Westerplatte and the Polish Post Office: The First Shots in Danzig

The Second World War in Europe opened with gunfire at close range inside a harbor canal. At dawn on 1 September 1939 the old German battleship Schleswig-Holstein, in Danzig on what had been announced as a courtesy visit, fired into the Polish military depot on the Westerplatte peninsula, a few hundred meters away. At about the same time, Danzig police and SS men attacked the Polish Post Office in the old city. The depot’s small garrison held out for seven days; the postal workers held out for most of one day, and 38 of them were later shot after a court-martial that a German court annulled nearly six decades later. This chapter tells both stories, and asks what the record actually shows about times, numbers and commanders.

Why it mattered

Danzig was the stated reason for the war. Hitler’s public demand in 1939 was the return of the Free City to the Reich and a German road and railway across the Polish Corridor, the story told in Chapter 1. It was fitting, and planned that way, that the first German attacks of 1 September fell on the two Polish footholds inside the city: the military depot on Westerplatte and the Polish Post Office. Both were legal Polish installations under the treaties that had created the Free City in 1920. Both had been quietly prepared for defense. Neither was expected, by the Germans or by the Polish high command, to last long.

Militarily, neither battle changed the course of the campaign. The Germans needed Westerplatte to open the port of Danzig and to remove an embarrassment, but the decisive fighting of September 1939 took place far to the south and west. What gave these two small actions their weight was what they came to stand for. Polish Radio’s repeated announcement that “Westerplatte is still defending itself” became one of the few pieces of good news in a disastrous month, and the seven-day defense of a depot meant to hold for hours became a national symbol. The Post Office became a symbol of a different kind: of civilians who fought in a city they had lived and worked in for years, and of the summary justice that followed. The court-martial and executions of October 1939 were among the first German war crimes of the war.

Both stories have also been retold so often that legend has grown around them. The time of the first salvo, the size of the garrison, the German losses, the order to hold “for twelve hours” and, above all, the conduct of Westerplatte’s commander, Maj. Henryk Sucharski, have been argued over for decades. This chapter follows the evidence as it now stands, with the help of the research published by the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk, which has run the Westerplatte site since 2015 and has excavated it since 2016.

A Polish depot on a Danzig beach

Westerplatte is a low, sandy, wooded peninsula between the Baltic and the harbor canal of the Vistula at Neufahrwasser (Nowy Port), the port district of Danzig. In the nineteenth century it was a seaside resort, with a beach, a wooded park and a spa established about 1830 (Wikipedia, “Westerplatte”). After the First World War, the Treaty of Versailles made Danzig a Free City under the protection of the League of Nations, bound to Poland by a customs union and by Polish rights in its port and railways. Poland, whose only other outlet to the sea was the fishing village of Gdynia, then still being built into a port, needed a secure place to unload war materiel. During the Polish-Soviet War of 1920, Danzig’s dockworkers had refused to handle munitions bound for Poland, and Warsaw did not want that to happen again.

In 1921 the League of Nations granted Poland the right to an ammunition depot with a guard near Danzig, and in 1925, over the objections of the Free City, the right was confirmed and Westerplatte was chosen as the site (Osmańczyk and Lee, Encyclopedia of the United Nations, 2003; Komorowski, 2009, as cited in Wikipedia, “Battle of Westerplatte”). The depot covered about 60 hectares (150 acres). Its 22 storage warehouses were completed in November 1925, and the railway line serving it in the summer of that year. Poland asked for a guard of 114 men; the League Council allowed 88, a figure usually broken down as two officers, 20 noncommissioned officers and 66 privates. Poland was forbidden to build fortifications (Komorowski, 2009; polishhistory.pl, “The defence of Westerplatte”). The first detachment, 22 men under Lt. Stefan Konieczny, arrived aboard the minehunter ORP Mewa at 2 p.m. on 18 January 1926 and began guard duty two days later (polishhistory.pl).

The official name, Wojskowa Składnica Tranzytowa, Military Transit Depot, described the function. Ammunition and other materiel arrived by sea, were unloaded at the depot’s basin and quay, and went on by rail into Poland. The site was walled off from the port by a brick wall about 2 m high on the harbor side and wire elsewhere. The guard lived in a mix of old resort buildings and new structures, and the Free City’s police and customs officers watched it closely from across the canal.

The depot’s first crisis came in 1933, weeks after Hitler became chancellor. In a dispute over control of the Danzig harbor police, the Polish government landed a battalion of marines on Westerplatte on 6 March 1933, more than doubling the garrison to about 200 men. The League, Danzig and Germany protested, and the extra troops were withdrawn by 16 March in exchange for Danzig dropping its harbor-police plans (Weinberg, 2010, and Osmańczyk and Lee, 2003, as cited in Wikipedia, “Westerplatte”). Historians have long read the episode as a Polish test of the new German government and of the Western powers, at a time when Marshal Józef Piłsudski was rumored to be weighing a preventive war against Germany. Whatever the intent, it taught Warsaw that Westerplatte was exposed and that its defense could not rely on the League.

A fortress that was not allowed to exist

Later in 1933 the Polish General Staff decided to strengthen the depot without saying so. Because fortifications were forbidden, the new works were disguised as ordinary buildings and built at night. Four guardhouses (Nos. 1, 2, 4 and 5) were finished by the spring of 1934, and a fifth position, No. 3, was set in the cellar of a villa. A modern barracks was built from 1934 and handed over in 1936, with a fighting room, radio station, power plant and ammunition store in its basement (Wiśniewski, Biuletyn KMDG, 2015; polishhistory.pl). There were no bunkers or tunnels in the sense later legend sometimes implied. The defenses were a ring of small reinforced-concrete posts in the woods around the barracks, linked by trenches and wire, with outposts in front of them (Zaloga and Madej, 1985, and Gierszewski, 2018, as cited in Wikipedia).

By 1939 the defense was organized in three belts. The outer belt was a line of outposts facing the harbor canal and the land approach: Prom (the ferry), Przystań (the landing), Łazienki (the bathing beach), Wał (the embankment), and others named for the power station (Elektrownia), the Fort and the railway. Behind them stood Guardhouses I to V, and at the center the barracks, sometimes called Guardhouse VI (Komorowski, 2009, pp. 445–446, as cited in Wikipedia). Weapons were smuggled in over several years. Two 37 mm Bofors anti-tank guns arrived in the autumn of 1938, and an old 75 mm field gun came in parts in the spring of 1939 (Wiśniewski, 2015). By 1 September the garrison had the 75 mm gun, the two 37 mm guns, four 81 mm mortars, about 40 machine guns (18 of them heavy) and roughly 160 rifles, with pistols and grenades (Komorowski, 2009, p. 446, as cited in Wikipedia; Wiśniewski gives 18 heavy, 17 hand-held and 6 light machine guns).

