Planned destruction of Warsaw

The planned destruction of Warsaw refers to the largely-realized plans by Nazi Germany to raze the city. The plan was put into full motion after the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. The uprising had infuriated German leaders who now wanted to make an example of the city, which they had long before selected for a major reconstruction as part of their plans to Germanize Central Europe.

The city must completely disappear from the surface of the earth and serve only as a transport station for the Wehrmacht. No stone can remain standing. Every building must be razed to its foundation.

Warsaw has to be pacified, that is, razed to the ground.

Even before the uprising, the Germans knew Warsaw would fall into Allied hands in a matter of few months. In spite of this, unprecedented effort was dedicated to the destruction of the city. This decision tied up considerable resources, which in theory could have been used on the Eastern Front and on the newly opened Western Front after the Normandy landings. The Germans destroyed 80%-90% of the buildings in Warsaw while an immense part of the cultural heritage was deliberately demolished, burned to the ground, or stolen.

Currently, more than half of the antiques and museum objects of Polish heritage stolen by Germans in 1944 have not been returned to Poland. After the war, extensive work was put into rebuilding the city according to pre-war plans and historical documents. As with most of Poland, the city was rebuilt without any German labor, unlike in Stalingrad and other cities, where German forced labor was used during and after the war as part of war reparations.

Destruction of Warsaw was planned before its final destruction in 1944 and even before the start of World War II. On June 20, 1939, while Adolf Hitler was visiting an architectural bureau in Würzburg am Main, he noticed 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 of 130,000. Third Reich planners drafted precise drawings outlining a historic "Germanic" core where a select few landmarks would be saved such as the Royal Castle which would serve as Hitler's state residence. The Plan, which was composed of 15 drawings and a miniature architectural model, was named after German army architect Friedrich Pabst who refined the concept of destroying a nation's morale and culture by destroying its physical and architectural manifestations. The design of the actual new German city over the site of Warsaw was devised by Hubert Gross. The project was soon incorporated into Generalplan Ost. The aftermath of the failure of the Warsaw Uprising presented an opportunity for Hitler to begin to realize his pre-war conception.

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Wikipedia