Germans take Łódź

On Sunday 6 December 1914 German troops marched into Łódź. The Russians had left the city the previous night. So ended the Battle of Łódź, fought since 11 November, in which neither side had managed to encircle the other. The second-largest city of the Kingdom of Poland, with nearly 480,000 inhabitants in 1914, came under German occupation for almost four years.

The Russian withdrawal

After General Scheffer’s German group broke out of the pocket at Brzeziny, the fighting around Łódź went on for almost two more weeks. The Germans received reinforcements, including corps transferred from the Western Front, which from 30 November attacked near Łowicz. The Russian armies, exhausted and short of ammunition, held a salient bulging westwards around the city. On 29 November the commander-in-chief, Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich, decided to pull the troops back to a shorter line, closer to Warsaw.

The Russians left Łódź on the night of 5–6 December. According to the Polish Wikipedia the first German patrols appeared in the city early in the morning, and the main body, from General Reinhard von Scheffer-Boyadel’s XXV Reserve Corps, entered at 4.45 p.m. The German artillery shelled the north-western part of the city that same day. The fire stopped only when, at the request of a German officer, a white flag was hung from the tower of the Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

The city after the battle

The people of Łódź had lived through three weeks of fear. From 18 November shells had been falling on the city, more than a hundred civilians had been killed, and hundreds of buildings had been destroyed or damaged. Hospitals and larger buildings were full of wounded. The city’s affairs were run by the Citizens’ Committee and order was kept by the Citizens’ Militia, both set up by the inhabitants themselves in the first weeks of the war. The Committee continued to operate under the occupation, until July 1915.

The Germans quickly established their own rule. General Hermann von Gerecke became commandant of the city, and from 19 December he headed the newly created military governorate of Łódź. The occupiers began requisitioning everything that might be of use to the army and to German industry. Raw materials, textiles, machinery, brass and copper parts, engines and drive belts were carried off from the factories. According to contemporary estimates, by April 1915 goods and raw materials worth tens of millions of roubles had been requisitioned in Łódź, including several tens of millions of pounds of cotton.

Hunger and unemployment

For the inhabitants the worst was yet to come. The Łódź textile industry, which before the war had sold its products mainly in Russia, had come to a standstill in the very first weeks of the war. According to official figures, on 1 September 1914, 135,000 people in the city were without means of subsistence. Cut off from the Russian market and stripped of raw materials, Łódź sank into poverty. By May 1915 the number of people without work or means of subsistence had risen to about 250,000. Food and fuel were short, and prices rose month by month. Thousands of workers later went to work in Germany, voluntarily or under compulsion.

Poverty, hunger, disease and flight meant that during the war the population of Łódź fell by more than a quarter of a million, almost by half. The German occupation of the city (PL) lasted until November 1918.

After the capture of Łódź

The capture of Łódź was an important propaganda success for the Germans, but not a decisive one. The Russian armies had not been destroyed. They were withdrawing east to the Bzura, the Rawka and the Pilica, where they intended to make a stand on new positions. In the north, near Łowicz, the fighting continued. Hopes of another march on Warsaw were soon to be dashed.