Command changed in the last year of peace. Capt. Franciszek Dąbrowski arrived as deputy commander in December 1937, and on 3 December 1938 Maj. Henryk Sucharski took command of the depot (Wikipedia, “Henryk Sucharski”; Liberation Route Europe, “Kapitan Franciszek Dąbrowski”). Sucharski, a capable organizer, pushed the field works forward through the summer of 1939: trenches, barricades and wire went in, shelters were built into the barracks basement, and trees were thinned to open fields of fire (Komorowski, 2009; Mann, 2008, as cited in Wikipedia). Medical supplies meant for the garrison were confiscated by Danzig customs officers in August (thesecondworldwar.org, “A Baltic outpost”).

The garrison grew in the same quiet way. The 88-man limit was exceeded by keeping men on beyond their rotation and by bringing in reinforcements. How far it was exceeded is one of the long-running questions of the battle. For decades the standard figure was 182 soldiers, the number that appears in the older literature. Later research put it higher: about 205 to 210 in many accounts, and 210 to 240, including six officers, in some recent ones (Komorowski, 2009, p. 445; Dróżdż, 2013, as cited in Wikipedia). The Museum of the Second World War, working from surviving garrison orders, treats 208 as a minimum: the orders end in mid-August 1939, a final order was probably issued at the end of the month and has not survived, and so there were most likely more than 208 people on the peninsula in September (Museum of the Second World War, “Presumed Westerplatte defenders”). Another recent calculation counts 201 soldiers and seven civilian employees on 1 September (polishhistory.pl). The museum also warns that dozens of men have claimed, or been claimed, to have served at Westerplatte without any document to prove it, especially after the 1960s, when the defense became a popular legend.

The “courtesy visit”

The ship that opened the war was older than most of the men aboard her. SMS Schleswig-Holstein was the last of the five Deutschland-class pre-dreadnought battleships, launched at the Germaniawerft in Kiel on 17 December 1906 and commissioned in 1908. She had fought at Jutland in 1916 and survived the scrapping of the old fleet after Versailles to serve as a training ship. In 1939 she carried four 28 cm (11-inch) guns in two twin turrets and ten 15 cm guns (Wikipedia, “SMS Schleswig-Holstein”).

On 25 August 1939 she entered Danzig on what was announced as a friendship visit, sent in place of the cruiser Königsberg, and moored in the harbor canal opposite Westerplatte (Komorowski, 2009, p. 446, as cited in Wikipedia; Wikipedia, “Gustav Kleikamp”). Below decks she carried a Kriegsmarine assault company of about 225 men, the Marinestoßtruppkompanie under Lt. Wilhelm Henningsen, which had come from Memel and been transferred to her at sea from the minesweeper M-1 and other vessels on the way. The overall commander of the operation against Westerplatte was the ship’s captain, Kapitän zur See Gustav Kleikamp, who had taken command of her on 26 April 1939 (Komorowski, 2009; Wikipedia, “Gustav Kleikamp”). On land, the Danzig forces were grouped under Generalmajor Friedrich-Georg Eberhardt, a Wehrmacht officer sent to the Free City in the summer of 1939 to organize them; they included the Danzig police and the SS Heimwehr Danzig, a unit of about 1,500 men raised in the city that summer (Komorowski, 2009).

The attack was first set for the morning of 26 August. When the Anglo-Polish alliance was signed in London on 25 August and Mussolini told Hitler that Italy was not ready, Hitler postponed the invasion on the evening of 25 August (Piekałkiewicz, 1987, as cited in Wikipedia). Not every German unit got the word in time. In the Jabłonków (Jablunkov) Pass on the Polish-Slovak border, an Abwehr detachment under Lt. Hans-Albrecht Herzner seized the railway station at Mosty early on 26 August, fought Polish troops, and withdrew when it was recalled, an episode both sides kept quiet. On Westerplatte the garrison spent the last week of peace on alert, watching the gray hull across the water.

German expectations were high. Kleikamp is said to have assured his superiors that the depot would be taken within minutes, and Eberhardt expected a few hours (Hargreaves, 2010, p. 120; Lask, 2008, as cited in Wikipedia). German intelligence estimated the garrison at no more than 100 men (Lask, 2008). Polish expectations were not high either. The garrison’s plan, widely repeated since, was to hold for about twelve hours until relief came from the Polish Army in Pomerania. The museum’s historians caution that the twelve-hour figure belonged to planning for a local provocation in Danzig, not a full-scale German invasion, and that it is unclear what Lt. Col. Wincenty Sobociński, who probably visited Sucharski the day before the attack, told him about relief (polishhistory.pl).

In the night of 31 August–1 September the battleship was warped to a new position at the bend of the canal known as the Bend of Five Whistles (Zakręt Pięciu Gwizdków), about 150 m from the depot’s wall, and the assault company was landed in the port district of Neufahrwasser, opposite the peninsula (polishhistory.pl). Estimates of the total German force committed against Westerplatte over the week range from just over 500 to more than 3,000 men, depending on whether naval, police, SS and army units are all counted (polishhistory.pl).

04:45, 04:47 or 04:48? The first shots

Every Polish schoolchild learns that the war began at 4:45 on the morning of 1 September 1939, when the Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on Westerplatte. The time is close, but not exact, and the claim that these were the first shots of the war needs qualifying.

For the salvo itself, published times range from 04:43 to 04:48. The naval historian Jarosław Tuliszka, working from German records, gives 04:45 as the time fixed in the plan, 04:47 as the time the order to fire was given, and 04:48 as the moment the guns actually fired (Tuliszka, 2003, p. 152, as cited in Wikipedia). Other Polish accounts say the order was issued at 04:43 and the guns fired a few minutes later. The Museum of the Second World War’s historians describe the bombardment as ordered for 04:45 and beginning about three minutes later (polishhistory.pl). The ship’s own Wikipedia article gives “about 04:47.” All of these are versions of the same event, separated by the difference between a plan, an order and a broadside, and 04:45 remains the conventional time.

