The belief that Lodz did not suffer any damage during the World War II is nothing but a myth. The reason for this was the fact that the losses did not relate to the buildings but to the city’s economy and population and because the first study on this topic did not appear until 2006 – back then the losses were calculated at approximately $ 13,000,000,000.00.

The city of Lodz was not prepared to defend, so the attack went pretty smoothly and on September 8 German troops marched into the city. By the decision of the German authorities Lodz, opposed to e.g. Warsaw, was incorporated into the Third Reich and has been recognized as its "own". The reason for this decision was that the city was a strong economic center and could have be easily converted for the purposes of the occupant and become the main town of the district. Just like in other cities the Nazis established in Lodz a ghetto which operated the longest in Poland (until 1944) and was also a huge labor camp. Lodz was supposed to be a resettlement place of Germans from Volhynia and Bukovina and the Poles were supposed to constitute the labor force in factories managed by the Germans. As part of the Heim ins Reich policy the city had been gradually populating with Germans. Polish children were Germanized, there was also a camp (some say that it was a concentration camp, however it was more an isolation or a labor camp) for children over the age of 2.

Sources: Źródła: Document from official town's page: www.uml.lodz.pl/get.php?id=19391

Book with detailed info: "Straty wojenne Łodzi" - Julian Baranowski, Krzysztof Baranowski, Lechosław Berliński, Andrzej Lech, Franciszek Sitkiewicz, UMŁ 2006