Poland conquests, Konev’s lead tanks reached the Vistula on the 26th, then turned to follow the river to Warsaw A bridgehead was established 50 miles south of the city on August After the Soviets reached the Vistula and Narew, the Polish front stabilized for another five months In that time the Soviets proved they came to Poland as liberators and occupiers rolled into one Much controversy therefore attends the decision to pause on the eastern side of the Vistula while the Germans crushed the Warsaw Rising over 63 days A balanced view must take into account that the various Red Army Fronts on the eastern bank were at the end of a long campaign and needed to rest and refit: on August 29 the Stavka ordered a shift to the “strict defense” along the Vistula while operations were conducted in Rumania and the Baltic States There is some evidence that a Soviet relief effort was attempted at Warsaw Russian historians have argued that the Red Army made real attempts to assist, but that real operational and logistics problems did not allow this Most importantly, the Soviets were defending their bridgeheads, only newly established, and building up forces for another deep battle operation to be fought in western Poland It was not their objective to liberate Warsaw as an end in itself, just as Western Allied commanders originally intended to bypass Paris that August but were drawn in by a rising of its citizens Once Polish units serving with the Red Army arrived on scene, a strong attempt was made to cross the Vistula and break into the city, but it was repulsed Many Polish and western historians nevertheless accuse Stalin of deliberate, cynical delay over the 63 days of the Warsaw Uprising, during which the city was systematically ruined and the main force of the Armia Krajowa crushed by the Nazis with utter ruthlessness And it is true that other Polish patriots were already being arrested and killed in Soviet rear areas by the NKVD The liberation of Warsaw and the rest of Poland from the Nazis waited for five agonizing months It did not begin until January 1945, with the start of the Red Army’s Vistula-Oder operation After Warsaw was liberated by Polish 1st Army, attached to Soviet forces, the NKVD arrested or kill as many Armia Krajowa personnel as it could locate in the liberated areas Several hundred krasnoarmeets were killed as Armia Krajowa men fought back Representatives of the London Poles were arrested in secret, and Polish soldiers were arrested and held in Soviet camps By October 1945, there were 30,000 Poles in NKVD holding camps That allowed the Lublin Poles to extend control over most of the country, which shifted from a central locale of wartime fighting to one of domestic and international contention over postwar and early Cold War politics The future of Poland was a major issue at the Teheran, Yalta, and Potsdam Conferences In the end, it was reconstituted on the Oder–Neisse Line in the west and the Curzon Line in the east by prior agreement among the Big Three, arrived at in secret and over the heads of the Poles Millions of ethnic Poles were forcibly moved westward, while the Poles expelled ethnic Germans from annexed portions of East Prussia and Silesia The innocent were evicted along with the guilty, as collective punishment was applied for what the Nazis did to a thousand Polish towns and villages and to six million compatriots Polish Jews who tried to return to their homes were discouraged by antiSemitic riots and acts of violence Many persevered; others kept walking to refuge 859