Bloodlands

church, the synagogue, the hospital all went up in flames. Wave after wave of munitions fell, seventy tons of bombs in all, destroying most of the buildings, and killing hundreds of people, mostly women and children. The population fled the city; when a German administrator arrived, there were more corpses than live people. Throughout western Poland, scores of towns and villages met a similar fate. As many as 158 different settlements were bombed.¹

In the Polish capital, Warsaw, people saw the planes race across the clear blue sky. “Ours,” people said to themselves, hopefully. They were wrong. The tenth of September 1939 marked the first time a major European city was bombed systematically by an enemy air force. There were seventeen German raids on Warsaw that day. By mid-month the Polish Army was all but defeated, but the capital still defended itself. On 25 September Hitler declared that he wanted the surrender of Warsaw. Some 560 tons of bombs were dropped that day, along with seventy-two tons of firebombs. In all, some twenty-five thousand civilians (and six thousand soldiers) were killed, as a major population center and historic European capital was bombed at the beginning of an undeclared war. Throughout the month, the columns of refugees were already streaming east, away from the Wehrmacht. German fighter pilots took their pleasure in strafing them.²

Poland fought alone. France and Britain declared war on Germany, as promised, but took no meaningful military action during the campaign. (The French advanced a few miles into the Saar region and then withdrew again.) The Polish Army rushed to take defensive positions. The Polish military had been trained to expect an attack either from the east or the west, from either the Red Army or the Wehrmacht. In the war plans and war games of the 1920s and 1930s, both variants had been taken into account. Now all available forces, some thirty- nine divisions (about nine hundred thousand men) were thrown against the fifty German divisions (1.5 million troops). Even so, Polish forces were outnumbered, outgunned, and outflanked by the motorized assault from the north, west, and south. Yet resistance in some places was stiff.

The Wehrmacht had become used to strolling into countries that had already given themselves up, such as Austria and Czechoslovakia. Now German soldiers were actually facing hostile fire. Not everything went their way. In Danzig, the free city on the Baltic coast that Hitler wanted for Germany, Poles defended their post office. German firemen poured gasoline in the basement, and burned out the defenders. The director of the post office left the building waving a white handkerchief. He was immediately shot. Eleven people died of burn wounds. The Germans denied them medical treatment. Thirty-eight men were sentenced to death and shot for the supposedly illegal defense of the building. One of them, Franciszek Krause, was the uncle of a boy named Gunter Grass, who later became the great novelist of West Germany. Thanks to his novel The Tin Drum, this particular war crime became widely known. It was one of many.³

German soldiers had been instructed that Poland was not a real country, and that its army was not a real army. Thus the men resisting the invasion could not be real soldiers. German officers instructed their troops that the death of Germans in battle was “murder.” Since resisting the German master race was, in Hitler’s terminology, “insolence,” Polish soldiers had no right to be treated as prisoners of war. In the village of Urycz, Polish prisoners of war were gathered into a barn, where they were told they would spend the night. Then the Germans burned it down. Near the village of Sladow, Germans used prisoners of war as human shields as they engaged the remnants of a cavalry unit. After the Germans had killed the cavalrymen, who were unwilling to shoot at their fellow Poles, they made the prisoners bury the bodies of their comrades. Then they lined up the prisoners against a wall at the bank of the Vistula River and shot them. Those who tried to escape by jumping into the river were shot—as the one survivor remembered, like ducks. Some three hundred people died. ⁴

On 22 August 1939, Hitler had instructed his commanders to “close your hearts to pity.” The Germans killed prisoners. At Ciepielow, after a pitched battle, three hundred Polish prisoners were taken. Despite all the evidence, the German commander declared that these captured soldiers were partisans, irregular fighters unprotected by the laws of war. The Polish officers and soldiers, wearing full uniform, were astonished. The Germans made them disrobe. Now they looked more like partisans. All of them were gunned down and thrown in a ditch. In the short Polish campaign, there were at least sixty-three such actions. No fewer than three thousand Polish prisoners of war were murdered. The Germans also murdered the Polish wounded. In one case, German tanks turned to attack a barn marked with a red cross. It was a Polish first-aid station. If it had not been marked with a cross, the tank commanders would likely have ignored it. The tanks fired on the barn, setting it aflame. The machine gunners fired at people who tried to escape. Then the tanks ran over the remnants of the barn, and any survivors.⁵

