September 1, 1939

When German armies crossed Poland’s borders at dawn on September 1, 1939, the world was plunged into a new war; yet for Poland, it marked something more than invasion—it signaled the beginning of a national crucifixion, a deliberate attempt to erase a people’s identity, culture, and the very existence.

From the first hours of that morning, German warplanes descended not on fortifications or military supply lines, but on towns and villages filled with civilians. Wieluń, a town without military significance, was obliterated from the air; its hospital, clearly marked with a Red Cross, was reduced to rubble, and hundreds of innocent men, women, and children were killed in their homes before most of Europe had even awakened to the realization that war had begun. Refugees who fled along country roads, carrying what little they could in carts and on their backs, found themselves strafed by machine-gun fire from above, as the invaders demonstrated that terror, not combat alone, was their chosen weapon.

The campaign waged by Hitler’s armies was never limited to the clash of soldiers on battlefields such as Westerplatte, Gdynia, or the plains of Mazovia; it was, from the outset, directed against the very heart of Polish society. In village after village, families were driven from their homes and watched as those homes were set ablaze while the inhabitants were forced inside. Priests, teachers, and community leaders were marked for elimination, dragged from churches, schools, and town halls to be executed in the streets or taken to forests where they were shot in groups. The invasion was not simply a military act of conquest—it was a campaign of extermination aimed at ensuring Poland’s spirit would never recover.

The massacres multiplied with chilling efficiency. In Bydgoszcz, in Piaśnica, and in nameless forests scattered across the occupied territories, German firing squads carried out mass killings as if it were routine duty. The campaign of terror known as Intelligenzaktion sought to decapitate the nation by eliminating its intelligentsia, ensuring that no future leaders, no future teachers, and no future priests could sustain the people’s will to resist. German policy was calculated with terrifying clarity: Poland was not to survive as a nation; its culture was to be erased; its land was to be plundered; and its people were either to be enslaved or destroyed.

Despite this avalanche of terror, Poland resisted with a ferocity that astonished observers across the world. Outnumbered and outgunned, the defenders of Westerplatte held out longer than German commanders anticipated, while in Warsaw soldiers and civilians fought side by side, enduring relentless bombardment until the city was reduced to ruins. The resilience of these defenders did not prevent the tragedy that followed, but it revealed a determination to resist annihilation even when defeat seemed inevitable.

For every act of defiance there was a corresponding reprisal. Entire villages were wiped from the map; hospitals and churches were bombed; civilians were hanged in town squares as a warning to others. Even children became targets in this calculated war of annihilation. These actions were not excesses of battle but deliberate measures—early experiments in terror that foreshadowed what the world would later come to know as the Holocaust.

The world rightly remembers the Jewish genocide that followed in ghettos and camps, but it must also remember that long before extermination factories were constructed, Poland was already bleeding. It was on Polish soil in September 1939 that Germany tested the methods of brutality and mass terror it would later impose on all of Europe, inflicting unspeakable suffering on Poles both Christian and Jewish.

September 1939 reminds us of two unshakable truths: that the Polish nation was the first to stand against Hitler’s tyranny, and that it bore an unspeakable price for that stand. To speak of courage without remembering the Polish soldiers who charged against tanks, the civilians who endured the bombardment of their homes, the mothers who shielded their children in burning villages, and the priests who blessed their people with their last breath is to forget the true cost of resistance.

The story of Poland in those early days is therefore not only a chronicle of atrocities committed but also a testimony of extraordinary endurance, a defiance of despair in the face of calculated annihilation. To remember is to honor those who fell, and to honor them is to guard the world against repeating the same descent into hatred and dehumanization.

Poland was the first battleground, the first to resist, and the first to bleed. Its courage and suffering remain a legacy to all humanity, demanding both memory and gratitude.

Edward Reid

(https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=801489875726951&set=a.159252953283983)

==========================

An empty place in German memory

In Germany dimension of the crimes committed in occupied Poland has never been fully realised. A survey carried out in 2024 by the German IPSOS on behalf of the Pilecki Institute showed that, according to German respondents, the victims of the Holocaust came primarily from Germany, and the repressions were significantly more severe in Germany than in occupied Poland.

What’s more, German politicians, the elites leading the institutions of the policy of memory and the German media de facto decided that anchoring German civic education and the discourse about German guilt around the Holocaust was basically enough.

In fact, because in the course of subsequent debates, this discourse and education were supplemented with threads about colonialism, Roma and Sinti victims, homosexual victims or – recently commemorated with a new monument in the heart of Berlin – in the middle of the path of memory of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

There was a lack of space, time and will to work out in public space and in education for crimes committed since September 1, 1939 against Polish victims, Polish cities and villages.

Dieter Bingen, long-time head of the German Institute of Polish Affairs in Darmstadt, says that German crimes committed in occupied Poland and Polish victims are “an empty place in German memory”.