>
> The Red Army had not been that far off for all the 63 bloody days it took
> the Germans to crush the uprising. They apparently set up camp on the
> other side of the Vistula - perhaps waiting for the Germans to do to Polish
> nationalists what they themselves would otherwise be ordered later to do.
> I have to go along with this dark view, as an attack in September, when a
> large chunk of German might was busy in the ghetto, would have been a good
> time to cross the river. That being the case, the uprising was doomed from
> the off, and those survivors who were to die at Stuthoff and Auschwitz had
> always been doomed ...
You had just been noting - plausibly - the battle of the Kursk salient (of June-July 1943) as the end of the fascist German strategic offensive possibility. Kursk is a thousand kilometers from Warsaw. Between the Red Army and the Warsaw ghetto uprising was a yet undefeated German Army Group Centre.
What you are thinking of was the Polish "Home Army" (_Armija Krajowa_) uprising of August -October 1944. There were still a few Jews left in Warsaw & they joined the uprising - or at least tried to - since there are survivor accounts that some of the Home Army folks stopped fighting the Germans in order to kill the remaining Jews. The magisterial account of the political and military situation in which the Home Army uprising began and the Red Army offensive ground to a halt is John Erickson's _Road to Berlin_ pp.247-290. He concludes - and there is no-one more authoritative - that the offensive had reached its furthest possible limit in early August, and that given Model's counter-thrust there was no military possiblility of "crossing the river."
john mage