During the first week of the German invasion of Poland, there is little agreement as to the number and manner of minority Germans killed during Bromberg Bloody Sunday Doubtless, some Germans participated in subversive acts, and equally doubtless, panicked and frustrated Polish soldiers and civilians were indiscriminant in attacking subversives Germans. There is still disagreement between historians, as to how many Germans were killed and the circumstances. The lowest number given for German victims was around 600. Nazi propaganda reported 60,000 people and used it as the second pretext for repression against Poles (after Provocation in Gliwice).

According to Nazi propaganda:

In addition to the events in Bromberg, throughout western Poland a portion of the German residents were rounded up, jailed, marched eastward, shot and buried in nearby woods. This all occurred in the confusion of the military retreat. When advancing German forces neared the prisoner marches, they were some times executed as a spies, but more frequently released.


German and Polish historians continue to argue about the validity of the claims.

As German forces gained control, immediate executions killed over 3,000 Poles, many with unproven culpability. More reprisals were soon to follow. A British witness described the beginning of the massacre as follows:

The first victims of the campaign were a number of Boy Scouts from twelve to sixteen years of age, who were set up in the marketplace against a wall and shot. No reason was given. A devoted priest who rushed to administer the Last Sacrament was shot too. He received five wounds. A Pole said afterwards that the sight of those children lying dead was the most piteous of all the horrors he saw.


Following this, the Wehrmacht troops began rounding up schoolboys in the street, who were similarly executed. The witness continues:

Thirty-four of the leading tradespeople and merchants of the town were shot, and many other leading citizens.


The troops then attacked the Jesuits, looting and ransacking the church. The priests were taken to a barn, where the local Jewish population was already imprisoned, and they were all subjected to abuse. Altogether, some 1,000 people were killed in the ensuing massacres.


http://www.wordiq.com/definition/World_War_II_atrocities_in_Poland




Bromberger Blutsonntag or Bromberg Bloody Sunday is an event that is said to have taken place on September 3, 1939, in and around Bydgoszcz (German Bromberg) in territory referred to as the Polish Corridor.

This territory was a part of Poland until 1772 (the First Partition of Poland) and was in 1921 returned to Poland after the Versailles Treaty. The German inhabitants of this part of Poland felt not welcome, because Germany was one of the neighbouring countries that was seen by Poland as wanting to wipe out Poland from the map of Europe and the ethnic Germans were quite often seen as just members of the fifth column.



Claims of Polish atrocities against Germans


Many former German citizens, now only ethnic Germans, had already resorted to leave the German provinces that fell to Poland after WWI, partially as effect of German propaganda which thought that without German lawyers and doctors Poland will be forced into chaos. After the death of the moderate leader of Poland Jozef Pilsudski in 1935, Polish nationalism, supported by the Catholic church, flared.

After invasion against Poland by German forces a number of ethnic Germans were collected by the Polish authorities from of a number of cities and towns and sent on a march, herded from town to town. Some German sources claim that many of them were murdered including many pastors, precisely because they were now the 'official link' remaining to the ethnic Germans. It's hard to say how many Germans died during such marches; a few German historians claim the number as high as 1700 and attributes it mainly to Polish atrocities, but Polish side points that since Germans were marching during war, most of losses should be attributed to war conditions, especially since many German witnesses confirm, that columns were sometimes attacked by Luftwaffe (which strafed all civilians on the roads) and artillery.

Most controversial is case of Bydgoszcz events in September the 3rd. Polish witnesses testified that early that day Polish army withdrawing via Bydgoszcz was attacked by diversants; someone was shooting at soldiers and civilians from roofs and church towers. The fact of shooting is confirmed by some German witnesses, who however guessed that it was Polish provocation. There is no proof however that such diversion had place, no preserved documents, and German historians generally take whole fact of diversion as fantasy.

