Sunday strapping of Bydgoszcz

The Sunday strapping of Bydgoszcz (in German Bromberger Blutsonntag ) is an episode of the Second world war on which the light is done little by little.

Bydgoszcz (in German Bromberg) is a Polish city, located on the the Vistula; it had between the two wars an important German population which was even majority in 1920, when the city had become Polish. The September 3rd 1939, two days after the aggression hitlérienne and the invasion of Poland without declaration of war, a certain number of Germans were massacred there. The propaganda of Goebbels then spoke fifty-eight the thousand dead ones, obviously exaggerated figure, which provides a pretext to bloody reprisals on September 5th when the 50e division of the Wehrmacht enters the city. The Germans gather civil hostages on the central place and shoot between 300 and 400 of them. In reprisals approximately 28.000 of the inhabitants of Bydgoszcz were shot or perished in the concentration camps.

After the war, German historians and Polish historians clashed: for the first one had been caught some with innocent civilians, among whom women and children; for the seconds a Fifth column German had tried to take the control of the city and, since the roofs of the houses, had drawn on the Polish army which, overcome, was folded up in disorder: this one had been defended and the Germans who had perished had died the weapons with the hand. Today, after the fall of the Iron curtain and because of distance of the events, the judgments are done more objective. The number of the German victims now is evaluated between thousand and six thousand died, and more close undoubtedly of the first figure that of the second, but one sees with difficulty the trace of a Fifth column and carnage seems well to be connected so that one would call today an ethnic massacre perpetrated on the civil German population.

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