Bloody Sunday in Bydgoszcz

On Sunday 3 September 1939, at around 10 a.m., columns of troops, supply wagons and crowds of refugees were streaming through Bydgoszcz. On the city’s main street, Gdańska Street, shooting broke out. Soldiers of the retreating Pomorze Army concluded that local Germans were firing on them from windows, roofs and church towers. For the rest of that day and the whole of the next, a hunt for “saboteurs” went on in the city. Between three hundred and more than four hundred people were killed, most of them members of the German minority, among them many chance victims and innocent people. Polish soldiers and civilians died too.

It is often stated that around a thousand German civilians accused of shooting at Polish soldiers were killed in Bydgoszcz. That figure comes not from research but from German propaganda of the autumn of 1939. Present-day findings by historians, Polish and German alike, put the number killed in the city on 3–4 September at roughly 300–400. Who started the shooting, on the other hand, remains disputed to this day. The name “Bromberger Blutsonntag”, the Bromberg Bloody Sunday, was given to these events by the propaganda of Joseph Goebbels, which used them to justify terror against the Poles. In the following weeks the Germans murdered several times more people in and around Bydgoszcz than had died on 3 and 4 September.

A city in the path of war

Bydgoszcz, Bromberg in German, had belonged to Prussia from the First Partition in 1772 until 1920, when it passed to Poland under the Treaty of Versailles. Before the First World War most of its inhabitants were German. After 1920 many of them left for the Reich, and by 1939, out of some 140,000 inhabitants, only somewhere between a few thousand and well over ten thousand were German. Among them were people loyal to the Polish state, but a growing part of the minority, as throughout Gdańsk Pomerania and Greater Poland, sympathised with the Third Reich. Polish–German relations in the city deteriorated sharply in the spring and summer of 1939, when Berlin demanded Gdańsk (Danzig) and an extraterritorial road across the Polish Corridor, and the German press wrote daily of the alleged persecution of Germans in Poland. In the demands of late August Bydgoszcz lay right on the edge of the area whose fate was to be decided by plebiscite.

The mistrust was not groundless. German military intelligence, the Abwehr, had for months been recruiting Polish Germans into sabotage and combat groups, and before the war the Polish police had uncovered several such networks in Pomerania, complete with weapons and explosives. After the outbreak of war the Polish authorities, working from lists prepared in advance, arrested thousands of minority activists and marched them east in columns. On these marches, among others towards Łowicz, some of the internees died or were murdered. Adolf Hitler, for his part, speaking in the Reichstag on 1 September, had justified the invasion partly by the “bloody terror” against Germans in Poland. Both sides, then, were expecting the worst even before the first shot was fired.

The war reached Bydgoszcz quickly. On 2 September German aircraft bombed the railway station, killing 25 civilians according to the German historian Markus Krzoska. The Pomorze Army of Major General Władysław Bortnowski suffered heavy losses in the Tuchola Forest, where the German Fourth Army was cutting through the Corridor. Stragglers and refugees began pouring into the city, and with them rumours of defeat. During the night of 2–3 September unknown persons reportedly woke the inhabitants of some districts, urging them to flee because the Germans were already coming. The Bydgoszcz area was to be defended by the 15th Greater Poland Infantry Division under Brigadier General Zdzisław Przyjałkowski (PL), while the supply trains and units of the 9th Infantry Division and the 27th Infantry Division were passing through the city towards the crossings over the Brda and the Vistula.

Sunday 3 September

At around 10 a.m., as people were coming out of church, shooting broke out on Gdańska Street, near Jagiellońska and Kamienna Streets. The columns of troops and refugee carts panicked and horses bolted. Polish military reports and the accounts of soldiers and inhabitants speak of fire coming simultaneously from many places: from windows, attics, the towers of the Protestant church and other buildings in a belt running from the station to the centre. The town commandant, Major Wojciech Albrycht (PL), reported “sabotage” to General Przyjałkowski, who sent two companies of the 62nd Infantry Regiment into the city. A guard battalion, the police, volunteers – scouts among them – and armed civilians joined in clearing the blocks. In the afternoon General Bortnowski drove through the city, and according to Polish documents his car too came under fire on Gdańska Street.

Soldiers and civilians searched houses inhabited by Germans and the towers and attics of Protestant churches. Those caught with weapons were shot on the spot. Many, however, were killed without any evidence at all – for a German surname, for speaking German, because a neighbour pointed them out, or on mere suspicion. There were summary executions and lynchings, and in the confusion Polish soldiers sometimes fired on one another. At around 4 p.m. the shooting in the centre died down. Several hundred detained Germans were herded into barracks and, in the evening, when the army and police were ordered to withdraw overnight, they were released.

That day, before noon, Great Britain, and in the afternoon France, declared war on Germany. In Bydgoszcz, as throughout Poland, this set off an outburst of joy, but it did not change the situation at the front. The Polish Army was preparing to leave the city.

