In almost all history textbooks, we can't find entries related to "Bloody Sunday" or "Bydgoszcz." For World War II, it is usually only said that on September 1, 1939, the German army launched a war and crossed the Polish border, and World War II broke out. Then came the fall of Poland under the attack of the German army, and the Polish people have lived in dire straits ever since. Under the dual oppression of Germany and the Soviet Union, the Polish people starved, their property confiscated and sent to the concentration camps of all evils.
But in fact, three days after the German invasion of Poland, a tragic incident occurred, which largely determined the measures taken by the Poles in Germany in World War II.
On September 3, 1939, when Polish troops under German attack retreated to the northern Polish city of Bydgoszcz, they claimed to have been attacked by German snipers inside the city. Bydgoszcz is a Polish city with a large german population, and although many Germans fled before the war, there are tens of thousands of German minorities in the city.
The Polish army and government then used this as an excuse to massacre the Germans in the city. After the Germans later captured the city, retaliatory executions were carried out against the Poles. The Polish National Institute of Memorials determined that 254 Germans were massacred, and after the fall of Bydgoszcz, the Germans executed about 600-800 Poles here as revenge.
Because September 3, 1939, happened to be a Sunday, Nazi propaganda officials at the time referred to the massacre of Germans by Polish troops as "Bloody Sunday." In a circular to the press, they stated that "the barbarism committed by the Poles in Bydgoszcz must be exposed to the whole world, and the word Bloody Sunday must be entered into the dictionary as a permanent word and known to the world." ”
The city of Bydgoszcz was part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth until it was annexed by the Kingdom of Prussia in 1772 and became part of Prussia. After German reunification in 1871, it became part of the German Empire, and it belonged to Germany until the end of World War I. In 1920, the Treaty of Versailles annexed the city and the surrounding area to Poland.
After the Nazis came to power in Germany, Hitler proposed a reconstitution of Germany, which attracted a large number of Germans living abroad for World War I reasons and became Nazi intelligence agents. Hitler's explicit goal was to create a Greater German state by annexing other countries inhabited by the German minority. By March 1939, german-Polish friction, distrust between each other, and german nationalism had risen, which eventually led to a complete deterioration in Polish-German relations. There have also been incidents of violence against germans in Poland. So long before germany invaded Poland, German newspapers and Nazi leaders accused the Polish authorities, both nationally and internationally, of organizing and tolerating violent ethnic cleansing by their own population of Germans living in their country.
On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and in the early hours of September 2-3, Polish troops entered Bydgoszcz after being defeated. A large number of local civilians fled the city in panic. On the morning of September 3, some Germans who had good relations with their Polish neighbors received warnings, vaguely telling them that "something unknown is about to happen in the city" and asking them to find a way to hide themselves by 10 a.m., but unable to reveal details of when it was about to happen.
The Polish Army's 9th, 15th, and 27th Divisions were retreating through Bydgoszcz, when a Polish soldier was said to have been shot by a Sniper of German descent hiding behind a house. A gun battle ensued between polish troops and armed Germans, with casualties on both sides. Polish troops executed captured Poles on the spot. In the process, the Polish government concluded in a 2004 survey that Polish troops had been shot by ethnic German minorities and German military intelligence officers, killing about 40-50 Poles and 100-300 Germans.
After the incident, the propaganda department of Nazi Germany, under the leadership of Goebbels, used the incident to try to justify the German invasion, constantly showing the massacre of Germans in Poland through press pictures. In Nazi German propaganda, which initially believed that 5,800 Germans were killed on "Bloody Sunday," by 1940 the estimated number had risen 10-fold to 58,000, and a pamphlet entitled "Polish Atrocities Against the German Minority" was published for domestic propaganda, which made most Germans think that the invasion of Poland was just and increased German hatred of Poles.
Hitler also believed that revenge must be waged against the Poles, and the Germans made the Poles pay the price after occupying Bydgoszcz. According to German historians, German courts tried 876 people involved in the Bloody Sunday incident. After the German occupation of Bydgoszcz, by September 8, the Germans had executed 200-400 Polish civilians in retaliation. Many Poles, especially intellectuals and Jews, were deported or thoroughly purged. Throughout the German occupation, more than 20,000 civilians in Bydgoszcz were sent to concentration camps for execution, accounting for 14 percent of the city's population.
After the German retaliation, Hitler himself felt very relieved. He signed a secret decree on 4 October 1939 that all crimes discovered by the German army between 1 September and 4 October 1939 would not be prosecuted.
The exact number of victims of Bloody Sunday has been disputed, with both Poland and Germany still disagreeing.