27 December 1939. Warsaw, German-occupied Poland. For almost four months, Poland has been under Nazi occupation, and during this time arrests, intimidation, and arbitrary violence have become an everyday reality for the citizens of the Polish capital.
When two German military officers are shot dead in a local bar by petty criminals who quickly escape, the Nazis respond with ruthless reprisals. Throughout the night, German soldiers sweep through the district of Wawer, dragging men from their homes and the streets. They are beaten, humiliated, and herded together as their identity papers are destroyed.
Before a makeshift court, proceedings unfold without defence or evidence and at dawn on 27 December, 114 men are sentenced to death. That morning, the arrested men are marched to a square, divided into small groups, and machine-gunned. In total, more than one hundred are murdered, the youngest only fifteen years old. The shootings mark one of the first large-scale reprisals carried out by the Nazis in German-occupied Poland, a crime that will become known as the Wawer massacre.
However, this crime will not remain unpunished, and the perpetrators will pay for their crimes with their own lives. The Second World War started on 1 September 1939 when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. The assault had been prepared in secret weeks earlier through the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, a non-aggression agreement between Germany and the Soviet Union that included a hidden protocol dividing Eastern Europe into spheres of influence.
On 17 September 1939, Soviet forces entered Poland from the east and within weeks, the Polish state was crushed and its territory partitioned between the two totalitarian powers. For Adolf Hitler and the Nazi leadership, the campaign was not merely a military operation but an ideological war. Poles were regarded as racially inferior and politically unreliable, obstacles to German expansion in the east.
Nazi doctrine envisioned Poland as a colonial space to be exploited, its elites eliminated and its population reduced to a reservoir of forced labour. Large western regions were annexed directly into the German Reich, while the central part of the country was organized as the General Government under German rule.
From the outset, the occupation was marked by arrests, executions, and the systematic destruction of Polish political and cultural life. The aim was not reconciliation or cooperation, but domination and racial subordination. That policy found one of its earliest and most brutal expressions in the southeastern outskirts of Warsaw, in the district of Wawer.
On the evening of 26 December 1939, while families were still celebrating Christmas, two local criminals, Stanisław Dąbek and Marian Prasuła, refused to leave a small snack bar at 85 Widoczna Street. Both men had escaped earlier from a prison during the chaos of war. When the owner of the snack bar, Antoni Bartoszek, called the police, a confrontation followed.
A local police officer recognized the troublemakers and requested assistance from nearby German forces. Two reserve non-commissioned officers responded. During the ensuing exchange of fire, one German was killed on the spot and the other died on the way to hospital. Zofia Bartoszek, the bar owner’s wife, was wounded in the crossfire. The perpetrators fled into the night.
The shooting was a criminal act, unrelated to any organized resistance, yet within hours it was transformed into a pretext for collective terror. Shortly before 11.00 p.m., units of the German police regiment entered Wawer. Acting on orders from SS-Standartenführer Max Daume, the police ignored offers from local representatives to assist in capturing the gunmen.
Although their identities were already known, Daume ordered his men to round up Polish males at random. Houses were entered without warning and men between the ages of 15 and 70 were dragged from their beds. They included craftsmen, merchants, workers, as well as white-collar workers, a journalist, and an officer of the Polish Army.
Some had come to Wawer only for the Christmas holiday, and many had no knowledge of the earlier incident. A resident of Wawer, Janina Przedlacka, later recalled how six German policemen burst into her apartment and ordered her husband and two sons to dress quickly. When she begged them to leave at least the younger boy, they reluctantly agreed. Her husband and elder son were taken away into the night.
By midnight, dozens of detainees stood assembled before the local police station. Groups of three were taken inside for interrogation, and as they exited the building they were beaten with rifle butts in full view of the others. No formal charges were presented and no evidence was examined, as the verdict had already been decided long before the me
n were called in for questioning. Around 5.00 a.m., a summary court was convened in Wawer. Major Friedrich Wilhelm Wenzel, commander of the two companies that took direct part in the operation, presided over the unlawful proceedings and oversaw the sentencing of the arrested men. Max Daume, who had ordered the round up and initiated the reprisal, was also present. One by one, the names of 114 arrested men were recorded, and none were permitted to defend themselves or explain their whereabouts.
