The Tarnów station bombing

At 11.18 p.m. on 28 August 1939 an explosive charge hidden in two suitcases went off in the left-luggage office of the railway station in Tarnów. The explosion destroyed the left-luggage office, the station police post and the restaurant, brought down part of the roof and reduced about a third of the building to rubble. Between 20 and 24 people were killed and dozens injured. The suitcases had been left a few hours earlier by Antoni Guzy, an unemployed locksmith from Bielsko, acting on the orders of German military intelligence, the Abwehr. It was the deadliest of the German sabotage attacks in Poland in the last weeks before the war, and the victims at Tarnów are sometimes called the first victims of the Second World War.

War before the war

By the end of August 1939 war was in the air. On 23 August Germany and the USSR had signed a non-aggression pact in Moscow, cutting Poland off from any help from the east. Hitler had set the attack for dawn on 26 August, but on the evening of 25 August, after the conclusion of the Anglo-Polish agreement and the news that Italy would not enter the war, he halted the offensive. Some units did not receive the countermanding order in time: on the night of 25–26 August a German sabotage unit attacked the station at Mosty and the tunnel under the Jablunkov Pass. In Poland the emergency mobilisation was under way: reservists were being called up by individual cards, and the railways were carrying soldiers and equipment to their units. Tarnów, which lay on the main line from Kraków to Lwów (Lviv), was an important junction in those days, and its station was full of travellers, many of them soldiers.

The German preparations for the invasion also had a second, hidden side. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris’s Abwehr, and in particular its Department II for subversion and sabotage, headed from 1939 by Erwin Lahousen, had for months been building sabotage networks in Poland. It recruited them mainly from members of the German minority, especially in Silesia, Greater Poland and Pomerania. Before the war the saboteurs were to stockpile weapons and explosives and spread confusion and fear; once fighting broke out, they were to seize or destroy bridges, stations, power plants and industrial sites. According to surviving documents of the Abwehr station in Breslau, which directed operations in southern Poland, the sabotage groups were to destroy fifteen railway stations, blow up eleven bridges and put five power stations out of action. A plan dated 15 July 1939 included an attack on Tarnów station, as well as on the station at Stróże and the bridge over the Wisłoka near Dębica.

The perpetrator

Antoni (Anton) Guzy came from Bielsko, from a Polish-German family: his mother was German, his father a Pole who had been killed in the First World War. According to some accounts he was thirty-two at the time. A locksmith by trade, he had lost his job in 1938. Looking for work, he joined the Gewerkschaft Deutscher Arbeiter, a trade union of German workers which arranged jobs in the Reich. The union was linked to the Young German Party, a National Socialist party of the German minority. From May 1939 its leader, Rudolf Wiesner, together with two officers from Breslau, was building a so-called Freikorps under cover of the union, which was to stockpile weapons, train men and prepare sabotage. Through these circles Guzy came into contact with people engaged in subversion, including a man named Neumann from Skoczów, who became his immediate superior.

28 August

The details of the attack cannot be fully reconstructed, and the accounts differ in minor points. According to Guzy’s later testimony, on 28 August he met Neumann in Bielsko at 11.30 a.m., and at 12.13 p.m. the two of them left by train for Kraków. At Kraków Główny station they collected two large suitcases from the left-luggage office. Neumann told Guzy to deposit them in the left-luggage office at Tarnów and return to Kraków, where he would be waiting for him. Guzy missed his train and, according to Polish accounts, went to Tarnów by taxi, paying 80 złoty for the journey. In the evening he handed the suitcases in at the left-luggage office, giving the porter 50 groszy.

He then behaved as though he did not know when the explosion would come. He drank a beer in the station restaurant, strolled around the station and bought a return ticket to Kraków on the Luxtorpeda railcar, which was due to leave shortly after 11 p.m. Some authors suspect that his handlers wanted him to die in the explosion along with the others, so that he could not testify. The bomb, fitted with a time fuse, went off at 11.18 p.m. (some sources give 11.17 p.m.). The toll would have been much worse but for chance. The train from Kraków, which should have been at the platform at the moment of the explosion, was eight minutes late, and a few minutes before the blast a military transport carrying many soldiers had left the station.

The victims

Railwaymen and police officers spent many hours pulling victims from the rubble. The number of dead varies from source to source. A police report of the following day spoke of fourteen dead and 38 injured, fifteen of them seriously. Some of the injured later died in hospital. The most frequently cited figures are 20 dead and 35 injured; the court records list 22 dead, and local studies refer to a list of 24 names. The press in the first days gave even higher figures. Among the victims were travellers and townspeople, Catholics and Jews – people who happened to be at the station that evening. The bomb also destroyed luggage that evacuated soldiers’ families had left in storage.