Westerplatte was not, however, the first place the Germans struck. About 30 km to the south, at Tczew (Dirschau), Ju 87 dive bombers of the 3rd Staffel of Sturzkampfgeschwader 1, led by Oblt. Bruno Dilley, attacked the Polish sappers’ positions and the demolition cables at the great Vistula bridges. The attack is usually timed at 04:34, about ten minutes before the battleship fired (Wikipedia, “Tczew”; Super Express, Silesia edition, on the opening times of the war), though some German-based accounts put it at about 04:45 (Wikipedia, “Sturzkampfgeschwader 1”). In central Poland the Luftwaffe bombed the town of Wieluń, killing at least 127 civilians, at a time Polish sources give as 04:40. German flight records give 05:40, and the historian Grzegorz Bębnik of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) and an IPN inquiry of 2004 concluded that there was no time difference between Poland and Germany and that 05:40 is correct; others still defend the earlier time from eyewitness accounts (Wikipedia, “Bombing of Wieluń”). Germany did not use summer time in 1939, which weakens the argument that the two times are the same moment on two clocks. The Wieluń raid is described in Chapter 3.

There were also German actions earlier still. The staged “Polish” attack on the Gleiwitz radio station on the evening of 31 August, described in Chapter 1, was a German operation against a German target. German irregulars in Upper Silesia crossed the border in the early hours of 1 September, and Herzner’s men had already fought in the Jabłonków Pass on 26 August. And at Szymankowo, a station on the Danzig side of the East Prussian border, Polish railwaymen and customs officers were killed in the night of 31 August–1 September, before any of the dawn attacks (see “Szymankowo and Tczew,” below).

Hitler himself added a further confusion. Speaking to the Reichstag later that morning, he presented the invasion as a response to Polish attacks and gave the time as 5:45. That was neither the time of the Westerplatte salvo nor of any Polish provocation, since there had been none. The most likely explanation is a simple error in the speech; the line became one of the most quoted in the history of propaganda.

In their words

Seit 5 Uhr 45 wird jetzt zurückgeschossen! (Since 5:45 we have been returning fire!)

The first day on Westerplatte

The first broadside knocked three holes in the depot’s brick wall but caused no Polish casualties; at that range the heavy shells largely failed to explode (Forczyk, 2019, p. 100, as cited in Wikipedia; thesecondworldwar.org). Sucharski radioed the naval base at Hel that he was under fire. About eight minutes after the salvo, Henningsen’s marines advanced through the breaches, supported by Danzig police, and moved about 200 m into the woods (Forczyk, 2019, pp. 100–101). They walked into prepared fire from the Prom outpost, the guardhouses and machine guns hidden in the trees. Lt. Leon Pająk’s 75 mm gun, firing from near Prom, hit German machine-gun positions in the windows of the port warehouses across the canal (Mann, 2008, p. 12). Among the first Polish dead was Sgt. Wojciech Najsarek, a reservist and railwayman who worked at the depot, killed by machine-gun fire early that morning and often described as one of the first Polish soldiers killed in the war (Forczyk, 2019, p. 101; Museum of the Second World War, “The fallen of Westerplatte”).

At 06:22 the marines reported heavy losses and fell back. A German account puts the losses of the first assault at about 50 Germans and eight Poles, most of them wounded (Mann, 2008, p. 13, as cited in Wikipedia). The battleship then fired a second, much heavier bombardment from 07:40 to 08:55, using 90 rounds from her 28 cm guns, 407 from her 15 cm guns and 366 from 88 mm guns (Lask, 2008, as cited by thesecondworldwar.org). The 75 mm gun was destroyed, and the Prom outpost was abandoned. A second assault, from 08:35, failed again; by noon Henningsen had been mortally wounded, and the Germans had lost, by German count, 16 killed and 120 wounded on the first day (Lask, 2008, as cited in Wikipedia). Four Polish soldiers were killed that day (Komorowski, 2009, p. 446; polishhistory.pl).

By evening the Germans had learned what the garrison had spent five years preparing. The peninsula could not be rushed by a single company, even one supported by a battleship. Eberhardt’s command now took over the land side, the Wehrmacht brought up artillery and engineers, and the Luftwaffe was asked for help.

The Stukas, 2 September

The air attack came at 18:05 on 2 September and lasted about twenty minutes. The number of aircraft is given differently in different sources: 60 Ju 87 dive bombers in two waves (Komorowski, 2009; Lask, 2008, as cited in Wikipedia), 47 Ju 87s (polishhistory.pl), or 56 Ju 87s and three He 111 bombers (defence24.pl). The weight of bombs, about 26.5 tonnes (58,000 lb), is more consistent. The museum’s figures for the bomb load are eight bombs of 500 kg, 50 of 250 kg and 100 of 100 kg (polishhistory.pl). For a garrison with no anti-aircraft guns there was nothing to do but take cover.

Most of the bombs fell in the woods and on the open ground, but one, probably of 500 kg, landed beside Guardhouse No. 5 and brought it down on its crew. More men died there than anywhere else on the peninsula: at least seven and possibly ten, with four survivors later identified (defence24.pl; polishhistory.pl). The post’s commander, Cpl. Adolf Petzelt, was among the dead (dzieje.pl, PAP, November 2022). The raid also destroyed the garrison’s radio and its field kitchen and much of its food (Mann, 2008, p. 13, as cited in Wikipedia). From then on the defenders were cut off from Hel and from the outside world, and they could hear news of the war only on a receiver.

The raid also produced the crisis of command that has been argued over ever since. Several accounts, German and Polish, report that a white flag was briefly shown after the bombing and then taken down, and that Sucharski, shaken by the raid, ordered the secret documents burned and spoke of surrender; others deny that a flag was raised (Szkudliński, 2012, as cited in Wikipedia; polishhistory.pl). What happened in the barracks basement that evening is discussed below, in “Who commanded?”

The bombing had one further consequence that historians have only recently been able to discuss. On 8 September, after the surrender, the Germans found a grave containing four Polish soldiers. Polish research has concluded that they were executed by the garrison for attempted desertion, most likely after the raid of 2 September (Sudoł, 2013, as cited in Wikipedia; thesecondworldwar.org). The episode is poorly documented and was long left out of the heroic narrative, but it is part of the record of a small group of men under extreme pressure.

Holding on, 3 to 6 September

For the next four days the Germans tried to wear the garrison down by fire. Artillery in the port and the battleship shelled the peninsula day and night, and German patrols probed the outposts at night. By one count the garrison withstood 17 heavy bombardments, 14 assaults and 19 night raids over the week (polishhistory.pl). On 4 September the attack came from the sea: the torpedo boat T196 and the old minesweeper Von der Groeben fired on the peninsula from the Gulf, and the Wał outpost on the shore had to be abandoned, leaving the Fort as the northernmost position (Rohwer and Hümmelchen, 1992; Mann, 2008, p. 14, as cited in Wikipedia).

