Bloody Sunday (1939) - The Debate in Scholarship

The Debate in Scholarship

The exact number of victims of Bloody Sunday is disputed. Peter Aurich (a pseudonym of the German journalist Peter Nasarski ) put the number of German civilian deaths in Bydgoszcz at 366, while Hugo Rasmus estimates it as at least 415. Two Polish historians, Włodzimierz Jastrzębski and Czesław Madajczyk, estimate ethnic German deaths at 103 (Jastrzębski), and about 300 (150 on September 3, the rest in the days after). The Polish historians point out that since these losses occurred during actual combat, most of the civilian losses should be attributed to accidents common in urban combat conditions; they argue that civilian losses might have occurred when the town was attacked by the German airforce (Luftwaffe). Strafing civilians in the town by the Luftwaffe is confirmed by German witnesses. Nazi propaganda reinforced Polish perceptions of the German minority as hostile, and during the invasion reported that the German minority was aiding the forces. This contributed Polish misconceptions, as the Poles were expecting the German minority to be actively hostile.

An even bigger debate in the scholarship concerns the question whether—as the Polish historiography suggests—there were indeed any members of a German fifth column in the city who opened fire on the Polish troops (and if so, whether they were composed of members of the Bydgoszcz German minority or not), or whether—as critics among the German historiography argue—Polish troops (or panicking civilians) overreacted in the confusion and targeted innocent German civilians.

The account of Peter Nasarski alias Aurich has been called by Harry Gordon one of the most thorough German accounts; his work is however generally rejected in Poland, perhaps because he indiscriminately used witness statements collected by Nazi officials. According to Nasarski, after police forces retreated from Bydgoszcz, agitated Polish civilians accused many Germans of assaulting Polish soldiers and executed them and any Poles who stood up in their defence. Rasmus attributes the situation to confusion and the disorganised state of the Polish forces in the city. von Frentz wrote that "In Bydgoszcz, the event was probably caused by confusion among the rapidly retreating soldiers, a general breakdown in public order and panic among the Polish majority after two German air raids and the discovery of a small reconnaissance group of the German Army on the previous day." He quotes Nazi German reports about the civilian victims and atrocities, later corroborated by a Red Cross commission that the Nazis invited to the scene. von Frentz also noted that eyewitness accounts of atrocities committed against the German population are as unreliable as Polish accounts of the fifth columnists. No ethnic Germans are known to have spoken of participation in that event. In the post-war collaboration trials, no ethnic German was charged in relation to Bloody Sunday. Another counterargument to the fifth column theory is that Polish troops were being targeted by advance units of the German regular army (Heer), or that the shots were fired by Polish soldiers in the confusion of the mass withdrawal. von Frentz claims that Polish troops and civilians massacred German civilians due to confusion. Polish historians feel the German historiography is based on Nazi German sources, ignoring numerous Polish sources.

Polish historians, such as Madajczyk, Jastrzębski, Karol Marian Pospieszalski, Ryszard Wojan, and others claim that the killings were triggered when the ethnic Germans, dressed up as civilians, opened fire on the Polish troops. The Poles retaliated, killing many and executing prisoners afterwards. Polish historians like Pospieszalski and Janusz Kutta point to a Nazi top secret false flag Operation Himmler (which took place on August 31 – September 1) and was designed to create an illusion of Polish aggression against Germany. Thus there is argument that actions like the Gleiwitz incident and events in Bydgoszcz were all part of a larger Nazi plan to discredit the Poles. Polish historians such as Pospieszalski and Wojan argue that the German fifth column agents (or their higher-ups) might have been deliberately aiming to produce a situation likely to result in German civilian casualties as a way to fuel Nazi propaganda. This argument has been criticized: Harry Gordon questions whether the Germans were willing to sacrifice their citizens for propaganda gains.

In 2003, the director of the Institute of History of the Academy of Bydgoszcz Wlodzimierz Jastrzębski reversed his earlier opinion on the subject. He said that there was no German diversion. Rather, Poles "lost their nerve" and vented their anger on helpless German civilians.

In 2004, historian Tomasz Chinciński in a publication of Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) summarized recent research related to Bloody Sunday, confirming that the majority of historians agree that an "insurrection" by agents who had arrived from the Third Reich as well as some German inhabitants of Bydgoszcz took place. He has published a work detailing new evidence of German diversionary activity in September 1939 in Poland. There are numerous Polish eyewitness accounts of action of a German fifth column which included members of local minority; Pospieszalski cited multiple witnesses for at least 46 cases of German civilians opening fire on Polish troops. There are numerous Polish Army reports and German documents confirming the saboteur actions of armed German Poles in other cities. According to German historians, any members of the fifth column, if present in the city, were infiltrators from Germany, not natives of Bydgoszcz. Eyewitness accounts have been criticised by Richard Blanke. In 2004, Chinciński discussed previously unpublished reports of Polish Army Pomorze, which reported "a large scale diversion" in Bydgoszcz on September 3 and numerous smaller incidents in surrounding area around that time.

A number of Polish and German historians discussed the problem September 4, 2006, at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw. Chinciński discussed newly discovered documents of the Abwehr that show that there were indeed plans for fifth column and diversion activities in Bydgoszcz; he discussed the bias of the Polish communist era historiography, which minimized cases of Polish mob lynching of ethnic Germans, which did occur in Bydgoszcz. German historian Hans-Erich Volkmann noted problems with German historiography, outlining some of the unreliability inherent in early post-war studies, which were still significantly affected by the Nazi era, and that the Bydgoszcz events were and still are used for political purposes. Overall, German and Polish historians continue to argue with one another over the validity of their claims, but a consensus version is emerging.