At Bydgoszcz on “Bloody Sunday,” 3 September, a thousand German civilians were massacred after allegations that they had fired on Polish troops. Some modern German historians claim that up to 13,000 ethnic Germans were killed during the campaign, most of them innocents; the true figure is almost certainly much lower, but such deaths provided a pretext for appalling and systemic Nazi atrocities towards Poles, and especially Polish Jews, which began within days of the invasion.
