Dan Snow's History Hit - The Warsaw Uprising

Episode Date: July 31, 2024

80 years ago, the Polish resistance rose up against their German occupiers and tried to seize back control of their capital city. For two months a terrible battle raged that saw much of the city levelled, and tens of thousands of its occupants killed.Historian, author and broadcaster Clare Mulley tells us all about the Warsaw Uprising, through the experiences of the relentless resistance fighter, Agent Zo.Clare is the author of 'Agent Zo: The Untold Story of Fearless WW2 Resistance Fighter Elzbieta Zawacka'.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign up HERE for 50% off for 3 months using code ‘DANSNOW’.We'd love to hear from you - what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. 80 years ago, on the 1st of August 1944, on a pre-arranged signal, the Polish Home Army rose up against the German occupiers and tried to seize control of the capital city, Warsaw. By the end of the day, the Poles had captured a major German arsenal, they'd taken possession of the main post office and power station, but the Germans were able to hold out in key strongholds and the scene was set for a terrible, attritional, urban battle. That battle was described by Heinrich Himmler, the SS chief, as the fiercest of our battles since the start of the war. It compares to the street battles of Stalingrad. It was a

terrible shock to the German army that by that stage was facing the Soviets advancing the east, the Allies advancing up the Italian peninsula and in northwest Europe. But the Germans were brutally determined to stamp out this Polish assault. At the outbreak, Himmler, quoting him again, the SS commander, he sent a message to Hitler saying, my Fuhrer, the timing is unfortunate, but from the historical perspective, what the Poles are doing is a blessing. After five or six weeks, he boasted, Warsaw, the capital, the head of the Polish people will be extinguished. After this, the Polish problem will no longer be a great historical problem for the children who come after us, nor indeed will it be for us. The Germans saw this

as the perfect opportunity to finish their business of wiping Poland and the Poles from the story of Europe. The Polish resistance hoped they'd only have to fight for a few days before the Soviets pushed through the front and complete the removal of the German snap out of Poland, but instead the Soviets sat back and allowed their two enemies, the Poles and the Germans, to fight themselves to the point of exhaustion. It was a monumental tragedy contained within the wider catastrophe of the Second World War. The city was largely destroyed. Around a quarter of the buildings destroyed a result of fighting, another third of the city destroyed by the systematic German demolitions following the suppression of the uprising. Warsaw was indeed nearly wiped off the map.

200,000 Poles were killed or captured, and many more displaced. To talk to me about it on the podcast today, we've got the brilliant Claire Mulley. She's been on the podcast before. She's written a slew of books, The Women Who Flew for Hitler, The Spy Who Loved,

and now she's written Agent Zoe, the extraordinary story of a Polish national hero, a woman who fought, who played a critical part in this Warsaw uprising. So we're going to be talking about the uprising and Agent Zoe's part within it. It's great to have Claire back on the podcast. So as part of our 80th anniversary series, all the great events leading from D-Day to the fall of Berlin, here's the Warsaw Uprising. T-minus 10. The Thomas bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. Claire Marley, thanks for coming on the podcast. Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me on. So 80 years ago, Warsaw rises up. How had the war been? Can you try and describe how hideous the war had been for the people of Warsaw from 1939 to 1944, those five long years?

Oh, well, I mean, absolutely horrendous. Poland, of course, the first country to be invaded on the 1st of September 1939, 17 days later gets invaded again by another aggressive power, the Soviet Union, coming in from the east. They said, of course, it was just to protect the ethnic Russians in that part of Poland. But, of course, we now know that there was this secret protocol between Russia and Nazi Germany. So they were invaded on both sides very early on. And I think it's actually quite often forgotten that Poland put up a very good defence in the first weeks of the war, but they knew they couldn't continue to fight on effectively on two fronts. And so they made the strategic military decision to get their armed forces out. They got 35,000 troops out through Lvov, which is now Lviv in Ukraine, of course. And that was their armed forces overseas. It's one of the major allied armed forces, in fact.

