Category: Weapons

Partial list of the weapons captured after the uprising was suppressed:

• 7 Polish Rifles
• 1 Russian Rifle
• 1 German Rifle
• 59 pistols of various calibers
• Several hundred hand grenades, including Polish and home-made ones .
• Several hundred incendiary bottles
• Home-made explosives
• Infernal machines with fuses
• A large amount of explosives, ammunition for weapons of all calibers, including some machine-gun ammunition.

What follows is a brief description of some of the homemade weapons used in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Truly Impressive.

Filipinka – right; Sidolowka – Left. By Halibutt

Flipinka, also known as Perelka, was an unofficial name for ET wz. 40 hand grenades, manufactured in the Home Army underground facilities in 1940. It was designed by a former worker of the Rembertow Polish Army ammunition factory and based on a pre-war anti-tank grenade, model ET wz. 38. The designer was Edward Tymoszak, hence the ET abbreviation.

About 700 young Jewish fighters clashed with German forces, sometimes in hand-to-hand combat. These fighters were poorly equipped and lacked military training and experience. Yet they held the great German war machine, the masters of the blitzkrieg, at bay for 27 days. The effects of the diversion of these resources had significant impact on the German war effort.

It is grimly amusing to note that the Warsaw inmates, with their pathetic weaponry, held off the German army for 27 days, while the French army fell in 24 days.

Błyskawica was the backbone of the Polish underground weapons industry, along with the Polish version of the Sten submachine gun. Originally produced in Britain, the Błyskawica was covertly manufactured in mass numbers. It was designed by two Polish engineers, Wacław Zawrotny and Seweryn Wielanier, and it combined the exterior of a German MP-40 sub-machine gun and the interior mechanism of the British Sten. All parts of the weapon were joined with screws and threads, rather than bolts and welding.