Prelude to Race War

The Ideological Drivers behind German Atrocities Committed against POWs and Civilian Populations during the September Campaign of 1939

Abstract

It is well known that the German invasion of Poland in 1939 was the start of the most hideous and murderous phase in Poland’s already blood-soaked history, yet the extent of the atrocities committed during the September Campaign is not widely appreciated. This article will assess, as far as is possible, what may have driven those excesses, asking whether they were primarily ideologically driven, or whether, perhaps, they can be attributed to circumstances, or to something more traditional, and less ideological in nature.

First of all, it is very clear that the conduct of the invading armies during the Sep­tember Campaign – German and Soviet – was exceedingly brutal. Right from the outset, German forces did not hesitate to target civilian populations – Jewish and non-Jewish – for reprisals, hostage-taking, casual brutality and outright murder. From the massacre committed at Częstochowa, in the opening days of the war, to the murder of some 600 Polish Jews at Przemyśl, to the machine gunning of over 300 civilians and POWs at Śladów on 18 September, to the massacre at Zakroczym, which followed the surrender of Modlin, German atrocities were committed, without respite, throughout the campaign. In the 1960s, the Polish historian Szymon Datner calculated that the Germans committed over 600 massacres and atrocities against Poles during the September Campaign alone (Datner, 1967, pp. 358–359). Despite his writing during the Communist period, there is no reason fundamentally to question his findings.

It is, of course, an open question how far motives can be divined on the part of the perpetrators, but this paper seeks to ascertain the extent to which these atrocities were driven by ideology, or alternatively whether they might have been driven by circumstances, the “fog of war,” or by old-fashioned anti-Polish prejudice.