fighting in uniform at that point, she was actually one of the very first women to serve in the Second World War, she decided to remain in the country as the armed forces and the government and the treasury and so on got out to France and then up to Britain eventually after the fall of France. The work that she undertook that made her legendary was in the resistance because the Poles never capitulated. Unlike so many nations, they kept fighting the entire time. They had immediately all these fledgling independent resistance groups set up and they were pulled together by a leader called General Ravetzky. And he united them in what became known as the Home Army, as opposed to the armed forces overseas. And they were one of the biggest resistance forces in occupied Europe. Massive force, 400,000 to 500,000 soldiers kept fighting as the home army.

But Poland had been immediately divided by these aggressive forces. It was divided into three. So the western part of Poland was annexed into the greater German Reich, as was, and people there were just forcibly, they could either take German citizenship if they could prove they were ethnically German, according to horrendous Nazi criterias, or they were forced into the middle zone of Poland, which was known as the general government, which was occupied by the Nazi German authorities. And from the east, they were annexed into the Soviet Union. And both of those occupational forces were incredibly brutal. So life in both spaces was appalling.

About six million Poles perished under the occupation in those years. And most of those were non-military casualties because the majority of the armed forces had already come out. Half of them were Jewish, murdered in the Holocaust. There were 700 ghettos around and this massive network of concentration and death camps, of course, in occupied Polish territory. But the other half were deported or resettled in the East and the intelligentsia were executed, sent to concentration camps and just shot under action, the AB action. Or they just perished in reprisal roundups or being taken in street roundups and sent for forced labour in appalling conditions. So a completely shocking situation, incredible rationing. I mean, if you're Jewish, ultimately no rations at all, of course,

forced into the ghettos and starved to death, left without medical supplies, and then the remainder of them rounded up. But even for the non-Jewish Poles, absolute starvation rations. And very similar going on in the Soviet occupied zone as well. Around half a million Poles were imprisoned and the intelligentsia were again rounded up. 6,000, 5,000 were executed

and there was, of course, ongoing terror. So... Claire, let me stop you there because I want to ask about... Let's talk about the Warsaw Uprising. But first of all, I'm really interested to pick up on this Home Army that you've talked about, this extremely well-organised Polish resistance force. But let's talk about it through the lens of this remarkable agent, Agent Zoe, that you've just written about. Who was she? Tell me about her. Zoe, yeah. So she's born Elspieta Zawadzka, but she's known in Britain

as Elizabeth Watson, but she's best known as Zoe, of course. She was born in 1909. She was the seventh of eight children. She was used to fighting her corner from an early age, I think we can say. And she was born into a historic Polish city called Torun. But when she was born, that part of Poland was actually annexed into the Russian Empire. So essentially the German Empire, because Poland has this centuries of history of being invaded and annexed and occupied, and of course of defiance and resistance and liberation as well. And when she was born, she was actually legally a German citizen, not Polish at

all. And her first language was German because Polish culture and language was suppressed. And when in public, she even had to have a German name, Lisa, the diminutive of Elspieta. Lisa is really her first alias, you know, her nondegor in a sense. She was brought up knowing by her patriotic parents that she was really deeply Polish. But she had to lead a double life from childhood. And I think all this actually became quite useful for her

in the Second World War when she had to serve under aliases and again lead a double life pretending to be a German. She was 11 years old at the end of the First World War, which is when Poland regained its freedom and was returned to the map of Europe. And some of her formative memories are of her father weeping. You know, he was a veteran himself, this great man. And she saw him weeping in the streets because for the first time he heard the Polish national anthem openly played in public and this you know she was determined to defend this freedom and when her elder brothers who she hugely admired she was a real tomboy she was always running off you know

