Although he started to work in his parents' shop in Nowy Dwór Gdański, he had a lot of free time which he dedicated to immerse fully himself into the political activity of the NSDAP.

This appointment marked the end of personal feuds which occurred within the Gdańsk NSDAP and concluded with the complete victory of Albert Forster and his suite over the president of the Senate of the Free City of Danzig and the deputy gauleiter Hermann Rauschning, who both had to resign.

[1] Gdańsk NSDAP saw its role expand with the outbreak of World War II and the subsequent occupation of Pomerania by Nazi troops, covering the entire region renamed Reichsgau Danzig-West Prussia.

To take over the political and administrative power in that place, only a man from Forster's closest circle could be trusted: the choice fell logically on Werner Kampe, then 28 year old.

In Bydgoszcz, Kampe initially cooperated with the heads of various organized offices:[2] Werner's main goals were to transform Bydgoszcz into a German city, organizing there an outpost of the NSDAP by recruiting collaborators, disregarding requests, liquidating Polish associations and press, confiscating radios, cars and fuel, taking over schools, launching propaganda cinemas, detaining the Polish intelligentsia and imposing a curfew from dusk till dawn.

[1] Werner Kampe directed in Bydgoszcz the mass murder of the inhabitants, part of the Nazi global plan Intelligenzaktion aiming at annihilating Polish intelligentsia.

The Intelligenzaktion followed a three-point action program:[1] Poles rounded up in the streets or arrested at their homes by the police or Einsatzgruppen were detained in places all over the city, in particular:[1] Some were murdered during interrogations, others taken to the surrounding forests and shot, others put before a special court, which often handed down death sentences.

This systemic annihilation of Poles also took the form of pogroms, planned and prepared under the supervision of Kampe, who received reports from Gestapo and SD, detailing ways, means and results of those actions.

[1] Kampe personally identified people to be "liquidated", such as Leon Barciszewski, the former mayor, who was shot together with his 18-year-old son intentionally on the Polish commemoration day, on 11 November 1939.

Jan Konopczyński, priest of the parish of the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, detained with Leon Barciszewski, witnessed Werner visiting their cell and formally identifying the former mayor and insulting him on the eve of the execution.

[2] Acting as the organizer of round-ups, arrests and shootings, Werner became the major Nazi officer responsible for the exactions which took place in Bydgoszcz from September 1939 to spring 1941.

In addition to Leon Barciszewski and his son, Kampe had been involved in the murder of social activists of Bydgoszcz (Kazimierz Bayer, Jan Góralewski, Tadeusz Janicki), together with Marian Guntzel, the director of municipal gardens, and his wife.

[2] Describing in 1955 the WWII Nazi actions in Bydgoszcz, Julis Hoppenrath, the President of the Gdańsk tax administration, claimed: "the regional party headed by Kampe was particularly active in this field.

[5] The criminal actions carried out in the area of Bydgoszcz were looked with interest in Gdańsk and Berlin, thanks to regular visits that W. Kampe made to Albert Forster, gauleister of the province and to both Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Goebbels.

[1] The city synagogue, then located at the corner of Wały Jagiellońskie and Jana Kazimierza streets, had been closed after the outbreak of World War II and the entry of the Germans into Bydgoszcz.

[7] Furthermore, on 20 September 1939, Kampe demanded the liquidation of: Resettling Polish and Jewish inhabitants, Werner ultimately desired to establish a German district in the city center, near the town hall.

He was a man without education, by profession a commercial assistant in the confectionery industry.This project was partially carried out in the first half of 1940: the church, three adjoining tenements on the right and one building on the left (the first seat of the city Museum) were razed down.

However, the activity was arbitrarily led by Kampe alobne and not by the "Central Trustee Office-East" established by the Third Reich authorities, which raised claims by local Germans, followed by denunciations and investigations by the Orpo and the Gestapo.

[9] His name is mentioned in the files of the former "Main Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland" (Polish: Główna Komisja Badania Zbrodni Niemieckich w Polsce) for Bydgoszcz, as late as August 1946.

The proceedings sped up in spring 1947, when archives about Kampe's actions were discovered in the City Hall, establishing his role in the mass executions during the first months of the German occupation.