Monday 4 September

During the night of 3–4 September and in the morning, Polish units passing through the city, among other places by the Bydgoszcz Canal and in the districts of Czyżkówko and Szwederowo, again reported coming under fire. The hunt for suspects flared up anew, this time in a city with less and less authority of any kind. The mayor, Leon Barciszewski (PL), had left for a meeting in Włocławek on 3 September and had not returned, and the last army units and the police were moving east. Order was kept by a poorly armed Citizens’ Guard (PL) of reservists, veterans and volunteers. Krzoska writes of a city that in those days was a lawless space in which no one was able to halt the unfolding violence. In the fighting in Szwederowo the Protestant church burned down. Also on 4 September, by Lake Jezuickie (PL), a dozen or so kilometres south of the city, 39 Germans were killed, some of them possibly by fire from German aircraft.

On the morning of 5 September German troops of Battle Group Netze under General Eccard von Gablenz entered the city. The Citizens’ Guard resisted them, especially in Szwederowo, and laid down its arms only when Gablenz promised to treat its members as prisoners of war.

The dispute over who fired

That there was shooting and killing in Bydgoszcz on 3 and 4 September is beyond dispute. What started it, however, has been argued over for more than eighty years. From the first post-war studies (Ryszard Wojan, Karol Marian Pospieszalski, Czesław Madajczyk) Polish historiography held that the army had been attacked by German saboteurs, made up of local Germans and agents infiltrated from the Reich, and that the response of the army and the population was the suppression of that sabotage. German expellee circles and most German authors presented the events as a pogrom of defenceless and loyal citizens, triggered by Polish panic and hatred.

In 1989 the German journalist and historian Günter Schubert, going against the view prevailing in Germany, came down in favour of the sabotage thesis, arguing that it had been prepared by the SS security services. Conversely, the Bydgoszcz historian Włodzimierz Jastrzębski, author of the 1988 book “Dywersja czy masakra?” (“Sabotage or Massacre?”), changed his mind over time and from 2004 maintained that there was no direct evidence of organised sabotage, and that Polish soldiers and civilians in their panic had taken for sabotage shots whose source cannot be established.

In 2003, on the initiative of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), a team of several dozen researchers set out to clarify the matter. The result was the volume “Bydgoszcz 3–4 września 1939”, published in 2008 and edited by Tomasz Chinciński and Paweł Machcewicz. The editors concluded that the source material as a whole justified the thesis that German sabotage had taken place in Bydgoszcz on 3 September and had been suppressed. They cited reports by the Pomorze Army command, hundreds of accounts by Polish witnesses identifying dozens of specific places from which shots had been fired, and Abwehr documents showing that from June 1939 it had been forming armed sabotage groups in Bydgoszcz and that some of their members were killed in the first days of September. Among the dead a collaborator of the Abwehr station in Stettin was identified. The same historians openly acknowledged, however, that the suppression of the sabotage degenerated into summary killings that claimed many innocent Germans, and that some executions may have stemmed from personal hatred and revenge.

Some scholars, especially German ones, consider that this evidence does not settle the matter, because the Abwehr documents speak of plans and of the existence of groups, not of their part in the shooting on 3 September, and because the witness accounts on both sides were often written down many years later. Markus Krzoska, author of a review of the research published in 2012 in the “Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte”, concluded that it is still not known who started shooting, and that three explanations remain plausible: provocateurs sent in from the Reich, action by local Germans, or panic born of hysteria. A fair summary of the state of knowledge, then, runs as follows: the existence of German sabotage groups in the city is documented, and most Polish historians regard the sabotage as proven, but its scale, and whether it was what set off the shooting, remain in dispute. What is beyond dispute is that the response took the form of killings that struck many people who had nothing to do with any sabotage.

How many died

The most precise findings concern the city itself. The IPN historian Paweł Kosiński, drawing on civil registers, parish books, obituaries and lists of the dead, established the names of 365 people killed in Bydgoszcz on 3 and 4 September. Thirty-three were not identified. Among them were 254 Protestants and 86 Catholics, which suggests that most of the victims were Germans, but the dead also included several dozen Poles, among them between a dozen and twenty soldiers. Krzoska, comparing Kosiński’s list with German card indexes in the archive in Marburg, concluded that the number killed during “Bloody Sunday” probably exceeded 400. Earlier estimates fell within similar limits: from about 100 to 300 in older Polish works, and 358 and 418 names on lists compiled after the war by Germans from Bydgoszcz. Including the surrounding villages, some authors give figures of up to 700 dead.

Across Poland as a whole, in September 1939, between about 2,000 and 4,000–5,000 civilians of German nationality died, according to various estimates: killed in summary executions, on the internment marches, but also by bombs and shells, German ones included. The British historian Ian Kershaw considered a figure of around 4,000 the most credible.

