Father Kolbe — the Wehrmacht arrives at Niepokalanów

Father Maximilian Kolbe (Rajmund Kolbe), 45, is a Conventual Franciscan. Since 1927 he has run the monastery of Niepokalanów ("City of the Immaculate"), which he founded — the largest Franciscan community in the Catholic world, with 762 friars in 1939. The monastery runs a printing house that publishes the monthly Rycerz Niepokalanej in a print run of one million (the largest Catholic magazine in Poland), a daily Mały Dziennik at 137,000 copies, a radio station, and a training airfield for missionary friars learning to fly.

Politically, Kolbe long published in Rycerz Niepokalanej texts now regarded as antisemitic in their tone (likening Judaism to a "spiritual enemy"). But that line fades from 1937 onward. In 1936 he had visited Japan to found a monastery in Nagasaki, and had been marked by the intercultural experience.

On 1 September 1939, Niepokalanów lies on the main axis of the German advance Łódź — Warsaw. From 9 to 17 September, tens of thousands of civilian refugees from the north and west of Poland pass through the region. Kolbe throws open the monastery's gates: dormitories, kitchens, workshops, underground shelters dug for the printing press. On 14 September there are about 3,500 refugees. Among them: between 1,500 and 2,000 Jews from the shtetls of Mazovia, fleeing the massacres already foretold. Kolbe takes them in without distinction of faith. The Wehrmacht approaches on 18 September.