I won't start getting involved in a discussion of who started expelling whom, since the Poles started expelling more than a million Germans from their homes after 1919 in Western Prussia, Province Posen and Upper Silesia. Also the Poles were pretty popular with almost all their neighbours after 1918, occupying as much land as they could grab from Lithuania, Ukraine, Bjelo Russia, Czechoslovakia and Germany using military force or starting a war.szopen wrote: If Nazis haven't started the expulsions and murdering milions of Poles, bombing Polish cities in 1939 (starting with Wielun, undefended city, bombed in morning 1939, where main target was hospital because of large red cross which was ideal target for Luftwaffe), then it would not be any expulsions.
who started expulsions - in 1939/40 and then through whole war hundreds of thousands of Poles were forced to leave their home and pushed to GG
These kind of discussions tend to end nowhere and are absolutely futile, since ( ad 1) a crime remains a crime regardless who started, and (ad 2) it is an infantile form of discours excusing the own crimes by pointing the finger to the other people shouting: "But you started!" You normally find this method of discours by people from countries occupied by the Germans during the war trying to excuse their own crimes. The german equivalent would be the right-wing germans who normally point out to the allied crimes and then shout: "See, they were bad boys too, therefore our few crimes are perfectly normal."
The Wielun story however stands for a correction since this town regularly comes up together with Warsaw, Rotterdam and Guernica when it comes to the question who started bombing undefended cities. Most of the contributors normally don't know anything about the legal facts and get everthing mixed up. I remember a letter in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of the largest german newspapers, a couple of months ago, blaming the Germans with starting bombing undefended cities with an attack on Wielun and not even writing about it.
The bombing of Wielun is already mentioned in the first edition of Cajus Bekker's "Angriffshöhe 4000" back in the Sixties with details regarding the attacking units and the polish cavalry units in and near the town. German reconnaissance planes detected the polish units and they were attacked by Stukas and bombers. Horst Boog, a famous specialist on air warfare, also handles the Wielun attack in his writings. There was no deliberate bombing of an undefended town yet alone a hospital. Considering the technical standard of bombing in the Thirties, it is no wonder civilian houses and facilities were hit, but this was not the purpose of the attack. Attacking Red Cross installations was strictly forbidden in the Luftwaffe regulations. Wielun was simply a town not that far from the front line, with troops in and around it and therefore a legitimate target for a bombing as for artillery fire.