When German militiamen entered Konitz in 1939, they immediately turned on their Polish Catholic and Jewish neighbours. On 26 September, they shot forty people. The next day a Polish priest was killed, and the day after that the killing extended to the 208 psychiatric patients at the Konitz hospital. By January 1940, with the assistance of the Wehrmacht and the Gestapo, the local militias had killed 900 Poles and Jews from Konitz and its surrounding villages.