Polish soldiers claimed that German diversants were shooting at them and started to search houses. In the next hours a disputed number of Germans were executed, most of them probably innocent of subversive involvement. The scale of the event is controversial. De Zayas estimates it for 2000. Hugo Rasmus compared Bydgoszcz address books and data for population for 1939 with Nazi lists of supposed victims and found 358 persons known from name who died that day in Bydgoszcz. Most of them are female and children. Jastrzebski, Polish historian, initially doubting in the scale of event, now is backing the Hugo Rasmus' number, thinking that Polish official government was unable to control the mob and sanctioned later what was in fact lynch. However, Jastrzebski has bad opinion among Polish historians, because he used to support communists propaganda.

Initially, Nazis claimed that 5000 Germans died in Poland in September 1939. Later, they inflated that number in 1940 to 58,000, and Hitler personally raised that number to over 60,000. De Zayas now estimates "conservatively" that number to be 5,000. Although many of those killed were victims of the war conditions (many Germans were drafted to Polish army for example, cities were bombed by Luftwaffe and artillery, civilians on the roads were strafed), it's without doubt that some Germans were victims of local acts of violance, of which Bydgoszcz was the most known example.

A common argument for the lack of provocation by Germans of Polish soldiers, is the contention that no Germans in Poland had been allowed to possess weapons for years. It would not be realistic to believe that all weapons had been removed, surely some had hidden their guns, rather than turning them in, if only for economic reasons. It is also believed that German sabotageurs acting in other cities were provided weapons from outside and so also for those in Bydgoszcz. While there are German documents confirming actions by saboteurs in other cities, no such documents are preserved in case of Bydgoszcz; one may assume, that it would be unlikely that German secret services would omit Bydgoszcz specifically from its actions.

There are also Polish claims of German atrocities against Poles in Bydgoszcz, cited in the evidence given to the War Crimes Tribunals. A document produced by the Polish authorities claims that:


"On 3 September 1939, at 1015 in the morning, German Fifth Columnists attacked Polish troop units retreating from Bromberg. During the fighting 238 Polish soldiers and 223 German Fifth Columnists were killed. As a consequence of the events after the entrance of the German troops into the town of Bromberg, they began mass executions, arrests, and deportations of Polish citizens to concentration camps, which were performed by the German authorities, the SS, and the Gestapo. There were 10,500 murdered, and 13,000 exterminated in the camps.


However, the updated version of Polish claims should by confirmed by IPN.

Source: Nuremberg Trial Proceedings. Vol. 9, day 88, Friday, 22 March 1946

Literature: Dywersja czy masakra? W?odzimierz Jastrz?bski, Gda?sk 1988.



External links

Nuremberg Trial Proceedings, question to G?ring (Nitzkor)
Nuremberg Trial Proceedings, question to G?ring (Yale) (same material as above)
Outside link with partial list of names and towns of murdered pastors
Text of German claims published in 1940


http://www.free-definition.com/Bromberg-Bloody-Sunday.html

Why was Poland revived after the Great War?

Why was Poland revived after the Great War?

So Britain and France could have a puppet state conveniently located between Germany and Russia.

"Why was Poland revived after the Great War?"


Why did the South attempt to succeed from the Union?

Poland wasn't "revived", certainly not by the Western powers, as you suggest in another thread. Poland regained her independence because her people wanted it and were willing to fight in order to gain it.


Pilsudski and his legionnaires marched into Warsaw on November 11, 1918, the very same day Germany capitulated, and Polish independence was declared. After that the Poles had to fight for every inch of land.

See below:

World War I

After World War I and the collapse of the Russian, German and Austro-Hungarian Empires, Poland became an independent republic. However, Poland's geographical position between Germany and Russia meant much fighting and terrific human and material losses for the Poles between 1914 and 1918.

