Rudolf Masaryk didn’t have long to live, but for now he was fighting with all of his life. As he stood on top of a roof in the burning Treblinka concentration camp, he yelled down toward the Nazi guards he was shooting at. “This is for my wife and my child who never saw the ...read more
A train rushed through the snow of a Polish winter. Its destination: the Warsaw Ghetto. Its passengers: a group of terrified Jews. Suddenly, a Nazi guard threw a three-year-old child off the train and into the snow. Its mother jumped off the train, too, desperate to save her ...read more
If you’d visited Warsaw in 1945, you might not have recognized it as a city at all. Destroyed by the Nazis in retribution for a 1944 uprising, the city was pocked by craters and reduced to miles and miles of rubble. It wasn’t just the capital: Much of Poland was rubble by the end ...read more
Auschwitz is best known as a place of death—a hellish extermination camp, the largest of its kind, where at least 1.1 million people are thought to have been murdered. So it’s strange to think of the camp as a place of life as well. It was, though—thanks to a woman named ...read more
Auschwitz. Treblinka. The Warsaw Ghetto. During World War II, Poland became the epicenter of the Nazis’ crimes—but soon, implying that those crimes were committed by the Polish state will itself be a crime. A controversial new law in Poland makes it illegal to accuse the nation ...read more
On April 22, 1934, Nazi officials in their crisp military uniforms and local dignitaries wearing black top hats gathered near the German town of Falkenburg for a ceremony marking the groundbreaking of the new Ordensburg Krossinsee center, one of three massive new educational ...read more
Since 2008, archaeologists have been excavating a 400-year-old cemetery on a sandy hill in northwest Poland near the rural village of Drawsko. More than 250 bodies have been unearthed so far, and they have been unremarkable with one noticeable exception—five skeletons buried with ...read more
For decades after the end of World War II, rumors persisted that the mountains of southwest Poland held a secret—a Nazi “ghost train” abounding with looted weapons, jewels, priceless art and up to 300 tons of gold hidden inside a secret labyrinth of tunnels. The legend appeared ...read more
Stories of the Nazi “ghost train” that disappeared along with its precious cargo into the Polish mountains near the end of World War II date back some 70 years, although historians say they haven’t been able to conclusively prove the train ever existed. During the war, Nazi ...read more
Legends of “revenance,” or people returning from the dead, have deep roots among human civilizations, stretching all the way back to ancient Egypt, Greece, Babylonia and beyond. As reported in LiveScience, vampire tales have circulated in eastern Europe since at least the 11th ...read more
At 4:45 a.m. on September 1, 1939, the pre-dawn skies lit up over the Baltic Sea as the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on a Polish fortress on the Westerplatte Peninsula as assault troops hidden aboard the vessel stormed the shoreline. The venerable ship that ...read more
In late 1940, more than a year after the German invasion of Poland, Nazi high command began the forced migration of the country’s 3 million Jews into a series of urban ghettoes. In Warsaw, the country’s capital, more than 400,000 were relocated to a 1.3-sqaure-mile corner of the ...read more
At 4:45 a.m., some 1.5 million German troops invade Poland all along its 1,750-mile border with German-controlled territory. Simultaneously, the German Luftwaffe bombed Polish airfields, and German warships and U-boats attacked Polish naval forces in the Baltic Sea. Nazi leader ...read more
The Warsaw Uprising ends with the surrender of the surviving Polish rebels to German forces. Two months earlier, the approach of the Red Army to Warsaw prompted Polish resistance forces to launch a rebellion against the Nazi occupation. The rebels, who supported the democratic ...read more
During World War II, an advance Soviet armored column under General Konstantin Rokossovski reaches the Vistula River along the eastern suburb of Warsaw, prompting Poles in the city to launch a major uprising against the Nazi occupation. The revolt was spearheaded by Polish ...read more
In Poland, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising comes to an end as Nazi soldiers gain control of Warsaw’s Jewish ghetto, blowing up the last remaining synagogue and beginning the mass deportation of the ghetto’s remaining dwellers to the Treblinka extermination camp. Shortly after the ...read more
In Warsaw, Poland, Nazi forces attempting to clear out the city’s Jewish ghetto are met by gunfire from Jewish resistance fighters, and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising begins. Shortly after the German occupation of Poland began, the Nazis forced the city’s Jewish citizens into a ...read more
At noon, despite threats of British and French intervention, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler signs an order to attack Poland, and German forces move to the frontier. That evening, Nazi S.S. troops wearing Polish uniforms staged a phony invasion of Germany, damaging several minor ...read more
The Babi Yar massacre of nearly 34,000 Jewish men, women, and children begins on the outskirts of Kiev in the Nazi-occupied Ukraine. The German army took Kiev on September 19, and special SS squads prepared to carry out Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s orders to exterminate all Jews ...read more
On the eve of a major offensive into Poland, the Soviet Union decides to recognize the pro-Soviet Lublin Committee as the Provisional Government of Poland instead of the government-in-exile that was temporarily being headquartered in London. On September 1, 1939, a massive German ...read more
On this day, Soviet troops liberate the Polish capital from German occupation. Warsaw was a battleground since the opening day of fighting in the European theater. Germany declared war by launching an air raid on September 1, 1939, and followed up with a siege that killed tens of ...read more
On this day in 1943, Polish General Wladyslaw Sikorski dies when his plane crashes less than a mile from its takeoff point at Gibraltar. Controversy remains over whether it was an accident or an assassination. Born May 20, 1888, in Austrian Poland (that part of Poland co-opted by ...read more
On this day in 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union agree to divide control of occupied Poland roughly along the Bug River–the Germans taking everything west, the Soviets taking everything east. As a follow-up to the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, (also known as the Hitler-Stalin Pact), ...read more