Blitzkrieg September 1, 1939: a new kind of warfare engulfs Poland

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Finally, on Sept. 27, with 12,000 citizens dead, one-quarter of the city destroyed and much of the rest in flames, with food stocks gone, the water system wrecked, Warsaw gave in. The Chopin had died away; the radio station had gone off the air. And there descended on Poland a great curtain of silence. Hitler had told his commanders in August that he planned to send SS units to Poland "to kill without pity or mercy all men, women and children of Polish race or language." That was an exaggeration, but not by much. In town after town, Einsatzgruppen (special units) began roaming from house to house, systematically murdering local officials, teachers, doctors, aristocrats, Jews, clergymen, anyone who might oppose the New Order. SS officials in Berlin boasted of 200 shootings a day, but behind that curtain of silence, in obscure villages with names like Treblinka and Auschwitz, the killing over the next few years would increase to a level beyond anything civilized minds could imagine.

In the West, the month-old war seemed virtually over before it had even begun, and there began a period of mysterious inertia on both sides. The British called it the phony war, the French drole de guerre, the Germans Sitzkrieg. But the war was not over. It had barely started.