War and the Polish Lands
The war split the ranks of the three partitioning empires, pitting Russia as defender of Serbia and ally of Britain and France against the leading members of the Central Powers, Germany and Austria-Hungary. This circumstance afforded the Poles political leverage as both sides offered pledges of concessions and future autonomy in exchange for Polish loyalty and recruits. The Austrians wanted to incorporate Congress Poland into their territory of Galicia, so they allowed nationalist organizations to form there. The Russians recognized the Polish right to autonomy and allowed formation of the Polish National Committee, which supported the Russian side. In 1916, attempting to increase Polish support for the Central Powers, the German and Austrian emperors declared a new kingdom of Poland. The new kingdom included only a small part of the old commonwealth, however.

As the war settled into a long stalemate, the issue of Polish self-rule gained greater urgency. Roman Dmowski spent the war years in Western Europe, hoping to persuade the Allies to unify the Polish lands under Russian rule as an initial step toward liberation. In the meantime, Pilsudski had correctly predicted that the war would ruin all three of the partitioners, a conclusion most people thought highly unlikely before 1918. Pilsudski therefore formed Polish legions to assist the Central Powers in defeating Russia as the first step toward full independence for Poland.

Much of the heavy fighting on the war's Eastern Front took place on the territory of the former Polish state. In 1914 Russian forces advanced very close to Krakow before being beaten back. The next spring, heavy fighting occurred around Gorlice and Przemysl, to the east of Krakow in Galicia. By the end of 1915, the Germans had occupied the entire Russian sector, including Warsaw. In 1916 another Russian offensive in Galicia exacerbated the already desperate situation of civilians in the war zone; about 1 million Polish refugees fled eastward behind Russian lines during the war. Although the Russian offensive of 1916 caught the Germans and Austrians by surprise, poor communications and logistics prevented the Russians from taking full advantage of their situation.

A total of 2 million Polish troops fought with the armies of the three occupying powers, and 450,000 died. Several hundred thousand Polish civilians were moved to labor camps in Germany. The scorched-earth retreat strategies of both sides left much of the war zone uninhabitable.

Recovery of Statehood
In 1917 two separate events decisively changed the character of the war and set it on a course toward the rebirth of Poland. The United States entered the conflict on the Allied side, while a process of revolutionary upheaval in Russia weakened and then removed the Russians from the Eastern Front, finally bringing the Bolsheviks to power in that country. After the last Russian advance into Galicia failed in mid-1917, the Germans went on the offensive again, the army of revolutionary Russia ceased to be a factor, and the Russian presence in Polish territory ended for the next twenty-seven years.

The defection of Russia from the Allied coalition gave free rein to the calls of Woodrow Wilson, the American president, to transform the war into a crusade to spread democracy and liberate the Poles and other peoples from the suzerainty of the Central Powers. Polish opinion crystallized in support of the Allied cause. Pilsudski became a popular hero when Berlin jailed him for insubordination. The Allies broke the resistance of the Central Powers by autumn 1918, as the Habsburg monarchy disintegrated and the German imperial government collapsed. In November 1918, Pilsudski was released from internment in Germany, proclaimed Poland independent on November 4, returned to Warsaw, and took control as provisional president on November 11 of an independent Poland that had been absent from the map of Europe for 123 years.

Interwar Poland

Pilsudski's first task was to reunite the Polish regions that had assumed various economic and political identities since the partition in the late eighteenth century, and especially since the advent of political parties. Pilsudski took immediate steps to consolidate the Polish regions under a single government with its own currency and army, but the borders of the Second Polish Republic were not established until 1921. Between 1921 and 1939, Poland achieved significant economic growth despite world economic crisis. The Polish political scene remained chaotic and shifting, however, especially after Pilsudski's death in 1935.


Formative Years, 1918-21
From its inception, the Second Polish Republic struggled to secure and maintain its existence in difficult circumstances. The extraordinary complications of defining frontiers preoccupied the state in its infancy. To the southwest, Warsaw encountered boundary disputes with Czechoslovakia. More ominously, an embittered Germany begrudged any territorial loss to its new eastern neighbor. The 1919 Treaty of Versailles settled the German-Polish borders in the Baltic region. The port city of Danzig, a city predominantly German but as economically vital to Poland as it had been in the sixteenth century, was declared a free city. Allied arbitration divided the ethnically mixed and highly coveted industrial and mining district of Silesia between Germany and Poland, with Poland receiving the more industrialized eastern section in 1922, after series of 3 Silesian Uprisings.