with them when they were dressing up in little children's uniforms she would be given a pinafore and she just wasn't interested in that at all. So when they joined the army, she joined the Women's Military Auxiliary, it's known as the PWK, which was uniformed and very highly trained. And she became a trainer and a leader in the PWK. But they were officially outside the Polish Armed Forces structures. But yeah, she was ready to serve. And her generation would be called upon to serve, as you point out, invaded by two neighbouring powers in 1939. Did she see much fighting in that initial stage? Yeah, I mean, Zoe is one of the very first women in the Second World War in active service. So she's actually shaken awake at five o'clock in the morning of the 1st of September 1939

by a series of explosions that she could feel shaking the walls of her room, going through the metal frame of her bed. And at first she thought it might be the Polish Air Force undertaking exercises. But there was a series of further detonations and she quickly put on her uniform and ran downstairs and Polish radio confirmed that they were being attacked. This was the Blitzkrieg. The Luftwaffe was entering into Polish airspace and the Wehrmacht was following on land. And she already had orders in place. She knew what to do. The end of that radio report actually said, as of now, we were all soldiers. And Zoe really took that to heart. So she and her unit were deployed to Lviv in eastern Poland, now Lviv in Ukraine. They got there. She requisitioned a municipal pass and

they threw glass and nails on the main thoroughfares to stop the German advance behind them. And this extraordinary journey being shot at by the Luftwaffe, eventually she's hitching lifts in vehicles taking military supplies of petrol, which must have made a very juicy target for the Luftwaffe above her, and eventually gets to Lvov and there she serves in direct action. So she's supplying the anti-aircraft batteries, she is making barricades and she's making petrol bombs in the basement of a sports hall, just filling any glass bottles they could get because these petrol bombs are the most effective homemade weapons they could use against approaching tanks, both against the panzer divisions coming in from the West, but very soon from the Soviet tanks as well.

So yes, she's seeing active service immediately. And then what does she decide to do once it's hopeless and the Soviets and the Germans complete the annexation? Does she stay in the country or does she escape like many Polish troops, Polish airmen famously, people know from the Battle of Britain, but also Polish infantrymen, soldiers, will make it out, eventually get to the West and fight for Britain and the Allies through the rest of the war.

What does she decide to do? Well, she, of course, could have got out. The route out is through Lviv, into Romania and then into France. And these forces served in the Battle of France. They got out 35,000 Polish troops. They got out the treasury, the government, which then set itself up in exile in Angers and then in London. The Enigma codebreakers. Zoe had actually, she'd been

a mathematician before the war and she'd studied with the Enigma codebreakers, Marian Riewski and others. And she knew she could have gone out with them, but she actually thought the best way she could serve her nation was to remain. You say it's hopeless, but the Poles never capitulated. They never conceded defeat. And she is determined to keep on fighting for her nation within its borders. So she doesn't get out. She makes her way with great danger, I must say, across to the west, gets to Warsaw and takes the oath of allegiance to the fledgling resistance in a freezing kitchen of a friend's apartment

and immediately sets up an intelligence network. So that intelligence, the gathering intelligence to be fed to what, the Polish government in exile? Yeah, I mean, it's a network within a month. She's got 50 women working. They are, you know, secretaries and translators in the occupying authorities' offices. They're stealing documents to be forged. They're getting military information. It's women who work in bakeries and laundrettes who are noting down the changing garrison order or, you know, the different uniforms that are coming through to be washed and mended, overlooking the thoroughfares, seeing the movement of military freight, all of this material. Zoe is pulling it together into reports every week, putting most of that information into her head

so it can't be found, and then serving herself as a courier with a little thin slip of paper as an aid memoir, which she hid in the back of a clothes brush we've still got the clothes brush amazingly but also then later would hide microfilm in keys and so on and she served as a courier going from Warsaw occupied Warsaw across those wartime borders because Poland had been divided up into these three sectors and eventually from 1942 because she spoke fluent German from childhood and she had conveniently blonde hair and blue eyes, she was selected to serve bringing this military information all the way into the heart of the Nazi Third Reich, into Berlin itself, which seems insane to bring this high grade military information right into Berlin. But they had contacts at one of the embassies there and they could get the microfilms out in the diplomatic post to Berlin. But they had contacts at one of the embassies there, and they could get the microfilms out in the diplomatic post to London. That was the fastest way of getting this very

