The German Fifth Column in Poland (6 page)

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I at once started for home and near the place where I was fired at on Sunday saw the body of a young air-raid warden who had been shot through the head —of course, non-combatant and unarmed. Went to the Red Cross first-aid station where I saw a Red Cross stretcher-bearer dying, he had been killed by a hand-grenade, of which the Volksdeutsche seemed to have an unlimited quantity. As I was going through the street a group of people called me to take cover as sniping was going on. As I entered a house there was a flash of a rifle from an opposite window,
evidently the Germans in this part of the town had not yet heard of the troops.

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When I reached home I heard that a young man and a young woman living in the house (air-raid wardens) had been shot, the man through the window of his room, he died two days later, and the woman as she left the house to go to her duties; she is crippled for life.

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From this time on life was a nightmare of horrors. The Germans started the campaign of lies about the Polish atrocities on the so-called ‘Bloody Sunday,’ and almost the first victims of this campaign were a number of young boy scouts, from 12 to 16 years of age, who were set up in the Old Market against the wall of the Municipal Museum and shot. No reason was given.

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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 horrors he saw. That week those murders continued. Thirty-four of the leading tradespeople and merchants of the town were shot and many other leading citizens. The square was encircled by military with machine-guns.

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Among the thirty-four was a man whom I knew who was too ill to take any part in politics or public affairs. When the execution took place he was too weak to stand and fell down, they beat him and dragged him again to his feet.

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Another of the first victims was the seventeen-year-old only son of a well-known surgeon who had died a year before. The father had been greatly esteemed by all and had treated Poles and Germans with the same care and devotion.

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We never heard what the poor lad was accused of.

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An instance of one horrible execution was related by a friend of mine. This person was standing at a window which overlooked a garden of the Polish Club, when the tramp of feet was heard and a party of civilians entered accompanied by Gestapo and S.S.

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An order was given and the civilians formed up into a line, the observer thought they had come to go through military exercises. A second order was given and the men dropped on their knees and at a third order began to crawl to and fro on the hands and knees. Then the police began to shoot and continued shooting until the last of their prisoners lay still. The shooting was, of course, heard and there was commotion in the streets, those in the street trying to force the iron gates, and those within threatening to shoot them unless they went away. At last the commotion ceased and the people were driven away, but soon after the Gestapo were given another house outside the town.

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The shooting still goes on, but it is farther away and everyone knows what is happening.

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These are only a few examples of the indiscriminate murders which took place. The shooting was still going on when I left the town. At the beginning it was by the military, afterwards the Secret Police (Gestapo and S.S.) took it over and exceeded it in cruelty.

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When the soldiers first entered the town their minds were inflamed against the Poles by the stories of horrible atrocities which the Poles had committed on the Germans, and in revenge they themselves acted with the most appalling savagery.

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Stories were spread of how hundreds of mutilated German corpses had been found in the forest, with eyes put out and tongues torn out of the victims, and photographs were shown to foreign newspaper correspondents of the victims of these murders.

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It was quite true that hundreds of such corpses were found, but they were of Poles, great numbers being of women and children who had fled from Bydgoszcz when the Germans approached and were hunted and machine-gunned by German airmen who had followed them. An acquaintance of mine who fled with her husband and two children, but had to return as they found no place of refuge, said that the saddest sight was the number of little corpses that strewed the way —babies and little ones who succumbed to exposure and want of food, or were shot down in the flight.

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There were corpses of Germans who had also fled, but the number was small and they would, like the Poles, be targets for the planes. It was also observed that the names of these people were printed at intervals six or eight times in the lists of victims, but were each time reckoned as fresh victims in order to lengthen the list.

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The following occurrence, told to a friend of mine by the only survivor, may illustrate this point. An old German woman and twelve other Germans decided to flee together to Brzóza, a forest place some kilometres from Bydgoszcz, and take refuge with the Catholic priest there. They were on foot, and when evening came on they were still about an hour's walk from Brzóza; they turned into a cottage in the hamlet they were passing through and decided to spend the night there. The old woman was uneasy and wished to press on, but others refused. When the others were sleeping, she got up and crept out of the house (she was a very devout Catholic and said a voice told her not to delay). When only a short distance from the house, she heard planes approaching and, turning to see where they were going, saw the cottage struck by a bomb and totally destroyed.  She said that everyone in the house was killed and the corpses were terribly mutilated, but—as we see, by German planes, not by Polish murderers.”

The next account is no less convincing:
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“On 1st and 3rd September, agents of the Gestapo, disguised as Polish peasants, police-agents, frontier-guards, etc., mingled with the evacuees, who were arriving in great numbers from the districts lying near the German frontier. In the vehicles, which were ostensibly serving for the transport of their baggage, were hidden arms, especially small machine-guns of the type employed by the German Army, and ammunition. These agents at first kept themselves concealed in houses belonging to members of a secret German association. Other agents landed by parachute at nightfall in the neighbouring forests, and it has since been ascertained that they had received orders to provoke riots at Bydgoszcz on Sunday, 3rd September, at 10 a.m. Motorized German divisions were to hold themselves in readiness outside the town, in order to occupy it in the course of the day.

