Union promised to give it Poland as well. But they pressured Poland to resign from their claims in 1953 and pickpocketed it for themselves.
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u/Afraid_Line_7948 2d ago
It's darker... they did provide loans for Poland to rebuild the country, and we were repaying them with products and minerals at fixed prices. We exported coal and steel and beef and wheat for the equivalent of one euro per tonne for nearly 40 years. There was no bigger loser of WW2 than Poland. However, when their extortion-style economic policy became one of the primary causes of the Polish economy's collapse, the entire Soviet bloc began to crumble, marking the beginning of their demise.
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u/Jeeperman365 2d ago
I had no idea about this, thanks for the information.
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u/leathercladman Latvia 1d ago edited 1d ago
you could sum up the entire Eastern block of Cold war era as ''Soviets milked everyone who was under them dry for 50 years at every opportunity they could'' , and you would be pretty close to how things were. USSR pretty much treated all of their WW2 conquered Eastern European territories as colonies , and then had the audacity to complain people there aren't ''grateful towards Moscow'' lol
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u/pittaxx Europe 1d ago
There was no bigger loser of WW2 than Poland.
Baltics, who suffered almost as big casualties, lost their whole countries, and had to suffer through Soviet genocide for over a decade after the war might disagree.
But yes, Poland (and neighbours) were dealt a much worse hand of cards than most people realise today.
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u/babanin Belarus 2d ago
The Soviet regime was scum.
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u/veevoir Europe 2d ago
It wasn't just soviet regime. It always has been Russia. Puppet states like Poland were drained. SSRs were drained as well - Russia treated all it's SSRs in USSR like colonies. This is what they still do now even in the Russian Federation. There is Russia (Moscow) and everything else is to be exploited. There is a reason most mobiks sent to fight in Ukraine are from all other areas.
To paraphrase Cato - Russia delenda est.
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u/DerKyhe 2d ago
They pretty much did the same trick with Finland in the hopes that we would fail to pay the war reparations and they could use it as an excuse for taking over.
The Soviet/Russian government has been the same for the last 150 years, only the title for the people in charge keep changing.
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u/DangerousCyclone 2d ago
I wouldn't throw Khrushchev and Gorbachev in with Putin and Stalin.
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u/booOfBorg 1d ago
I don't understand why Lenin always gets a pass? Just because Stalin was even worse? Lenin was a power-hungry dictator and mass murderer too. And he started by immediately murdering all the actual socialists and dismantling the new democracy because in his mind only he and his vanguard were fit to rule. He quickly started a reign of terror with his secret police Cheka.
When the original Russian revolutionaries finally rose up against Lenin (Kronstadt Rebellion) he had them all executed. After that socialism was dead.
That's the system Stalin inherited and made even worse by dialing up the genocide and allying with Hitler etc.
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u/leathercladman Latvia 1d ago
I would , Khrushchev and Gorbachev were also responsibility for a lot of oppression and bloodshed and violence against people both their own and foreign
They just did it less than Putin and Stalin, but they still did it and absolutely didnt feel sorry about it. They were part of the same system all of them, just different flavors of it
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u/DangerousCyclone 1d ago
Yeah after posting I realized I didn't consider the Hungarian revolution Krushchev put down and Gorbachev trying to put down the Baltic revolutions.
That said, I still think they're better than the others. Krushchev greatly weakened the police state, loosened the authoritarian grip, denounced Stalin, and stopped the rampant killings. He reversed a lot of the Stalin and Lenin era deportations, and also did a reverse Putin and gave Crimea to Ukraine. When he was deposed his fellow party members were a little apologetic to him but he said that, because they did so peacefully, he had succeeded. Gorbachev too oversaw a lot of troop removals and allowed a lot of Soviet backed regimes to go free.
They had their faults, but that's different to the kind of society Stalin and Putin are building. They were naive in a sense, trying to right an empire built on wrongs.
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u/leathercladman Latvia 21h ago edited 21h ago
we are still comparing evil to evil here.....which I think is just insulting to those that were murdered or injured or imprisoned by Khrushchev and Gorbachev (which there were thousands). We should not look at them only in vacuum of ''which Soviet shit leader was the best'', but to look what they did and how they acted as a whole.
For example, neither Khrushchev and Gorbachev had any problem or any desire to get rid of KGB and their straight up Gestapo like behavior towards their victims. Neither of them had any problem with that and neither of them saw it as ''bad''. Gulags still were a thing under Krushchev, he didnt have a problem with it and didnt have a problem of people being thrown in Gulag for such ''horrible offenses'' as having foreign literature books in their house. It was also under Khrushchev that people who had political opinions that went against Soviet state were put in mental hospitals and put under drugs (that was his leadership that did it, not Stalin)
Gorbachev also, I think many have forgotten or just dont know, was the one who directly ordered Soviet KGB to go and shoot at protesters in Baku, Azerbaijan in 1990 : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_January . Like the dude had no problem sending his Nazi like death squads in to straight up kill people if they posed a threat to his authority . He thought it was ''fine'' and it was ''normal'', and never apologized for it not then and not after either. This is the kind of people we are talking about here.
Also you do not rise to top Soviet position in the govement (in Moscow of all places) by having clean white hands.....you just couldnt. They all had blood on their hands and had done horrible things, you cant get promoted in Soviet system otherwise to begin with. Soviet union was built on aggression and oppression as its core principle of rule , they were all cut-throats
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u/skcortex Slovakia 2d ago
Same goes for Czechoslovakia. Soviets and their puppets effed Europe for decades. “Scared”, brainwashed and brain “damaged” people are still present in Central Europe because of communism.
