Wawer massacre

In Wawer (December 1939)

Antoni Bartoszek hanged by the Germans on December 27, 1939 near the entrance to his restaurant

Memorial to the Wawer massacre

The Wawer massacre on December 27, 1939 was a retaliatory action by the German police in occupied Warsaw in the town of Wawer .

The massacre

On the evening of December 26, 1939, two NCOs of the German 538th Construction Battalion stationed in Wawer were shot dead in an inn by the Polish criminals Marian Prasuła and Stanisław Dąbek. As a result, the deputy commander of the Warsaw Police Regiment (31st Regiment of the Ordnungspolizei), SS-Standartenführer Max Daume (1894-1947, a senior Nazi police officer and SS-Standartenführer) ordered one by the 2nd and 3rd Company of VI . Battalion to be carried out "special action" in Wawer and the nearby Anin . The commanding officer of the unit was Major Friedrich Wilhelm Wenzel. On the night of December 26th to 27th, around 120 arbitrarily selected Polish men between the ages of 16 and 70 were herded out of apartments and houses. On site, under the chairmanship of Wenceslas and in the presence of Daumes, a court martial was formed, which sentenced 114 men to death (some had managed to escape). Statements by those affected were not allowed. Before the verdict was pronounced, the innkeeper in which the two German soldiers were shot was hanged. The convicted local residents were shot with a machine gun in a vacant square between Błękitna and Spiżowa streets.

In a critical report by the Commander-in-Chief of the East, Colonel-General Johannes Blaskowitz , on February 6, 1940, the Wawer massacre was named and the fact that the battalion in command was praised was also mentioned. The two people responsible for the massacre, Daume and Wenzel, were sentenced to death after the war by the Supreme People's Tribunal and the Voivodship Court in Warsaw. Both were executed in Poland (1947 and 1951, respectively).

memory

Today there is a memorial near the execution site in Wawer. The symbol of the Polish resistance movement in World War II, the Kotwica , was created on the occasion of the Wawer massacre.

literature

Wladyslaw Bartoszewski : The death ring around Warsaw 1939-1944. Interpress, Warsaw 1969, p. 27 ff.
Martin Stotzer: ... and there was war outside. About everyday life and all night in Büren an der Aare during the Second World War . Chronos Verlag, Zurich 2016, ISBN 978-3-0340-1316-1 ; therein pp. 36–42: The mass murder in Anin near Warsaw, December 1939. A previously unpublished eyewitness report .

Web links

Photos of the massacre

Individual evidence

↑ According to Bogdan Musial : The fourth partition of Poland. In: Manuel Becker, Holger Löttel, Christoph Studt (eds.): The military resistance against Hitler in the light of new controversies (= series of publications of the research community July 20, 1944 eV vol. 12). Lit-Verlag, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-8258-1768-8 , p. 31.

52.233777777778 21.159138888889Coordinates: 52 ° 14 ′ 1.6 ″ N , 21 ° 9 ′ 32.9 ″ E

[1] According to Bogdan Musial : The fourth partition of Poland. In: Manuel Becker, Holger Löttel, Christoph Studt (eds.): The military resistance against Hitler in the light of new controversies (= series of publications of the research community July 20, 1944 eV vol. 12). Lit-Verlag, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-8258-1768-8 , p. 31.