German Defensive Preparations
By the end of July the town had been declared "Festung Warschau" (Fortress Warsaw) by the Germans. It was to be defended at all cost against the Soviet offensive. However, the July 20 Plot and the failed attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler made many German units withdraw westward through Warsaw. The Home Army saw it as a sign of defeat of the Germans. The number of German soldiers in the area was lowered significantly.
On July 27, the governor of the General Government, Hans Frank called for 100,000 Polish men between the ages of 17–65 to arrive at several concentration places in Warsaw the following day. They were to be employed at construction of fortifications for the Wehrmacht in and around the city. This move was viewed by the Home Army as an attempt to neutralise the underground forces and the underground urged Warsaw inhabitants to ignore it. Fearing German reprisal actions, general Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski ordered full mobilisation of Home Army forces in Warsaw area.
Read more about this topic: Prelude To The Warsaw Uprising
Famous quotes containing the words german, defensive and/or preparations:
“The Germans—once they were called the nation of thinkers: do they still think at all? Nowadays the Germans are bored with intellect, the Germans distrust intellect, politics devours all seriousness for really intellectual things—Deutschland, Deutschland Über alles was, I fear, the end of German philosophy.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“We find that even the parents who justify spanking to themselves are defensive and embarrassed about it....I suspect that deep in the memory of every parent are the feelings that had attended his own childhood spankings, the feelings of humiliation, of helplessness, of submission through fear. The parent who finds himself spanking his own child cannot dispel the ghosts of his own childhood.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“At the ramparts on the cliff near the old Parliament House I counted twenty-four thirty-two-pounders in a row, pointed over the harbor, with their balls piled pyramid-wise between them,—there are said to be in all about one hundred and eighty guns mounted at Quebec,—all which were faithfully kept dusted by officials, in accordance with the motto, “In time of peace prepare for war”; but I saw no preparations for peace: she was plainly an uninvited guest.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)