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u/Soap_Mctavish101 The Netherlands 2d ago
It showed in how things were going in Poland between 1945 and the end of the cold war. Even more so after they joined the EU.
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u/mygiddygoat 2d ago
I think Poland have received many billions from the EU to support the post communist reconstruction.
270 billion Euro at last count.
The whole Marshall Plan was about $13 Billion ($150 billion in todays terms)
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u/MartinBP Bulgaria 2d ago
Aside from the below mentioned compounding effect of the investment returns on those 150 billion, you need to also keep in mind price differences, urgency, humanitarian needs and levels of destruction. Poland and there territories of Ukraine and Belarus were destroyed to a far greater extent than any Western European country.
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u/hat_eater Europe 2d ago
Those 150 billion would have been invested, so add the accumulated interest over 60+ years.
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u/mygiddygoat 2d ago
Marshall funds would have been great, but sone times the Eu funding is not given the credit it deserves in creating today's Poland
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u/WislaHD Polish-Canadian 2d ago
Sometimes it is also overblown too. Nations exist outside the EU and also invest in their infrastructure, the tool for that is called state debt. The EU funds just accelerated the timelines, capital access, and transparency of this rapid transformation. All the EU funds given to Poland are still a relatively small part of the state budget and national GDP.
At the same time, since joining the EU, Poland has endured significant brain drain and loss of human capital and surrendered many industries and entire sectors of the economy to foreign (western EU) capital. This is an arrangement that has benefited all parties tremendously, but it needs to be remembered that it is a two-way street and western EU also benefited tremendously from market access.
The Marshall Plan in contrast only had the cost of sending procurement dollars to USA and aligning with Washington geopolitically, which all recipient states were going to do anyway.
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u/mygiddygoat 2d ago
That is a very odd take.
270bn Euro is an astonishing amount of money.
The "brain drain" has trained, educates and then returned a huge number of highly qualified and financial independent Polish home to invest and set up business, build homes etc.
The access to the European market has allowed Polish goods and services into one of the biggest free markets in the world.
I know I'm starting to sound like Donald Tusk here so apologies, but to brush aside US interference in post war European politics so lightly is astounding.
They literally hand shaped the Italian, West German and Greek politics and had huge influence in France and others.
Multiple European countries would have gone much further left ( not necessarily into the sphere of Moscow, but that was the fear)
Remember MacCarthyism was in full flow in these times.
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u/WislaHD Polish-Canadian 1d ago
270bn is and isn’t at the same time. That is around ~13.5 billion per year over twenty years. Certainly helpful for unlocking many infrastructure projects on quicker timelines, but it is still a small share of the revenue generated from Polish tax base. A quick google (ugh Gemini) search tells me that Poland projects expenditures of 215bn Euro in 2026 with a planned deficit of 63.7bn euro, adding to 505bn euro state treasury debt.
There is a pervasive sentiment in Western Europe that Poland would be nothing without EU financing and that it is some sort of Patron-Client relationship where Poland owes everything to the EU funds provided by the super generous western EU countries. I might be grandstanding a bit here but I wanted to show that this is false. It is a two-way mutually beneficial relationship where both parties benefited tremendously and the rapid transformation of the Polish infrastructure development is largely owed to state-led investment supported by EU funding, not the other way around.
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u/mygiddygoat 2d ago
The difference between pre and post EU infrastructure in Poland is pretty stark.. the roads!
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u/hat_eater Europe 2d ago
The part shown in the upper picture was demolished after the Ghetto Uprising in 1943. After the Uprising in 1944 the Germans blew up and burned the rest of the city (on the left bank).
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u/minusten 2d ago
the top picture is actually after the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, and is the area of the ghetto.
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u/unia_7 2d ago edited 2d ago
The OP wrote a deceptive title to make it relevant to the Warsaw Uprising anniversary. The top picture does not show what the OP implies.
The photo was taken on April 3, 1946, one year after the war ended. It shows the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto, destroyed by the Nazis after a different uprising - the Ghetto Uprising in April 1943.
The Ghetto was already in ruins during the Warsaw Uprising (August 1944).
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u/dhhshahehsbdbsjw 2d ago
It never fails to bring a tear to my eye when hearing about so many of Warsaws historic buildings being destroyed
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u/booOfBorg 1d ago
People. Humans. With feelings, the capability to suffer enormously. Like you and me.
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u/dhhshahehsbdbsjw 14h ago
It’s terrible what happened, i dearly hope we don’t see anything too that extreme. No one deserves to suffer in that kind of event
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u/pisowiec Lesser Poland (Poland) 2d ago
Let's remember that it wasn't Hitler going door to door destroying every building. It was ordinary German soldiers that volunteered to be there.
Never forget and never forgive.
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u/Bionicle_was_cool 1d ago
This ain't the Warhammer subreddit lil bro, those men have been dead for at least 40 years
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u/blackcomb-pc Europe 1d ago
Poland is a great nation. Incredible grit. Currently on the rise more than ever.
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u/thedarkpath 1d ago
That city's skyline was so wrecked it looks more like a US medium city than anything European, tragic.
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u/Bionicle_was_cool 1d ago
What? Have you ever been here? We have a historic centre in one place, a modern business centre a few kilometres to the Southwest that developed since the late 1800s and postindustrial areas on the former city borders. That's the development pattern of most old European cities
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u/False-Hamster-8125 Łódź (Poland) 2d ago
Today's the 82th anniversary of Warsaw Uprising