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WORLD WAR II
Troops crossing out of the Free City into Poland
September 1, 1939, forever etched in the history books
as the day the world went to war. The planet would never
be the same again, and it started here, seventy years
ago, with Gdansk as the opening gambit in Hitler’s vile
master plan.
Prelude
Endlessly caught in a tug-of-war between Germany and
Poland, the end of World War One saw the League of Nations
come up with a hare-brained solution to the ceaseless
bickering - it matched the city to neither suitor, instead
assigning it the title of Free City of Danzig. To give it to the
Germans - who let’s face it, had previous form for causing
trouble - was out of the question, while leaving her in Polish
hands was a gamble; would the Poles side with their Slavic
brothers east and turn red? Anything was possible in this
volatile post-war Europe, and the thought of Gdansk - then a
hugely important international trading route - falling into the
hands of the communists was all too much. And so it was
that Gdansk became a semi-independent state, an answer
that pleased neither Germans nor Poles.
Nonetheless the region thrived, and the two communities
(the majority of whom were German) co-existed for quite
some time; the Germans controlled the State senate, the
police and much of the business, while the Poles dominated
the railways, port authority and had their own postal service.
The rise of Hitler changed all that, and bitter rivalries soon
came to the surface after his election in next door Germany.
Anti-Polish sentiment spread rapidly, and by 1935 the local
police force had started keeping tabs on any Pole seen as
a threat to the German way.
The rise in tensions wasn’t lost on the Poles. From 1925 the
League of Nations bowed to pressure and consented to the
deployment of a token 88 man Polish force across the water
from Gdansk on the Polish controlled Westerplatte Peninsula.
As the years went on, and Hitler’s posturing became ever
more threatening, the Poles continued to covertly strengthen
their foothold, smuggling in military hardware and secretly
building fortifications in breach of League of Nations decrees.
To all intents and purposes Westerplatte was guarded by a
German troops destroy all signs of Poland in the Reich’s Danzig
crack unit, whose unspoken remit was to be able to hold out
for one day should the Germans attack, thereby giving other
Polish units enough time to rescue Gdansk from Nazi claws.
Outbreak
On August 31, 1939, Nazi units dressed in Polish uniform
infamously staged a mock attack on a radio tower in the
German border town of Gleiwitz (now Gliwice).
Pictures of the victims (actually corpses of concentration
camp inmates dressed in German uniforms) were flashed
across the world, with Hitler looking innocent and claiming
a provocative attack by the Polish army. The following dawn,
Germany launched a strike on Westerplatte, an attack that
would ultimately kick off World War II.
Popular theory asserts the first shots were fired from the
German warship the Schleiswig Holsten, supposedly visiting
Gdansk on a goodwill mission. Wrong. Logbooks recovered by
the Nowy Port Lighthouse prove beyond doubt that the German
battleship was pre-empted by a matter of three minutes
by a gun emplacement nestled halfway up the lighthouse.
The Poles, taken aback, missed this target entirely. Second
time round they scored a direct hit, credited to a Pole called
Eugeniusz Grabowski, thereby in all likelihood making the
lighthouse gunners the first casualties in a war that would
go on to claim 55 million lives.
The German shelling of Westerplatte was simultaneously
supported by infantry attacks on the Westerplatte gateway,
with the Polish defenders repelling repeated attempts at
advance by the navy storm troopers. At precisely the same
time this assault had begun, another equally ferocious battle
was being waged at the small post office in the city’s thencalled
Hevelius Square. Detachments of German police and
SS laid siege to the 50 Polish post workers inside, who put
up a brave struggle for over 17 hours until casualties became
intolerable, part of the building collapsed and the Germans
began to attack with flamethrowers. A truly heroic story of
David and Goliath proportions, and one that has entered
Polish folklore. However what the story fails to tell is just why
a bunch of posties were armed to the teeth, and why two
elite units were attacking them. The explanation becomes
clearer when one recognizes that the Polish Post Office was
the centre of intelligence, breaking ciphers and smuggling
secrets in and out of Gdansk, and as such was seen as a key
strategic target by the Nazis. All of the Post Office ‘workers’
were later executed and buried in a mass grave in Zaspa.
Siege
Yet while the post office capitulated, the garrison at Westerplatte
- numbering around 220 men - held on. The plan was
simple: in the event of an attack in Gdansk the Polish navy,
stationed in nearby Gdynia (Poland), would sail in to help,
aircraft from Puck would be scrambled, and the bridge in
Tczew would be blown to stop a German advance into what
was the demilitarized zone of the Free State. In the event
everything that could go wrong, did. The navy was caught
out in the Bay of Gdansk, while the air force was destroyed
while still on the ground. There were some successes, mind.
Polish customs officers succeeded in blowing the bridge
at Tczew, crucially slowing the German advance whose
armour was gathered over in Szymankowo. They paid for
their bravery with their lives, and all were later shot by their
German opposites, themselves also armed and primed for
war. Today Stutthof museum has a post-execution picture
of a grinning Nazi shooting party taken outside the Pullman
wagons in which the Polish officers had lived.
