The bombing of Wieluń

Early on the morning of 1 September 1939 German Junkers Ju 87 dive-bombers appeared over Wieluń, a county town in the Łódź province some 20–25 kilometres from the border with the Reich. The town was asleep. It had no garrison, no anti-aircraft artillery, no arms factories and no important railway junction. In the course of several raids by several groups of Stukas, the Germans destroyed some 70–75 per cent of the town’s buildings, and as much as 90 per cent in the centre itself. Some of the very first bombs hit the All Saints’ Hospital. At least 127 inhabitants whose names have been established were killed, and by cautious estimates several hundred.

In Poland Wieluń is a symbol of the first day of the war and of the first war crime committed by the Germans in that war. It was not, admittedly, “the world’s first carpet bombing”, as it is sometimes described: cities had already been bombed in Spain and in China, and the very notion of carpet bombing, the even saturation of an area with bombs dropped by a large number of aircraft, does not fit precision attacks by dive-bombers. But it was one of the first targets of the German air force in the Second World War, and one of the first towns in that war to be destroyed from the air.

A town near the border

In 1939 Wieluń had about 16,000 inhabitants, several thousand of them Jews. It was an old royal town with the Gothic parish church of St Michael the Archangel, monasteries, stretches of medieval walls and a town hall incorporating the Kraków Gate. It lay on the axis of advance of the German 10th Army under General Walther von Reichenau, the strongest army in Case White, which was to strike towards Warsaw from Upper Silesia and the Opole area.

The Polish defence of this sector was the responsibility of the Łódź Army. Deployed around Wieluń were its 28th Infantry Division, which had marched through the town in the last days of August, and cavalry brigades; to the south, near Kłobuck, stood the Volhynian Cavalry Brigade, which on 1 September fought the Battle of Mokra. As the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) has established, there were no Polish units in the town itself on 1 September or the day before; the headquarters of the 28th Division was in villages a few kilometres away.

Air support for the 10th Army was provided by a close-support air command subordinated to Luftflotte 4 under General Alexander Löhr. It was commanded by General Wolfram von Richthofen, who in Spain, as chief of staff of the Condor Legion, had been responsible for air operations during the bombing of Guernica. Among his units was I Group of Dive Bomber Wing 76 (I./StG 76) under Captain Walter Sigel, the same group that two and a half weeks earlier had lost thirteen aircraft and twenty-six airmen in the Neuhammer disaster.

The dawn raid

The first raid was flown by Sigel’s group. Twenty-nine Ju 87B bombers took off from the Nieder-Ellguth airfield (today Ligota Dolna near Gorzów Śląski) under fighter escort. Morning mist in the valleys made flying difficult, and the reconnaissance Dornier Do 17s sent ahead of the bombers, according to some sources, failed to find the town at all. Over Wieluń, however, the sky was clear, as the airmen later reported. The aircraft dived singly and in flights from low altitude, since no one was firing at them. According to the most frequently cited calculations, the group dropped twenty-nine 500-kilogram bombs and 112 bombs of 50 kilograms.

Some of the first bombs fell on the All Saints’ Hospital on the edge of the town. According to witnesses, the building was marked with a Red Cross on its roof. The main building, dating from 1840, collapsed and burned. According to the recollections of the hospital’s director, Zygmunt Patryn, twenty-six patients, two nuns and four nurses died there; most studies accept this figure of thirty-two victims. Witnesses also said that the airmen machine-gunned people fleeing from burning houses into the fields.

On returning to the airfield Sigel reported that no enemy had been observed. After his group, others came over the town. Several dozen Ju 87s of I Group, Dive Bomber Wing 77, under Captain Friedrich-Karl von Dalwigk zu Lichtenfels, attacked the town later that morning, followed by I Group of Wing 2 under Major Oskar Dinort, whose target, by his own account, was a cavalry brigade in the woods north of Wieluń, and which dropped several heavy bombs near the market square over the town itself. The German press later quoted Dinort’s boastful remark about the last bomb landing right on the market square. The number of waves and the times of the later raids vary in the literature: the historian Grzegorz Bębnik, drawing on German documents, accepts three morning raids and a weaker one in the afternoon, while other authors speak of raids repeated until as late as 2 p.m. In all, according to the most commonly given estimates, some 380 bombs weighing about 46 tonnes fell on the town.

Wieluń burned all day. Little of the market square survived, among the exceptions the former Piarist college and the town hall, in whose roof an unexploded bomb had lodged. Destroyed were the fourteenth-century parish church of St Michael the Archangel (PL), the synagogue (PL) of 1842, and parts of the Augustinian convent and of the medieval walls. The inhabitants fled eastwards. In the afternoon the first German infantry units entered the ruined town.

