03/09/2026
Bloody Sunday in Bydgoszcz
The bloodbath began as soon as the German Army entered Bydgoszcz.
➡ Before the war, 6.5% of 145,000 residents of the Polish city of Bydgoszcz were Germans, who called it Bromberg. In early September 1939, after the Wehrmacht crossed the border in an unprovoked invasion, the Poles watched its advance with apprehension, the Germans with impatience. The pre-war tension, in the last months of peace pushed on a sharp upward curve by the aggressive Goebbels propaganda, was skyrocketing.
➡ It climaxed before noon on 3 September: units of the "Pomorze" Army, marching through Bydgoszcz in hasty retreat, unexpectedly came under fire in the city they thought was still friendly; the shooters were members of German saboteur groups, sent from Berlin or locally recruited, and trained by the Sicherheitsdienst or Abwehra. That much is beyond doubt: the shots WERE fired, and they DID provoke a response from both regular troops and Civil Guard.
➡ The revolt was quickly quelled, and everyone caught with unauthorized firearm executed on the spot under martial law. Two dozen servicemen got killed on the Polish side; the bulk of German dead were armed saboteurs, but admittedly, the tension, rage and confusion also claimed a number of perfectly innocent civilian victims. The attacks on regular troops repeated in the wee hours of 4 September, and the German body count exceeded 300.
➡ On 5 September, elements of German 50th Infantry Division entered Bydgoszcz, within hours followed by SS-Sturmbannführer Helmut Bischoff’s Einsatzkommando 1/IV, and bromberging of Bydgoszcz began. Several summary executions of randomly apprehended Poles took place in various spots in these first days, and then, the revenge gave way to the implementation of a meticulously prepared strategy.
➡ Einsatzkommando 1/IV came with Sonderfahndungsbuch Polen, Prosecution Book for Poland (list of prominent society members compiled before the war on information from the German minority), opened its Bydgoszcz chapter, and went through it page by page, name by name. Helped by local Selbstschutz, and later by Einsatzkommando 16 from Gdańsk, they murdered thousands of Polish intelligentsia considered too attached to Bydgoszcz to live in Bromberg. Too attached to live.
➡ Simultaneously, the wheels of German propaganda were spinning; Goebbels didn’t care about the German minority until early 1939, when it became obvious that Poland would not side with Hi**er against the USSR, but now was crying bloody murder in an attempt to prevent British and French aid to the Polish Army that dared to execute German saboteurs. To give propaganda some credence, from 11 September the Sondergericht, a special court, was used.
➡ Well, special it surely was, but court, not so much. The propaganda machine needed death sentences, and, presto, the Sondergericht delivered. The defendants were tortured, proceedings took minutes, and public defenders – yes, that window dressing was provided too – were a joke. What would you think of a defence counsel who petitions the court to sentence his client to death by firing squad? Beyond the pale?
➡ The court certainly didn’t consider such motions improper – the pale had already gone very brown – and granted them. The convictions very much suited the propaganda system, because, parallel to the terror machine producing Polish victims, Goebbels was fabricating the German dead. By the end of the year, he had inflated the number of German civilian deaths in September 1939 to 58,000 – all but 6.5% of them fake.
➡ Meanwhile, of the 5,000 Polish deaths delivered by the terror machine in that time in Bydgoszcz alone, every single one was real.
📷Polish hostages in Bydgoszcz. September 1939 (public domain, colorized by IPN using AI)
