Moorhouse wrote on Twitter that the massacre at the Warsaw suburb of Wawer on December 27, 1939, was “one of the earliest mass atrocities committed by the Germans in occupied Poland.”
Recalling the circumstances of the tragedy, Moorhouse wrote: “The chain of events that led to the massacre began with the killing of two Wehrmacht NCOs in a bar in Wawer.
"The killers - local petty criminals Marian Prasuła and Stanisław Dąbek - escaped the scene, but the Germans started rounding up local men. The round ups lasted through the night. Local men were beaten and abused, their identity documents were destroyed and they were arraigned before a kangaroo court.
"At dawn on the 27th, 114 of them were sentenced to death as collective punishment. On the morning of 27th, the condemned were marched down to a square in the town, where they were divided into batches of a dozen and then machine gunned.
"In total, 107 men were murdered, the youngest of them 15 years old. Seven survived the slaughter beneath the bodies. In addition, the keeper of the bar where the initial murder of the two German NCOs took place - Antoni Bartoszek - was beaten up by the Germans and then hanged above the door of his premises."
Moorhouse added that the massacre proved “a spur to the nascent Polish resistance,” noting that the graffiti "Pamiętamy Wawer" (We Remember Wawer) "became commonplace."
Earlier this year, Moorhouse received the Polish foreign ministry's History Prize for his book First to Fight: Poland 1939.
His other publications include Berlin at War: Life and Death in Hitler's Capital 1939-1945; The Devils' Alliance: Hitler's Pact with Stalin, 1939-1941; and The Third Reich in 100 Objects.
(mk/gs)
