During the September 1939 campaign, it was very common for German Luftwaffe aircraft to target objects of no military importance. Bombs were dropped on Polish towns and villages, and it was mainly civilian inhabitants of Poland who died from the shrapnels or from fires ignited by bombs. German airmen also fired on crowds of fleeing Poles jammed on the roads with their deck guns. All those actions were intended to terrorise Polish society.
In their plans to attack Poland, the Germans assigned a major role to armoured and motorised units, which were to wreak havoc on the ranks of the Polish army with rapid raids. A key role was given to the German military aviation – the Luftwaffe, whose task was to attack airfields, roads and railways, places of army concentration, but also, as it soon turned out, its targets included places completely without a military infrastructure.
The Treaty of Versailles of 1919, which ended the First World War, imposed several restrictions on the losing Germany’s armed forces. One of these was a ban on military aviation. However, this restriction was circumvented by the Germans, who established close military cooperation with the Soviet Union. Thanks to an aviation school opened in 1925 in Lipetsk, next to Voronezh, it allowed to train future German pilots and technical personnel. This was also the location of the aviation training grounds where aircraft designs were developed. The ban was also violated in Germany under the guise of developing German civil aviation.
The situation completely changed after Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, when the German state openly began to violate the Treaty of Versailles. Already at the beginning of 1935, the German military air force, the Luftwaffe, was established, with one of Hitler’s closest associates, Herman Göring, a World War I fighter pilot, as its commander. From then on, the air force underwent a dynamic development, both quantitatively and technically. New airborne regiments were formed and plans of new aircraft emerged on the drawing boards of constructors’ studios, which, once checked, were sent into mass production. They included modern fighters as well as bombers.
Taken part in the Spanish Civil War, the German Condor Legion was also equipped with new weapons. At the end of April 1937, bombers from this formation carried out a raid on Guernica, which killed around 1,000 people and destroyed 60% of the town’s buildings.
This crime, however, was a prelude to the upcoming events in Poland in 1939, following the outbreak of the Second World War. The foreshadowing of the German bestiality, which consisted of raids on a defenceless population, were the words of one of the Luftwaffe commanders, General Albert Kesselring. He addressed the graduates of flight schools shortly before the aggression against Poland: “As you fly over the enemy’s cities and fields, you should suppress all feelings in yourselves. You must tell yourselves that the creatures you see are not human. Only fighting Germans are human beings. For the German Luftwaffe there are neither so-called non-military objects nor emotional considerations. The enemy countries should be wiped off the face of the earth”.
During the 1939 September campaign, the Germans had a huge advantage over the Polish armed forces, both in the number of aircraft and their modernity (German designs were matched only by the Polish PZL-37 ‘Łoś’ bombers, which had recently become part of the equipment of Polish units). Two of the four German air fleets (the 1st operating in the north and the 4th in the south) were involved in the war hostilities.
German pilots followed Kesselring’s directives from the very first day of the war, an example of which was the bombing of the border town of Wieluń, devoid of Polish military units, three times on 1 September 1939. The first raid took place at around 5.30am and was carried out by 29 Junkers Ju-87 ‘Stuka’ dive bombers from the 76th Regiment. Their targets included a hospital, despite it being marked with a symbol with a red cross on the roof. Half an hour later, the city was bombed again by 20 aircraft, and the destruction was completed by another 30 Ju-87 “Stuka” in the afternoon. Several hundred civilian inhabitants of the city died as a result of the air raids, and 75% of the city’s buildings were destroyed, including the synagogue built in 1842.
On the first day of the war, the Polish capital Warsaw also became the target of Luftwaffe air raids. In addition to Okęcie airport, the attacks included residential districts. Practically every day the Germans bombed the city. The most intensive air raids took place on 7,9,10,13,16,17,20,23, and 25 September, when German aircraft repeatedly flew over the capital city, attacking mainly civilian objects, often shooting at civilians with their on-board weapons. This happened, for example, on 13 September, when bullets from German aircraft reached women digging potatoes on the outskirts of Warsaw. The victims included 14-year-old Anna Kostewicz, whose dead body and weeping younger sister Kazimiera were photographed by the American documentary film-maker Julien Bryan. The last raid of 25 September was a typical carpet bombing. At that time, more than 400 aircraft made a total of almost 1,200 combat flights over Warsaw, dropping more than 600 tonnes of bombs, resulting, among others, in the deaths of 700 patients in two Warsaw hospitals.
The German air raids targeted practically all Polish cities and towns, and the civilian population living there. The example was small Frampol in the Lublin region, whose unique architecture, including the largest market square in Europe, was almost completely destroyed.