This is the story of a city and the unbreakable spirit of its people in the face of unspeakable barbarism. The Warsaw Uprising of August 1944 was a shocking and terrible event in a hideous war. The German retaliation to the insurgency was carried out with monstrous brutality, and the murder of over 40,000 innocent men, women and children on 5 August 1944 is the single largest battlefield massacre of the Second World War. But the Poles did not give in, and fought off German troops, including Himmler"s most notorious SS battalions, for sixty-three days. Placing the uprising firmly in the context of the Second World War, this remarkable book is the first to tell this tragic story from German and Polish perspectives and asks why, when the war was nearly lost, Hitler and Himmler decided to return to Warsaw to murder or deport the inhabitants and then wipe the city from the map.