#7: The Horror of Total War


The German Blitzkrieg into Poland in September 1939 involved three elements of air power. First, air attacks destroyed much of the Polish air force while it was still on the ground. Second, bombers hit road and rail communications, assembly areas and munitions dumps. Third, fighters and dive bombers attacked columns of Polish troops as well civilian refugees. On September 2, the Luftwaffe conducted air raids on Warsaw, Gydinia and many other towns. In Warsaw a hospital for Jewish children was bombed. The railway station in Kolo was hit and 111 people were killed, many of them refugees from border towns.

Adolf Hitler's aim in Poland was more than just the conquering of territory, he also sought to impose German rule on Poland. To achieve the latter aim, three regiments of SS Death's Head troops were to follow the army's advance and conduct "police and security" operations. The SS were ordered to "incarcerate or annihilate" every enemy of Nazism. Whole villages were burned to the ground. Fifty-five Polish civilians were rounded up and shot on September 3 in Truskolasy -- a child of two was among the victims. At Wieruszow, twenty Jews were ordered to assemble in the market place; the daughter of one of the men was shot for "impudence" because she ran after her father.

In Poland, while armies fought, civilians were being massacred behind the lines. On September 3, Sulejow was bombed, the center of town caught fire, and as thousands of civilians ran to the nearby woods for safety they were strafed by German fighters. Many other towns in Poland were to burn and thousands of Poles would perish.

At Bydgoszcz on September 4, more than a thousand Poles were murdered, including several boys between 12 and 16. They were lined up against a wall and shot. The following day in Piotrkow, the Germans set fire to dozens of Jewish homes and then shot those individuals lucky enough to escape the flames. One structure survived the flames and its occupants were ordered to run; five were shot down and a sixth later died of his wounds.

In the fields outside Mrocza on September 6, the Germans shot nineteen prisoners of war. Other POWs were locked into a railwayman's hut which was then set on fire. POWs in the east would not be treated in accordance to the Geneva Conventions on prisoners of war.

On September 8, thirty-three civilians in Ksiazki were executed by the SS. Such executions were becoming a daily occurrence.

"It is the Fuehrer's and Goering's intention" wrote Colonel Eduard Wagner, "to destroy and exterminate the Polish nation."

At Bedzin, several hundred Jews were driven into a synagogue; Two hundred died after the Germans set the building on fire. The following day the Germans accused Polish civilians of the crime and executed thirty of them.

By mid-September, Warsaw became the focus of the campaign. On the fourteenth there was a severe bombing raid. For the city's Jewish residents it was the Jewish New Year. "Just as the synagogues were filled," wrote a Polish eyewitness, "Nalewki, the Jewish quarter of Warsaw, was attacked from the air. The result of this bombing was bloody." On the same day in Przemysl, 43 leading Jewish citizens were arrested, beaten and then shot. In Sieradz, five Jews and two Poles were shot.

By September 19, Warsaw had suffered artillery bombardments for ten consecutive days. So many Poles had been killed that public parks became cemeteries.

Eight hundred Polish intellectuals and municipal leaders were shot on September 23 and September 24 in Bydgoszcz. The twenty-third was the Day of Atonement for the Jews in Bydgoszcz and to mark the occasion the Germans herded several thousand Polish POWs, including many Jews, into the synagogue. Denied the use of lavatories, the POWs were forced to relieves themselves in the Synagogue, and then forced to clean up the mess with prayer shawls, curtains from the Holy Ark, and ornamental covers of the Scrolls of the Law.

Warsaw was bombed on September 25 by 400 bombers and dive bombers. Even tri-motor transports got in on the action dropping seventy-two tons of incendiary bombs, causing widespread fires. Jadwiga Sosnkowska spent the night in a hospital helping patients.

"On the table at which I was assisting," Sosnkowska would later write, "tragedy following tragedy. At one time the victim was a girl of sixteen. She had a glorious mop of golden hair, her face was delicate as a flower, and her lovely sapphire-blue eyes were full of tears. Both her legs, up to the knees, were a mass of bleeding pulp, in which it was impossible to distinguish bone from flesh; both had to be amputated above the knee. Before the surgeon began I bent over this innocent child to kiss her pallid brow, to lay my helpless hand on her golden head. She died quietly in the course of the morning, like a flower plucked by a merciless hand."

Warsaw surrendered on September 27, but for three days the Germans made no effort to enter the city. Hundreds of wounded Polish soldiers and civilians who might have been saved by medical attention, died instead.

"There were so many corpses lying still unburied," Sosnkowska recalled, "there was no food, and there were no medical supplies. These were sorrowful days, but they will live forever in my memory as days of the greatest solidarity and brotherly compassion of the whole community. An ocean of kindness welled from human hearts, eager to save, to help, to console. The walls of the city had fallen, but the people of Warsaw remained erect, with unbowed heads."

Source: Gilbert, M. (1989). The Second World War: A Complete History. New York: Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

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"The mass murders on which the Third Reich embarked in the autumn of 1939, both in Germany and in the occupied areas of Poland, were far from being a consequence of the outbreak of a war in which the Nazi leadership considered that Germany's very existence was at stake. Still less were they the product of the 'barbarization of warfare,' brought on by a life-and-death struggle against a ruthless enemy in harsh conditions.

"The invasion of Poland took place under favorable conditions, in good weather, against an enemy that was swept aside with contemptuous ease. The invading troops did not need to be convinced by political indoctrination that the enemy posed a huge threat to Germany's future; clearly the Poles did not. Primary group loyalties in the lower ranks of the army remained intact; they did not have to be replaced by a harsh and perverted system of discipline that replaced military values with racial ideology.

"Almost everything that was to happen in the invasion of the Soviet Union from June 1941 onwards was already happening on a smaller scale in the invasion of Poland nearly two years before. From the very beginning, SS Security Service Task Forces entered the country, rounding up the politically undesirable and shooting them or sending them off to concentration camps, massacring Jews, arresting local men and sending them off to Germany as forced laborers, and engaging in a systematic policy of ethnic cleansing and brutally executed population transfers.

"These actions were not confined to the SS. From the very beginning, too, Nazi Party officials, stormtroopers, civilian officials and especially junior army officers and ordinary soldiers joined in, to be followed in due course by German settlers moved into Poland from outside. Arrests, beatings and murders of Poles and especially Jews became commonplace, but what was even more striking was the extent of the hatred and contempt shown towards them by ordinary German troops, who lost no time in ritually humiliating Jews on the streets, laughing and jeering as they tore off their beards and made them perform degrading acts in public.

"Just as striking was the assumption of the invading and incoming Germans that the possessions of the Poles and Jews were freely available as booty. The theft and looting of Jewish property in particular by German troops was almost universal. Sometimes they were aided and abetted by local Poles. More often than not, non-Jewish Poles themselves were robbed as well.

"All of these actions reflected official policy, of course, directed from the top by Hitler himself, who had declared that Poland was to be totally destroyed, its academically educated and professional classes annihilated, and its population reduced to the status of uneducated helots whose lives were worth next to nothing. The expropriation of Polish and Jewish property was explicitly ordered Berlin, as were the Germanization of the incorporated territories, the transfers of population, and the ghettoization of the Jews."

-- Richard J. Evans, in his book The Third Reich at War

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