Propaganda

For Nazi propaganda Bydgoszcz was a godsend. As early as 7 September the German News Bureau was writing of “Bromberg, city of horror”, and Goebbels’s ministry brought a group of foreign journalists to the city, where they were shown bodies and selected witnesses. The term “Bromberger Blutsonntag” appeared in the “Deutsche Rundschau”, published in the city, on 8 September, and the press was instructed to make it a fixed term. A Wehrmacht propaganda company photographed the bodies. The researcher Miriam Arani has shown that the authenticity of most of these photographs is unconfirmed and that some are obvious fakes. It is not even known whether the victims shown to the journalists were Germans, since in those same days the Wehrmacht and the police were shooting hundreds of Poles in the city.

The figures grew to order. In October 1939 Kurt Lück, an SS officer and head of the “graves centre” in Poznań, spoke of more than 5,000 Germans murdered in Poland, including “around a thousand” in Bydgoszcz alone. This is the source of the figure still repeated by some chronologies. In November 1939 the German Foreign Office gave 5,437 killed in the whole of Poland. On 7 February 1940 the Reich Ministry of the Interior ordered that the figure of 58,000, almost eleven times greater, be used from then on, and this was the number announced in the second edition of the official “documentation of Polish atrocities”. The figure was refuted after the war by Pospieszalski, and serious German historians do not accept it, although it still circulates on the far right.

The occupier’s revenge

The reprisals began on the day the Germans entered. Contrary to General Gablenz’s promise, the captured members of the Citizens’ Guard were handed over to Einsatzgruppe IV of SS-Brigadeführer Lothar Beutel, one of the task forces that had been carrying out Operation Tannenberg since 1 September. The SS men beat around 40 of them to death; the rest, including the leaders of the Guard, were shot. The Wehrmacht and the Einsatzgruppen combed the districts house by house in search of “partisans”. A souvenir sabre or a shotgun could count as a weapon. From 8 September the town commandant was General Walter Braemer, who estimated that by that day at least 400 people had been shot in Bydgoszcz. According to other estimates, between 200 and 400 Polish civilians were killed in the first days of the occupation.

On 9 September the first public execution of twenty hostages took place in the Old Market Square, and another followed the next day. Among those shot were scouts and a priest who had tried to give the condemned the last rites. According to surviving reports, on 11 September Hitler ordered that, in view of the “rebellious population” of Bydgoszcz, the Reichsführer-SS should take 500 hostages and apply the harshest measures, and that the army was not to hinder him. From 9 September a German special court was in operation which, until the end of the war, tried hundreds of Poles in “Bloody Sunday” cases and, according to the researcher Edmund Zarzycki, handed down more than 240 death sentences in proceedings that were a travesty of justice. On 22 September at Boryszew near Sochaczew Wehrmacht soldiers shot 50 prisoners from the Bydgoszcz National Defence battalion, falsely accused of taking part in the events of 3 and 4 September, although the battalion had not been in the city at the time.

From October the killing was taken over by the SS, the police and the Selbstschutz, made up of local ethnic Germans. In the Valley of Death at Fordon, between 10 October and the end of November 1939, between 1,200 and 1,400 Poles and Jews were shot, according to the most widely accepted estimates, although older studies gave figures as high as 3,000. Barciszewski, who returned to the city in October to answer the propaganda accusations, was arrested and shot together with his son on 11 November, blamed for failing to prevent the “riots”. In the first four months of the occupation the Germans murdered some 5,000 people in Bydgoszcz and the surrounding district, probably between 1,500 and 2,000 in the city itself. A secret decree by Hitler of 4 October 1939 granted impunity for acts committed by Germans since 1 September “out of bitterness at the atrocities of the Poles”.

Significance

The Bydgoszcz “Bloody Sunday” was a genuine tragedy. Several hundred people died in it, most of them civilians of German nationality, many of them innocent, killed by Polish soldiers and civilians in an atmosphere of panic, fear of betrayal and hatred built up over the preceding months. An honest memory of these events requires that this fact be acknowledged, regardless of whether, and on what scale, German saboteurs were active in the city. It also requires that proportion and sequence be kept in mind. Bydgoszcz was a consequence of Germany’s invasion of Poland, not its cause, and it was not a “pogrom ordered from Warsaw”, as propaganda portrayed it.

In Goebbels’s hands the event became a tool. Figures inflated tenfold and doctored photographs were meant to convince Germans and the world that the war against Poland was an act of defence and the terror against Poles a punishment. They served to justify what had already been planned: the liquidation of the Polish intelligentsia, priests, teachers and activists in Operation Tannenberg and the Intelligenzaktion, which in Pomerania alone cost the lives of tens of thousands of people. Historians estimate the losses of the population of Bydgoszcz over the whole war at around 10,000.

After the war the dispute over Bydgoszcz long divided historians in the two countries, but joint research in recent decades has brought their findings on the number of victims closer together. The question of who fired the first shots remains open. What is certain is that the German occupation of Bydgoszcz began with crimes that many times exceeded what was supposed to “justify” them.