On that day, their guns were not loaded, as the Wehrmacht command was more concerned with the risk of "friendly fire" caused by inexperience and nervousness on the part of the troops,[2] than of possible threat from the Polish rear guard.

Lt. Col. Ube, who was in charge of the Wehrmacht units carrying out the massacre (and who was the author of the report to regimental command who blamed the shooting on "Polish partisans") estimated that around 10,000 people had been collected in the square.

The remaining men were told to enter the church, but as they began moving to do so German soldiers opened fire on them from machine guns and hand-held weapons.

[10] There were also several smaller scale murders carried out at various points in the city, including of patients at a military hospital which was run by the Red Cross.

[12] One of the regiments that carried out the massacres in Częstochowa was two days later involved in a very similar incident in the Polish village of Kajetanowice, although on a smaller scale.

In all 72 victims of the Kajetanowice massacre were identified (one-third of the village's inhabitants),[4] including an infant, five little children, fourteen teenagers, twelve women and six elderly persons.

[5] One of the soldiers involved in the action told eyewitness Wiktoria Czech that he knew the villagers were innocent but that the regiment had received orders to kill all civilians.

The official report of the unit stated that the massacre and burning of the village was carried out as revenge for the shooting of two German horses.

Several former soldiers admitted that a general panic had broken out among German troops, with everyone running to get their weapons, stumbling over each other and shooting wildly.

[5] Former soldiers of the unit also admitted that in the search that followed they did not find any weapons, or for that matter, able-bodied men, only a few women with children and some elderly persons.

[5] In regard to the second massacre near the cathedral, former Wehrmacht soldier Fritz S. in an initial statement claimed that after the wild shooting stopped he was ordered to politely ask the civilians to leave their houses and gather in a church.

In 2009, the Polish Institute of National Remembrance found mass graves near the Stradom railway station containing about 2000 corpses, although it is unclear at this stage if the bodies are related to this massacre or to later killings by the Nazis.

[14] On the 70th anniversary of the German invasion of Poland, September 2009, the German public broadcaster Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg was planning to shoot a documentary film on the subject of the massacre in Częstochowa, since the war atrocities of the Wehrmacht were not widely known in Germany (in contrast to war atrocities of the SS and those committed after Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union).