Fotos von der Ostfront, den Zweiten Weltkrieg

>“They lifted the Home Army’s barricades on Wola Street by marching Poles in front of them and forcing them to do the work, using women and children as human shields in the meantime, and raping some of the women.

>The men of the Dirlewanger Brigade burned down three hospitals with patients inside. At one hospital, wounded Germans who were being treated by Polish doctors and nurses asked that no harm come to the poles. This was not to be. The men of the Dirlewanger Brigade killed the Polish wounded. They brought the nurses back to camp that evening, as was the custom: each night selected women would be whipped by officers and then gang-raped before being murdered. To the accompaniment of flute music, the men raised a gallows, and then hanged the doctors and the naked nurses.“

– Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands, describing the atrocities during the Warsaw Uprising.

The Warsaw Uprising was just one of countless atrocities across the Eastern Front. Hitler’s legions, and to a smaller extent Stalin’s, would kill twenty-six million civilians in four years, the vast majority of them Soviets (Russians, Ukrainians, Belarussians) and Poles.

Poland’s Jewish population was annihilated. Ukraine’s Jewish population was decimated.