- Mass murders in Piaśnica
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The mass murders in Piaśnica were a set of mass executions carried out by Germans, during World War II, between the fall of 1939 and spring of 1940 in Piasnica Wielka (Groß Piasnitz) in the Darzlubska Wilderness near Wejherowo. Standard estimates put the number of victims at between twelve thousand and fourteen thousand. Most of them were Polish intellectuals from Gdańsk Pomerania, but Poles, Jews, Czechs and German inmates from mental hospitals from General Government and the Third Reich were also murdered. After the Stutthof concentration camp, Piaśnica was the largest site of killings of Polish civilians in Pomerania by the Germans, and for this reason is sometimes referred to as the "second" or "Pomeranian" Katyn.[1] It was also the first large scale Nazi atrocity in occupied Poland and a harbinger of things to come.[2]
Contents
Background: Intelligenzaktion Pommern
After the Nazi invasion of Poland, the Polish and Kashubian population of Gdańsk Pomerania was immediately subjected to brutal terror.[3] Prisoners of war,[4] as well as many Polish intellectuals and community leaders were murdered. Many of the crimes were carried out, with official approval, by the so-called "Selbstschutz", or paramilitary organizations of ethnic Germans with previously Polish citizenship. They in turn were encouraged to participate in the violence and pogroms by the Gauleiter of Danzig (Gdańsk), Albert Forster, who in a speech at the Prusinski Hotel in Wejherowo agitated ethnic Germans to attack Poles by saying "We have to eliminate the lice ridden Poles, starting with those in the cradle… in your hands I give the fate of the Poles, you can do with them what you want". The crowd gathered before the hotel chanted "Kill the Polish dogs!" and "Death to the Poles".[5] The Selbstschutz participated in the early massacres as Piaśnica, and many of their members later joined police and SS formations which continued the massacres until the Fall of 1940.[5]
Organized action aimed at exterminating the Polish population of the region however, began only after the end of the September campaign, with the Intelligenzaktion in Pomerania (Intelligence Action Pomerania), a part of an overall Intelligenzaktion by Nazi Germany aimed at liquidating the Polish elite. Its main targets were the Polish intelligentsia, which was blamed by the Nazis for pro-Polish policies in the Polish corridor during the interwar period. Educated Poles were also perceived by the Nazis as the main obstacle to the planned complete Germanization of the region.
As a result, even before the Nazi invasion of Poland, German police and Gestapo prepared special lists of Poles which they regarded as representative of Polish culture and life in the region, who were to be executed.[5] According to official criteria, the Polish "intelligentsia" included anyone with a middle school or higher education, priests, teachers, doctors, dentists, veterinarians, military officers, bureaucrats, medium and large businessmen and merchants, medium and large landowners, writers, journalists and newspaper editors.[5] Furthermore, all persons who during the interwar period had belonged to Polish cultural and patriotic organizations such as Polski Związek Zachodni (Polish Union of the West) and Maritime and Colonial League.[5]
As a result, between the fall of 1939 and spring of 1940, in the "Intelligenzaktion Pommern" and other actions, Germans killed around 65,000 Polish intellectuals and others. The main site of these murders were the forests around Wielka Piasnica.
The executions
Digging the graves
Victims before the execution
Mass execution in Piaśnica
Moments before the execution
Bodies of the victimsPiaśnica Wielka is a small Kashubian village located around 10 km from Wejherowo. The forests around it were chosen by the Germans as the site of the mass murders because it was easily accessible by bus and truck, it had a nearby rail line and at the same time was located far enough from other villages and centers of population.
