WARSAW, September 15, 2008 (AFP) - Poland's Baltic Sea port city of Gdynia has launched an Internet site hoping to discover the fate of its 120,000 pre-World War II residents, the majority of whom were expelled or killed under Nazi occupation.

'The goal of the program is to discover what happened, name by name, to the pre-war citizens of our city,' Ryszard Toczek, head of the project, told AFP. 'Were they killed and if so, under what circumstances? Were they deported or did they escape abroad or did they die a natural death?'

On the new website -- www.2wojna.gdynia.pl -- the city has published a list of residents by name and address dating from a city address book published in 1937.

The website was launched on September 1, marking the 69th anniversary of Nazi Germany's September 1, 1939 attack on Poland that began World War II.

Project coordinators hope Internet users may be able to offer testimony about the fate of the listed persons.

'It's the last moment to do this kind of research, witnesses from this period are dwindling in numbers from one year to the next,' said Toczek.

The site has already received its first testimonies.

A woman on the 1937 Gdynia address list went to France after the outbreak of the war, according to one Internet user.

'Maria Jaszunska who lived at 89 Swietojanska Street in 1939 escaped from Gdynia,' according to one Internet user who contacted the site.

'As a young employee of a French maritime shipping company with offices located in Gdynia, her employer told her to pack her bags and go to France along with other French and Polish employees. She continued to work for the same company in Paris where she died in the early 1970s.'

-- We have a list of 3,000 people who died --

According to current estimates, the city's Nazi Germany occupiers expelled 50,000 ethnic Poles after October 1939.

Estimates quoted by Toczek, suggest between 12,000 to 13,000 residents, including civil servants, teachers and priests were executed by the Nazis in nearby forests.

Towards the end of the war in 1944, the Nazis reopened mass graves and burned the remains to destroy evidence, he added.

'We have a list of 3,000 people who died. Otherwise we don't have accurate and complete data and that is why we've launched this project,' Toczek explained.

'The data is indispensable, in order to avoid attributing too many crimes to the Nazis or, for that matter, too few,' he added.

Gdynia was a model city for newly independent Poland during the inter-war period. Partitioned by Tsarist Russia, Germany and the Austro-Hungarian empire, Poland ceased to exist for 123 years prior to World War I.

With its independence in 1918, Poland regained limited access to the Baltic Sea along a small swathe of coast flanked by German territory.

In a bid to safeguard its economic independence, it chose Gdynia -- no more than a fishing village at the time -- to build a modern sea port.

Poland's inter-war leaders felt they could not rely on the nearby port city of Danzig (now Poland's Gdansk). Separated after the war from Germany, it became a free city under the control of the League of Nations, a move opposed by a majority of its ethnic German residents.

But when in 1939 Nazi Germany occupied Poland, Gdynia was integrated into the Third Reich under the German name of Gotenhafen (Port of the Goths).

With the intention of reintroducing ethnic Germans into the region lost by Germany in 1918, the Nazi expelled ethnic Poles replacing them with Germans from the Baltic states.

The Nazis installed a military port in Gdynia, which under Polish rule had developed the most modern maritime facilities in the Baltic.

'We don't want to settle accounts, like the cities of Warsaw and Poznan that tallied the financial losses under Nazi German occupation,' insisted Toczek. 'Our goal is to simply know our history,' he said.