Another tragic case on the Eastern Front was the Warsaw Uprising. The Polish Resistance launched an uprising designed to wrest control of their nation's capital from the Germans before the Russians arrived. The Germans brutally crushed them in savage urban fighting while the 1st Belorussian front of the Red Army sat motionless only 15 miles away. Stalin refused to lift a finger to help them as their destruction suited his purposes. When the Russians did finally enter the city the NKVD began rounding up the Resistance survivors as ruthlessly as they did the Germans. Not much joy for those small nations stuck in the middle on the Eastern Front.
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