The most commonly accepted time line for the beginnings of the executions is that of late October 1939. However the date of the first execution is uncertain and disputed among historians.[5] According to Zygmunt Milczewski, this happened on the 21st of October. Prof. Andrzej Gąsiorowski states that the first person to be killed was the priest, father Ignacy Błażejewski, on the 24th of October.[5] Prof. Barbara Bojarska gives the date of the 29th of October. Former prisoners and witnesses likewise give various dates at the end of October, and even the first few days of November.[5]
The victims were transported to the execution sites by cars and trucks. Usually they were forced to strip and on some occasions to dig their own graves. They were then lined up on the edge of the ditches they had dug and machined gun down, although sometimes regular rifles and pistols were also used. Some of the wounded were finished off with hits of the rifle butts, as is documented by the broken skulls that have been exhumed from the graves. Estimates and records suggest that a single platoon of the 36th SS Regiment Wachsturmbann "Eimann" (named after its commander Kurt Eimann) involved in the massacres was capable of killing around 150 people daily.[6] Witnesses report that on numerous occasions, prior to the executions, the victims were tortured and children in particular were treated with utmost cruelty, and often killed by having their heads smashed against trees by German SS soldiers.[2]
The most detailed accounts of one of the executions come from witness accounts regarding November 11, (Polish Independence Day). On that day, Germans murdered around 314 Polish and Jewish hostages in Piasnica. According to the testimony of former Gestapo and later, Smersh agent, Hans Kassner (alias Jan Kaszubowski), made in 1952, the executions on that day lasted from early morning until 3 in the afternoon.[1] Men and women were led in fives to the previously dug graves and shot. Some of the victims were buried alive.[1][2] One of those killed was Sister Alicja Kotowska, the head of the convent in Wejherowo.[5] Witnesses report that as she was being transported from the prison to the execution site, Kotowska huddled and comforted Jewish children which were also being taken to be executed at Piasnica.[5] During the post war exhumation Alicja's corpse had not been identified but a grave was found containing a rosary of the kind worn by sisters of her order. The grave where the rosary was found is presently the site of a memorial. In 1999 Alicja Kotowska was beatified by Pope John Paul II along with 107 other martyrs.[5]
The area around the forests where the massacres were taking place was surrounded with police and paramilitary groups in order to both prevent any victims from escaping and also to preclude access to any potential witnesses from the outside.[1] Despite these arrangements, the local Polish and Kashubian populace was able to observe the numerous transports going to the forests and could hear the sounds of gun fire.[1]
The last transports to the site were seen in the spring of 1940 and contained mostly patients from mental hospital from within the Third Reich, in particular from Stettin (Szczecin) and Lauenburg (Lębork).
The total number of victims, killed in an area around Piaśnica of about 250 square kilometers is estimated at between twelve and sixteen thousand, including women, children and infants.[6]
The victims
The prison in Puck where victims were held and tortured before being shipped to Piasnica, along with a plaqueDue to the fact that in 1944, the Germans exhumed and burned many of the corpses in an attempt to hide the crime, the exact number of victims is not known, and as are not many of the names and their national origins. From investigations carried out after the war, three different groups of victims can be identified:
- The first group of about two thousand persons, mostly Poles and Kashubians from Gdańsk Pomerenia, arrested in September and October 1939 and subsequently held in prisons in Wejherow, Puck, Gdańsk, Kartuzy, and Kościerzyn.[1]
- Second group, the largest, of ten to twelve thousand people, consisted of Polish, Czech and German families who had been transported from other areas of General Government and the Third Reich. This group also included many Polish workers who had migrated to Germany for economic reasons in the interwar period. The estimated number is based on the mass graves that had been found and on eyewitness reports by railroad men who observed the arriving transports.[1]
- The third group included about 1,200 (some sources give 2,000) mentally ill patients, transported from hospitals in Stralsund, Ueckermünde, Altentreptow and Lauenburg (Lębork).[2]
Investigations carried out so far have established the names of about 600 of the 14,000 murdered.[1]
The perpetrators
There were three groups which were primarily involved in carrying out the massacres:
- Einsatzkommando 16, under the command of the chief of the Gdańsk Gestapo SS-Obersturmbannführer Rudolf Tröger[5]
- Special units of the Wachsturmbann "Eimann" from the 36th Regiment of SS[5]
- Local ethnic Germans from Wejherowo, members of Selbschutz, led by the German mayor of Wejherowo G. Bamberg and the county director of the Nazi party Heinz Lorentz.[5]
The headquarters of the command in charge of carrying out the ethnic cleansing were in a villa on Krokowska St. in Wejherowo.A[5]
Attempts at hiding the murders
After the extermination action was ended in the Spring of 1940, the organizers and perpetrators began the process of covering their deeds.[7] Trees and bushes were planted on the site of the graves, and German police restricted access to the area in the following years.
