Polish Postal Service 40th Anniversary of Warsaw Uprising

POLISH POSTAL SERVICE on 1 August 1984 issued a stamp series entitled "The 40th anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising". The stamps were designed by Wojciech Freudenreich, the author of many stamps and book covers, including "Pamiętnik z powstania warszawskiego" by Miron Białoszewski and "Warszawa jaka była". His designs incorporated  black and white photographs and were enhanced with white and red as well as red elements such as insurgent armbands, the Scout Field Post stamp and the Red Cross emblem. Photographs in this series depicted the following: a group of soldiers at an assembly (4 złotych), an insurgent carrying letters (5 złotych), a group of soldiers in combat (6 złotych) and the wounded being dressed by the medical service (25 złotych).

The Warsaw Uprising (Polish: powstanie warszawskie; German: Warschauer Aufstand) 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 (Polish: Armia Krajowa). 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 temporarily halted combat operations(some historians suggest deliberately), thus 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.

The destruction of the Polish capital was  intentional and planned before the start of World War II. On 20 June 1939, while Adolf Hitler was visiting an architectural bureau in Würzburg am Main, his attention was captured by a project of a future German town – "Neue deutsche Stadt Warschau". According to the Pabst Plan Warsaw was to be turned into a provincial German city. It was soon included as a part of the great Germanization plan of the East; the genocidal Generalplan Ost. The failure of the Warsaw Uprising provided an opportunity for Hitler to begin the transformation.

By January 1945, 85% of the buildings were destroyed: 25% as a result of the Uprising, 35% as a result of systematic German actions after the uprising, and the rest as a result of the earlier Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and the September 1939 campaign. Material losses are estimated at 10,455 buildings, 923 historical buildings (94%), 25 churches, 14 libraries including the National Library, 81 primary schools, 64 high schools, University of Warsaw and Warsaw University of Technology, and most of the historical monuments. Almost a million inhabitants lost all of their possessions. The exact amount of losses of private and public property as well as pieces of art, monuments of science and culture is unknown but considered enormous. Studies done in the late 1940s estimated total damage at about US$30 billion. In 2004, President of Warsaw Lech Kaczyński, later President of Poland, established a historical commission to estimate material losses that were inflicted upon the city by German authorities. The commission estimated the losses as at least US$31.5 billion at 2004 values. Those estimates were later raised to US$45 billion 2004 US dollars and in 2005, to $54.6 billion.

Source: Wikipedia and historian/writer Maciej Białecki