The investigation

Immediately after the explosion Guzy fled along with other terrified travellers. Officers of the State Police stopped him and checked his papers, but let him go. Soon afterwards he was detained again near the station when, it seems, he wanted to see the effects of the blast, and he was recognised as the man who had left the suitcases. Under interrogation he confessed. He testified that the signal to act had been a message broadcast on 24 August by the Breslau radio station: “Special announcement: Doctor Funk is to start work.” He knew what was in the suitcases and what they were for. He claimed that he had not been paid for it and that he had acted because he felt himself to be a German. He expressed remorse. He also named other members of the network, including German colonists from the areas around Bielsko and Mielec who had been trained in Germany. One of his accomplices, Jakub Hessler (Hesler in some sources), claimed that the charge had only been meant to start a fire.

The trail led to a wider operation. At around 4.10 p.m. on 28 August a railway worker found a time bomb on the tracks near Staniątki, and on the stretch from Kraków to Kłaj a second one was discovered, set for nine o’clock. Neumann’s group was to blow up the track on the line from Kraków to Bochnia. At 2 p.m. the same day, explosives stored in the flat of an ethnic German bookbinder in Bielsko went off; he testified that two days earlier another German from Bielsko had left two suitcases with him. The charges were to have been used to blow up public buildings in Bielsko and Biała.

On 1 September Guzy was formally arrested. In the first days of the war, as the Germans approached Tarnów, he was taken east with other prisoners and all trace of him was lost. According to the findings of a German inquiry of 1941 and some Polish authors, he was shot in early September together with other saboteurs, probably near Baranów Sandomierski. There is, however, no firm proof of this. The Wehrmacht took Tarnów on 7 September, and Abwehr officers came to the station to inspect the damage on 9 and 13 September.

Other sabotage operations

Tarnów was not an exception. In the summer of 1939 the Polish police and counter-intelligence broke up one network after another. In Upper Silesia several hundred people suspected of sabotage were detained in mid-August, and weapons and ammunition were found in hundreds of searches. In Greater Poland the police arrested members of sabotage groups and uncovered caches of weapons and explosives. In Silesia the Abwehr was also preparing the Freikorps Ebbinghaus (PL), a unit made up mainly of Germans who had fled the Polish part of the region. In the first hours of the war it was to seize mines, steelworks and railway junctions before the Wehrmacht arrived. In mid-August the same Abwehr formed, under the code name “Bergbauernhilfe”, a unit of members of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, intended for operations behind the Polish front in Eastern Galicia (Eastern Lesser Poland). Its strength is variously given as from just over a hundred to several hundred men. After the pact with the USSR it became an embarrassment to the Germans, and it was disbanded at the end of September.

In parallel, the SS security service (SD) under Reinhard Heydrich was preparing its own provocations. Its task was to create the appearance of Polish attacks on German installations near the border. The purpose of the Tarnów attack has never been established beyond doubt. Historians point out that it struck at the Polish railways during mobilisation, sowed fear among the civilian population and was meant to undermine the sense of security behind the lines. Some authors also suggest that such operations were intended to provoke an outburst of anti-German feeling in Poland, which German propaganda could present as persecution of Germans and as a further justification for war.

Significance

The Tarnów bombing showed that for Germany the war with Poland had begun before the first shots were fired on the border. Those killed at Tarnów station were civilians, and their deaths had no military significance whatsoever. The event belongs to the same chain as the Jablunkov incident and the Gleiwitz incident, though it differed from the latter in being not a staged event but a real terrorist attack deep inside Poland.

Four days later, on 1 September 1939, Germany invaded Poland. The sabotage networks prepared by the Abwehr over the summer joined the fighting. In Upper Silesia saboteurs crossed the border during the night before the Wehrmacht’s attack and assaulted police posts and industrial plants, but most of them were beaten off by the army and by volunteers drawn from former Silesian insurgents. Fear of a “fifth column”, heightened by events such as the Tarnów bombing, weighed on the mood in Poland in the first days of the war. The Abwehr’s saboteurs later grew into its special operations unit, Brandenburg, and in September the Germans formed from the German minority in Poland the Selbstschutz, which took part in the mass murder of Poles. Barely ten months later Tarnów became the scene of another tragedy: on 14 June 1940 the first mass transport of political prisoners to Auschwitz set off from its station.