The Wola massacre (August 5-8 1944 in Wola, Warsaw) was the scene of the largest single massacre in the history of Poland. According to different sources, some 40,000 to 50,000 Polish civilians and POWs were killed by the Nazi forces. August 5 is the 217th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar (218th in leap years), with 148 days remaining. ...   This article is about the year 8. ... 1944 (MCMXLIV) was a leap year starting on Saturday. ... The neutrality of this article is disputed. ... Warsaw (Polish: , , in full The Capital City of Warsaw, Polish: ) is the capital of Poland, its largest city, and a gamma world city. ... The word massacre has a number of meanings, but most commonly refers to individual events of deliberate and direct mass killing, especially of noncombatant civilians or other innocents, that would often qualify as war crimes or atrocities. ... A civilian is a person who is not a member of a military. ... Geneva Convention definition A prisoner of war (POW) is a soldier, sailor, airman, or marine who is imprisoned by an enemy power during or immediately after an armed conflict. ... National Socialism redirects here. ...

The German units indiscriminately executed all the civilians of the district, including elderly, children and women, as well as any insurgents taken prisoner. Executions in the Wola district also included the mass murders of both the patients and the personnel of local hospitals. Victims’ bodies were then collected by the members of the Verbrennungskommando, comprising selected Polish men, and burnt. An insurgency is an armed rebellion against a constituted authority, by any irregular armed force that rises up against an enforced or established authority, government, or administration. ... Mass murder (massacre) is the act of murdering a large number of people, typically at the same time, or over a relatively short period of time. ...

To quote Martin Gilbert, in his The Second World War: A Complete History, page 565, (see Google Books page view): Sir Martin John Gilbert, CBE (born October 25, 1936 in London) is a British historian and the author of over seventy books, including works on the Holocaust and Jewish history. ...

By August 5, more than fifteen thousand Polish civilians had been murdered by German troops in Warsaw. At 5:30 that evening, General von dem Bach Zelewski gave the order for the execution of women and children to stop. But the killing continued of all Polish men who were captured, without anyone bothering to find out whether they were insurgents or not. Nor did either the Cossacks or the criminals in the Kaminsky and Dirlewanger brigades pay any attention to von dem Bach Zelewski's order: by rape, murder, torture and fire, they made their way through the suburbs of Wola and Ochota, killing in three days of slaughter a further thirty thousand civilians, including hundreds of patients in each of the hospitals in their path.

See also

• Warsaw Uprising
• Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
• Nazi crimes against ethnic Poles

Combatants Poland Germany Commanders Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski, Antoni Chruściel, Tadeusz Pełczyński Erich von dem Bach, Rainer Stahel, Heinz Reinefarth, Bronislav Kaminski Strength 50,000 troops 25,000 troops Casualties 18,000 killed, 12,000 wounded, 15,000 taken prisoner 250,000 civilians killed 10,000 killed... Combatants Nazi Germany {SS, SD, Gestapo, Order Police, Wehrmacht} Collaborators {Blue Police, Jewish Ghetto Police} Jewish resistance (ŻOB, ŻZW) Polish resistance (Armia Krajowa Gwardia Ludowa) Commanders Ferdinand von Sammern-Frankenegg Jürgen Stroop Mordechai Anielewicz†, Dawid Apfelbaum†, Paweł Frenkiel†, Icchak Cukierman, Marek Edelman, Zivia Lubetkin, Henryk Iwański Strength Official... This article details the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed against ethnic Poles during World War II. 3 million non-Jewish Polish citizens perished during the course of the war, most of them civilians, killed by the actions of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. ...

External links

• Witness testimony on German massacre of Polish hospital patients
• Witness testimony on German massacre of Polish civilians in Wola