The German-Polish border were so complicated, that only close collaboration between those countries would let the situation to stay there longer time. (1930 km in comparison to 430 km of Oder-Neisse line.

Military force proved the determinant of Poland's frontiers in the east (see also Polish-Soviet war), a theater rendered chaotic by the repercussions of the Russian revolutions and civil war. Pilsudski envisioned a new federation with Lithuania and Polish domination of western Ukraine, centered at Kiev, forming a Polish-led East European confederation to block Russian imperialism. Lenin, leader of the new communist government of Russia, saw Poland as the bridge over which communism would pass into the labor class of a disorganized postwar Germany. When Pilsudski carried out a military thrust into Ukraine in 1920, he was met by a Red Army counterattack that drove into Polish territory almost to Warsaw. Although many observers marked Poland for extinction and Bolshevization, Pilsudski halted the Soviet advance before Warsaw and resumed the offensive. The Poles were not able to exploit their new advantage fully, however; they signed a compromise peace treaty at Riga in early 1921 that split disputed territory in Belorussia and Ukraine between Poland and Soviet Russia. The treaty avoided ceding historically Polish territory back to the Russians. In 1922 Poland also officially annexed Central Lithuania after elections won by Polish majority.

From Democracy to Authoritarian government
Reborn Poland faced a host of daunting challenges: extensive war damage, a ravaged economy, a population one-third composed of wary national minorities, and a need to reintegrate the three zones kept forcibly apart during the era of partition. Under these trying conditions, the experiment with democracy faltered. Formal political life began in 1921 with adoption of a constitution that designed Poland as a republic modeled after the French example, vesting most authority in the legislature. The postwar parliamentary system proved unstable and erratic. In 1922 disputes with political foes caused Pilsudski to resign his posts as chief of state and commander of the armed forces, but in 1926 he assumed power in a coup that followed four years of ineffectual government. For the next decade, Pilsudski dominated Polish affairs as strongman of a generally popular centrist regime. Military in character, the government of Pilsudski mixed democratic and dictatorial elements while pursuing sanacja, or national cleansing. After Pilsudski's death in 1935, his prot?g? successors drifted toward open authoritarianism.

In many respects, the Second Republic fell short of the high expectations of 1918. As happened elsewhere in Central Europe, the attempt to implant democracy did not succeed. Minority peoples became increasingly alienated, and antisemitism rose palpably in the general population. Nevertheless, interwar Poland could justifiably claim some noteworthy accomplishments: economic advances, the revival of Polish education and culture after decades of official curbs, and, above all, reaffirmation of the Polish nationhood that had been disputed so long. Despite its defects, the Second Republic retained a strong hold on later generations of Poles as a genuinely independent and authentic expression of Polish national aspirations.


Poland's International Situation
In foreign policy, the republic allied itself with France (February 1921 as a defence against both Germany and Soviet Russia, but in January 1934 concluded a non-aggression pact with Germany's new Nazi government, subsequently rejecting (September 27) French proposals for an Eastern European security pact directed against Germany, partly because the proposed treaty involved no guarantee of Poland's eastern frontier with the Soviet Union.

By far the gravest menace to Poland's longevity came from abroad, not from internal weaknesses. The center of Poland's postwar foreign policy was a political and military alliance with France, which guaranteed Poland's independence and territorial integrity. Although Poland attempted to join the Little Entente, the French-sponsored alliance of Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia, Czechoslovak suspicions of Polish territorial ambitions prevented Polish membership. Beginning in 1926, Pilsudski's main foreign policy aim was balancing Poland's still powerful neighbors, the Soviet Union and Germany. Pilsudski assumed that both powers wished to regain the Polish territory lost in World War I. Therefore, his approach was to avoid Polish dependence on either power. Above all, Pilsudski sought to avoid taking positions that might cause the two countries to take concerted action against Poland. Accordingly, Poland signed nonaggression pacts with both countries in the early 1930s. After Pilsudski's death, his foreign minister Jozef Beck continued this policy.

