Attack on the Vistula Bridge near Dirschau
The attack on the Vistula Bridge near Dirschau in Poland was a commando operation by the German Wehrmacht on the morning of September 1, 1939. On that day, the Second World War began .
History of the bridges
The Dirschau Bridge between Dirschau and Marienburg was completed in 1857 after twelve years of construction. It was a combined road-rail bridge. The rail connection was strategically important ( Prussian Eastern Railway ) because it was used to run traffic to Königsberg in East Prussia . For a long time it was the steel girder bridge with the largest span in Germany. The middle segments had a span of 131 m. The first bridge was a lattice girder construction , parts of which still exist today. With the increasing rail traffic, the bridge, which was also used by wagons and pedestrians, became the bottleneck and Prussia decided to build a second bridge reserved for the railways only. This was built between 1888 and 1891 with lens holders . Nothing of her exists today. Between 1910 and 1912, the bridges were lengthened by 250 m to allow more passage for the Vistula floods.
After the First World War , the bridge fell to Poland due to the creation of the Polish corridor . The rail route from the now Polish bridge to the East Prussian Marienburg ran 16 km on the territory of the Free State of Danzig until it moved to German territory in East Prussia shortly before Marienburg. In terms of railway technology, the trains to the Polish corridor on Polish locomotives with Polish personnel were completed in Marienburg. Operation on the section of the route over Gdańsk was ensured by Polish staff. The bank of the Vistula was the border to Poland, the bridge itself was already on Polish territory. Freight trains were sealed in the Polish Dirschau behind the bridge for the journey (approx. 100 km) through the Polish corridor.
The plan of attack
The bridges were of great strategic importance, especially with regard to the planned offensive to the east. On August 8, 1939, Hitler instructed the High Command of the Wehrmacht : "In all attacks against Poland, the main focus is on maintaining the surprise of taking possession of the Vistula bridges." Have gates, rail barriers and explosive charges fitted. This was not hidden from the German Enlightenment. A commando operation was planned. A scheduled German freight train was supposed to drive over the bridge immediately before the start of the war and thus open the barriers and gates. German fighter planes should bomb out the ignition wires with the outbreak of war and the shelter, would be carried out from the ignition destroy. The Ju-87 pilots who were delegated for this purpose drove several times as passengers on regular trains in order to memorize the local conditions. Immediately after the ignition cables were destroyed, engineer units hidden in the apparently regular freight train were supposed to render the detonators harmless and shut down the defenders at the bridge. An armored train immediately following the freight train was to use its firepower to put the other Polish defenders out of action and hold the bridge against possible relief attacks until regular German Wehrmacht units arrived.
The attack
The Polish administration was notified of the scheduled German freight train 963 consisting of 65 wagons for September 1, 1939. With him the German engineer unit 41 was smuggled in. At 3:08 a.m., the train, apparently coming from East Prussia, began its journey to the Reich. The locomotive was changed in Marienburg. However, German railway workers in Polish uniforms performed their service on the now Polish locomotive. The Polish railway workers were murdered, making them the first to die in this as yet undeclared war. On the other trip was followed by the scheduled freight train of armored train . So that this armored train was not reported on the section of the route belonging to Danzig and monitored by Polish railroad workers, all Polish marshals on the route were arrested by command groups operating from Danzig and most of them murdered. In Simonsdorf , a Polish official became suspicious and began to check the freight and transit documents. Although this played into the hand of the Germans, they had to be 15 minutes late to keep to the schedule, but on the other hand, the Germans increasingly lost control of the schedule. The distance to the following armored train dwindled and the entire plan threatened to be exposed. The commando units in the occupied Polish checkpoints in the Gdansk area reacted in panic and shot 20 Polish railway and customs officials who had already been overwhelmed. A Polish railway worker was able to warn the guards at the bridge before he was shot while he called.
The Polish defenders immediately closed the gates, installed the barriers and prepared to blow up the bridge. The delay in Simonsdorf was critical for the command team, but it was just on schedule. The train had to cross the bridge at 4:45 a.m. at the latest. This still seemed feasible, but the engineer unit under the command of Lieutenant Hacken overlooked the fact that after the warning, due to the barriers and the closed gates, the bridge could no longer be driven.
At 4:26 a.m., three Ju 87 B-1s took off from Elbing . At 4:33 a.m. they destroyed the ignition cables to the bridge and the shelter from which the blast was to be carried out. The first bombs on Poland threw Lieutenant Bruno Dilley thus twelve minutes before the official start of the war , which the shelling of Westerplatte at 4.45 am by the training ship Schleswig-Holstein initiated.
Access to the bridge was denied to the trains. The installed barriers and the closed gates of the bridge prevented the commando squad and the armored train following it. Since the freight train could not drive over the bridge as planned, the armored train behind him came to a halt in front of the bridge and could not use its firepower effectively. 100 m before the bridge, the German troops left the freight train, but could not approach the bridge successfully. The Polish defenders have since managed to create new connections to the explosive charges. At 6:10 a.m. they managed to blow up the first bridge pier in Lisau, and at 6:40 a.m. also the first one on Dirschau's side. The first two fields on each side of the bridge fell into the river.
Wehrmacht troops took the destroyed bridges one day later. German engineer units installed a single-lane emergency bridge for rail traffic by October 15. One year after the demolition, the new double-track bridge went into operation before it was almost completely demolished by German troops on the evening of March 8, 1945 while retreating. Today's Weichselbahnbrücke was built a few meters away from the old bridges. The road bridge still contains parts of the old box bridge from 1857, parts of a British emergency bridge and other temporary parts.
The old bridge is now in great need of renovation and can only be crossed by pedestrians.
literature
- Gabriel Habermann: Building bridges. In: ModellEisenBahner , 58, 2009, no . 9, Verlagsgruppe Bahn, Bad Waldsee, pp. 30–34 (about the Vistula bridges from Dirschau).
- Janusz Piekalkiewicz: Polish campaign, Hitler and Stalin smash the Polish Republic. Lübbe, Bergisch Gladbach 1982, ISBN 3-7857-0326-0 .
- Jochen Böhler: The attack, Germany's war against Poland. Eichborn Verlag, Frankfurt, 2009, ISBN 978-3-8218-5706-0 , pp. 65-67.
Web links
- Exhibition Alte Weichselbrücke Dirschau, 1850–1857 . 2002.
- The Vistula bridges between 1920 and 1945
- brueckenweb.de