Gdańsk In Your Pocket gdansk.inyourpocket.com
Adolf Hitler salutes the crowds on Langgasse (ul. Dluga)
Britain and France declared war on Germany on September
3, but hopes of outside help being directed to Poland
proved ill founded. Yet still the Westerplatte garrison fought
on. By now water had begun to run short, and the terrain
they defended had churned up into a pockmarked mass
of craters. Intensive bombardment from land, sea and air
continued night and day, before finally, at 10:15 on the
morning of September 7, Major Henryk Sucharski took the
decision to raise the white flag. The battle had cost just 15
Polish lives, and the bravery of the troops was recognized
by the German general who allowed Sucharski to keep his
sword with him in captivity, as well as by German soldiers
who allegedly saluted their Polish counterparts as they were
marched away. To this day German losses in the battle for
Westerplatte remain an official secret. Gdynia surrendered
two weeks later, and then Hel - the final Polish stronghold in
Pomerania - fell on the 2nd of October by which time Poland
had been invaded from the east by the Soviet Union. Ironically,
Hel, the final stand for the Poles, would also be the
last place the Nazis would relinquish in 1945.
Under the Reich
Hitler had always made much of incorporating Danzig into
the Reich, yet somewhat surprisingly he only made two
visits to the city - a deep held suspicion of Danzigers, and a
fear of assassination explaining such apathy. The second of
these visits came on September 18, 1939, with an exultant
Fuhrer arriving to Sopot on board his armoured train, the
Amerika. It was there he checked into the Kasino Hotel (today
the Sofitel Grand), booking into rooms 251-253. His stay
lasted a week, during which time he received a delegation
from Japan, visited the Schleswig-Holstein, Westerplatte
and inspected a parade outside Dwor Artus on Gdansk’s
Dlugi Targ. Stories of him eating in the nearby Ratskeller
persist to this day, and you’ll still find ghouls asking to be
seated on his table.
By this time fervent Nazis were already clamouring to rid the
region of all traces of Polonization. Intelligentsia and other
such targets were arrested and incarcerated in numerous
camps and prisons, including the Victoriaschule (ul. Kładki 1.
B-5), which was used as a interview and processing centre,
the city jail (now replaced by a newer model) and Stutthof -
later to morph into a notorious concentration camp. Flags,
signs and anything else remotely Polish was torched and
destroyed, and even today visitors can view a Polish eagle in
the Free City Museum (C-4 ul. Piwna 19/21), its form clearly
scarred from the rocks thrown at it.
Governor and Gauleiter of the region was Albert Forster,
and his reign still arouses controversy and debate among
both scholars and survivors. Unlike other Gauleiters in
annexed and occupied territories, Forster followed a
gdansk.inyourpocket.com
WORLD WAR II
program of assimilation, granting thousands of Poles
German citizenship if they swore German heritage. Even
more remarkably, those Poles rounded up and persecuted
in the first wave of arrests could seek German citizenship,
and even pursue compensation and restitution for any
property originally seized. Benign by some benchmarks,
Forster was a form Nazi on others. Jews faced merciless
persecution, Stutthof emerged as a true place of terror
and he is personally thought to have given the order for
the mass murder of over 2,000 Poles executed between
1939 and 1940. Today traces of Forster’s Danzig are
scant - his country retreat on Wyspa Sobieszewksa, where
he hunted and lived in extravagant style, is today fenced
from prying eyes. His Danzig home in Oliwa has been
pulled down, and the secret escape tunnel running from
Party HQ in Wrzeszcz (ul. Orzeszkowej 2 H/I-3) to the foot
of a hill in the Siedlice district (ul. Kartuska 135L I-5) has
long been bricked up. Eventually caught and held on the
Hel Peninsula trying to flee westwards, even his death
remains a mystery - some claim he was hung in Biskupia
Gora after the war, others that it was his body double who
faced the hangman. Yet more sources claim he was taken
to Warsaw’s Mokotow Prison and beaten to death. The
truth, it appears, will never be known.
The End
For ordinary Danzigers the quality of life remained relatively
good for much of the war. Sopot, especially, became
a favourite stamping ground for soldiers on R&R, and in
spite of rationing and occasional shortages life didn’t get
worse until the closing stages. The first warning signs that
all was not well came with the first air raids, yet even so
allied bombers targeted the shipyards - home to munitions
factories producing V1 and V2 rockets - and the
Zaspa airfield. The war still seemed far off, even in 1943
when work commenced on whisking cultural treasures to
locations westwards.
By 1944 a different picture had emerged; Danzig had
become a major transit point, not least with swarms
of refugees fleeing from the east, as well as a regular
target for bombing raids. By March, 1945, with the Red
Army fast approaching, the population had reached 1.5
million and city stood on the precipice of chaos. Suspected
deserters were strung up from the lampposts
and trees of al. Zwyciestwa, and the city descended
into a Dantean vision. Historian Antony Beevor writes
of the ensuing siege: ‘Fighter bombers strafed the
towns and port areas. Soviet Shturmoviks treated
civilian and military targets alike. A church was as
good as a bunker, especially when it seemed as if
the objective was to flatten every building which still
protruded conspicuously above the ground... Tens of
thousands of women and children, terrified of losing
their places in the queues to escape, provided
unmissable targets’.
Danzig had been designated a closed fortress, or Festung,
and the defence proved bitter and bloody. Gdynia fell in
the middle of March, and faced the full wrath of a drunken,
avenging army, spurring the defenders of Danzig to fight
even harder to grant the remaining civilians the chance of
evacuation. Encircled and out-powered, even when the opportunity
to surrender was offered the Germans continued
fighting; that fires were burning a month after Danzig was
captured is testament to the ferocity of the siege. Polish
and Red Army troops finally entered the city on March 21;
Gdansk, home to the first shots of the war, now lay adrift on
a sea of rape and ruin.
May - July 2012
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