In the second half of 1944, during the Red Army's offensive, Nazi authorities anticipated the evacuation of German military and civilian personnel. During this time, an organized action was undertaken to destroy evidence of the massacres. Thirty-six prisoners from the concentration camp KL Stutthof were chosen and brought to the forests in August 1944.[5] Chained and bound, they were forced to dig up the graves, remove the bodies and burn them in specially prepared forest crematoria. After six weeks of this work, the prisoners were murdered by the SS troops which supervised them, and their bodies burned as well.[5] Local German civilians participated in further covering up any traces of the burning of the bodies.[5]
Despite the attempts by the Germans to cover up the massacre, photographs of the events survived. Two local Germans, Georg and Waldemar Engler who ran a photography studio in Wejherowo took part in the massacres as part of the para military organizations. The younger Engler, Waldemar, made a photographic record of the massacre. Both of them were tried and sentenced for war crimes after the war.[5]
Punishment and responsibility
In 1946 a National Tribunal in Gdańsk, Poland, held Albert Forster, the Gauleiter of the Gdańsk Region and the Nazi administrator of Pomerania and Western Prussia, responsible for the murders at Piasnica, as well as for other war crimes. He was sentenced to death and the sentence was carried out on February 28, 1952, in Warsaw.[5]
A German court in Hamburg in 1968 sentenced SS leader Kurt Eimann to four years in prison for his participation in killing of the German mentally ill at Piasnica (but not the Polish intellectuals and citizens also murdered there).[5]
Richard Hildebrandt, Higher SS and Police Leader in Pomerania, was sentenced to death by a Polish court in Bydgoszcz for his part and role in organizing the murders.[5] A British military court in Hamburg in 1946, sentenced M. Pauly, a guard at the Neuengamme concentration camp to death for war crimes. During the proceedings, Pauly did not reveal that he had also taken part in the executions at Piasnica, Stutthof and other places in German occupied Pomerania. The sentence was carried out at Hameln Prison in 1946, by Albert Pierrepoint. The occupation mayor of Puck, F. Freimann was also sentenced to death by a court in Gdynia.[5]
References
- ^ a b c d e f g h Grzegorz Popławski, "Piaśnica - pomorski "Katyń" " (Piaśnica - Pomeranian Katyn), Dziennik Baltycki (The Baltic Daily), [1]
- ^ a b c d Tadeusz Piotrowski, "Poland's holocaust: ethnic strife, collaboration with occupying forces and genocide in the Second Republic, 1918-1947", McFarland, 1998, pg. 25, [2]
- ^ Jerzy Lukowski, Hubert Zawadzki, A concise history of Poland, Cambridge concise histories, Concise Histories Series, Cambridge University Press, 2001, pg. 228, [3]
- ^ Johen Bohler, "Zbrodnie Wehrmachtu w Polsce" (Warcrimes of Wehrmacht in Poland), Wydawnictwo Znak, Kraków, 2009, pg 183-192
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w Elżbieta Grot, "Ludobójstwo w Piaśnicy z uwzględnieniem losów mieszkańców powiatu wejherowskiego." (Genocide in Piaśnica with a discussion of the fate of the inhabitants of Wejherow county", Public Library of Wejherowo,Biblioteka Publiczna Gminy Wejherowo im. Aleksandra Labudy w Bolszewie
- ^ a b Elżbieta Maria Grot, "Ludobójstwo w Piaśnicy jesienią 1939 r. ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem losu mieszkańców Gdyni" (Genocide in Piasnica in the fall of 1939, with a discussion of fates of inhabitants of Gdynia, Państwowe Muzeum Stutthof, oddział w Sopocie (National Museum of Stutthof, Sopot Division), [4]
- ^ Ewa Michalkowska-Walkiewicz, "Tajemnica Piaśnicy" (The Mystery at Piasnica), Polish News, 04 August 2008,[5]
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