I visited Bydgoszcz today. In many ways the history of Bydgoszcz is similar to the history of other cities in Pomerania, such as Malbork, which I described in a post a month ago. However, its past also has a couple of darker episodes.

In the Middle Ages Bydgoszcz changed hands a couple of times between Poland and the Teutonic Knights and was also destroyed because of their conflict. The city finally ended up in Polish hands as the Teutonic Order was defeated. In the early modern period Bydgoszcz was an important city in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth with its strategic and economically important position next to the Vistula and Brda rivers. After the partitions of Poland, Bydgoszcz became Bromberg and was a part of Prussia and then the German empire until 1919 when it became a part of the new Polish Republic as stated in the treaty of Versailles.

Bydgoszcz’s history is also darker in some regards. Around the middle of the 18th century, it was almost erased from the map and only a few hundred inhabitants remained. This was largely due to the devastations of the Great Northern War (1700-1721) when the Swedish army laid waste to the city and worsened by floods and epidemics.

During the first weeks of WW2 Bydgoszcz also experienced a dark time and became the centre of the German propaganda machine. At the start of the war there was still a relatively large ethnic German minority living in the city. When the war started and the German army approached the city, some Germans started firing on the retreating Polish soldiers. This sparked a backlash in which between 100 to 300 German irregulars and mostly civilians were executed or lynched.

This event became known as ‘Bloody Sunday’ in the German media and the number of victims was initially blown up to 5400. Later this increased to 58 000. The events of ‘Bloody Sunday’ led to bloody reprisals of German soldiers who executed thousands of Polish civilians in Bydgoszcz in the days after and served as justification for the cruel treatment of Poles much later. 

Originally posted on Instagram on December 5, 2021