“The sentence ‘From 5:45 we return fire’, barked by the ‘leader’ on September 1, 85 years ago, into the microphone in the Reichstag, was a double lie. As we know, it was not a ‘response’ to the shots, and in addition, the Luftwaffe had carried out a bombing raid on Wieluń, a small town east of Wrocław, an hour earlier,” writes Stefan Locke in a material published on Sunday (01.09.2024) on the portal “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”.
Hitler’s Double Lie
“We were woken up by explosions,” recalls Józef Stępień. The 92-year-old man survived a German air raid as a seven-year-old boy. “I looked out the window and saw that the house opposite was burning, it had been hit,” he says. His parents took a few essentials and, together with their son, fled the city to protect themselves from another air raid.
Shouts came from the basement of a burning multi-family house on the market square. “My father tried to help, but the house collapsed,” recalls Józef Stępień. In this one place alone, 73 people died.
Stępień’s family hid in a haystack. “The next day we saw the barrels of German soldiers’ guns. They told us to go back. But our city as we knew it was gone. More than 16,000 residents died,” he added.
“Wieluń was the first city to be destroyed by a massive air raid. Officially, the beginning of the war is considered to be the shots fired by the Schleswig-Holstein ship at Westerplatte near Gdańsk, but by that time Wieluń had already been razed to the ground,” Locke writes.
“Nobody outside Poland knows about it,” says historian Jan Książek, director of the local museum. The military was stationed at Westerplatte, while Wieluń was a “civilian, undefended city,” he explains.
Bombing target: Wieluń
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A senseless act of destruction
“The purpose of the senseless act of destruction, which was the first war crime of World War II, was probably to provide evidence of the effectiveness of the Luftwaffe and to test its striking power. In the first of three raids, German bombs hit the hospital,” writes “FAZ”.
As Locke pointed out, one of the German soldiers who entered Wieluń after the bombing was Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg. His album of photographs taken in September 1939 is shown at the exhibition. Under the photographs of burning houses and a family killed in one of them, the officer wrote under the date 2 September 1939, “victory march”.
The unit commander, Wolfgang Paul, wrote in his memoirs that the young soldiers were impressed by the effects of the raid and saw that “in this war there is no difference between the military and civilians.”
Duda and Steinmeier remind us about Wieluń
Locke emphasized that in Germany the fate of Wieluń and 158 other towns that were bombed in the first days of the war remained unknown for a long time. After the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989/1990 the situation did not improve, and Wieluń continued to remain in the shadow of Westerplatte.
Only five years ago the situation reversed – on the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of the war, President Andrzej Duda invited Frank Walter Steinmeier to Wieluń. The German president assured that the crime would not be forgotten and that Germany would acknowledge its historical responsibility. “I bow my head before the Polish victims of the German dictatorship and ask for forgiveness,” Steinmeier said.
The German occupation ended in mid-January 1945. More than a third of the inhabitants, including 5,000 Jews, were murdered. Traces of the war are still visible today. The Germans blew up a church near the market square. The foundations of the temple were excavated after the war, and the square is dedicated to the memory of the war.
Youth will remember the victims
Wieluń is currently called the “City of Peace and Reconciliation”. The visit of Andrzej Duda and Frank-Walter Steinmeier drew attention to the city and its fate. More tourists from Germany appeared, and the media interest is maintained – we read on the “FAZ” portal.
On Sunday, President Duda will visit Wieluń. As every year, the celebrations will be attended by young people from Osterburg in Saxony-Anhalt, Wieluń’s partner city. Young Germans, together with their friends from Wieluń, will walk from the airport, from which German bombers took off on September 1, 1939, to the market square in Wieluń to commemorate the victims of the war.
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