Blitzkrieg Unleashed: the German Invasion of Poland 1939

The battle won, German troops began clearing up the battlefield. Thousands of horses roamed around without their masters. Some were shot, most were rounded up and pressed into service hauling German carts and guns. Cattle, too, driven by the Poles from Poznan, also wandered around aimlessly. Binoculars, saddles, harnesses, ammunition, guns, rifles – all proved useful replacements for equipment lost or destroyed in the bitter fighting. Polish wounded lay on straw on panje carts, tended by nurses. Polish prisoners were herded into temporary camps or sent to the rear for processing. There were German prisoners too, several hundred Landsers freed from temporary captivity in Polish hands. Most were men of 30th Infantry Division who had been marched around the battlefield by their captors for days on end, seemingly without aim, covering upwards of thirty miles a day. `They were treated badly and roughly,’ a staff officer observed. `Usually all they had to eat was a thin cabbage soup and occasionally some bread.’

After two days out of the line to recover from the battering it had taken, the men of 30th Infantry Division returned to the battlefield. The inhabitants of the village of Slugi, north of Lodz, had rejoiced when liberated by their countrymen. Now they were sullen and evasive. But the battlefield itself was empty; gone were the bodies of the German dead – among them company commander, the brave yet brutal Joachim Meyer-Quade, and two junior officers – they had been carted away by the Poles and hastily buried in Piatek, five miles to the east. Meyer-Quade was a Nazi hero, winner of the Iron Cross First and Second Class a generation earlier, an Obergruppenführer in the Sturmabteilung in Kiel, a veteran of the Party from its days of the Kampfzeit – years of struggle. `He always set the example,’ Viktor Lutze, the SA’s Chief-of-Staff, eulogised in the Nazi organ, the Völkischer Beobachter. `Now he marches to immortality under the standard of Horst Wessel.’ For Meyer-Quade’s fallen comrades there were no such eulogies, no full pages dedicated to them in the Völkischer Beobachter. There were, however, seventeen dog tags, recovered by Bavarian troops now holding the line at Slugi; children playing in a farmhouse found soldiers’ paybooks. The men of the Nordmark scoured the now silent command post and the lines they had held determinedly. Dead Poles lay where they had been cut down by the Germans’ fire. `The cap of a dead NCO was found, while at the position where the company’s final command post had been, the Hautpmann’s sword was still sticking out of the piled-up earth,’ Christian Kinder recalled. Gerhard M was ordered to bury German dead in Piatek – `a ghastly place of death’ – with five comrades. The town centre was littered with smashed vehicles and the cadavers of horses. And piled high in two ditches, each 300 yards long, were the Gefallenen. No attempt had been made to inter them. Faces had turned black and started to decompose. Gerhard picked up guns, rusted machine-guns, spades, bayonets, gunsights, and strips of canvas from this `field of death’, while the rest of the burial party dug graves for six men at a time. The soldiers snapped slats off garden fences to make simple crosses. `The dead are laid side-by-side with all their kit,’ Gerhard remembered. `Nothing is taken off them – we even leave their steel helmets on their heads.’ Dirt was tossed over the fallen until small mounds replaced the hole in the ground. Green branches were tossed upon them and a simple wooden cross thrust into the mound. A pierced steel helmet placed atop the cross completed the grave. It went on like this all day. No man ate.

No man who witnessed the battlefield of the Bzura was not left deeply impressed by what he saw. A Propaganda Kompanie reporter wandered along a stretch of the main road between Sochaczew and Wyzogrod – `the road of lost divisions’. It was littered with wrecked cars, burned-out ammunition limbers, abandoned gas masks, steel helmets, cartridge belts, caps, boots. The smell was acrid, overpowering. `Bloated cadavers of horses, their harnesses torn, litter the forest earth,’ he wrote, `and among them dead artillerymen, their hands tensed up, their faces look like masks which still depict their last fright.’ Such scenes were repeated mile after mile. In a clearing a dozen guns were lined up ready to move. On a secluded forest lane, a handful of light tanks wrecked, burned out, their hulls empty shells. Next to the main road a staff car was turned upside, letters, photographs, documents were tossed around on the ground. The reporter studied the photograph of an elderly Polish officer at home with his family. His body lay a few feet away on a forested slope. `It is that same clean-shaven face, only waxen now and without life,’ the reporter recalled. `We look for his dog tag, but there’s no indentation on it, a blank piece of metal hanging pointlessly around his chest.’ So hastily had the Polish Army been mobilised there had no time to press them. The ford of the Bzura at Brochow, thirty miles west of Warsaw, seemed `like the apotheosis of devastation’. Polish troops had tried to force the river only to face a wall of steel on the far bank in the form of panzers, while a hail of death fell from the Stukas overhead. Carts, guns, men, horses, all became trapped at Brochow. `They were destroyed where they drove, rode or stood, at the exits of the forest paths and here, where the columns ran into each other in front of the ford, only to end in utter chaos and wild panic,’ the reporter observed. The waters of the Bzura lapped the remains of a shattered army. There was so much debris in the river it was possible for the victors to cross the Bzura without getting their feet wet.