Hitler could never bear that in the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, the winning powers of World War I handed over the city of Danzig to Poland. The future Nazi dictator was 29 years old and was in hospital, recovering from the poison gas attack he had suffered on the Ypres front, when he was informed that the conflict had ended and that Germany had been defeated. “Everything went black again before my eyes,” he commented irritably.
In reality, Danzig had been declared a free city-state and was to be administered jointly by Poland and the League of Nations. With this new status, the Poles were allowed to maintain special port rights, an arsenal protected by a contingent of 88 soldiers on the Westerplatte peninsula and the small post office that stars in the story that we are going to tell you. A feat that was the first act of heroism of World War II.
For the young Adolf, however, the city of Danzig “had been seized under duress, with a revolver in his hand and threatening the Germans with death by starvation”, as he denounced when he came to power in 1933. He was aware that The city and its corridor had been very important for communications and commerce in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century, which is why he made it one of his main obsessions and the center of his foreign policy when he took charge of the country.
Danzig had to return to Germany and had to do it as soon as possible. Hitler knew that 90% of its inhabitants were German, 10% of the Polish Kashubian minority, an ethnic group that spoke its own dialect. Since Versailles, the city has been governed by a democratically elected senate, but Poland’s exact powers over it have never been defined in a statute. That is why the friction with the Nazis was constant. In fact, the Polish government was forced to reinforce its Westerplatte defenses in 1933, building bunkers and adding reinforced concrete protection, among other things.
The Nazis, in the City Hall
The situation was complicated when the National Socialists entered the City Hall after the municipal elections and began to demand in plenary sessions that the city return to Germany. Soon, official requests turned into threats through the Third Reich’s Foreign Minister Joachim Ribbentrop and Hitler. Fear gripped the Polish neighbors as they watched the Nazis invade Czechoslovakia and Memel, the latter a city that had also been declared free at Versailles. Everything seemed to indicate that Danzig would be next… and they were not wrong.
The ‘Führer’ signed a secret order to launch the invasion of Poland, and this had to start with his long-awaited Danzig. Its conquest was of vital importance, since it was one of the few exits to the sea that the country could count on and its capitulation meant the impossibility of the enemy to respond by sea to the attacks of the Germans. With that idea in mind, on August 31, 1939, the false flag attack against the radio station in Gleiwitz, a Polish border city, was launched. Hitler thus gave the starting signal to the Second World War, to attack Westerplatte on September 1.
In total, 1,500 Germans against 200 Poles, in an episode that we have already told you about on ABC. The attack took the inhabitants of Danzig by surprise, who were startled awake by the noise of the shelling and by the great columns of smoke rising from the fuel depots in the port. In eight minutes they had seen how eight 280-millimeter projectiles fell on the outer walls, 59 from 155 and 600 from 20, with which they tried to open a breach to pave the way for the infantrymen who were guarding on the ground. However, they failed and had to back down.
Assault on the Danzig post office, 1 September 1939, by SS units supported by an ADGZ armored car
“Continue this fight to the end”
After that first day of unsuccessful fighting on Westerplatte, Hitler gave a speech before the Reichstag about the start of the war against Poland. Danzig had a special role: «For years we have been suffering under the pressure of a problem that was raised in the Treaty of Versailles and whose consequences are now not unbearable. Danzig has been and is a German city. The runner has been and is also German. Danzig was separated from us, the corridor was annexed by the Poles and, as in all eastern German regions, the inhabitants of this corridor have been intolerably mistreated. […]. That is why I am resolved to continue this fight to the end.”
In the midst of all this initial chaos, one of the most impressive and unusual episodes of the war occurred: the assault on the Post Office, made up of several buildings that had originally been built as a German military hospital. As tension with Germany rose in the months before the outbreak of war, Poland dispatched Army Reserve Combat Engineer and Second Lieutenant Konrad Guderskiso that, together with the commander Alfons Flisykowskiorganized security personnel and volunteers from the office to defend the small square from possible hostilities.
They certainly took this very seriously, as they also trained the staff and prepared the defenses in and around the building, cutting down all the nearby trees to gain visibility and fortifying the entrance. In mid-August 1939, when it was suspected that Hitler was going to attack the city, ten additional employees were sent from other Polish post offices in Gdynia and Bydgoszcz. When the invasion began on September 1, there were 56 people in the compound: Guderski, 42 local Polish employees, ten employees from Gdynia and Bydgoszcz, and the building caretaker along with his wife and his ten-year-old daughter, Erwinia. The family lived in a small apartment right there.
a small arsenal
To defend themselves, the Polish employees had a small arms cache consisting of three Browning light machine guns, 40 handguns, and three boxes of hand grenades. With this arsenal they had to keep the Germans away from the building for only six hours, since a relief force from the Pomeranian Army would secure the area before the end of that period. The Nazi plan, devised more than two months earlier, was to storm the main building from two directions: a diversionary attack through the main entrance, while the main force broke through the wall of the neighboring Labor Office.
A contingent of Nazi-affiliated policemen under the command of Willie Bethke, which surrounded the building at 4 a.m., 45 minutes before the battleship Schleswig-Holstein began the bombardment on Westerplatte. Then they cut the telephone lines and electricity and, at the appointed time, the exchange of shots with the besieged began. The Germans were soon supported by local formations of the SA and units of the SS Wachsturmbann Eimann and the SS Heimwehr, with three heavy armored vehicles of the Police.
Albert Forster, head of the local Nazi party, arrived in one of the vehicles to witness the event as if it were a movie. A good group of local journalists from newspapers, radio and the city news agency also turned up to cover the battle. The first attack was repulsed, although some Germans managed to briefly enter the building. Two people died and seven were injured, including the group leader. The second was also repelled, Guderski himself dying from the explosion of his own grenade. The Poles were offering much fiercer and more determined resistance than the Nazis had expected.
Assault on the Danzig post office, by the Nazis, on the first day of World War II
600 kilos of explosives
At 1100, the Wehrmacht sent in two 75mm guns and a 105mm howitzer in support, but the offensive was equally contained. At 3:00 p.m., the Germans declared a provisional two-hour ceasefire and demanded the surrender of the Poles, but the Poles chose to resist. While the negotiations were taking place, Nazi sappers dug tunnels under the building’s foundation and planted 600 kilograms of explosives. Bethke had chosen the most brutal and ruthless option of all. He had to finish off those postmen as soon as possible… before they ended up humiliating them.
At 5:00 p.m. they were detonated, destroying part of the wall of the headquarters, through which the third attack was then launched with the support of the artillery. They captured most of the building, but the basement resisted. Frustrated, Bethke asked the firemen for a tanker which they filled with gasoline to flood it and set it on fire with hand grenades. Three Poles died as a result of the flames and the rest had to turn themselves in. First the director came out, Jan Michonwith a white flag. That did not help him, because the Germans shot him anyway. Then the commander Joseph Wasik he was burned alive as soon as he appeared on the street.
The remaining defenders were allowed to surrender and leave the burning building. 16 wounded were counted, of which six ended up dying in the Gestapo hospital, including the 10-year-old girl. The other 28 survivors were arrested and tortured, along with 400 other Danzig residents at the nearby Victoria School. To this day his fate is unknown. Four defenders managed to escape and hide, surviving the war, but their families and postmen were also persecuted. It was the first of the more than 60 million deaths that the most devastating war of humanity would produce.