On 5 September Sucharski called a council of his officers. He argued that the garrison had held far longer than it had been asked to, and that surrender was now justified. Dąbrowski opposed him, and the officers agreed to fight on (Mann, 2008, pp. 11, 14, as cited in Wikipedia). Dąbrowski’s own memoir records that the major expressed doubts about the point of further resistance (Dąbrowski, Wspomnienia z obrony Westerplatte, 1957, as quoted by dzieje.pl).

On 6 September the Germans tried fire. At 03:00 a tank wagon full of benzol was pushed down the depot’s railway line toward the Polish positions, to be ignited among them; the driver uncoupled too early, and the wagon burned at the buffers, lighting the woods in front of the German lines instead (polishhistory.pl; Mann, 2008, p. 15). An attempt to set the forest alight with flamethrowers also failed. At 15:45 two more tank wagons reached the Polish positions, but the fire was put out within about fifteen minutes (polishhistory.pl). That evening Sucharski again argued for surrender, pointing to the German advance on Warsaw, the shortage of water, food and ammunition, and wounded men who were developing gangrene in the barracks basement (Mann, 2008, p. 15).

Outside, the defense had become a legend. Polish Radio repeated each day that Westerplatte was still defending itself, “Westerplatte broni się jeszcze,” a phrase that passed into the language (Zajączkowski, 2013, as cited in Wikipedia). The defenders knew little of this. They knew that no relief had come, that the coast’s other garrisons at Gdynia, Oksywie and Hel were under attack, and from the radio that the Polish armies in the west were in retreat.

Surrender, 7 September

The last attack began at 04:30 on 7 September with an intense bombardment by the battleship and artillery, followed by flamethrowers. Guardhouse No. 2 was destroyed and Guardhouses I and IV were damaged (Mann, 2008, p. 15; Komorowski, 2009, p. 447, as cited in Wikipedia). German anti-aircraft guns fired into the treetops to shower the trenches with splinters (polishhistory.pl). Later that morning the white flag went up over the barracks. The time is given as 09:30, 09:45 or 10:15 in different accounts; the museum’s historians give 10:15, with 09:30 in some sources (polishhistory.pl; Komorowski, 2009, p. 447, as cited in Wikipedia). The garrison marched out at about 11:30 (Mann, 2008, p. 15).

Sucharski surrendered to Kleikamp and Eberhardt. The Germans, who had been made to look foolish for a week, treated the garrison with some ceremony. Eberhardt allowed Sucharski to keep his officer’s saber, and photographers recorded the major with the German commanders; the saber was taken from him later (Mann, 2008, p. 15, as cited in Wikipedia). The German flag was raised over the peninsula on 8 September. Within days senior Germans came to see the ruins: Admiral Erich Raeder with Gauleiter Albert Forster on 18 September, and Hitler himself on 21 September (Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe photographs; Gierszewski, 2018, as cited in Wikipedia).

Not all of the garrison survived captivity. The radio operator, Sgt. Kazimierz Rasiński, was taken away by the Germans after the surrender and never returned; later accounts say he was killed for refusing to reveal the garrison’s radio codes. He was once commemorated among the fallen of the battle, but the museum notes that he “definitely did not die at Westerplatte,” and his name has been removed from that list (Museum of the Second World War, “The fallen of Westerplatte”; polishhistory.pl). The rest went into prisoner-of-war camps. The officers were held in the camps for Polish officers; Sucharski, after transit camps, went to Oflag IV-A Hohnstein on 26 October 1939 (Wikipedia, “Henryk Sucharski”).

Timeline

The seven days of Westerplatte

1. 18 Jan 1926First Polish guard detachment, 22 men, lands at the new Military Transit Depot.
2. 6–16 Mar 1933Poland lands a marine battalion, doubling the garrison to about 200; withdrawn after protests.
3. 1933–36Five disguised guardhouses (1933–34) and a fortified barracks (1934–36) are built.
4. 3 Dec 1938Maj. Henryk Sucharski takes command; Capt. Franciszek Dąbrowski is deputy.
5. 25 Aug 1939The Schleswig-Holstein arrives in Danzig on a “courtesy visit” with an assault company aboard.
6. 26 Aug 1939Planned attack canceled after Hitler postpones the invasion.
7. 1 Sep 1939, 04:45–04:48The battleship opens fire; the first assault fails by 06:22.
8. 1 Sep 1939, 07:40–12:00Second bombardment and second assault; Henningsen mortally wounded; four Poles killed.
9. 2 Sep 1939, 18:05Dive-bomber raid; Guardhouse No. 5 collapses; radio and kitchen destroyed.
10. 4 Sep 1939Torpedo boat T196 and minesweeper Von der Groeben attack from the sea; Wał outpost abandoned.
11. 5 Sep 1939Officers’ council; Sucharski proposes surrender, Dąbrowski opposes.
12. 6 Sep 1939, 03:00 and 15:45Two fire-train attacks fail; second council.
13. 7 Sep 1939, 04:30Final bombardment and flamethrower attack; Guardhouse No. 2 destroyed.
14. 7 Sep 1939, about 10:15White flag (09:30 and 09:45 in other accounts); garrison marches out about 11:30.
15. 21 Sep 1939Hitler visits the ruins of Westerplatte.

Who commanded? Sucharski, Dąbrowski and the debate

For forty years after the war the story of Westerplatte was the story of Major Sucharski. The main reason was a book. In August 1946, in Italy, the writer Melchior Wańkowicz interviewed Sucharski, who was then serving with the Polish II Corps; a few days later Sucharski died of peritonitis in a Naples hospital (Wikipedia, “Henryk Sucharski”). Wańkowicz’s account, published in 1948, made Sucharski the hero of the defense and became the main popular source for it. The communist authorities, it has often been said, preferred that version to one that gave the credit to Dąbrowski, a man of noble birth whom they dismissed from the postwar navy and left in poverty, though this explanation is itself more often asserted than documented (Wikipedia, “Henryk Sucharski” and “Franciszek Dąbrowski”; Liberation Route Europe).