Wehrmacht officers and soldiers blamed Polish civilians for the horrors that now befell them. As one general maintained, “Germans are the masters, and Poles are the slaves.” The army leadership knew that Hitler’s goals for the campaign were anything but conventional. As the chief of staff summarized, it was “the intention of the Leader to destroy and exterminate the Polish people.” Soldiers had been prepared to see the Polish civilian population as devious and subhuman. One of them was so convinced of Polish hostility that he interpreted a Pole’s death grimace as the expression of irrational hatred for Germans. The soldiers quickly took to taking out their frustrations on whomever they happened to see. As a rule, the Germans would kill civilians after taking new territories. They would also kill civilians after losing ground. If they took casualties at all, they would blame whoever was at hand: men in the first instance, but also women, and children.⁶

In the town of Widzow, the Germans summoned the men, who, fearing nothing because they had done nothing, answered the call. One pregnant wife had a sense of foreboding, but she was torn away from her husband. All of the men of the town were lined up against a fence and shot. In Longinowka, forty Polish citizens were locked in a building, which was then set aflame. Soldiers fired on people as they leapt from windows. Some of the reprisal actions were unthinkably casual. In one case a hundred civilians were assembled to be shot because someone had fired a gun. It turned out that the gun had been fired by a German soldier.⁷

Poland never surrendered, but hostilities came to an end on 6 October 1939. Even as the Germans established their civilian occupation authorities that autumn, the Wehrmacht continued to kill Polish citizens in large numbers in quite arbitrary reprisal actions. In December, after two German soldiers were killed by known Polish criminals, the Germans machine-gunned 114 men who had nothing to do with the incident. In January the Germans shot 255 Jews in Warsaw after the Jewish community had failed to turn over someone whom the Germans, judging by his last name, thought to be Jewish. The person in question had nothing to do with the Jewish community.⁸

German soldiers had been instructed to regard the Jews as eastern barbarians, and in Poland they did encounter something that they never would have seen in Germany: large communities of religious Jews. Though Hitler raged on about the destructive role of Jews in German society, the Jews were an extremely small proportion of the German population. Among the German citizens defined by the Nuremberg laws as Jewish, most were secular, and many did not identify strongly with the Jewish community. Jews in Germany were highly assimilated, and very often married non-Jews. For historical reasons, Jewish life in Poland was very different. Jews had been expelled from Germany in the late middle ages, as they had been from most of central and western Europe. Poland had been for centuries a haven for Jews, and became and remained the center of European Jewish settlement. In 1939 about ten percent of the Polish population were Jews, and most of these were religiously observant and traditional in dress and custom. They generally spoke Yiddish, which Germans tended to hear as a deformed version of their own language. In Warsaw and Lodz, the most important Jewish cities in Poland, Jews were about one third of the population.

Judging by their correspondence, German officers and soldiers saw Polish Jews as living stereotypes rather than as human beings, a special blight on an already benighted Polish land. Germans wrote to their wives and girlfriends to describe an inhuman assemblage of disorder and filth. In their image of Poland, everything that was beautiful was the work of previous German settlers, while everything ugly was the result of Jewish corruption and Polish laziness. Germans seemed to feel an uncontrollable urge to neaten the appearance of the Jews. Again and again, soldiers would surround Jewish men and shave their sidecurls, while others would laugh and take photographs. They would also rape Jewish women, casually, as though this were not an offense for which they could be punished. When they were caught, they were reminded of German laws against racial mixing.⁹

In the town of Solec, Jews were taken as hostages and locked in a cellar. After an escape attempt, soldiers threw grenades into the cellar, killing everyone. In Rawa Mazowiecka, a German soldier asked a Jewish boy for some water. When the boy ran away, the soldier took aim and shot. He hit one of his own comrades instead. The