85 years ago, the German Wehrmacht invaded Poland. The memory of this day is mostly associated with the bombardment of Westerplatte near Gdansk. But the first bombs hit another city.
Józef Stępien leads us through the town. Wieluń is not big, Stępien has lived here his whole life. He knows the streets. Now the 92-year-old is marching ahead. “Let’s go outside,” he said. He wants us to see what he saw 85 years ago.
He stops in front of an inconspicuous house next to a church. He lived here with his parents when he was seven. “We were sleeping. The roar woke us up first. And then the window was ripped out. When the bomb fell on the building opposite, the air pressure was so great that it ripped out the window.” There were fires everywhere, he says. The green spaces, the houses, the entire street was in flames.
The hospital was first shelled
The small-town atmosphere, the warm summer day, everything disappears when Stępien describes how the German air force attacked the town on September 1, 1939. For a long time it was said that the first shots in World War II were fired near Gdańsk, Danzig. The war broke out with the bombardment of the Polish garrison on Westerplatte. But by that time Wieluń was already burning.
A few minutes before Westerplatte, the Germans started the war here, without a declaration of war, with a war crime against Polish civilians.
The first building to be bombed was the hospital in Wieluń – “even though there was a large red cross painted on the roof.” The Junkers dive bombers dropped bombs wherever they wanted, says Stępien. The clearly recognizable church was also hit.
The German bombs hit the city center of Wieluń on September 1, 1939 – and not the country’s military infrastructure.
Attack from the neighborhood
After World War II, Poland was moved westward. The country gained German territory in the west, but had to give up much larger areas in the east. Before the move, Wieluń was only about ten kilometers from the border with the German Reich. The attack therefore came from the neighborhood. People knew each other.
One of the German pilots had even lived in Wieluń until shortly before the attack. He had grown up there and gone to school with the people he bombed on September 1. After the fighter planes came reconnaissance planes, who documented the destruction of the city with high-resolution cameras.
Many historians today believe that Wieluń was a test. The Luftwaffe wanted to evaluate their work afterwards. Today, the photos can be seen in large format in the Wieluń City Museum.
A militarily insignificant city
“Wieluń was primarily an agricultural trading town, a merchant town, not an industrial town,” says the museum’s director, Jan Książek. There were no fortifications or bunkers in the town – neither to protect the civilian population nor as military targets.
If the Wehrmacht had attached any military importance to the city, it would have destroyed streets or military infrastructure, he says. But the Germans used incendiary bombs to wipe out a large part of the city center and murder several hundred people. “It was certainly an attack designed to intimidate the Polish military. We are convinced that it was a terrorist attack,” says the museum director.
On a monitor, Książek shows the German photos of the ruined landscape. And pictures from a war photo album made by Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg. The later Hitler assassin was involved in the attack on Wieluń. Stauffenberg wrote “Advance!” in his album, next to pictures of burning ruins and a woman’s corpse.
Wieluń today – at that time the city was only ten kilometers from the border with the German Reich.
The war was expected, the bombing was not
Of course, says Książek, people knew that the Germans were preparing for war. And in Wieluń too, people were preparing for occupation and looting, possibly for gas attacks like in the First World War, but not for aerial bombs.
Józef Stępien outside points to a basement window. Because people had heard rumors about poison gas, they tried to seal the windows with sand. “Instead of gas, there were planes bombing houses. The people who were hiding there in the basement all died.” A bomb had hit the building and buried the entrance. The basement became a trap.
Destruction continues to shape Wieluń to this day
The city still shows its wounds today. It looks strange, said museum director Książek. The gaps in the city were filled with apartment blocks after the war, like a patchwork quilt. The foundations of the bombed church can be seen on the market square. The Wehrmacht blew up the damaged building after the invasion.
In 2019, the German Federal President laid a wreath here. In his speech, Frank-Walter Steinmeier declared: “The past does not pass. And responsibility does not pass. We know that.” As Federal President, he promised the Poles that the Germans would not forget.
“Responsibility never goes away,” said the Federal President during a visit in 2019.
Stępien doesn’t have to promise that. He will never forget the night of the German attack 85 years ago, or the war years that followed, when his parents were taken away to do forced labor and he was left alone as a child. As one of the last survivors, he will stand on the market square early in the morning on September 1st, shortly after 4:30 a.m., and remember the victims of the first of many German war crimes in the Second World War.
Andrzej Duda, the Polish President, will be there. No visit from Germany has been announced.