The Wola massacre (Polish: Rzeź Woli, "Wola slaughter") was the systematic killing of around 40,000-50,000 people by Nazi German troops during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. Between 5–12 August 1944, tens of thousands of Polish civilians along with captured resistance fighters were indiscriminately shot or killed in organised mass executions throughout the Wola district of the Polish capital Warsaw. The action was designed to crush the Poles' will to fight and put the uprising to an end without having to commit to heavy city fighting. However the Germans soon found that the atrocities in Wola only stiffened Polish resistance. German authority across the city was only achieved after more than two months of heavy fighting and the total destruction of Warsaw.
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“It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)