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Actually, at the arranged hour, the agents of the Gestapo, aided by the German minority population of the town, attacked Polish troops who happened to be at Bydgoszcz as well as civilian Polish population
which was coming out of the churches, not sparing the women and children. Shots were fired from windows and roofs of houses belonging to Germans, and even from roofs and towers of several churches. The disturbance caused by this unexpected attack did not last long. The Polish troops and the civilian population took up the pursuit of the instigators of the riot. The latter put up an embittered resistance and more than once siege had to be laid to houses where Gestapo agents had taken refuge. A veritable battle developed between the armed Germans and the Polish troops and civilians. The Germans accused of having taken part in the riots, but who had not been taken whilst in possession of arms, were brought before a court martial which sat during the entire day of 3rd September. Order was not re-established until six in the afternoon.

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According to the figures which I am in a position to refer to, the Germans left approximately 150 dead on the field, of which only a part were citizens of Bydgoszcz. The rest was composed of unknown men, doubtless agents, who had come from the Reich. About forty people were brought before the court martial, which condemned fourteen of them to death. There were also numerous victims among the Polish Population.

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After having crushed the putsch, the Polish troops remained at Bydgoszcz during the whole of the following night and the morning of Monday, 4th September, but as their retreat had been decided by the authorities in command, they left the town during the day, and it was definitely occupied by Germans from 5th September.

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mmediately after their entry, the massacres of the Polish population commenced. Without trial, and often in a revolting manner, the Germans shot a great number of the most prominent citizens of the town, among them several women and priests, as well as the members of the civic guard organized by the population after the retreat of the Polish troops. The number of victims augmented from day to day, and in the course of a few weeks it surpassed, in Bydgoszcz alone, the figure of three thousand.

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One of the cruellest episodes of those days was the execution of a group of Polish boy scouts who had been arrested by agents of the Gestapo, either because they were in the uniform of the boy scouts, or because their uniforms had been discovered during house-to-house searches. These poor children, unaware of the doom that awaited them, joked and even played games among themselves after their arrest. They realized the truth when they were made to line up on the Market Square and the machine-guns were brought. Some of the little ones began to cry, but the others gave proof of the most admirable courage. They intoned the Polish national anthem, ‘Jeszcze Polska nie zginela’ and fell like heroes, machine-gunned at close quarters by the Germans.”

Witness No. 3 was employed at Bydgoszcz, and was at work throughout this period.
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He declares:

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On that memorable Sunday which the Germans have christened ‘the bloody Sunday of Bydgoszcz,' the German regular army had not yet arrived in the town.

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At ten in the morning the German population suddenly opened fire on the detachment of Polish National Guards which was in the town and on any Polish civilians who happened to be passing through the streets. The fire was so sustained, so violent and unexpected that it at once caused a panic. All who could do so took shelter in houses. The firing came from private houses occupied by Germans, and also from the tower of the Protestant church, where, as we later observed, a cleverly concealed machine-gun had been placed. As the firing did not cease for a single moment, we had to proceed to the attack. We first disposed of the nest in the church, damaging the tower somewhat in doing so. Simultaneously an attack was made on the men hidden in the German houses. There were losses on both sides. We had to force our way into the locked and bolted houses where men dressed in civilian clothes received us with heavy fire. These people, who so far had lived in perfect amity with us, now, after twenty years of living on the same soil, showed us their real features.

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How did it come to pass that the civilian population began to fight our soldiers, when they were bound to realize that in face of the crushing numerical superiority of the Polish elements in Bydgoszcz the attempt was doomed to failure? That will always remain a mystery to us. Either the Germans had overestimated their strength, or else they were badly informed as to the proximity of the German troops. It may be that the
Germans in Bydgoszcz wished to free ‘the town by their own efforts in order to welcome the German troops to a free’ Bydgoszcz and to earn special praise.

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The total killed was not large. No harm was done to civilians who had not committed any crime. Accounts were settled only with those who were taken with arms. There were altogether 160 Germans. By far the majority of these fell in combat, the others were shot after a summary court martial.

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Among those killed were only a few inhabitants of Bydgoszcz. The rest were strangers, probably part of the Hitler troops who, acting under orders from their command, had succeeded in filtering into the town together with the Polish refugees who during those days had arrived in large numbers. The local German population provided them with arms and assigned them their posts. Everything proves that the affair had been prepared a long time before by the ‘competent’ elements.

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The firing began at ten in the morning, but it did not cease till six in the evening.  By this time the centre of the town was in our hands. Absolute calm reigned in that part of Bydgoszcz where I was.

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At 7.30 that same evening the Polish commander of the Pomorze front telephoned an order to the civil authorities to evacuate the town immediately. I left Bydgoszcz at nine o’clock; on the road outside the town I was fired on by German machine-guns.

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From September 3rd to 7th inclusive I was in the immediate neighbourhood of Bydgoszcz; I was continually in contact with inhabitants of the town, and no information whatever came to my knowledge of acts of cruelty or of outrages upon dead bodies. Beyond the 160 killed whom I have mentioned, there were no other victims. The German Army first entered Bydgoszcz only on September 4th, at 12.30, but, for some unknown reason, they retired almost immediately. They returned next day, Tuesday, September 5. All the representatives of the intelligentsia class were at once arrested, including the clergy. Priest X. Y., known to everybody and held in great esteem in the town, was chased barefoot along the street; he was ordered to march at the point of bayonets and to call upon the population through a megaphone not to resist the German authorities. The missionary fathers received still worse treatment. Their new, uncompleted church was turned into stables, and two of their priests were killed.