In the early hours of September 1, 1939 the Polish small town of Wieluń was largely destroyed by an air raid of the German Luftwaffe. The bombing is considered by many historians to be the first combat operation of the Second World War.
History
Wieluń is a small town in central Poland half way between the major cities of Wrocław and Łódź. During the First Partition of Poland the town belonged to Prussia. In the interwar period the town was Polish again and was situated in the immediate vicinity of the German border.
On September 1, 1939 the German Wehrmacht attacked Poland from the North, West and South without a declaration of war. Almost simultaneously with the attack on the Westerplatte near Gdańsk the Luftwaffe conducted an air raid on Wieluń in which about 30 dive bombers of the new Junkers Ju 87B type were involved. They released bombs on the town centre, including incendiary bombs. The attack caught the largely sleeping population totally unaware, also because the town had no military infrastructure to speak of. During the day the Luftwaffe launched two more waves of attack. More than 70% of the town were destroyed, including many historic buildings, the synagogue and the hospital. The majority of the population fled – when German soldiers arrived shortly afterwards they discovered more corpses than people alive.
During the German occupation the town was renamed Welun and was annexed to the German Reich as part of the »Warthegau«. The town's approximately 4,000 Jews had to move to a ghetto in 1941. In August 1942 all Jews from Wieluń were deported to the extermination camp of Chełmno-on-Ner (Polish: Chełmno nad Nerem, German: Kulmhof am Ner) and murdered there.
Victims
The number of victims killed during the air raid is not known, it is usually stated as 1,200. After their invasion the Germans buried many corpses in mass graves. The approximately 4,000 Jewish inhabitants of Wieluń were all murdered before the end of 1942.
The Second World War began in September 1939 with the invasion of Poland and the occupation of the west of the country by German troops and the east of the country by the Red Army. Persecution and terror directly followed the invasion in both parts of the country. German units massacred members of the intelligentsia, Jewish and non-Jewish civilians as well as hospital patients.
At the end of 1939 the German administration established ghettos where the Jewish population was forced to live in cramped and horrendous conditions. Following the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, eastern Poland also fell under German control. SS Einsatzgruppen started to systematically murder Jewish men, later also women and children. In autumn 1941, local German authorities in the former west of the country began to prepare for the mass murder of Jewish ghetto prisoners using poison gas. By 1945, some three million Polish Jews had been murdered in the extermination camps at Chelmno, Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek or Auschwitz, starved to death in the ghettos or shot dead. In 1943 the Jews living in the Warsaw ghetto staged an uprising, which was brutally crushed by the SS.
Polish soldiers fought with the Allies on all fronts during the Second World War. Polish partisan groups, including the patriotic »Armia Krajowa« (Home Army), formed the largest resistance movement in occupied Europe. August 1, 1944 saw the start of the Warsaw Uprising, the most extensive civilian campaign against the Germans in occupied Europe. It failed also because the Red Army, already standing on the opposite side of the Vistula River, chose not to intervene. It is estimated that up to 250,000 people lost their lives in the uprising. A total of around three million non-Jewish Poles met a violent death during the German occupation.
Once the Red Army had arrived on (East) Polish soil in January 1944, the troops of the Armia Krajowa were stripped of their weapons by the Soviet secret service and the officers were either shot or deported. The millions of deaths during the occupation, the permanent Soviet annexation of eastern Poland, the incorporation of former eastern German territories and the ensuing population transfers all left a traumatic political and social legacy in Poland.
Remembrance of the murder of European Jews in German extermination camps was initially marginalised in the Polish culture of memory. Although Auschwitz soon became an international symbol of the Holocaust, in Poland it was viewed for decades above all as a »site of Polish martyrdom«. However, the start of the 21st century brought about changes in this respect, due in part to the fierce debates over the Jedwabne massacre in eastern Poland. The massacre of around 340 Jews on July 10, 1941 was originally attributed to the »Gestapo and Hitler police« but had in fact been carried out by Polish »neighbours« without orders from the Germans. Debates in Poland and abroad on Polish perpetration resulted in the Polish President Aleksander Kwaśniewski (*1954) issuing an apology to the victims in 2001. There were increasing calls from experts, such as those from Poland’s Institute for National Remembrance, for the country to confront the most difficult chapters in its history, which also include the anti-Jewish pogroms in 1946-47 and state anti-semitism in communist Poland during the post-war period.
The Polish invests extensively in memorial culture, including grand projects with international ambition. The Warsaw Rising Museum was opened already in 2004. The POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews was opened in 2013 on the territory of the former Warsaw Ghetto, a new museum dedicated specifically to the Warsaw Ghetto will follow suit in 2024. Since 2017, there is a major Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk. Since the turn of the millennium, the sites of the former German extermination camps have also been converted into modern memorial sites. An ever-growing preoccupation with Poland’s Jewish and multicultural heritage can be observed in the field of culture as well.
Remembrance
Although the exact moment of the air raid can't be established, for many Poles Wieluń is the place where the Second World War really started. Furthermore, there is a broad consensus in Poland that the attack was not aimed at military targets but was a terror attack where new weapons and tactics of the Luftwaffe were to be put to the test. Many German historians also subscribe to this opinion.
The town had to be rebuilt after the war. Of the Kościół św. Michała Archanioła (St Michael Church), the town's oldest church only the foundations remain. In 2004 the then Polish president Aleksander Kwaśniewski dedicated a memorial there, remembering the attack of September 1, 1939. The hospital which was destroyed during the raid and where numerous patients, doctors and nurses were killed hadn't been rebuilt either. For decades there was a memorial plaque which was complemented by a sculpture in 2009. The Polish inscription on the plinth reads: »Here on September 1, 1939 at 4:40am an unforgettable act of injustice, violence and crime was committed against the defenceless population of the town of Wieluń. On this site on September 1, 1939 the All Saints Hospital was situated on which the first bombs of the Second World War fell.« Almost nothing remembers the town's Jewish inhabitants, the Jewish cemetery was flattened during the German occupation. There is a memorial plaque at the site of the synagogue which was destroyed during the raid and later demolished.
