Warsaw 1944: Hitler, Himmler and the Warsaw Uprising. By Alexandra Richie. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 752 pages; $40. William Collins; £25. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

THE Warsaw uprising is a microcosm of the second world war and the impossible choices it imposed on people who bore no blame for the wickedness around them. The German occupation of Poland was a regime of unparalleled harshness, involving mass murder (particularly of Polish Jews) and the deliberate destruction of national spirit and culture. Against the odds, the Poles built a sophisticated underground administration and army, loyal to the exiled government in London.

But in 1944 it became clear that the oncoming Soviet forces wanted Poland to be communist, not free. Polish forces greeted them as allies and liberators, only to be locked up and killed. The thinking behind the uprising was that if the Polish underground could win control of the capital city from the Nazi occupiers, it would make it impossible for Stalin to ignore the country’s lawful authorities.

That was always a long shot. The Germans were in retreat, but far from beaten. The Polish forces were lightly armed and ill-supplied. Stalin was in no mood to change his mind. Nor were his Western allies, eager to end the war before Germany developed new weapons, in any mood to let the alliance with Stalin fray.

The result was unconscionable. The Soviet troops, by then on the fringes of Warsaw, stood by until the Nazis had put down the Poles—a tacit echo of the original division of Poland between Hitler and Stalin in 1939. The uprising was crushed street by street and sewer by sewer, amid some of the worst atrocities of the entire war.

Alexandra Richie’s detailed and sympathetic history paints the foreground and background to this story. A Canadian-born historian who now lives in Warsaw, she takes an unashamedly polonocentric approach, rebutting the views of unnamed historians who, she hints darkly, have downplayed Polish valour and suffering. Some may find her account of the delights of pre-war Warsaw rather too rosy, and military historians may wish for a clearer account of the fighting itself.

But she bleakly sets out the central narrative: the poor leadership, flawed intelligence and bad planning which reduced the uprising’s slender chances to nothing. The battle for Warsaw was ultimately a political, not a military event. It was part of a bigger story of Soviet machinations, allied pusillanimity and the desperation of the Nazi retreat, with a leadership panicked by the failed assassination plot against Hitler only weeks earlier in July 1944.

Ms Richie paints a particularly vivid portrait of the greatest villains of the story, the RONA, a Russian nationalist army recruited by the Nazis. It had briefly tried to set up an anti-communist Utopia in a tract of the Soviet Union. The rape, looting and carnage that these ragged, savage and desperate troops unleashed on Warsaw shocked even the SS. The book also traces the evolution in Nazi thinking as the uprising progressed: having derided the Poles as subhuman bandits worthy only of extermination, the Germans by the end gave the surviving combatants grudging respect.

The author is married to a Pole, the son of Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, a pro-Jewish hero of the resistance who later became a leading dissident and then a distinguished foreign minister. “Warsaw 1944” draws heavily on her father-in-law’s private archives and recounts many previously unpublished stories of the tragedy. Such survivors’ testimony makes it the definitive study of the uprising.

Yet the abundance of fragmentary detail is a weakness as well as a strength. A more selective approach and a focus on a few stories rather than a multitude would help readers keep the narrative thread. A more energetic editor might also have pruned some of the repetition which in places mars the book.

The Poland in which Ms Richie lives is stronger, safer, richer and happier than at any time in its history. Warsaw has been rebuilt and is a thriving metropolis—once again one of Europe’s great cities. But the invisible mental scars are still raw. Poles find it hard to trust each other or outsiders, and many Poles feel that foreigners still lack any real understanding of Poland’s wartime fate (or in some cases contrition for their countries’ part in it). Reading Ms Richie’s book may help non-Poles begin to understand the depth of those feelings.