Werwolf - partisans of the Third Reich. German territories annexed to Poland and western Poland
Continuation, previous part: Werwolf — partisans of the Third Reich. Western Front and western occupation zones of Germany
In post-Versailles Poland (1931 data), national minorities constituted approximately 30% of the population, of which Germans constituted up to 1,5-1,7 million people (in 1918, there were 2,5 million). They constituted a particularly high percentage (up to 40% and more) in the northwest and Silesia.
Regions of Poland with a significant German population (1931 census)
One of the goals of the fascist "sanation regime" (the authoritarian political regime in Poland in 1926–1939) was to transform the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth into a mono-ethnic state through both harsh repression and the displacement of national minorities and their forced assimilation.
Minorities in Poland will soon disappear. This policy is being pursued recklessly, without the slightest regard for world public opinion, international treaties, or the dictates of the League of Nations.
— wrote the English newspaper “Manchester Guardian” on December 14, 1931.From 1920 until the start of World War II, the League of Nations in Geneva registered approximately 15 complaints from Polish national minorities.
Lord Noel Buxton stated in 1932:
At the meetings of the League Council, issues concerning minorities were discussed. A report was considered detailing the terror in Polish Ukraine in the autumn of 1930. Since the annexation, at least a million Germans have been deported from the "corridor" and Poznan, as conditions there were intolerable. In the Polish part of Eastern Galicia, the number of national schools was reduced by two-thirds between the end of the war and 1929. In the Polish part of Ukraine, which formerly belonged to Russia—that is, Volyn—conditions are even harsher. We cannot fail to mention the deplorable fact of medieval torture of convicts and suspects who fell out of favor with the Polish authorities. Unfortunately, I have convincing evidence of this.
In 1938, two-thirds of German estates in Poland were expropriated, forcing hundreds of thousands of Germans to leave the country, and 8000 Germans were killed in the most brutal manner, including Catholic and Protestant priests, women and children.
In 1939, the Poles closed German schools and revoked Germans' licenses for all commercial activity. Their homes were looted and set on fire. By August 39, approximately 80 Germans from Poland were in refugee camps in the Danzig region alone.
In addition to “digesting” the territories acquired as a result of Versailles and the Soviet-Polish war, the predatory Poles set their sights on German lands up to the Oder-Neisse and even threatened to “water the Polish horses in the Spree” by taking Berlin.
The plans could have been quite successful. After all, the German Wehrmacht only began to be formed in 1935, so the advance of the largest and most well-armed Polish army in Europe until then could only have been resisted by the 100,000-strong, poorly armed German Reichswehr.
In the summer of 1939, Polish Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły (appointed Supreme Commander-in-Chief on September 1, 1939) declared: “Poland wants war with Germany, and Germany will not be able to avoid it even if it wants to.”
According to a number of publications, the Polish leadership regularly developed plans for military action against Germany, counting on armed support from England and France, the latter of which envisaged their commencement on August 25, 1939. The Polish command began developing a war plan against Germany, codenamed "Zahud," in March 1939, while Hitler signed the directive on the development of the war plan against Poland, "Weiss," only on April 11.
On March 23, 1939, a covert mobilization of a number of Polish military units (334 men) began. On August 23, 1939, a partial mobilization began, "aimed at bringing units of primary importance for the defense of the country to combat readiness." General mobilization was declared on August 31.
September 1, 1939, midnight: Polish radio announced: “Poland launched a victorious attack on Berlin and will be there by the weekend. The Germans are randomly retreating all along the front. ”
The Krakow newspaper “Tempo Dnia” reported on September 2: “In response to the treacherous attack of the German aviation Polish pilots bombed Berlin and Gdansk in Polish cities."
September 1, 1939: Hitler delivers a speech to the Reichstag: "Last night there were 21 border violations, this night there have already been 14, and three of them were very serious... At 5:45 a.m. we returned fire..."
Despite the victorious reports of the first days of the war, the "brave" Polish Zolnierz quickly retreated, offering only sporadic resistance. Instead, they actively began exterminating their own German civilians, including women, the elderly, and children. Ordinary Polish civilians also joined them, not disdaining Jews, who were treated even worse than in Germany. These events became known as Bromberger Blutsonntag (Bydgoszcz Bloody Sunday). The Poles explained it all as a "fight against German sabotage groups."
On September 3, 1939, units of the Polish army, gendarmerie, and police, as well as individual civilians, committed mass murder of German civilians in the cities of Bydgoszcz, Schulitz, and dozens of towns in the Poznań region. Wehrmacht units entering these towns found their streets littered with the corpses of men, women, young children, and the elderly. Mass graves were also found in the surrounding areas.
