Operation Tannenberg

Operation Tannenberg
Unternehmen Tannenberg
Operation Tannenberg, 20 October 1939. The mass murder of Polish townsmen in Reichsgau Wartheland (western Poland)
Location General Government (German-occupied Poland)
Date September 1939 – January 1940
Target Poles
Attack type
 Genocidal massacre, mass shooting
Weapons Firearms
Deaths 20,000 deaths (during 1–2 months) in 760 mass executions by SS Einsatzgruppen
Perpetrators Nazi Germany

Operation Tannenberg (German: Unternehmen Tannenberg) was a codename for one of the anti-Polish extermination actions by Nazi Germany. The shootings were conducted with the use of a proscription list (Sonderfahndungsbuch Polen) targeting Poland’s elite, compiled by the Gestapo in the two years before the invasion of Poland.

The secret lists identified more than 61,000 members of the Polish elite: activists, intelligentsia, scholars, clergy, actors, former officers and others, who were to be interned or shot. Members of the German minority living in Poland assisted in preparing the lists.

Operation Tannenberg was followed by the shooting and gassing of hospital patients and disabled adults, as part of the wider Aktion T4 programme.

Implementation

Polish teachers from Bydgoszcz guarded by members of Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz before execution

Following the orders of Adolf Hitler, a special unit dubbed Tannenberg was created within the Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt). It commanded a number of Einsatzgruppen units formed with Gestapo, Kripo and Sicherheitsdienst (SD) officers and men who were theoretically to follow the Wehrmacht (armed forces) into occupied territories. Their task was to track down and arrest all the people listed on the proscription lists exactly as it had been compiled before the outbreak of war. The plan was finalized in May 1939 by the Central Office II P (Poland).

The first phase of the action occurred in September 1, 1939, and was perpetrated by the Einsatzgruppen, with assistance from the Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz and local SA militias. Many listed targets were killed. Some officials were beaten and mutilated. Pregnant women were also not spared.

Massacres of hospital patients

Remaining building of former SS at Soldau concentration camp in Iłowo-Osada, location of first gas van experiments by SS-Sonderkommando Lange using Polish hospital patients

After the extermination of the Polish elite, patients from Polish hospitals were murdered in Wartheland (Wielkopolska) by Einsatzgruppe VI men. They were led by Herbert Lange, who was under the command of Erich Naumann. He was appointed commandant of the first Chełmno extermination camp soon thereafter. By mid-1940, Lange and his men were responsible for the murder of about 1100 patients in Owińska, 2750 patients at Kościan, 1558 patients and 300 Poles at Działdowo who were shot in the back of the neck; and hundreds of Poles at Fort VII where the mobile gas-chamber (Einsatzwagen) was first developed along with the first gassing bunker.

According to the historian Peter Longerich, the hospital massacres were conducted on the initiative of Einsatzgruppen, because they were not ordered by Himmler. Lange's experience in the mass killing of Poles during Operation Tannenberg was the reason why Ernst Damzog, the Commander of Sicherheitspolizei (Security Police) and SD stationed in occupied Poznań (Posen) placed him in charge of the SS-Sonderkommando Lange (special detachment) for the purpose of mass gassing operations which led to the eventual annihilation of the Łódź Ghetto.

See also