The dispute over the hour

In Poland the time of the raid has come to be accepted as 4.40 a.m., five minutes before the battleship Schleswig-Holstein fired its first shots at Westerplatte. This is the time given on the commemorative plaque placed in Wieluń in 1959, in the witness accounts collected by Barbara Bojarska, a researcher at the Western Institute, and in the works of the Wieluń historian Tadeusz Olejnik. Some witnesses even spoke of 4.30. On this basis Wieluń is sometimes called the place where the Second World War began.

German air force documents, however, give different times: Sigel’s group took off at 5.02, attacked at 5.40 and landed at 6.05. The journalist Joachim Trenkner and others explained the discrepancy by a supposed time difference between Poland and the Reich, but in 1939 both countries used the same Central European Time. Bębnik and some other researchers therefore accept that the Stukas struck Wieluń at around 5.40 a.m., and regard the raid on the bridgeheads at Tczew as the first air attack of the war. They also point out that the witnesses were not questioned until 1961, two years after the plaque bearing the time 4.40 had been set in place. Supporters of the earlier time reply that the witnesses consistently described the surprise of a sleeping town, whereas an hour later they would have heard the artillery barrage from the border. The dispute remains unresolved. What is certain is that Wieluń was one of the first targets of the German air force that day and that the raid took place without a declaration of war.

How many died

The number of victims has been disputed from the start. In the years of communist Poland figures of 1,200, 2,000 and even 2,169 dead were given. Norman Davies, relying on older literature, wrote of 1,290 inhabitants killed. More recent research is far more cautious. The Institute of National Remembrance, which reopened the investigation into the raid in 2004, concluded that 127 victims could be confirmed beyond all doubt, but that the true number could have reached several hundred. In 2013 the historian Mateusz Piątkowski concluded that the figure of about 1,200 referred to all the victims in the Wieluń district during the first days of the war, not to the town alone. Some 160 victims of the raids were later identified by name. The full number cannot be established, because some inhabitants fled the town and were killed or went missing on the road, and many of the dead were buried in mass graves without any record.

Military target or test?

The hardest question is why Wieluń was bombed at all. The German air force had information, probably already out of date, about a Polish cavalry brigade in the area, and through Wieluń ran the road along which the 10th Army was to advance eastwards. The German military historian Rolf-Dieter Müller believes the Luftwaffe meant to strike Polish troops and hit the town because of poor visibility. Likewise, two investigations conducted in West Germany in 1978 and 1983 were discontinued on the assumption that in the morning mist the airmen could not tell which building they were aiming at.

Most researchers, however, reject this explanation. Sigel’s group’s report speaks of no enemy and a clear sky, and the airmen described in detail the buildings they had hit. Jochen Böhler and Hans-Erich Volkmann point out that the town had no operational significance whatever for the 10th Army. Volkmann believes that Richthofen chose Wieluń on his own initiative as an undefended target close to the border, on which he wanted to test the effectiveness of dive-bombers without risk of losses. As early as mid-August the diary of the Chief of the Army General Staff, General Franz Halder, mentioned air operations “in the Wieluń area”. In the first days of the war the Luftwaffe also bombed other small towns in the area, among them Działoszyn and Kamieńsk, and photographed the results. The American historian Timothy Snyder called Wieluń the site of a “deadly experiment” to see whether a modern air force could terrorise a civilian population.

Whatever the commanders’ intentions, most Polish and German lawyers and historians regard the raid as a war crime. Professor Witold Kulesza (PL), head of the IPN’s investigative branch, called it the first German war crime of the war. It is pointed out that the attack came without a declaration of war, on an undefended town; that it hit a hospital, a church and a synagogue, all protected under the Hague Convention of 1907; and that fleeing civilians were fired upon. None of the commanders or airmen was ever brought to trial for the raid. The Polish investigation conducted by the IPN was likewise discontinued.

Wieluń’s place in the war

Wieluń heads the list of towns destroyed from the air during the Second World War. In the following days the Luftwaffe bombed other Polish towns, among them Sulejów and Frampol, and in September besieged Warsaw, which suffered its heaviest raid on 25 September. On the very day Wieluń was destroyed, the President of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, appealed to the belligerents not to bomb civilians, and the Germans gave assurances that the Luftwaffe was attacking military targets only. The fate of Wieluń showed what those assurances were worth, and foreshadowed a war in which the bombing of cities would become an everyday occurrence: from Rotterdam and London to Hamburg and Dresden.

For the town itself, 1 September marked the beginning of the occupation. Wieluń was annexed to the Reich, and in August 1942 the Germans deported its Jewish inhabitants, who had been confined in a ghetto, to the Chełmno extermination camp. The Germans blew up the ruins of the parish church in the spring of 1940. For years the memory of the raid remained local in Poland; only Bojarska’s research in the 1960s and Olejnik’s in the following decades turned Wieluń into a symbol. In 2004 President Aleksander Kwaśniewski unveiled a monument to the victims in the town, saying that it was here that total war had begun, a war that drew no distinction between soldier and civilian. Today the raid on Wieluń is also presented in the exhibition of the Bundeswehr Military History Museum in Dresden.