officer. At Kajetanowice, 72 Poles were
massacred in response to the death of two
Wehrmacht horses in a friendly fire incident.
Further examples are legion: 34 Poles were
killed at Torzeniec, 26 at Łaziska Górne, 38 in
Zimnowoda, 75 in Parzymiechy.
In part, of course, such atrocities were a
consequence of the nature of the German
advance – what we retrospectively call Blitzkrieg- in which mobile, fast-moving troops, disrupted
and isolated a more static defence, thereby
causing many defenders to be left behind the
advance, where continued resistance could
easily be interpreted as the work of ‘irregulars’
or ‘partisans’. Others have suggested that the
comparative inexperience of German soldiers
may have contributed to a trigger-happy
atmosphere in which nervous troops fired first
and asked questions later.
Yet, valid though they may be, such reasons
cannot provide a full explanation for German
atrocities. In the 36 days of the September
campaign there were over 600 massacres
carried out by the Germans alone, an average
of over 16 per day. Clues to the motivation
behind such actions are abundant in the letters
and diaries of German soldiers, many of which
described the Poles as “uncivilised”, “filthy”,
“a rabble”. In short, as one Wehrmacht soldier
confessed, “barely human”.
German prejudice towards the Poles was
widespread and well-documented, and Nazi
ideology added a biological element to it,
which saw Poles very simply as a lesser form
of human life, one slated only for a lifetime of
servitude to their German masters, and for
long-term extermination. And, of course, if the
enemy was perceived in this manner, it was
easy for conventional morals and behaviours to
be suspended. As one soldier wrote, “The Poles
behave in an unhuman way. Who can blame
us for using harsher methods?” It was a neat
euphemism for racially motivated murder.
While the Germans brought race war to
western Poland, the Soviets imported class
war to the east. The Kremlin had sold its
invasion of eastern Poland – carried out on 17
September in line with the Nazi-Soviet Pact – as
a ‘liberation’, but it was decidedly belligerent,
with approximately 500,000 combat troops and
nearly 5,000 tanks confronting the lightly-armed
forces of the Polish border protection corps.
For those Poles who fell under Soviet control,
there was no doubt about the Red Army’s
revolutionary intentions. In countless towns and
villages, Soviet officers goaded the masses torise up against their “lords and oppressors”,
to seize property and “avenge the pain of
exploitation with blood”. Local communist
militias quickly complied, targeting landowners
and members of the local administration.
Victims were often dragged from their beds
and lynched, or beaten to death. One court
official was tied by his feet to a horse and cart,
which was then driven around the cobbled
streets until he was dead.
Prisoners of war, meanwhile, were sorted
according to their social class. Officers were
routinely separated out from other ranks for
interrogation, along with those who appeared
to be especially well-dressed or well-equipped.
In time, with so many escaping the net by
shedding their uniforms or pulling off their
insignia of rank, the Soviets began checking
their prisoners’ hands. Beloruchki – those
with white, uncalloused palms – were clearly
not from the working class, and so were also
detained. For some of them, at least, it was the
start of a journey that would end in execution.
In some cases communist class fury would
be assuaged more immediately. Like the
Germans the Red Army was content – in the
name of ideology – to ignore the moral norms
of warfare. A group of injured Polish prisonersW O R L D
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ANNIVERSARYDEFENDING AGAINST THE BLITZKRIEG