German War Crimes on Polish citizens in Łobżenica.

History
Sunday, 23 November 2014 5:15
by: Paul Brojek

In the autumn of 1939 in the Selbstschutz region Germans murdered approximately 200 Polish inhabitants of the Wielkopolska Łobżenica and the neighbouring village.
The newly introduced terror took such a brutal form that it forced an official reaction even from the official German authorities.
Łobżenica, located next to the then Polish-German border, was occupied by the Wehrmacht immediately on the first day of the war and shortly afterwards the Selbstschutz paramilitary militias composed of representatives of the German minority became very active in committing war crimes on the Polish citizens.

Werner Köpenick was the officer dealing with the organization’s structures. Hermann Seehaver, who held an office of Łobżenica mayor, was also made the local commandant representing Germany. His deputy was a volksdeutsch, Harry Schulz who soon became the main instigator of the anti-Polish terror.

Soon the arrests began in the city and surrounding areas, where the victims, according to the “Intelligence”, were mainly representatives of the Polish intellectual elite.
Those arrested were initially incarcerated in Lobzenica prison court, which in the first months of occupation was managed by the newly promoted, volksdeutsch Schulz. The conditions were horrific; up to five hundreds prisoners were cramped in one small prison cell.

Detainees were subjected to regular interrogations, during which they were also tortured and the imprisoned women were raped.
The Poles detained there were tortured and murdered by either shooting or hanging until November 1939 when eventually the prison management was taken over by the German Police Central headquarters.

Selbstchutz’s paramilitary militias murdering rampage and executions of Polish citizens also took place outside the city, in the surrounding woods, nearby other towns. One such place was the Marian’s sanctuary, the nearby Hill Convent, which originally was a temporary place of accommodation for the Polish Catholic clergy.

In mid November of 1939 all the imprisoned priests and monks were taken in the vicinity of Nakła and murdered there. In their place, several dozen groups of Poles and Jews were brought in. In November 23rd, drunken Selbstschutz members led by Schulz brutally murdered all the prisoners. One of the prisoners, Anna Jaworska, a member of the Greater Poland Uprising was bound with ropes and torn in half.

In total the number victims killed by Selbstschutz members including those murdered in the autumn of 1939, about 200 inhabitants of Łobżenica and surrounding villages, together with around the sixty Catholic clergy members lost their lives.

In January 1940, the district attorney’s office in Bydgoszcz received a complaint filed by officers of the gendarmerie of Łobżenica, indicating the nature and number of crimes committed by Schulz and his gang, including the rapes carried out by him on the Polish women, which under German law constituted the crime of “race defilement”.

The gravity of those charges was so enormous that Schulz had to stand trial before the Special Court in Bydgoszcz. In July of 1940 he was sentenced to 15 years in prison and a heavy deprivation of civil rights for 10 years. The only Just Court at the time, for in other parts of Poland the German terror reign went unstoppable.

Schulz was in prison in Koronowo until the end of war. After the war he was hiding under an assumed name in Szczecin. However, he was recognized, arrested and sentenced to death by hanging. The execution was carried out in 1954.

The other commanders of Lobżenicki Selbstschutz gang – Werner Köpenick and Hermann Seehaver – settled in West Germany after the war and were never brought to justice.

Part of the victim’s remains were exhumed in 1945 and part in 1965, which were buried in a mass grave in the parish cemetery in Łobżenica.

arr. Paul Brojek

LONG LIVE POLAND!!!