From the early 1990s a different account appeared, based on testimony from surviving defenders and on the officers’ own later statements. According to it, Sucharski suffered a breakdown after the dive-bomber raid of 2 September, some say a seizure; he ordered the secret papers burned and a white flag raised; Dąbrowski countermanded the order and in practice led the defense for the rest of the week, while the officers agreed among themselves to keep the matter quiet (Piński and Przedmojski, 2005; Kwiatkowski, 2016; Derdej, 2009, as cited in Wikipedia; Wiśniewski, 2015). Even writers sympathetic to Sucharski accept that he argued for surrender at the councils of 5 and 6 September and that Dąbrowski argued against it.

The debate is not settled, and it should be handled with care. Sucharski’s biographer, Andrzej Drzycimski, emphasized that his superiors rated his military skill and character highly before the war (as quoted by dzieje.pl). The museum’s historians write that it is hard to determine whether Sucharski had a breakdown and raised a flag on 2 September, and whether Dąbrowski opposed him at that moment; they note that Sucharski may have wanted to end the defense after the loss of Guardhouse No. 5, and that some have argued the final surrender on 7 September was hasty (polishhistory.pl). Others point out that by 5 September Sucharski’s view was a rational one. The depot had been expected to hold for hours and had held for days; Grudziądz and Bydgoszcz had fallen; no relief was coming; and as commander he was responsible for wounded men lying in a basement without proper medical care (Wiśniewski, 2015). What can be said with confidence is that Westerplatte was defended by both men, that Dąbrowski’s will to resist was decisive at the councils, and that the organization of the defense in the months before the war was Sucharski’s work.

Losses and uncertainty at Westerplatte

Polish dead. The Museum of the Second World War lists 15 soldiers who died in the battle of 1–7 September, from Sgt. Wojciech Najsarek on the first morning to Jan Czywil, who died of his wounds in a Danzig hospital. Most of them died on 2 September in Guardhouse No. 5. The museum stresses that identification of the remains is still going on: the burial places of several men are unknown, one exhumed body was found with German military equipment and its identity is doubtful, and a full monograph on the fallen is still in preparation (Museum of the Second World War, “The fallen of Westerplatte”). Seven of the dead from Guardhouse No. 5 were identified by DNA in work led by Dr. Andrzej Ossowski, and in November 2022 they were buried, with Sucharski and two unidentified soldiers, in the new Polish military cemetery on Westerplatte (dzieje.pl, PAP, November 2022). Older and more popular accounts give “15 to 20” dead, and some add the four men executed by the garrison and Rasiński, who was killed after the surrender.

Polish wounded. Usually given as at least 40, or as 13 seriously wounded and 40 lightly wounded or concussed, with seven more men dying of other causes after the fighting (Komorowski, 2009; Lask, 2008, as cited in Wikipedia; Wiśniewski, 2015).

German losses. These are the most disputed figures of all. Komorowski and the Danzig historian Lask give about 50 killed, 16 of them from the Kriegsmarine, and about 150 wounded (as cited in Wikipedia). German figures for the first day alone are 16 killed and 120 wounded. Older Polish accounts, written when the defense was a national legend, gave about 300 killed and 700 to 1,000 wounded (Wiśniewski, 2015), figures that no German record supports. The truth is probably closer to the lower range, but the German records for the Danzig police and SS units are incomplete.

The Polish Post Office on Heveliusplatz

The second Polish target in Danzig was not a military post at all. The treaties that created the Free City gave Poland the right to run its own postal and telegraph service in the port, set out in the Paris Convention of 9 November 1920 and the Warsaw Agreement of 24 October 1921. The first Polish post office opened in Neufahrwasser on 10 March 1920. In 1922 Poland was given part of a former Prussian garrison hospital on Heveliusplatz, in the old city near the Radunia canal, and on 5 January 1925 a Polish post office opened there. From 1 August 1926 it was Polish Post Office No. 1, the main office of the Polish postal administration in Danzig (IPN, Obrońcy Poczty Polskiej w Gdańsku). The building was treated as Polish property with extraterritorial status. Its staff were Polish civil servants, many of them Danzig Poles or Kashubians from the surrounding countryside, and the office was a center of the city’s Polish community. Its very existence was a grievance for Danzig’s Nazi government, and there were disputes over it from the 1925 quarrel about Polish mailboxes in the city to a “war over stamps” in 1938 (IPN).

Polish military intelligence had drawn up a plan for defending the building as early as 1935, and the decision to make it a strongpoint was probably taken in March 1939 (IPN). In April 1939 the high command sent a reserve second lieutenant of engineers, Konrad Guderski, under the code name “Konrad,” to prepare and command the defense. He organized and trained the staff, had the entrance fortified, and arranged for weapons to be smuggled in from Gdynia in postal vehicles until mid-May; the deliveries resumed on a smaller scale in August (IPN; Wikipedia, “Defence of the Polish Post Office in Danzig”). The trees in front of the building were cut down to clear a field of fire. In August ten more postal workers, most of them reserve noncommissioned officers, were sent from Gdynia and Bydgoszcz to strengthen the staff and to replace two employees who had been arrested by the Danzig authorities (IPN; Hargreaves, 2010, as cited in Wikipedia).

The armament, by the most detailed English-language account, was three Browning wz. 1928 light machine guns, about 40 other firearms and three chests of hand grenades (Hargreaves, 2010, as cited in Wikipedia). On 28 August Alfons Flisykowski, a senior postal official, was named Guderski’s deputy and successor (IPN). On the evening of 31 August the women employees were sent home (IPN). The defenders’ instructions were to hold the building for about six hours, until relief arrived from the Polish Pomorze Army under Gen. Władysław Bortnowski, whose units were expected to break through to the city (Wikipedia; der Freitag, “1939: Bronskis Ende”). No relief came, or could have come.

On the morning of 1 September there were 58 people in the building by the IPN’s list: postal employees, the ten reservists, Guderski, and the building’s caretaker and his family, including a ten-year-old girl, Erwina Barzychowska, who lived with them as their ward (IPN). The English-language literature usually gives 56; Polish press accounts give “about 60” and stress that the exact number cannot be fixed (Wikipedia; PAP, as published by dzieje.pl).

A long day: the battle for the Post Office

At about 04:00 on 1 September the Germans cut the building’s telephone lines and power (Wikipedia). The attack began at about 04:45, timed to coincide with the battleship’s salvo; the Polish Press Agency gives 04:48 (IPN; PAP). The attackers were Danzig police, about 180 men assigned under Col. Willi Bethke, with men of the SS Heimwehr Danzig and SS Wachsturmbann “Eimann,” Berlin police and the SD. They attacked in three groups, with a cordon, a reserve and a fire-support group with three light machine guns (IPN). Albert Forster, the Gauleiter of Danzig, came to watch, and so did journalists and a newsreel crew (Wikipedia).

