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Originally Posted by BTinSF
I see a few buildings that appear to be clearly pre-WW II but I'm curious: How much of the city survived the war? A lot, not much??
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You probably mean the buildings on Plac Trzech Krzyzy (Three Cross Square). But the answer is not simple. For example the church (now like a small Pantheon) was completly different before WW2, much bigger and much more beautiful, and was nearly completely destroyed. It was rebuild later during communist era, but the authorities allowed to build very small and modest church according to the existing XVIII century predecessor.
This pattern was applied to almost all historical buildings rebuild after the war.
In place of magnificent buildings, sometimes better and more impressive than that of Paris or London we have now a kind of "historical" small provincial city architecture. The original pre war architecture is very rare but exists and still shows how great city it was before the war.
In the begining of XX century Warsaw was a very wealthy city. It was a great industrial and trade center, a gateway to the markets of Russia and Far East. This can be clearly visible in the buildings from this period. By the way during first world war retracting russian occupation troops dismantled or damaged most of the industrial installations but little damage was done to the city itself.
I would say that 90% of city center had been completely destroyed in WW2. Most not during the actual battle but deliberately later. German troops drilled thousands of holes in walls of most precious monuments, filled with dynamite and blew up. Before this remaining alive population was expelled from the city. All furniture, tableware, paintings, silverware, linen, etc. has been looted in the organized way by german state. Thousands of railway carriages full of objects having any value was transported to Germany. The value of destroyed and stolen Warsaw property is counted in tenths of billions of dollars. This has no precedence in the history.
Below is one of the few buildings that survived the war relatively intact.
