On August 1, 1944, Warsaw rose against its Nazi occupiers. At 5:00 p. m. , the hour known as W Hour, the Polish Home Army launched a coordinated attack across the city, hoping to liberate the capital before the Soviet Red Army arrived and imposed a communist government under Moscow’s control.
The uprising was a bid for Polish independence, a final assertion of defiance after nearly five years of brutal occupation. The Nazi response was immediate and merciless. Adolf Hitler ordered that every inhabitant of Warsaw be killed, that no prisoners be taken, and that the city be razed to the ground as a terrifying example for all of Europe. To carry out this order, the German command assembled a collection of improvised and often undisciplined units, including collaborationist formations recruited from German-occupied Soviet territories.
Among them was the Waffen Sturmbrigade RONA, commanded by SS-Brigadeführer Bronislav Kaminski. RONA, the Russian Liberation People’s Army, was also known as the Kaminski Brigade. Though formally incorporated into the Waffen SS, it lacked the discipline and structure of regular military units. On August 4, 1944, at around 10:00 a.
m. , about 1,700 RONA troops under Major Ivan Frolov entered Warsaw’s Ochota district. Almost immediately, the operation descended into chaos. Instead of engaging the insurgents, the troops turned on the civilian population.
They broke into homes and dragged terrified residents into the streets. People were beaten, robbed, and shot without warning. Women were pulled from crowds and raped while buildings were looted and burned. The violence began on nearby Obachevska Street, where soldiers stormed homes and forced residents out, shooting those who refused to leave.
Most of the buildings on that street were looted and set on fire that day. Civilians were also killed in nearby garden plots, and residents hiding in a basement at 104 Grójecka Street were killed with grenades. On August 5, as the number of displaced civilians grew, the Germans set up a makeshift holding camp in a former vegetable market known as Zieleniak, before sending people to a transit camp outside Warsaw. As residents were driven from their homes, they were stripped of watches, jewelry, and anything of value.
Witnesses later described soldiers cutting off fingers to remove rings and tearing earrings from ears, sometimes with pieces of flesh still attached. Anyone who resisted was beaten or shot. During the marches to Zieleniak, the attacks continued. Young women and girls were pulled from the crowds and raped in ruins and doorways.
Some victims were shot because they could not keep up with the march. Others were dragged from the crowd and killed on the spot. Soldiers fired into the crowds for amusement or threw grenades into them. By the evening of August 5, between 10,000 and 20,000 residents of Ochota and surrounding districts had been rounded up and forced into the camp.
Inside Zieleniak, conditions were catastrophic. There were no toilets, no medical care, and almost no food. Occasionally prisoners received small amounts of moldy bread, but there was no drinking water. On August 8, RONA soldiers drove several cows into the market and shot them.
In the chaos that followed, several Poles were killed or wounded. Since lighting a fire was punishable by death, the prisoners were forced to eat the meat raw. Women and girls tried to protect themselves from rape by smearing their faces with mud or soot, wearing men’s clothes, cutting or disheveling their hair, pretending to be pregnant or disabled, or covering themselves with fake bandages. Families hid young women under piles of clothes and blankets.
It was not enough. One witness later described the nights lit by burning houses, with drunken groups trampling over people in search of young women and girls, dragging them to the wall, and raping them, sometimes as many as eleven men to one girl. Afterward, the victims lay half-naked, most often shot in the stomach or breasts. Newborns and babies were strangled or had their heads bashed against walls.
Near the gate of Zieleniak, a huge pile of bodies grew. Dozens more lay by the walls and along the roads. Nobody buried them, so they rotted quickly in the summer heat. Eventually, the troops ordered that the bodies be buried in shallow graves by the fence, and others were burned in the gymnasium of the local high school.
More than 1,000 people died at Zieleniak from executions, beatings, starvation, and disease. At least 300 were killed directly by RONA troops. Elsewhere in Ochota, similar atrocities were unfolding. On August 5, RONA troops broke into the Radium Institute, founded by Nobel Prize-winning scientist Marie Curie.
After looting the hospital and robbing staff and patients, they set fire to the library and destroyed food supplies, the pharmacy, and much of the medical equipment. At first, they intended to execute everyone inside, but changed their minds. The patients and a small number of staff remained. In the evening, drunk soldiers gang-raped not only the nurses who had stayed behind, but also patients, including those gravely ill with cancer.
The next day, the building was set on fire, and some patients were burned alive. About 60 people survived by hiding in the cellar and chimneys. On August 9–10, some survivors were discovered, and the building was set on fire again. On August 19, troops dragged out the remaining survivors and killed 50 critically ill patients on the spot.
The rest were taken to Zieleniak, where, according to eyewitnesses, they were executed with a shot to the back of the head and burned on a pyre in the gymnasium. About 170 people, patients and staff, were murdered at the Radium Institute. In total, over 10,000 people were killed during the Ochota massacre. After the war ended in May 1945, justice caught up with the perpetrators.
Hans Frank, the Governor General of the General Government that included Warsaw, was executed in October 1946. The execution was botched by American Army Sergeant John C. Woods, and Frank died only after eleven minutes of convulsing. Major Ivan Frolov, who had led the regiment of 1,700 killers, was interrogated in Moscow.
He denied that his men had taken part in the executions of civilians during the Warsaw Uprising and claimed to know nothing about mass killings. He justified civilian casualties by citing air force and artillery attacks on houses where insurgents were hiding. Nevertheless, he was executed in Moscow on December 31, 1946. Bronislav Kaminski, the leader of the brigade, did not survive the war.
In late August 1944, he was executed by the SS, officially for looting. In all likelihood, his unit had become uncontrollable and had provoked outrage even among the Nazi leadership. In the final months of the war, many members of the Kaminski Brigade were killed or split up as German forces retreated west. Others were captured by Western allies and forcibly repatriated to the Soviet Union, where many were sent to forced labor camps in the Gulag system or executed.
The men who had carried out the massacre met their end one by one, scattered across the ruins of the empire that had unleashed them.