Germans take Białystok

On 26 August 1915 the German war communiqué reported that on the northern sector of the Eastern Front fighting was going on for the line of the Brzozówka river, and that “our advance guards have reached Białystok”. The Russians abandoned Białystok without a fight. According to the Austrian official history, by the evening of that day the German 8th Army of General Friedrich von Scholtz already stood on a line from Białystok to Suchowola. For the city, which had belonged to Russia since 1807 and to the Grodno Governorate since 1842, a German occupation lasting more than three years began. Polish and Russian works often give the date as 13 August. This is the same day in the Julian calendar, which was then in use in Russia.

The road to Białystok

Białystok was an important junction on the Warsaw–St Petersburg railway, from which lines branched off to Brest, Grodno and East Prussia. To the west and north it was shielded by the Narew and the marshes of the Biebrza with the fortress of Osowiec. In the second half of August this shield fell apart. On 22 August the Russians abandoned Osowiec, and the armies of Scholtz and General Max von Gallwitz crossed the Narew. On 25 August the German communiqué reported that the 8th Army had taken Knyszyn and forced the Narew south of Tykocin, and that Gallwitz’s army had fought its way across on the road from Sokoły to Białystok. That same day General Mikhail Alekseyev ordered the wings of his armies threatened with encirclement to fall back to the line Białystok–Bielsk, and during the night of 25–26 August the Central Powers entered Brest-Litovsk. Białystok found itself in the front line and the Russians abandoned it. Some sources credit the capture of the city to units of Gallwitz’s 12th Army, whose right wing was advancing south of it.

Evacuation and destruction

The city, which before the war had several tens of thousands of inhabitants, most of them Jews, was one of the largest centres of the textile industry in the Russian Empire. The war reached it earlier than many other places. On 20 April 1915 German aircraft bombed Białystok, killing 13 people. When the front began to approach in the summer, the Russian authorities set about evacuating it. Machinery, raw materials and finished goods were carried east from the factories, and what could not be taken was blown up or burned. The Russians destroyed the water towers, part of the power station, railway installations and the viaduct over the tracks. For many years Białystok ceased to be an industrial city. Together with the army and the officials, most of the Orthodox inhabitants left, frightened by official propaganda about German atrocities. This was part of the great wave of bezhenstvo, the refugee exodus that swept the western governorates of Russia in 1915.

A Polish Białystok newspaper recalled years later that the tsarist troops had left “burning and plundering the property of the unfortunate citizens of Białystok and the surrounding area”. News of the Russians’ departure quickly spread through the city. Polish accounts describe that morning as the first in more than a hundred years when there was no foreign authority in Białystok: the Russians were already gone and the Germans had not yet arrived. Many inhabitants greeted the arrival of the Germans with relief, hoping that it would be easier than the last weeks of Russian rule.

Under occupation

These hopes were soon dashed. Białystok came under the German military administration of the former western governorates, run by the Eastern Front command of Hindenburg and Ludendorff. The occupation brought requisitions, forced labour and the removal of the remaining machinery to Germany. The Germans turned some Orthodox churches into military hospitals and places of worship for their own garrison, and set up a hospital in the Branicki Palace. The front meanwhile moved further east, towards Grodno and Vilna. German troops left Białystok only on 19 February 1919, when units of the Polish Army entered the city.