Among the victims were defenders of Kalisz, people from Winiary, Kalisz, Ostrów Wielkopolski, Ostrzeszów and other nearby settlements arrested during the genocidal Intelligenzaktion campaign, former insurgents of the Greater Poland uprising, merchants, entrepreneurs, teachers, school principals, doctors, railwaymen, lawyers, farmers and mayors of Ostrów Wielkopolski and Odolanów.

[4][5] In 1940, the occupiers also carried out expulsions of Poles, whose houses and farms were then handed over to German colonists as part of the Lebensraum policy.

[6] In 1940, Polish spy and resistance member Alfred Nowacki, officially classified as a German, settled in Winiary, and soon founded a food processing company.

[7] The factory became a focal point of the Kalisz unit of the Home Army, and Nowacki fictitiously employed his Polish underground associates there.

[7] In March 1944 he was arrested by the Gestapo, then subjected to brutal investigation in Łódź, and eventually sentenced to death and executed in nearby Skarszew in 1945.