The murders of German civilians were shocking in their brutality. Among the dead were infants and small children with their hands tied behind their backs and their skulls smashed, young girls stabbed with bayonets, and elderly people burned alive. In Bydgoszcz, a Protestant church was burned down, and dozens of German homes were destroyed and looted.
People were often mutilated beyond recognition, making identification difficult. Fifteen thousand bodies were identified, but many more remained unidentified, and according to some estimates, between 58,000 and 62,000 people were killed in total.
From the testimony of the miller Pavel Sikorsky:
I saw railroad workers and soldiers surrounding seven people, aged between 20 and 60, beating them with rifle butts and stabbing them with bayonets. They shouted, "Kill the Germans!" Blood was streaming. I ran away, and when I returned, I saw corpses near the embankment. Two had their eyes gouged out with bayonets. Their orbits were a bloody mess. Three had their skulls crushed and their brains leaked out. I recognized three of them. They were Leischnitz, the butcher Jägershoff, and Herr Schlicht. In the afternoon, Polish soldiers brought 18 Germans, tied together in pairs, to the mill. They shot them. Among them were a 14-year-old boy and a woman... On Monday afternoon, when it was said that the Polish soldiers had already left the city, two soldiers brought an elderly man and an elderly woman to the mill. Before my eyes, they lined them up against the wall. I ran up to the soldiers, knelt before them, and begged them in Polish to release these two old men, who were about 65 years old. One of the soldiers pushed me away with the butt of his rifle and said, "Let those damned Germans die." After which the two old men were shot, and their bodies were thrown into a ditch.
Is it any wonder, after this, that the Germans got even with the Poles in Katyn in the autumn of 1941, executing about 22 thousand Polish officers there.
Germans, victims of Bydgoszcz Bloody Sunday
A victim of Bydgoszcz Bloody Sunday was a woman with a partially born child.
While the Poles' crimes against Soviet prisoners of war during the Polish-Soviet War of 1919–1921, and against Ukrainians and Belarusians in the "Kresy Wschodnie" (Forests of the Boundary), are more or less well known, their genocide against the Germans in 1939 and earlier is either modestly hushed up or dismissed as "false Nazi propaganda." Those Poles who shout about the Volyn massacre should remember that they, too, are guilty of something!
More details about the genocide of Germans in Poland in August-September 1939 can be found here here.
The spiral of mutual repression continued unabated. During the occupation of Poland, the German authorities carried it out against the Polish population, and on February 28, 1945, in accordance with a decree of the new Polish government, all ethnic Germans were interned within the country's pre-war borders.
But the hardest times for the German population living east of the Oder-Neisse came later. These territories were transferred to Poland in accordance with the decisions of the "Big Three" in Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam, and all Germans (approximately 10 million people) were to be expelled from there. This problem was partly "solved" by the German leadership itself through mass evacuations of ethnic Germans to the western regions of the Reich; as a result of these measures, their number was reduced to 5 million.
In areas where the German population constituted a majority—Pomerania and especially Silesia (Military District VIII)—Werwolf operations assumed a large scale. They were joined by soldiers from the remnants of defeated German units and Volkssturm soldiers. In these areas, Werwolf enjoyed popular support and was considered the protector of ethnic Germans. Its units, such as the Free Germany (Upper Silesia) unit, numbered up to 1600 men.
The German Resistance movement operated here not only during the war but also in the post-war period (at least until 1948). Under the Potsdam Treaty, these territories were transferred to Poland, leading to the mass deportation and de facto genocide of millions of Germans—the original local population. Between 1946 and 1949, 3,325 million Germans were deported from here to German occupation zones. Another 0,5 million were deported from pre-war Poland.
Deportation of Germans from Poland
Local Polish authorities didn't wait for the official start of organized deportation. They began to "encourage" "voluntary" expulsions in every possible way, which amounted to sheer lawlessness. In this post-war chaos, violence and domestic vendettas were the most common occurrences. This despite the fact that the remaining Germans were, for the most part, ordinary civilians. Ruthless gangs of Polish robbers, eager to profit from the "mine" of the local Germans, moved ahead of or with the Polish settlers. Meanwhile, the Soviet military administration and the new Polish authorities were either unable to combat this or simply turned a blind eye to what was happening.
Our older generation may still remember post-war Polish western-style films about attempts to establish law and order in former German but now Polish cities.
