When the Nazis blitzed Warsaw into rubble during the World War II uprising, which started exactly 60 years ago, 60 times more people died than in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, British historian Norman Davies says.
But despite the enormous loss of life and the almost entire destruction of a city, people around the world remain largely unaware of one of the War's biggest catastrophes, he says in his book Rising '44. The Battle for Warsaw.
"The statistic that I think is amazing -- the same number of civilians were killed in Warsaw every day for 60 days as were killed in the World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11, 2001," Davies, one of the most prominent historians on Poland, said in an interview ahead of yesterday's commemorations.
The 63-day uprising, launched on Aug. 1, 1944 by the non-communist resistance group, the Polish Home Army (AK), was directed both against the German Nazis, who occupied Warsaw at the time, and against Stalin, whose Red Army was advancing on the Polish capital.
Russian forces stopped on the Vistula river, which runs through Warsaw, and sat by as the Germans crushed the uprising, destroying the capital street by street, as resistance fighters fled through the sewers.
The Soviets did not fully occupy Warsaw until Jan. 17, 1945, signalling the start of more than four decades of communist rule.
In his book, which was released in Polish on Sunday at 5:00pm in Poland, the exact time the uprising started, Davies says a cover up by the Soviet regime, embarrassment by Poland's western wartime allies and attention given to the Holocaust explained the worldwide ignorance of the uprising.
"The authorities in Poland suppressed information about the rising. There was no monument to the rising until 1989," he said. "Can you imagine? A city that has been totally destroyed and there was no monument about it?
"The second [reason] was the rising was very embarrassing to the Western powers. Western mythology said we won the war and the rising was one of the big catastrophes of the war," he said.
"And then of course there is the Holocaust, which quite rightly has been greatly publicized. But the publicity was so enormous that it pushes out all other events of the second world war, especially in Poland and countries to the east."
Davies, who lives in Krakow in southern Poland, is full of admiration for the men and women who staged the uprising, many only in their teens.
"It was a huge organization and very good in terms of fighting the Germans. They were brilliant," he said.
"But all the military experts, German experts, or Polish experts or Soviet experts, say that a rising like this can't last for more than four, five, six days. They fought for 60 days, 10 times longer than anybody thought it was possible.
"They had very few arms. They had to capture their arms from the Germans to begin with. And then they captured tanks and turned the tanks against an SS concentration camp in Warsaw. They rescued a lot of Jews, who then turned to the rising.
"They had so little ammunition but by God did they not use it. They killed as many Germans as the Germans killed them in the insurrection. The Germans had an air force, they had heavy artillery, they had tanks."
While the German forces lost 20,000, some 18,000 resistance fighters were killed. The other dead were civilians as the Nazis bombed the city street by street to avoid combatting resistance fighters in the sewers.
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