The first assault, on the front entrance, was beaten off. Some of the attackers got into the building briefly; their leader, Lt. Gert Heinrich, was wounded and replaced by Capt. Max Rosenbaum, and the German losses in this first clash were two killed and six or seven wounded, against one Polish dead and two wounded (IPN; Wikipedia). The second attack came through the wall of the neighboring labor office. Guderski stopped it at the cost of his own life: he was killed by the blast of a grenade he threw at the Germans who had broken through (IPN; Wikipedia). Flisykowski took command. Bethke then took personal charge of the attack.

The police could not take the building with rifles and machine guns. During the morning artillery arrived: two infantry guns from the SS Heimwehr’s anti-tank company, a heavy howitzer from a Danzig artillery battery, armored cars, and a mortar brought from the Westerplatte sector, which proved useless because of a faulty sight (IPN). According to the English-language account, Bethke proposed blowing up the building with high explosives and Forster vetoed the idea (Wikipedia). A renewed assault late in the morning failed. At 15:00 the Germans offered a two-hour ceasefire and demanded surrender, which the defenders refused (Wikipedia).

The third attack was planned for 17:15. German engineers blew a breach in the wall with a large explosive charge, given as 600 kg in the English-language literature, and the attackers, covered by the guns, took most of the building except the basement (Wikipedia; IPN). Then Danzig’s fire brigade pumped gasoline from a tanker into the basement under police cover, and a hand grenade set it alight (IPN; Wikipedia). Several defenders burned to death. The survivors in the cellar decided to surrender. Dr. Jan Michoń, the director of the Polish postal service in Danzig, went out first carrying a white flag and was shot; the postmaster, Józef Wąsik, who followed him, was burned with a flamethrower (IPN; Wikipedia). The surrender came at about 17:30 to 18:00 by the IPN’s account; other accounts say about 19:00 (IPN; PAP; Wikipedia, “September 1939”). Depending on which times are used, the defense lasted thirteen to fifteen hours.

Six defenders escaped in the confusion. Flisykowski, wounded, hid under a staircase and was betrayed by a German resident; Franciszek Mionskowski was caught near Letnica on 2 September (IPN). Four survived the war in hiding: Andrzej Górski, Franciszek Mielewczyk, Władysław Milewczyk and Augustyn Młyński (IPN). The rest, 39 people, were taken prisoner. Sixteen wounded were sent to the Gestapo hospital, where six of them died (Wikipedia).

Erwina, the court-martial and the executions of 5 October

The youngest victim of the attack was Erwina Barzychowska, the caretaker’s ward, who was badly burned in the fire. She was born on 16 October 1929 and died in hospital on 20 October 1939, four days after her tenth birthday and seven weeks after the attack (IPN). A plaque of 1979 gave her age as eleven; the Polish Press Agency notes that she was ten (PAP, via dzieje.pl). In all, eight people died in the fighting or immediately after it, and six more, among them two civilians including Erwina, died of their wounds in Danzig hospitals: fourteen dead (IPN).

The prisoners were treated not as prisoners of war but as criminals. They were tried by the field court-martial of Gruppe Eberhardt, the military command in Danzig, with Dr. Kurt Bode, vice-president of the Danzig Higher Regional Court, presiding and Dr. Hans-Werner Giesecke as prosecutor. On 8 September the court sentenced 28 defenders to death as “Freischärler,” irregular combatants, under the German special wartime criminal ordinance of 1938. The remaining ten, who had been in hospital and whom there had been talk of sparing, were sentenced on 29 September (IPN; the English-language literature gives 30 September). The sentences on the first 28 were confirmed by Gen. Günther von Kluge and the others by Col. Eduard Wagner, and Gen. Walther von Brauchitsch rejected a plea for clemency (Wikipedia, citing Schenk, 1995).

The proceedings were unlawful on their face. The defenders had fought in a building that the treaties treated as Polish property, many of them in uniformed posts of the Polish state, and the special ordinance did not take effect in Danzig until 16 November 1939, after the executions (Wikipedia; IPN). There was no proper indictment and no real defense; a single Wehrmacht officer acted as defense counsel at the first trial (IPN; Wikipedia).

At dawn on 5 October 1939 the 38 condemned men were shot behind the embankment of the police shooting range at Zaspa, near Danzig’s airfield, by a unit of about 80 men; a chaplain was present, and an officer read out the sentence and identified the condemned (IPN). Flisykowski was among them. So was a postilion named Franciszek Krause, born on 13 August 1900, number 16 on the IPN’s list of the executed (IPN). The bodies were buried in an unmarked mass grave. Leon Fuz, who had been separated from the others, was later recognized as a Heveliusplatz employee and murdered in the Piaśnica forest on 13 December 1939 (IPN).

The grave was found by chance on 27 August 1991, during construction of an office building on what is now Aleja Jana Pawła II in Gdańsk. The remains were identified by anthropological examination as those of the postal workers, and on 5 April 1992 they were buried at the Cemetery of the Victims of Nazi Terror at Zaspa (IPN; PAP). Bode and Giesecke were never punished. Giesecke became a presiding judge at the regional court in Frankfurt am Main and died in 1971; Bode became vice-president of the Higher Regional Court in Bremen and died in 1979 (IPN).

Lübeck, 1998, and The Tin Drum

The legal rehabilitation of the defenders came from Germany, and it came late. In 1995 Dieter Schenk, a former senior officer of the German Federal Criminal Police, published Die Post von Danzig, a study of the case that called the executions judicial murder, Justizmord (Wikipedia, “Dieter Schenk”). His work led the regional court in Lübeck, the successor jurisdiction for Danzig cases, to review the 1939 verdicts. In 1998, in May according to the Polish Press Agency, the court annulled them, finding that German wartime law did not apply in the Free City in September 1939, that the law had been applied in gross violation of its terms, and that the judges’ conduct amounted to judicial murder (PAP, via dzieje.pl; Wikipedia). Some sources give 1995, 1996 or 1997 for the decision, probably confusing it with stages of the proceedings; most give 1998. A later out-of-court settlement paid 10,000 marks to widows and 5,000 marks to children of the executed (der Freitag). Schenk was made an honorary citizen of Gdańsk in 2003.