time-sensitive, a lot of it, material out to the Allies. So she was working on the most perilous routes of all. It's astonishingly brave. What plans are being made at this point of the war? Did the Polish government, were they laying down the foundations of this kind of Polish uprising, or was it a more spontaneous event? The uprising was hugely planned. I mean, if you think about it, the plans for D-Day, the re-invasion of Normandy and getting the Allied troops back on continental Europe, you know, we're talking at least 18 months of preparation. And of course, the same is going on inside Poland for their own self-liberation as well. So it's not there for the early stages

because having managed to escape the Kasapa multiple times, including leaping from a train, she realised she's eventually burnt on the roots that she's been doing in intelligence work. And she is sent in 1943 to Britain as an emissary. She's the only female emissary of the commander of an Allied army, to my knowledge, the commander of the Home Army in Poland, sends her with some very important microfilm and two missions to undertake in Britain. So she has to cross nearly a thousand miles of Nazi-occupied territory, nearly drowned in France, shot out in the high freezing mountain passes of the Pyrenees, eventually makes it back to London and is serving in London when they start preparing plans for the liberation of Poland by their own home army. And you mentioned self-liberation. That presumably is what's really

important here. They had no interest in being quote-unquote liberated by the advancing Soviet Red Army. Okay, so when Zoe's in London, she has two missions to undertake, as well as handing over this incredible stash of microfilm. And one of them is actually to secure the legal recognition of women as soldiers in the Home Army, because until this point, they have just been volunteer auxiliaries. And the commander of the Home Army, Ravetsky, knows, I mean, he's not an equal opportunities employer or a feminist. He actually knows that women need to be able to have rank to issue orders and to instill discipline a lot of the women are more experienced a lot of the men in the home army are incredibly courageous have escaped prisoner of war camps or downed pilots but they don't necessarily have the

service experience that a number of the women do and so on so the women need to be able to instead of asking the men politely to do things they need to be able to issue orders as well for security and efficiency. So she manages to draft a legal decree. And then once she's completed that mission and trained some of the elite Polish special forces, the paras who are being trained in British country houses, she signs up as the only female member of the elite Polish special forces, the silent unseen.

And she's the only woman to parachute back to Poland specifically to support preparations for the Warsaw Uprising. And the key thing about that uprising, presumably, is that is your expression, self-liberation. They did not wish to be, quote unquote, liberated by the Soviet Red Army. They'd seen enough of them. Yeah, absolutely right, Dan. So the Poles are determined. They know at the start of the war, the Soviet Union has had this agreement with Nazi Germany. It's only after Operation Barbarossa in June 1941 that the Soviet Union changes sides and joins the Allies. And so they know that they have this very aggressive

neighbour with eyes on Polish territory. And to the Poles, it is strategically vital for them to rise up and liberate at least their own capital city, Warsaw. The Soviet Red Army at this point is already pushing through from the east, pushing the Germans back, and they're coming into Polish territory. But Poland wants to liberate its own capital so that they can welcome the Red Army as equals and allies rather than liberators to whom they are beholden. And the Polish Underground Army is just the military arm of an entire Polish underground state. They have law courts, they have universities, they have all sorts of civil structures in there. So they are prepared

to have their own government in situ welcoming the Red Army as they arrive as an independent nation. So that is what the fight is for. And it's very strategically organised. You know, they wait until the 1st of August, because by then D-Day's happened in June. The Allies from the West are pushing forward on that side and the Soviets are coming very close towards Warsaw itself. So they time it, thinking that they can liberate their capital within two days, but they are prepared to hold out for up to two weeks. And then if the worst comes to the worst, the Soviets will arrive and can support them. You're listening to Dan Snow's History.

We're talking about the Warsaw Uprising 80 years on. More coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings.

