The Deutschland Regiment

Now Warsaw and Modlin were surrounded and the Germans attempted to bring the Polish campaign to a speedy conclusion by unleashing a series of bombings on Warsaw, designed to terrorize its population. The bombings worked, and the Polish Army units in Warsaw surrendered the city on 27 September. This left the battered and depleted Polish 8th Infantry Division in Modlin holding out to the north. Early on 29 September, the Germans opened with a short bombardment, closely followed by an attack by the Deutschland Regiment. Flamethrowing detachments spearheaded the attack by the SS men, and they soon forced a passage into the small town. As the attackers penetrated the defensive lines, the fighting broke down into a series of individual firefights for blocks and buildings. The Polish command ordered the surrender of Polish forces, but in the confusion some units did not receive the order. The fortress garrison was one of those units, and it continued to resist even after the city's surrender. The Germans began a heavy artillery bombardment on Fort No 1, and the last Polish occupants were eventually forced to surrender.

The Germania Regiment

The Germania Regiment was assigned to support the Fourteenth Army in the south and was involved in several clashes with the Polish Cracow and Carpathian Armies. The Polish troops were soon in headlong retreat, trying to escape to freedom in Romania before Soviet forces from the east, advancing in cooperation with the Germans under the terms of the non-aggression treaty signed between Stalin and Hitler, cut their escape route.

The Poles put up strong resistance and on 16 September roughly handled the Germania Regiment near Przemsyl and Lvov, but by 1 October all organized resistance in Poland had ceased. The country was now in the grip of Nazi terror as Himmler and his SS moved to eradicate all traces of the old Polish Government. Political and community leaders, intellectuals, trade unionists, clergymen and Jews were rounded up by the SS and Gestapo squads that moved into the country in the wake of the Blitzkrieg. Himmler ordered Eicke to form three Einsatzgruppen, or Special Action Squads, from the three Totenkopfverbönde regiments mobilized for the campaign. They moved through Polish cities, towns and villages, burning synagogues and arresting and indiscriminately executing any Jews they could catch. Rounding up Jews and locking them inside their synagogues before setting the buildings on fire was a favoured method of murder by the SS Einsatzgruppen. They also arrested and shot Polish civilians, especially intelligentsia, on death lists compiled by the SD, as well as shooting the occupants of any mental hospitals they came across. One Einsatzgruppe murdered 800 people during a two-day period.

SS terror

Other SS units were equally quick to join in the pogrom. Leibstandarte troops were implicated in several massacres of civilians. They killed scores of local villagers in revenge for the casualties they suffered in the fighting along the Warta River. In the weeks after the Polish defeat, Leibstandarte men trawled the areas they occupied, looting property from Jews and staging random killings. The regiment's band machine-gunned more than 50 people in Burzeum who were accused of being "Jewish" criminals. In Danzig the SS-Heimwehr Danzig joined in the effort and massacred 33 Polish civilians, while the soldiers of the SS-VT artillery killed 50 Jews when they set their synagogue on fire.

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