minority living outside of Germany's post-World War I borders and recruiting its members for Nazi intelligence. It was Hitler's explicit goal to create a Greater German State by annexing territories of other countries inhabited by German minorities. By March 1939, these ambitions, charges of atrocities on both sides of the German-Polish border, distrust, and rising nationalist sentiment in Nazi Germany led to the complete deterioration of Polish-German relations. Hitler's demands for the Polish inhabited Polish Corridor and Polish resistance to Nazi annexation fueled ethnic tensions. For months prior to the 1939 German invasion of Poland, German newspapers and politicians like Adolf Hitler had carried out a national and international propaganda campaign accusing Polish authorities of organizing or tolerating violent ethnic cleansing of ethnic Germans living in Poland. After armed conflict erupted on 1 September 1939, statements that persecutions of ethnic Germans had occurred in Poland, especially in Bydgoszcz, continued to appear in the Nazi press. The incident Beginning in early September, the Nazi intelligence organization Abwehr reported in documents prepared by general Erwin von Lahousen that German armed saboteurs conducting operations behind the front line in Bydgoszcz suffered heavy losses. Their operations coordinated by Abwehr residents in Bydgoszcz-Grischner are documented in operational reports and plans in Abwehr archives. Among the tasks allocated to armed saboteur groups documented in German archives were: blowing up the main office of the German organization Deutsche Vereinigung, the passport office Deutsche Paßstelle, the German private school, and setting fire to the German theater and offices of the Jungdeutsche Partei. These operations are documented as coordinated and organized by Schutzstaffel SS. Additionally a special Abwehr sabotage group was located in Bydgoszcz according to German records from Abwehr Breslau department, called Sabotage-Organisationen Gruppe 12 whose task was to disable a local power-plant and cut phone communications between Inowrocław and Toruń. Besides these sabotage groups in Bydgoszcz, the Abwehr also recorded in its documents paramilitary groups that were formed in the city. According to German records stored in Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv in Freiburg they counted 150 members in Kampf-Organisation under leadership of a local German named Kleiss and were part of a larger military formation coordinated from Poznan which altogether had 2077 members. In addition to this group a 10-member combat unit under command of a German named Otto Meister was also formed in Bydgoszcz and received orders from Wroclaw local office of Abwehr. By the end of August just