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Tell me, how does it go? Do they succeed in liberating that capital within two days what happens at first they have massive successes they have this huge element of surprise and they have more people and the ground of course than the nazi germans do inside warsaw but they are massively outgunned absolutely massively outgunned as i said they've had been preparing so they have stockpiles of weapons munitions including, but also brought in. Some of it actually bought from the Germans in corruption that goes on with the armies. And they also, Zoe's role, she is involved in the provisioning of medical supplies, food and water to the field hospitals and the field kitchens across the city. And they have huge stockpiles of those. For her, the start of the uprising, W hour, as they called it, was at five o'clock on the 1st of those. For her, the start of the uprising, W hour as they called it, was at five o'clock on the

1st of August. Because it's going to be an open fight, they have to be in uniform. So they have these white and red armbands that they've made the colours of Poland. And she pulls hers on an hour early. She's inside a building no one's going to see. And she goes upstairs to look down over the streets for the last hour of occupation in her home country. And as she looks down, she actually sees a platoon of men who are rushing off to their meeting point, to where they're going to start their work, because they have battalions coordinated to go all across the city and take out key targets early on. But as she watches these young men, one of them draws his pistol, and when they round the corner, they're just shot down by the Germans who happen to see them and she quickly

runs downstairs she's provisioning medical supplies she's got some stretchers downstairs so she goes to grab one but there's a medical team four women two nuns two civilian women and they grab it and Zoe actually has a bit of a tussle she it takes her a moment to realise there is greater need now than her need to serve so of course she lets them go out with this stretcher and they go out she runs back upstairs to watch and as these four women go out with this stretcher and they go out and she runs back upstairs to watch. And as these four women go out, there's another round of shots and she sees them all mown down as well. This is the start of what it's like. It's a most incredibly brutal battle. It's street fighting. Initially, the Poles succeed very well. They take some of the key sites that they'd aimed for. They take some garrisons and transport and communication huts,

power plants. They take the Holy Cross Church, which has got Chopin's heart in it, you know, very symbolic for the Poles. They take the Prudential Building, which was the highest skyscraper in Europe at the time, I believe, and they fly the Polish flag from it. All these crumpled flags come out. There's a real sense of jubilation. So talks about a sense of euphoria and it being the most wonderful time of my life. I mean, she's a pretty hardened fighter, but nevertheless, and she sees these young soldiers, male and female, sort of wandering off to make love while they're, you know, it's all going on. In fact, there are, I think it's about an average of four or five weddings a day during the Warsaw Uprising. This is a real sort

of affirmation of life going on at the same time. It's extraordinary. But the German response is absolutely brutal. Himmler says to Hitler, the action of the Poles is a blessing and we shall finish them off. And Hitler, I mean, he's just absolutely incandescent. He's still recovering from the 20th of July bomb attack on him. OK, so he's unwell. He's feeling frail. And then the audacity of the Poles, who he considers, you know, truly appallingly as subhuman. They're not considered really fully human. How dare they rise up against the occupying forces? So he demands that Warsaw is completely levelled. And his generals have to tell him we can't do that because we have so many Germans on the ground there. So he says, oh, you must level it by other means. And he issues an order that every soldier and civilian,

man, woman and child is to be shot. And this is exactly what they do in certain suburbs of Warsaw. So in Wola and Oceta, they go out and they go house to house. You know, at the start of the uprising, there's a million people in Warsaw. And the idea is that they shelter in basements and cellars throughout and will survive. But the Germans go in house to house and they throw hand grenades down into the cellars. Anyone else that's left on the streets, they bring them out, they shoot them in the back of the head or they machine gun them. There are some photographs of these massacres. of these massacres. There's an SS brigade they bring in under Oskar Derlewanger, who's got a lot of ethnic cleansing experience. And General Vondenbach is the famous anti-insurgents corps leader brought in. On one day alone, they massacre 40,000 people. And then it begins the hard grind.