The Post Office is known to most readers outside Poland not from history books but from a novel. Günter Grass was born in Danzig in 1927, the son of a German father and a Kashubian mother, and was eleven when the war began. In The Tin Drum (1959) he devoted a chapter, “The Defense of the Polish Post Office,” to the battle: the boy Oskar Matzerath goes to the Post Office with Jan Bronski, his uncle and presumed father, who works there, and Jan is shot with the other defenders at Saspe (Zaspa) (Wikipedia, “Defence of the Polish Post Office in Danzig”; der Freitag, “1939: Bronskis Ende”). In his memoir Peeling the Onion (2006), Grass wrote that his mother’s cousin Franz, a postman who helped defend the Post Office, was executed by the Germans. The Franciszek Krause on the IPN’s list of the 38 is generally identified as that relative, a real man behind the fictional Jan Bronski. The IPN describes the novel’s portrayal of the defenders as controversial (IPN).

The American connection runs through the film. Volker Schlöndorff’s adaptation of The Tin Drum shared the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1979 with Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, and in 1980 it won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. For many Americans the siege of the Polish Post Office, if they know of it at all, is the scene in that film of a card game among the defenders as the building burns around them.

Szymankowo and Tczew

The third German operation planned for the Danzig region that night was aimed at the great railway and road bridges over the Vistula at Tczew (Dirschau), which carried the main line from East Prussia across the Corridor to Germany. The Germans wanted them intact. Their plan was to send trains carrying assault troops, disguised as ordinary freight trains, from East Prussia through the Danzig territory to seize the bridges before the Polish engineers could blow them, with an armored train following (Wikipedia, “Szymankowo,” citing Ziółkowski, Do Broni!, 2009).

The route ran through Szymankowo (Simonsdorf), a station on the Danzig side of the border, staffed under the treaties by Polish railwaymen and customs officers. In the night of 31 August–1 September they recognized the train for what it was. They diverted it onto a dead-end track and fired signal flares to warn the Polish troops at Tczew, depriving the Germans of surprise (Polish National Revenue Administration, KAS, 2019). Local Germans, members of the SA, then seized the station and killed the Poles there: 21 customs officers and railwaymen by the KAS account, 23 people including family members and a pregnant woman by another (KAS; Wikipedia, “Szymankowo”). They were among the very first civilian victims of the war.

At Tczew itself, the dive-bomber attack described above struck the sappers’ bunkers and the cables to the demolition charges, which ran along the railway embankment between the station and the bridges; the crews had learned their route by traveling across the bridge before the war (Wikipedia, “Sturzkampfgeschwader 1”). The attack was a partial success. Polish engineers repaired the cables, and the bridges were blown before German troops could reach them, shortly after 06:00 by most accounts (some give 05:30) (Wikipedia, “Tczew”; Wikipedia, “September 1939”). The destroyed bridges forced the Germans to build crossings of their own and delayed the use of the main rail link between East Prussia and the Reich. The fighting in the Corridor is told in Chapter 3.

The arrests of Danzig’s Poles

While the guns were firing at Westerplatte and the Post Office, the Free City ceased to exist. On the morning of 1 September Forster proclaimed Danzig’s reunion with the Reich, and the same day Hitler signed the law incorporating it. SS, SA, police and Gestapo units arrested about 1,500 members of the city’s Polish minority, working from lists prepared in advance by the Danzig police and the local SS and Selbstschutz, and held them in the Victoriaschule, a school near the city center, where many were beaten (Liberation Route Europe, “Outbreak of the Second World War”; Wikipedia, “Stutthof concentration camp”). Those arrested were above all the leaders and activists of the Polish community: officials of Polish institutions in the city, teachers, priests, journalists and members of Polish associations.

On 2 September the first 150 prisoners were taken to a new camp in the woods at Stutthof (Sztutowo), east of the city. By 15 September it held 6,000 (Wikipedia, “Stutthof concentration camp”). Stutthof became a concentration camp in which tens of thousands of people died by 1945. Many of Danzig’s Polish leaders were murdered in the Piaśnica forest and other sites in the autumn and winter of 1939, the story told in Chapter 9. The executions of the Post Office defenders on 5 October were part of that larger campaign to destroy the Polish community of the city.

The photographs of September 1939 in Danzig reflect who took them. Most were made by German press photographers such as Hans Sönnke, whose pictures of Danzig police and German soldiers tearing down Polish border barriers were, as the German Federal Archives and the Wikimedia Commons records note for some of them, staged for the camera, in at least one case on 14 September. The images in this chapter are captioned with that in mind.

Questions readers ask

Were the shots at Westerplatte the first shots of World War II?

Not quite. They were the first shots of the main German attack in the Danzig area and the first naval gunfire of the war, fired at about 04:45–04:48 on 1 September 1939. German dive bombers attacked the Polish positions at the Tczew bridges about ten minutes earlier, at about 04:34, and Polish railwaymen were killed at Szymankowo in the night before. Westerplatte became the symbol of the war’s beginning because it was the first real battle and because it lasted a week.

Did Major Sucharski really command the defense?

He commanded the depot and signed the surrender, and he organized its defenses before the war. Accounts that emerged in the 1990s say he suffered a breakdown after the bombing of 2 September and that his deputy, Capt. Franciszek Dąbrowski, effectively led the defense from then on. Historians still disagree about how far that account is accurate. It is clear that Sucharski argued for surrender on 5 and 6 September and that Dąbrowski argued against it.

Why were the Post Office defenders executed?

A German field court-martial ruled that they were irregular combatants, not soldiers, and sentenced 38 of them to death under a special wartime ordinance that did not yet apply in Danzig. They were shot on 5 October 1939. In 1998 the regional court in Lübeck annulled the verdicts and described them as judicial murder.

How it connects

Westerplatte and the Post Office existed because of the Free City settlement of 1920, and their defenses were built during the long quarrel over Danzig and the Corridor described in Chapter 1: The Road to September. The attacks of 1 September were the northern edge of a front that ran from the Baltic to the Carpathians; the battles in the Corridor, at Mława, Mokra and Wieluń, are in Chapter 3, and the Luftwaffe raids, including the one that broke Guardhouse No. 5, belong to the air war described in Chapter 4.

The Schleswig-Holstein’s war did not end at Westerplatte. After the surrender she moved on to shell the Polish positions at Oksywie, Redłowo and Hel, whose defense continued until 2 October; that story, and the escape of the submarine Orzeł, is told in Chapter 7. The arrests of Danzig’s Poles, Stutthof and Piaśnica, and the long postwar argument over how to remember Westerplatte, are in Chapter 9.