It should be taken into account that Silesia (especially Lower Silesia), like East Prussia, was a Nazi stronghold. Here, as throughout Germany, one could often encounter manifestations of hostility from the local population: Red Army and Polish Army soldiers were ambushed; grenades were thrown into the windows of houses where Red Army officers were staying. The Red Army encountered the greatest hostility in Upper Silesia. In the railway town of Schoffets, several Germans were detained who were attempting to throw grenades at Soviet barracks. In Breitenmark, drinking water wells, food, and alcohol in a local warehouse were poisoned. In Zablatsch, on February 19, local residents destroyed a Soviet tank with a Panzerfaust. танкThese are just a few examples of the actions of German partisans.
Similar clandestine activities took place in other areas as well, where, having learned of the impending deportation of Germans, the local population greeted the Red Army with extreme hostility. In response, the Soviet occupation authorities, believing that the civilian population was responsible for such incidents, resorted to harsh repression. In Zielenzig, thirty hostages were executed. In Politzig, where a Soviet officer was killed, twenty Volkssturm (Volksturm) soldiers were prepared as hostages for execution. Fortunately, the NKVD managed to locate the "werewolves," and the execution was cancelled.
A new peak of "werewolf" activity in these territories occurred in the summer of 1945, triggered by the policy of deporting the German population. While these territories had previously been controlled by the Red Army, the newly formed and inexperienced Polish militia and state security agencies were now unable to cope with the onslaught of problems. After all, in addition to the "Werwolf" and other German terrorist organizations, various criminal gangs, units of the Polish anti-communist underground, and Vlasovites were operating in the new Polish lands.
The murders of Polish militiamen and colonists became commonplace. In 1945 and the winter of 1946, the Breslau region (now Wroclaw, Poland) resembled a war zone even during the day. Around 150 Polish militiamen were killed in the area in the first post-war year alone. Bridges and industrial plants were blown up, and German anti-fascists collaborating with the new authorities and Red Army soldiers were killed. A veritable guerrilla war unfolded in the mountainous and forested region near the Polish-Czechoslovak border.
According to various Polish publications, the following largest underground armed German organizations operated in the former German territories:
- "Werwolf" - numbering about 4 thousand people;
- “Freies Deutschland” - from 1200 to 1600;
- “Edelweiss-Piraten” - from 200 to 300;
- "Masurian Liberation Forces" (1949-1952) - approx. 120;
- “Uber” — about 150;
- “Freikorps-Oberschlesien” - approx. 180;
- “Ring” — about 200.
In total, according to the Polish security service, the total number of such groups was at least 60.
In turn, the Polish authorities responded with brutal repression. For example, in response to the shelling of a police outpost in Schreiberhau (Lower Silesia, now Szklarska Poręba) on the night of July 15-16, 1945 (a policeman was killed), local Polish authorities decided to shoot or hang 300 Germans aged 18 to 50. Fortunately, this decision was overruled by higher-ups.
The German underground's activities were brought to an end in the most radical manner: in September 1946, the Polish government issued a decree "on the separation of Germans from the Polish nation." Between 1946 and 1949, the vast majority of ethnic Germans were deported from Poland to the Soviet and British occupation zones of Germany. This action was also aimed at undermining the social, mobilization, and economic base of the German resistance movement.
It is well known that the deportation of Germans from the territories transferred to Polish administration in 1945 was accompanied by mass violence by Poles against the German civilian population.
The published archival documents indicate that the Soviet government was extremely concerned about the inability of the Polish authorities to ensure the implementation of the decisions of the Potsdam Conference on the organized and humane resettlement of Germans and attempted to encourage the Polish government to decisively suppress acts of violence in its area of responsibility.
The published archival documents indicate that the Soviet government was extremely concerned about the inability of the Polish authorities to ensure the implementation of the decisions of the Potsdam Conference on the organized and humane resettlement of Germans and attempted to encourage the Polish government to decisively suppress acts of violence in its area of responsibility.
The Poles are cruel, you can't imagine how they torture people. They rob and force them to die of starvation. Stettin has become a city of death and suicide... Now Karl says: better death in hell than a return to Stettin.
— from a letter from Dora Kletzin, April 14, 1946During the Russian occupation of Silesia, the people there lived well; they had no shortage of food, etc. But in July, when the Poles took their place, everything went down the drain. In Breslau, the Poles evicted Germans from their apartments, stole furniture, and forced them to perform backbreaking labor for free... Relatives of the deceased were robbed right at funerals, taking not only their clothes, but also flowers and wreaths...
- from a letter from P. Richter to Cardinal K. von Preysing, Bishop of Berlin, 03/22/1946(The materials are published on the portal History.RF.)
In a similar manner, the Poles managed to deal with the activities of the OUN-UPA on their territory by deporting all their crests to former German lands in 1947 during Operation Vistula, forbidding them to settle there in compact settlements.
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