As I said, I mean, they had hoped to liberate their city in two days, but they were prepared to hold out for two weeks. And they do have certain stashes of supplies. There's loads of weapons stored under the stage of the opera and other places. A lot of the women have been involved in coordinating that. And the RAF begin to do supply drops. So this is the Brits, but it's also Polish pilots, also South Africans. They come out from Italy, from bases near Brindisi, once we have Italy, because that's a slightly shorter journey. But these pilots, you know, they're flying into the teeth of anti-aircraft fire at low level because they want to drop these canisters of supplies without smashing everything. It's incredibly brave work. And the attrition rate is appalling. It's unsustainable losses. So that's cancelled.

And then they go again. And a lot of the supplies are picked up by the Germans. And the Red Army, of course, is coming down from the east. So when they get to about 20 miles short of Warsaw, Stalin orders them to stop and they set up camp. And the Poles can see them from the rooftops of Warsaw setting up camp. You know, in the days before the Warsaw Uprising, Soviet radio was broadcasting, you must rise up all your cowards, you must rise up all your collaborators, we are coming, prepare the ground for us. As soon as they arrive at the outskirts of Warsaw, they set up

camp and they wait because it's not in Stalin's interest, of course, to go in. We mustn't forget that there were such massive Soviet losses. Why should he, from his perspective, then go into a fight between the Poles and the Nazi Germans? It does him two things. It's the Poles taking on the Germans, but also he doesn't want the Poles to have a strong resistance force left to oppose any Soviet regime after the war. So it serves him on that front as well. And plus, he's got other military strategic priorities to be focusing on. So he just lets the battle continue. And he actually deliberately prevents, you know, these airdrops that are coming in from the West. It's about a thousand miles, as I said, and they can't carry that many containers because they have

to take auxiliary fuel canisters because Stalin won't let them land in the Soviet held airfields behind the enemy lines, even though we're allies. He refuses to give them that. And in fact, if the Western Allies' planes stray into airspace held by the Soviet Union and are taken down, then they get arrested and sent to Moscow, the air crews. So he's deliberately obstructing any support, not just not supporting directly himself with his forces, but he's deliberately obstructing support to the Home Army in Warsaw. Let's check in on Agent Zoe. What is she seeing of the fighting? Her role, as I said, is in the supply of medicines and food primarily. So not frontline with gun in hand, but immediately the whole city is the frontline. So they're being bombed by the Luftwaffe.

The Germans are using lots of pretty new and hideous technology like these remote controlled mini tanks that go in on flamethrowers. So the whole city is under fire in effect. Obviously, there are sectors that are held by the Home Army. And that's where the main food kitchens and hospitals are in the basements mainly there. So on the 6th of August, they managed to take the warehouse of the main brewery in Warsaw. And that fortunately has a lot of barley and sugar and yeast. So they can use that. There's no milling facilities, though. So they're grinding all this barley in coffee grinders and trying to supply it. The men call it spit soup because it's this very sort of thin gruel-like soup with husks

of barley and mortar grit in it. But this is because a lot of the food stores are still in enemy held territory. So they have to make do with what they can. Obviously, all pets are eaten. Pigeons are eaten. Any food, any cultivation, that's all gone pretty quickly. There's jars that they've stockpiled for some while. So she's doing that. Also, the Germans cut off the water supply and this disease very quickly it gets contaminated so they start digging wells at one point they have chains of women with buckets across the city and Zoe suddenly finds that she's absolutely soaking she looks down and aircraft have come in with machine guns going and they've shot through the bucket of water she's carrying but managed to

miss her so she really is in the front line of fire. She's also doing medical work. She's supplying what she can. She's sending groups of women out to get anything that can be used as medical supplies, like methylated spirits from the university and glass bottles or whatever they can use. She talks about going into the hospitals and the appalling conditions there. And women, not even in the hospitals, you know, women in the bomb making factories who are being poisoned by crushing down and reusing enemy weaponry that hasn't exploded. Their lips are going blue. Their skin is turning grey. She's trying to sort that out. And she's bringing people in herself, wounded people, including friends of hers from the streets. On one occasion, she sees a bomb come down and there's a little boy standing next to where this bomb has come down in a Warsaw Square.

