Warsaw

When Nazi forces seized Warsaw, Poland, in October 1939, Heinrich Himmler's orders to his officers were devilishly simple: raze the city to the ground and turn it into a Wehrmacht transport center, 'no stone shall remain standing.' Those orders were put into effect with the sort of efficiency you only associate with Germans for the following five years or more, until it was ultimately freed by Soviet troops in January 1945.

The first Red Army soldiers to arrive in the city described a picture of total and utter ruin. Buildings had been meticulously leveled to guarantee that they could not be restored or built upon, and that was repeated with every structure, no matter how huge or tiny. It was maybe the only city utterly destroyed during the war; it would not be a leap to claim that pre-WW2 Warsaw ceased to exist under the occupation. The war, or more especially the Nazis, transformed Warsaw from a multiethnic, cosmopolitan city to a battle-torn desolation that would take decades to rebuild properly.

• Location: Warsaw, Poland
• Stages: October 1939
  
• Deaths: between 150,000 and 200,000 people