border were cut off and ceased to exist. This created a domino effect. Because Łódź had fallen, the victorious tank brigade and the supporting infantry soldiers had to withdraw from Piotrkow Trybunalski. This exposed the flank of the Kraków Army and they and the fully mechanized 10th Cavalry Brigade of Stanislaw Maczek had to head towards Lviv. This withdrawal from southwestern Poland in turn forced a withdrawal from northern Poland and left units under the de facto command of General Kutrzeba (Battle of Bzura river) stranded west of the Vistula river. Even the units that did successfully withdraw, for the most part, did not reach either the Romanian Bridgehead nor the Hungarian border crossing because on September 17, 1939, Soviet troops took over that very bridgehead and cut off the routes of escape. Only 60,000 to 80,000 Polish soldiers escaped German, Soviet, or Slovak capture or the need to hide to continue the fight as underground soldiers. Polish counterattack The Germans advanced too fast for the units of the Polish Army to be in a position to counterattack, or for other armies to encircle the Germans by forcing their spear heads into a small narrow corridor between Łódź and Warsaw. The only major Polish offensive action occurred during the Battle of Bzura river marshes also known as the Battle of Kutno (township). Aftermath All of Poland fell completely under the control of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and the Slovak Republic on October 6, 1939. By 1940 the city of Łódź was renamed Litzmannstadt and became an important industrial city for the German war machine. Munitions and uniforms were manufactured in the newly established Ghetto Litzmannstadt by Jewish slave labor. Jews from Poland, Germany, Benelux and Czechoslovakia as well as Roma people from Austria were brought to live and work there in appalling conditions. While most of them were taken for extermination in the Nazi death camps, more than 70,000 survived until the summer of 1944. But the Soviet move forward stopped and in August 1944 those survivors were also killed by the Nazis. At the end of the war Łódź was taken by the Soviet Army on January 17, 1945, without substantial damage to the city. Only 877 Jews survived to the moment of liberation. Tens of thousands of ethnic Poles were expelled from the city. In 1939, at least 10,000 Poles were expelled. A concentration camp was built