And she runs for him and grabs him, pulls him away. But the bomb on that occasion didn't explode. And there's a little boy standing next to where this bomb has come down in a Warsaw Square. And she runs for him and grabs him, pulls him away. But the bomb on that occasion didn't explode. She looks at it and she can recognise it. She sees it was made in a Czech factory. And she thinks perhaps there's Czech sabotage and they can reuse that. She has to go and they can reuse that material for their own weaponry. So that gives you a bit of a picture of what the situation is.

The Germans demolish city blocks. As you say, they kill everyone. They grind their way forward. The fighting starts on the 1st of August. When does it sort of come to an end? It's two months. It's October, the start of October, when they finally are forced to capitulate. Stalin eventually gives permission for the Americans to come in and do an airdrop. And there's a massive airdrop. And again, there is hope once more that in that case, the Poles haven't been forgotten and their allies are there. But unfortunately, the Americans drop from far too high and the huge number of parachutes come down across the city and a lot of it actually arms the Germans. And so Stalin, you know, this is no good for him

either. So he doesn't allow any more airdrops. The Soviets do a few airdrops themselves right at the end. But I think this is more for their own propaganda to show we are allies as well when they know it's far too late. And they drop them low and sometimes without parachutes. So Zoe collects some of their material and she just said everything was broken. Absolutely useless. And so capitulation talks start towards the end of September, but stop and start as these airdrops happen. But eventually at the start of October, it's now Borkomorowski is head of the Home Army, a new general, the other one's been executed, and he starts negotiating terms. And he has two priorities. First of all, he wants the fighters

to be fully recognised as combatants. They have been in uniform, albeit just these red and white armbands. And he has managed to secure recognition of the Home Army by the Brits and Americans as an official part of the Polish armed forces. And the other thing is because Zoe had drafted that decree for the females, the women soldiers, Because Zhou had drafted that decree for the females, the women soldiers, Borg-Konrassi signs that at the start of October. So finally, the women are actually officially soldiers, the same rank and status as the men in the armed forces,

or slightly lower rank, to be honest. And so when capitulation comes, a lot of these women walk out with their heads held high. And it's the first time in the Second World War, and the only time, in fact, that the Nazi Germans set up prisoner of war camps for women soldiers, two separate camps for the women as well as the men, because they are protected under the Geneva Convention. And so Zoe's work there to draft that decree actually saves many thousands of lives. decree actually saves many thousands of lives. Mormons, kings and popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.

What was Warsaw like at the end of that battle? Almost completely decimated. This two months of courageous defiance had come at an enormous cost. About 18,000 fighters of the Home Army have been killed. 200,000 civilians have been killed. Over 10,000 buildings have been destroyed, including more than 90% of the historic landmarks, 25 churches, all the schools, all the libraries, including the National Archive. I think they've got about 4% of their holdings from the National Archive they managed to save. The million people who have been living in the city at the start of the uprising, they've lost everything, all their possessions, a lot of them,

their families as well. And although it's not completely destroyed as they bring the last people out, they evacuate the last civilians, they bring out the fighters to go to the prisoner of war camps, and then the Germans go in and destroy anything that's left standing. So the city is totally, I mean, this is one European country against another European country completely flattened their capital. What does the uprising mean today? Well, for the Poles, it's still a sense of great pride, the courage of those fighters. I mean, one of the other remarkable things about the Warsaw Uprising is it's one of the most documented engagements of the Second World War. So there were photographers who were sent out,

there was a radio station run by a man called Jan Novak, the Lightning. They called it the Lightning radio station. Also with the support of an Englishman, John Ward, who one of the bomber crew who had been downed and he had joined the Warsaw Uprising and he had served on the radio station, but also became the official correspondent for The Times who appointed him over the wireless and was sending back reports in The Times. And a lot of that material is kept. But also it was very highly filmed. So you can actually see film footage of men and women fighting in the Warsaw Uprising. And that was shown in cinemas like the Palladium Cinema in Warsaw during the uprising to keep their morale up. But it was also brought out to Britain because Zoe's last mission in the war, she didn't go out to the prisoner of