What happened afterward

Westerplatte remained in German hands until the end of the war. In the last weeks, from 28 March to 1 April 1945, elements of the German 73rd Infantry Division made a final stand on the peninsula against the Red Army (Museum of the Second World War, as cited in Wikipedia). The Schleswig-Holstein was hit by RAF bombs at Gotenhafen (Gdynia) on 18 December 1944 and sank in shallow water; her crew scuttled her on 21 March 1945, and the Soviets later raised her and used her as a target (Wikipedia, “SMS Schleswig-Holstein”).

After the war a cemetery and a tomb of the unknown soldier were laid out on Westerplatte in 1946, and in 1966 the 25 m Monument to the Defenders of the Coast was unveiled on an artificial mound above the harbor entrance (Gierszewski, 2018, as cited in Wikipedia). Sucharski’s ashes were brought from Italy and buried there on 1 September 1971. In Gdańsk, Heveliusplatz was renamed the Square of the Defenders of the Polish Post Office, and in 1979 a monument to the defenders was unveiled beside the building, which houses a museum of the Polish post. The ruins on Westerplatte were recognized as a cultural monument, and on 1 September 2003 the site was designated a Historic Monument of Poland (Wikipedia, citing the National Heritage Board).

Historic Monument · 2003

Westerplatte, a Historic Monument of Poland

On 1 September 2003 the battlefield of Westerplatte was designated a Pomnik historii, Historic Monument, Poland’s highest heritage designation for a site of national importance. Since 2015 the peninsula has been run as a branch of the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk, which has carried out archaeological work there since 2016 and in 2022 opened a new military cemetery for the identified and unidentified defenders.

Museum of the Second World War →

Walking the ground today

Westerplatte lies a few miles north of Gdańsk’s old town, at the mouth of the harbor canal. In summer, tourist boats run from the old town’s quays down the harbor canal past the Bend of Five Whistles, the same water the Schleswig-Holstein fired from; there are also city buses. On the peninsula, a marked trail leads past the ruins of the barracks, whose shattered basement can be seen, the outline of Guardhouse No. 5, and Guardhouse No. 1, which has been a small museum since the postwar years. The new military cemetery and the old one with Sucharski’s grave lie near the barracks. The Monument to the Defenders of the Coast stands on its mound at the tip, with a view across the harbor entrance to the port and the Gulf. The site is part of the Museum of the Second World War; check its website for opening hours of the guardhouse exhibitions.

The Polish Post Office building still stands on the Square of the Defenders of the Polish Post Office in the old town, rebuilt after the war and still a working post office, with a museum of its defense inside. In front stands the steel monument of 1979 to the defenders. The defenders themselves are buried with the victims of Nazi terror at the cemetery in Zaspa, near the place where they were shot, and a memorial marks the site of the execution on Aleja Jana Pawła II. At Tczew, the nineteenth-century road bridge over the Vistula, rebuilt after the war, still crosses the river; at Szymankowo a memorial commemorates the railwaymen and customs officers killed in the night before the war.

Sources

• Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk: “#WesterplatteHistory: The fallen of Westerplatte”; “#WesterplatteHistory: Presumed Westerplatte defenders”; and the museum historians’ article “The defence of Westerplatte: the first battle of the Second World War” (polishhistory.pl).
• Instytut Pamięci Narodowej (IPN), Obrońcy Poczty Polskiej w Gdańsku (brochure, in Polish), including the list of people in the building and of the executed.
• Polish Press Agency (PAP), articles on the Post Office and on the Westerplatte reburials, published on dzieje.pl, dzieje.pl and “Dziesięciu bohaterów z Westerplatte” (2022); dzieje.pl on Henryk Sucharski.
• Jarosław Wiśniewski, “Westerplatte 1939”, Biuletyn KMDG 33 (445), 2015 (in Polish); biographical entry on Alfons Flisykowski, Kujawsko-Pomorska Biblioteka Cyfrowa (in Polish).
• defence24.pl, “Westerplatte odsłania swoje tajemnice” (23 October 2016, on the first season of excavations, in Polish).
• Krajowa Administracja Skarbowa (KAS), report on the 80th-anniversary commemoration at Szymankowo (2019, in Polish).
• Liberation Route Europe: “Kapitan Franciszek Dąbrowski” and “Outbreak of the Second World War” (Gdańsk).
• der Freitag: Lutz Herden, “1939: Bronskis Ende”, and “Rehabilitierung zweiter Klasse” (in German); Super Express, “1 września 1939 r. O której godzinie Niemcy rozpoczęli agresję na Polskę?” (in Polish).
• Wikipedia: “Battle of Westerplatte” (for the works it cites: Komorowski, 2009; Lask, 2008; Mann, 2008; Tuliszka, 2003; Forczyk, 2019; Hargreaves, 2010; Dróżdż, 2013; Sudoł, 2013; Piński and Przedmojski, 2005; Kwiatkowski, 2016), “Westerplatte”, “Defence of the Polish Post Office in Danzig”, “SMS Schleswig-Holstein”, “Bombing of Wieluń”, “Tczew”, “Szymankowo”, “Sturzkampfgeschwader 1”, “Stutthof concentration camp”, “September 1939”, and the biographies of Henryk Sucharski, Franciszek Dąbrowski, Konrad Guderski and Dieter Schenk.
• thesecondworldwar.org, “A Baltic outpost” (summarizing Lask and Mann).
• Books: Steven J. Zaloga, Poland 1939: The Birth of Blitzkrieg (Osprey, 2002); Robert Forczyk, Case White: The Invasion of Poland 1939 (Osprey, 2019); Richard Hargreaves, Blitzkrieg Unleashed: The German Invasion of Poland 1939 (Pen & Sword, 2008); Roger Moorhouse, Poland 1939: The Outbreak of World War II (Basic Books, 2020; UK title First to Fight); Halik Kochanski, The Eagle Unbowed: Poland and the Poles in the Second World War (Harvard University Press, 2012); Dieter Schenk, Die Post von Danzig: Geschichte eines deutschen Justizmords (Rowohlt, 1995); Melchior Wańkowicz, Westerplatte (1948) and Walczący Gryf (1963); Franciszek Dąbrowski, Wspomnienia z obrony Westerplatte (1957); Zbigniew Flisowski, Westerplatte (many editions from 1959); Andrzej Drzycimski, Major Henryk Sucharski; Günter Grass, The Tin Drum (1959) and Peeling the Onion (2006).

Photographs: Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe (NAC), Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, the U.S. National Archives (New York Times Paris Bureau collection), Centralne Archiwum Wojskowe and Polish postwar publications; public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Several of the 1939 photographs were taken by German press photographers and reflect their framing.