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The German officers declared that since Poles had killed Germans, Poles would suffer the consequences. Among the victims, however, were not only Poles but also a Russian and two citizens of the United States. Among those condemned was a man of German descent Daniel Gering, a bank employee.
Witnesses later stated that the Germans gave him repeated opportunities to declare himself German and thereby save his life, granting him fifteen minutes on three separate occasions to reconsider. Finally, he replied: “I was born a Pole and I shall die a Pole, and I do not care how my death will come about.” With the sentences delivered, the condemned men were led outside to await their fate.
A tall, slim Nazi officer, wearing a hat and probably Daume, stepped forward and announced that everyone would be shot. After a short while, a second voice, speaking in Polish, repeated the sentence. Many fell to their knees and began to weep. Among them, a faint voice, sounding like that of a boy, could be heard: “Major, why are we to die? Please, give us two days, and we will catch these bandits.
” Despite their pleas, there was no reprieve. They were struck repeatedly about the head. In response, they began to sing religious songs in Polish. Of the 114 men, seven were shot but survived and later managed to escape, while 107 were killed. Some shouted “Long live Poland” in the moments before their execution.
Among those killed, the youngest was Tadeusz Ryszka, aged 15, and six were over 60 years old. The execution site resembled a slaughterhouse. The bodies were mutilated beyond recognition. Some of the dead remained kneeling by the fence; others lay scattered across the ground in contorted positions, some on their sides with their faces turned upward.
A few minutes after the massacre, local residents began arriving at the scene, overcome with unspeakable despair. One witness recalled: “People were running around like mad. They were crying, howling in pain and helplessness, and vowing to retaliate. They wanted to take the dead home, lifting them to their feet, urging them to come back to life and speak.
” As the bodies could not be removed, they had to be buried on the spot. Husbands, sons, and fathers were laid in a pit, one beside the other. Their faces were covered with whatever could be found, such as hats, scarves, and handkerchiefs, so that sand would not fall into their eyes. Initially, the victims were buried in a makeshift cemetery.
After the exhumation carried out on 25–27 June 1940 by order of Ludwig Fischer, the Governor of the Warsaw District responsible for terror in the occupied city, seventy-six corpses were reburied in the new cemetery in Wawer. Some were transferred to family graves in Warsaw, and the bodies of eleven Jews were laid to rest in the Jewish cemetery there. The massacre shocked even some within the command structure of the Wehrmacht, the German army.
Generaloberst Johannes Blaskowitz, who at the time was the Wehrmacht’s Commander-in-Chief East, addressed the execution in a report dated 6 February 1940. He wrote that the shooting had deeply angered the Polish population because the murder of the two soldiers had no connection to the civilian community, and that the motives behind the original crime had been purely criminal in nature. His criticism, however, did nothing to change occupation policy.
The Second World War in Europe ended on 8 May 1945 and during the following years justice eventually reached two of the main perpetrators of the Wawer massacre. SS-Standartenführer Max Daume, who had ordered the mass arrests in Wawer and initiated the collective reprisal that led to the executions, was identified by the Americans after Germany’s defeat and handed over to the Polish authorities.
He was tried before the Supreme National Tribunal, a court established to prosecute German war criminals. On 3 March 1947, he was found guilty of organizing and authorizing the massacre, sentenced to death by hanging and executed 4 days later. Major Friedrich Wilhelm Wenzel, who had presided over the summary court and oversaw the unlawful sentencing of 114 Polish civilians, was later extradited to Poland by the Soviet authorities.
He too was held accountable for his role in the killings and was executed in November 1951. Ludwig Fischer, the Governor of the Warsaw District at the time of the Wawer Massacre, ultimately met a similar fate. During the war, Fischer oversaw a campaign of terror in Warsaw that included mass executions, forced-labour roundups, and the deportation of Poles and Polish Jews to German concentration camps.
After Germany’s defeat, he went into hiding in Bavaria but was arrested by U.S. troops on 10 May 1945. Extradited to Poland on 30 March 1946, Fischer was tried before the Supreme National Tribunal for crimes against humanity. On 3 March 1947, he was sentenced to death. The 41-year-old Ludwig Fischer was executed by hanging in Warsaw’s Mokotów Prison on 8 March 1947.
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