war camps. She was never going to be taken prisoner, thank you. Her last mission given to her by the commander-in-chief of the Home Army was to get Jan Nowak out with this microfilm and she managed to get him back to Britain. So we have this incredible record of that heroism and the appalling conditions. So yes, it is a sense of pride. It is also known to be this terrible tragedy. And of course, after that, the Soviets, once the Germans have pulled back, the Soviets march in and they say that they liberated Warsaw, but they didn't, they just took ownership of the ruins. They weren't involved in a liberation in any active sense of the word there. And of course, after the war, Poland, you know, arguably the first of the Allies, is left with a Sovietviet-backed communist regime a puppet

government a communist government imposed on them so you know while we're celebrating freedom in trafalgar square and we've got bunting and parades and tea parties in poland they've got peace or arguably peace but they don't have freedom at all and that communist regime then rounds up the senior resistors and arrests them and imprisons them. And they actually execute, we think, between 22 and 54,000 people in the peace after the war. And that includes Zoe. Zoe is arrested. I mean, this is one of the great ironies of her story. She was one of the first women to serve in the Second World. She sort of serves the entire way through the war. She is nearly arrested so many times. She invades the Gestapo, gets thrown out of buildings, jumps from a train.

She's never arrested. And yet in 1951, the Soviet State Security Police in Warsaw arrest her and they sentence her to 10 years imprisonment. And she's tortured. One of the most extraordinary interviews I did during my research was an interview with a woman who shared a prison cell with her. She said nothing could defeat her. And she actually kept the morale up. She kept the people, the women that she was in prison with, she educated them and she kept them fighting. And then she was actually released early after about six years after Stalin died. But then the Soviets very deliberately kept her story hidden. So that's why we don't know about her because partly just because she's a woman and those stories weren't told as much, but also because the Soviets, of course, are presenting the war. I mean, every nation does

this to some degree, presents the story of the war from their own perspective. But the Soviet story is a very, very different narrative. So she was kept from the history books. Once the Soviet-backed puppet government of Poland had collapsed in the late 1980s, has she found a place in Poland's pantheon of heroes? Yeah, I mean, even before that, she never stopped fighting, actually. So she fought against martial law, she supported solidarity. I managed to interview Lech Wałęsa, who remembered her and the inspiration that he gave the Solidarity fighters as well. So she was still doing underground resistance press and all that sort of thing.

She was gathering veteran testimonies before they left us, you know. So the only reason we have a lot of the information on the female fighters and the fighters from Pomerania, her area of Poland, is because she was secretly gathering this testimony for years. And she was, in fact, area of Poland is because she was secretly gathering this testimony for years. And she was, in fact, arrested again in 1976 because they thought that this was seditious. So she kept fighting throughout and eventually Lech Wałęsa gave her Poland's highest honour, the Order of the White Eagle, which I must say she wasn't that bothered about. She's got so many medals. She only saw them 40 years later, of course, when Poland was restored to democratic freedom. But he did give her another honour that she really valued. He promoted her

to the rank of general. She became brigadier general, retired, and that meant the world to her. She's only the second female general in Polish history. And when did she die? Amazingly. She nearly died so many times, but in fact, she only died in 2009. She was just two weeks shy of her centenary. And they turned her centenary birthday celebration, as they turned it, into her funeral. So her coffin was carried on a gun carriage and draped in the Polish flag. 3,000 people came to pay their respects.

And there was a military flyby. So she was truly honoured at that point. What a story. Claire Mulley, thanks for telling us about the Warsaw Uprising and Agent Zoe's place within it. What's your book called? It's called Agent Zoe. So yes, please go and find out about this extraordinary woman. Thanks for coming on.

Pleasure. Thank you. you