Operation Tannenberg

On 1 September 1939, in the wake of the German armies that had crossed the Polish border, the task forces of the Security Police and the SS Security Service, the Einsatzgruppen (PL), set off. Their operations in Poland as a whole bore the code name “Unternehmen Tannenberg” (Operation Tannenberg). Officially, they were to “combat all elements hostile to the Reich and to Germans in the rear of the fighting troops”. In reality they brought with them lists of names drawn up before the war, and from the first days they arrested, and increasingly murdered, Polish activists, officials, teachers, priests, former insurgents and Jews.

The frequently repeated statement that Operation Tannenberg “killed some 20,000 selected Poles in two months” needs explaining. This figure, given in various versions, usually refers to all the mass executions of civilians during the period of German military administration, not only those carried out by the Einsatzgruppen. The Wehrmacht, SS units, the Order Police and militias of the German minority also took part in the crimes, and the extermination of the Polish elite did not end in October but continued until the spring of 1940.

The name and the preparations

The code name was telling. The Germans used “Tannenberg” both for the Battle of Grunwald of 1410 and for the battle of August 1914 in which Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff destroyed a Russian army in East Prussia. For the German right, the victory of 1914 was revenge for Grunwald. In the literature the same name is sometimes also applied to the border provocations staged by the SD on 31 August, such as the raid on the radio station at Gleiwitz (Gliwice); the SS men who took part in them were afterwards assigned to the task forces.

The Germans had already sent SD and Security Police task forces in behind the army into Austria in March 1938, into the Sudetenland in the autumn of 1938 and into Bohemia in March 1939. Poland, however, was to be something different. On 18 May 1939 the head of the Security Police and SD, Reinhard Heydrich, presented the first guidelines for the event of war with Poland. Four days later a unit called Zentralstelle II P (Polen) was set up in the SD Main Office to collect data on Germans living in Poland and on Poles who had “distinguished themselves in the ethnic struggle”. On 5 July, at a meeting in Heydrich’s office, preliminary decisions were taken on the composition and routes of the groups. Over the summer the organisational framework was built by Heydrich’s deputy in the Gestapo, Werner Best, working with Walter Schellenberg. The future commanders were trained at the SD school in Bernau near Berlin. Co-ordination was handled by a special section set up in the Security Police Main Office under the name “Unternehmen Tannenberg”.

At the same time proscription lists were compiled. Information came from Gestapo and SD posts in Pomerania, Silesia and East Prussia, from German consulates, from the military intelligence service, the Abwehr, and above all from informers among the Germans of Poland. The lists included political and social activists, veterans of the Greater Poland Uprising and the Silesian Uprisings, plebiscite campaigners, members of the Polish Western Association (PL) and participants in anti-German boycotts. The groups set out for Poland with the so-called Sonderfahndungsliste, which has not survived. The notorious Sonderfahndungsbuch Polen, the “Special Prosecution Book–Poland”, long regarded as the basis of the operation, was, according to the findings of Grzegorz Bębnik, issued only at the end of 1939, on the basis of the earlier list as supplemented by the Einsatzgruppen. It contains not 61,000 names, as has often been repeated, but about 8,700.

On 18 August 1939 the commanders of the “great Security Police operation” were assembled in Berlin. They were told that the driving force of Polish resistance would be the intelligentsia and that in fighting it “all methods, including shootings” were permitted. An entry of 29 August in the diary of the Chief of the Army General Staff, General Franz Halder, shows that the army expected the police to arrest 10,000 and then 20,000 people and place them in concentration camps. Historians, among them Klaus-Michael Mallmann, Jochen Böhler and Jürgen Matthäus, authors of the German monograph on the Einsatzgruppen in Poland, believe that the original plans did not yet envisage systematic extermination, although oral orders for shootings cannot be ruled out. The occupier’s policy became radicalised within a few days.

The task forces

Five Einsatzgruppen were formed before the war, one for each army attacking Poland. At first they were named after their assembly areas; on 4 September they were given numbers:

• Einsatzgruppe I (Wien) under Bruno Streckenbach, attached to the 14th Army, in the Dąbrowa Basin and Lesser Poland;
• Einsatzgruppe II (Oppeln) under Emanuel Schäfer, attached to the 10th Army, in the Częstochowa, Radom and Kielce regions;
• Einsatzgruppe III (Breslau) under Hans Fischer, attached to the 8th Army, in Greater Poland and the Łódź region;
• Einsatzgruppe IV (Dramburg) under Lothar Beutel, attached to the 4th Army, in Pomerania and later in Warsaw;
• Einsatzgruppe V (Allenstein) under Ernst Damzog, attached to the 3rd Army, in northern Mazovia.

Others were added during the campaign: on 3 September, on the orders of Heinrich Himmler, the “Einsatzgruppe for special tasks” (z.b.V.) under Udo von Woyrsch, which was to “radically suppress” Polish resistance in Upper Silesia; Einsatzgruppe VI under Erich Naumann for Greater Poland; and, in Danzig, the independent Einsatzkommando 16 under Rudolf Tröger (PL). In all, some 2,700 members of the Gestapo, the Criminal Police and the SD took part in the operation. The figure of 27,000 found in some publications is a mistake. Formally the groups were subordinate to the army commanders, with whom Heydrich had agreed the rules of co-operation before the war.

