positions, among others;
in the gardens of the Royal Castle, on the Gdańsk Bridge or at 11 Listopada Street. Photographs from the railway track, where senior officers of the Bahnschutz railway formation set fire to crates of bottles, are intriguing.
We instantly reacted when we found out that German photos of the Warsaw Uprising were put up on auction portals. We managed to contact an antiquarian who agreed to sell the Museum's entire collection on the condition that we finalise the transaction within 48h. Through our cooperation with PGE, we quickly purchased these valuable photographs of the Warsaw Uprising. - said Jan Ołdakowski, Director of the Warsaw Rising Museum.
The photographs taken by the German photographer are unique because of their documentary rather than propaganda nature. The collection from Pilsen is devoid of an ideological filter. The photographs show a genuine image of the German army base in Warsaw - the fatigue, the abandonment of a regimented appearance, the makeshift nature of military positions, and finally the ruins of Old Town churches and tenement houses, created as a result of the army's own shelling and bombardment, and the planned destruction of historic buildings. - adds Jan Ołdakowski.
For Warsaw inhabitants and experts on the history of the Warsaw Uprising, three photographs in the collection will prove vital: The Royal Castle depicting the stages of its destruction between 8 and 12 September 1944. One can still see the wing with the clock tower, which is also about to collapse. The Germans deliberately blew up the historic Castle in late August 1944. The photographs capture the moment when neither the insurgents nor the district's inhabitants, ousted from their homes and ruins, are no longer present in the Old Town. In those final moments of the Uprising, the district can only be seen through the eyes of the Germans preparing to repulse the Red Army approaching the Praga bank. The photographs also include shots of the Saski and Brühl palaces on Piłsudski Square - these buildings will share the fate of the Royal Castle in the subsequent months.
The series closes with photographs of civilians evacuated through the streets of Ochota and shots of the famous fence next to Dulag 121 in Pruszków, hung with cards of people looking for their loved ones.
The photographs further conceal several mysteries: who is the author? Who commissioned them? The motif of a black civilian car, which the author probably drove while preparing his photo reportage from the insurgent city, runs through the frames. Several photographs depict the aforementioned German railway security officers (Bahnschutz) visiting railway junctions - these motifs require further research.