The City of Ruins is a “digital stereoscopic reconstruction of Warsaw destroyed during World War II.” Although you have to actually go to the Warsaw Rising Museum to see the film you can view the trailer and see how they created the models used.
The name City of Ruins comes from what happened to Warsaw in WWII. Warsaw was the home of two major, and ultimately futile, resistance efforts. The first, called the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, pitted thousands of Polish Jews against the Nazis in 1943. It was crushed in less than a month and almost all of the survivors were slaughtered. Then in 1944, hoping to keep Poland independent of the approaching Soviets, the Warsaw Uprising began. As the Red Army sat on the outskirts of Warsaw and waited, the resistance fought the Nazis for 63 days before being forced to give up. Angry at the citizens of Warsaw, Hitler ordered the entire city to be destroyed and any art or other valuables to be taken back to Germany. It is estimated that over 85% of the city was reduced to rubble as a result.
It wasn’t until January of 1945 that the Red Army finally entered Warsaw and liberated it from Nazi occupation. Although many buildings were eventually restored to their pre-war state others were replaced by pre-fabricated housing in order to deal with the large number of displaced residents. Even so, the historic Old Town area was named to UNESCO’s World Heritage list in 1980.
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