The first weeks

The officers entered towns almost immediately behind the troops. They seized offices, police stations and the headquarters of organisations, searched for card indexes, carried out house searches and arrested people on their lists, which were continually supplemented by denunciations from local ethnic Germans and by captured documents. Those detained were held in makeshift camps for “civilian prisoners”, the first German camps for civilians on Polish soil. In Danzig the arrests of Polish activists began on the very first day of the war.

In the first week the Einsatzgruppen still killed relatively few people, fewer than the army, which shot civilians and prisoners of war in reprisal for real or alleged resistance. After that the number of executions rose sharply. In Upper Silesia groups I, II and z.b.V., together with the Wehrmacht and the sabotage unit Freikorps Ebbinghaus, shot defenders of Katowice and veterans of the Silesian Uprisings. From 5 September detachments of Einsatzgruppe IV carried out executions in Bydgoszcz together with the army. Jews increasingly became the target. On 8 September Woyrsch’s men set fire to the Great Synagogue in Katowice; in Będzin several hundred people were killed; and in Przemyśl, between 16 and 19 September, groups z.b.V. and I murdered at least 500–600 Jews. Tens of thousands of people were driven across the San into the zone assigned to the USSR by the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.

The direction was set by the leadership itself. On 7 September Heydrich told a meeting of the heads of police departments that no protectorate was envisaged for Poland, only German administration, and that “the leading stratum of the population in Poland should as far as possible be rendered harmless”. According to surviving statements by SS and Wehrmacht commanders, in the first half of September Adolf Hitler approved the physical liquidation of the Polish intelligentsia, clergy and nobility. On 21 September Heydrich informed the Einsatzgruppen commanders that “at most three per cent” of the Polish political leadership remained in the occupied territories and was to be rendered harmless, and he ordered Jews to be concentrated in the larger towns along railway lines.

The Selbstschutz and the Intelligenzaktion

In September yet another formation was created, and it proved the bloodiest of all: the Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz, the paramilitary “self-defence” of the German minority, subordinate to the SS. Its members knew their neighbours and pointed them out for arrest, and often did the shooting themselves. In Pomerania it was commanded by Ludolf von Alvensleben, who reported as early as 5 October that “the harshest measures” had been applied to 4,247 former Polish citizens. The propaganda of Joseph Goebbels exploited the events in Bydgoszcz of 3 and 4 September to stoke hatred and justify reprisals.

In Polish historiography the killings of the autumn of 1939 are called the Intelligenzaktion, and their first, wartime stage is often identified with Operation Tannenberg. The line between the actions of the Einsatzgruppen, the Selbstschutz, the army and the Order Police is blurred, because these formations operated together or one after another in the same places. The largest executions took place in Gdańsk Pomerania: at Piaśnica near Wejherowo an estimated 12,000–14,000 people were murdered, and thousands more in the Szpęgawsk Forest, at Mniszek near Świecie and in the Valley of Death at Bydgoszcz. In Greater Poland Einsatzgruppe VI carried out public executions in more than a dozen towns in October, and its men under Herbert Lange murdered patients of the psychiatric hospitals at Owińska and Kościan.

How many victims

The exact number of victims of Operation Tannenberg itself cannot be established. Szymon Datner, and after him Jochen Böhler and IPN historians, calculated that during the period of military administration, from 1 September to 25 October 1939, the Germans carried out 714 mass executions on Polish soil, in which more than 16,000 Poles and Jews were killed; Wehrmacht soldiers took part in 311 of them. In German and English-language literature a figure of at least 20,000 victims in some 760 executions is widely cited, likewise referring to all the perpetrators. According to estimates cited in Polish studies, by the end of 1939 the Germans had murdered more than 50,000 civilians in the occupied Polish territories, including some 30,000 in Gdańsk Pomerania and about 7,000 Jews. Maria Wardzyńska of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) estimates the victims of the entire Intelligenzaktion, which lasted until the spring of 1940, at about 50,000 killed. The authors of the monograph on the Einsatzgruppen in Poland conclude that the victims of the task forces alone ran into tens of thousands.

Some Wehrmacht officers protested. The best known are the memoranda of General Johannes Blaskowitz, commander of the troops in the east, from the autumn of 1939 and the winter of 1940. The protests, however, were concerned more with discipline and “the honour of the army” than with the fate of the victims, and they changed nothing. On 4 October 1939 Hitler proclaimed an amnesty for Germans who had committed crimes in Poland “out of indignation at Polish atrocities”.

Place in the war

On 20 November 1939 the Einsatzgruppen were disbanded, and their men transferred to the permanent Security Police and SD offices in occupied Poland, subordinate to the Reich Security Main Office, created on 27 September. The extermination of the elites went on: on 6 November, in Sonderaktion Krakau, professors of the Kraków universities were arrested; in the territories annexed to the Reich the executions of the Intelligenzaktion continued until the spring of 1940; and in the General Government their counterpart in the spring and summer of 1940 was the AB-Aktion, whose victims were shot at Palmiry, among other places.

Operation Tannenberg was the first genocidal action of the German Security Police and a model for the future. The same structures, the same men and the same co-operation with the army were used in June 1941, when four new Einsatzgruppen followed the Wehrmacht into the territory of the USSR and shot more than a million Jews. Several of the commanders of 1939 later played an important part in the Holocaust: Streckenbach recruited the personnel of the new groups, Naumann commanded one of them in Belarus, and Schäfer, as head of the Security Police in Serbia, oversaw the murder of the Jews there. For Poland, September 1939 marked the beginning of an occupation whose aim was not merely to subjugate the country but to destroy its leading stratum. That intention accompanied German policy towards the Poles until the end of the war.