The gunfire came without warning, somewhere in the early afternoon of 4 September 1939, in two different sectors of the city. In the courtyard of the Craft Industrial School, where German soldiers were stationed, shots rang out. At the same moment, on Strazacka Street, troops of the 97th Infantry Regiment were escorting several hundred Polish civilians who had been detained in nearby villages when the first bursts erupted there as well. Witnesses at both locations described the same scene: panic, confusion, shots ringing out in every direction, and no one able to tell where they came from.

German soldiers, many of them inexperienced recruits, fired wildly, convinced they were under attack from surrounding buildings or from snipers hidden in windows. The result was catastrophic. Eight German soldiers were killed and fourteen wounded, most likely by friendly fire. Yet almost immediately, the officers blamed the chaos on the city’s Polish and Jewish inhabitants.

They insisted that partisans had launched an organized attack. Later investigations proved that claim false. When troops searched nearby houses, they found no weapons and no civilians carrying guns. Diaries kept by German personnel described the same truth.

One soldier wrote that shots came from everywhere and that no one could tell who was firing. According to the chief medical officer of the Fourth Army Corps, glowing tracer rounds striking the walls made it look as if shots were being fired from the windows. He stated plainly that he did not believe civilians had fired at German troops. Even the Einsatzkommando, one of the Nazi mobile death squads that followed the German army as it invaded and occupied countries across Europe, admitted in its own report that it became impossible to determine who had been shooting at whom.

Despite all of this, German commanders reacted with the assumption of betrayal. And retaliation followed instantly. To understand how the city had come to this, one had to look back only a few days. In the summer of 1939, Częstochowa had a population of about 138,000.

It stood only thirty kilometers from the border between Poland and Germany, placing it directly in the path of the advancing German army. As tensions rose, many families fled the city. Women and children traveled deeper into the country, while men of conscription age prepared for military duty. The Second World War began on 1 September 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland.

Due to the unfavorable course of the border battle, the Polish 7th Infantry Division withdrew from the city on 2 September. Thousands of residents followed the retreating troops, leaving Częstochowa largely deserted by the time German forces approached. German commanders expected resistance from the city’s working-class population, whom they associated with communist organization. The 42nd Regiment of the 46th Infantry Division was therefore ordered to establish strong authority immediately after entering the city.

Yet when German units marched in at dawn on 3 September, they encountered no opposition. Reports described the inhabitants as calm. For almost an entire day, the city stayed quiet. The city had fallen to the Nazis without resistance.

But the calm lasted only hours. Now, on the afternoon of the fourth, that calm had shattered. German soldiers stormed into homes throughout the city. They dragged civilians into the streets, beating and threatening them before forcing them to march toward three assembly points: Magistrate Square, the New Market, and the square in front of the cathedral.

Thousands of terrified residents were ordered to lie face down on the ground for hours, or to stand motionless with their hands raised. Anyone who moved risked being shot. Men were separated from women and children and searched. Possession of a razor blade or a penknife was enough to justify execution on the spot.

Soon the killings began. At Magistrate Square, civilians were lined up and shot at point-blank range. More executions took place in the inner courtyard of the town hall. Many victims were shot in the back of the head beside an anti-aircraft trench dug behind the municipal technical building.

Forty-eight bodies would later be recovered from that location alone. At the New Market, at St. Sigismund’s Church, at the Brassa Factory, and at the military hospital, similar killings occurred. Witnesses remembered scenes of cruelty, especially at the New Market, where German soldiers forced Jewish civilians to jump over the trench while beating them and laughing.

The Einsatzkommando joined the violence. Its members claimed to have shot two partisans on 4 September and executed others the next day, describing them as snipers or assassins. No evidence supported these accusations. As the operation expanded, nearly 10,000 civilians were rounded up at Magistrate Square.

Women and children were eventually released, while most men were taken away under guard. The Zawadzki prison became overcrowded within a matter of hours. Detainees were then forced into St. Sigismund’s Church, and when that building filled, into the cathedral.

German soldiers repeatedly entered both churches, firing warning shots over the heads of the prisoners and threatening to execute everyone. Some victims were shot inside the cathedral. Conditions quickly deteriorated, as prisoners were not allowed to leave even to relieve themselves, which left the churches desecrated. Survivors later described the night as one of terror and suffocation.

German military reports initially claimed that ninety-nine people had been executed. This figure was false. In early 1940, German authorities ordered exhumations across Częstochowa, and investigators uncovered 227 bodies: 194 men, 25 women, and eight children. Among the victims, 205 were Polish and 22 were Jewish, and 121 were identified by name.

Later examinations concluded that the true death toll was higher, with estimates ranging from about 300 to as many as 500 civilians killed on that day. What became known as Bloody Monday, or the Częstochowa massacre, had claimed between 227 and 500 lives—Poles and Jews of all ages. The repression continued in the days that followed. On 5 September, seven Polish men were executed near the airfield.

The city’s German commander imposed a strict curfew from 6:00 p. m. to 7:00 a. m.

Anyone found outside during those hours risked immediate execution. On 8 September, German soldiers discovered remnants of Polish uniforms and two razors in a monastery building once used by Polish cavalry. They arrested two monks, the elderly father of one of them, three neighbors, and two laborers. All were taken to German army barracks, then executed in a forest outside the city.

On 10 September, a large cleansing operation swept through the city. Hundreds of Polish and Jewish men were arrested, beaten, and held in degrading conditions. Nearly 700 civilians were transported to prisoner camps inside Germany, where many suffered further abuse. After the killings, the men of the 46th Infantry Division did not remain in Częstochowa.

They continued their march through the war, fighting first in France in 1940, and later in the invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941. When Germany turned east that summer, the division advanced with the German army into the Soviet Union, pushing through Ukraine and into Crimea. By early November 1941, the same soldiers who had carried out the shootings in Częstochowa took part in the German capture of the Black Sea port city of Feodosia, in the Crimea. It was there that the same violence they had unleashed in Poland would meet them again.

On 29 December 1941, Soviet marine troops and regular infantry landed on the beaches of Feodosia and retook the city the next day. The retreating German commanders left behind about 160 wounded soldiers from the 46th and 170th Infantry Divisions. They lay in military hospitals, many of them too injured to be moved, tended only by a handful of German and Russian doctors and nurses. What followed was one of the most brutal acts of revenge recorded on the Eastern Front.

According to witnesses, including Russian medical personnel, Soviet troops entered the hospitals drunk. They shot doctors and nurses, then turned on the wounded. Some soldiers were thrown from windows onto rocks below. Others were dragged outside into the winter cold, mutilated, and doused with water until their bodies froze solid.

Many were beaten to death where they lay. When German forces recaptured Feodosia on 18 January 1942, they discovered the evidence of the killings in the snow and sand around the hospitals. German medical officers reported finding bodies stacked beneath thin layers of sand, many still wearing splints and plaster casts. Other corpses lay frozen on the beach, their limbs shattered or broken.

In a nearby cemetery, more than one hundred bodies were found piled inside a ruined building, many of them showing signs of severe mutilation. Only twelve wounded Germans survived the massacre, escaping death only because they managed to hide for days while the others were hunted down and killed. Among the dead were many men of the 46th Infantry Division, the same unit that had carried out the killings in Poland two years earlier. In Feodosia, the violence they once unleashed on civilians in the city of Częstochowa finally came back to them with equal cruelty.

The perpetrators had paid for their crimes with their own lives.