The failure to establish planned alliances in Eastern Europe meant great reliance on the French, whose enthusiasm for intervention in the region waned markedly after World War I. The Locarno Pact, signed in 1926 by the major West European powers with the aim of guaranteeing peace in the region, contained no guarantee of Poland's western border. Over the next ten years, substantial friction arose between Poland and France over Polish refusal to compromise with the Germans and French refusal to resist Adolf Hitler's rise to power in the early 1930s. The Polish nonaggression treaties with Germany and the Soviet Union resulted from this bilateral deterioration of confidence.

The Polish predicament worsened in the 1930s with the advent of Hitler's openly expansionist Nazi regime in Germany and the obvious waning of France's resolve to defend its East European allies. Pilsudski retained the French connection but had progressively less faith in its usefulness. As the decade drew to an end, Poland's policy of equilibrium between potential enemies was failing. Complete Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in early 1939 encircled Poland on three sides (East Prussia to the northeast had remained German). Hitler's next move was obvious. By 1939 Hitler had shattered the continental balance of power by a concerted campaign of armed diplomatic extortion that brought most of Central Europe into his grasp.

As western appeasement of Germany culminating in the German takeover of neighbouring Czechoslovakia (March 1939) left Poland increasingly vulnerable, the Nazi regime proposed Poland to join Axis. Immediate measures were for territorial concessions to join East Prussia to the rest of Germany, demanding an extraterritorial highway through the middle of Polish territory, but also the return of Danzig, separated from Germany in 1920 as a Free City in a customs union with Poland. However, all concession had to be paid back in conquered terriotories of Lithuania and Ukraine.

After Polish refusal to cede the territories demanded, Germany invaded on September 1, 1939.

http://www.fact-index.com/i/in/independence_of_poland_regained.html

:: Why did the South attempt to succeed from the Union?

False analogy. The British and French did not enter the American War Between the States.

:: Poland wasn't "revived", certainly not by the Western powers, as you suggest in another thread.

This is false. As of 3 June 1918, the restoration of Poland with access to the sea was officially endorsed as a war aim by the Entente powers. Wilson had already called for the restoration of Poland earlier that year as well. There was absolutely nothing inevitable about the restoration of Poland after the Great War according to Jerzy Lukoski and Hubert Zawadzki.

:: Poland regained her independence because her people wanted it and were willing to fight in order to gain it.

Umm no. Poland regained its independence by exploiting the unique opportunity brought on by the Great War, specifically, the desire of the Allies to weaken Germany and their fear of Bolshevik Russia.

:: Pilsudski and his legionnaires marched into Warsaw on November 11, 1918, the very same day Germany capitulated, and Polish independence was declared.

Yet Poland was not officially recognised by France, Britain, and Italy until February of 1919.

:: After that the Poles had to fight for every inch of land.

What are you talking about? Substantial German territories were transferred to Poland at Versailles as part of the armistace.

Gotta agree with the nazis here, reviving Poland was a big mistake, especially the corridor and taking away the coal basin in Silesia.

Don't think Hitler( or the communist) would have come to power if it wasn't done.

What are you talking about? Substantial German territories were transferred to Poland at Versailles as part of the armistace.

Yep, The Freikorps um defeated the forces under Pilduski( and the other guy whos name begins with an S I don't remember) when they tried to press beyond those areas in Prussia granted by the treaty of Versailles.

Of course the Germans didn't press beyond where the peace settlement said they would get because while the allies would not have kept the Poles from taking more they would the Germans...