At 4:45 on the morning of September 1, 1939, the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on the Polish garrison at Westerplatte, and World War II began. In Danzig (now Gdansk), six miles away, the Polish community woke to a different kind of attack. Nazi paramilitaries were seizing government buildings, arresting Polish leaders, and hoisting the swastika over the Free City. By mid-morning, the Polish Post Office -- a squat brick building at Dominikanski Square -- was surrounded.
The Polish Post Office in Danzig was no ordinary postal facility. It was a symbol of Polish presence in the Free City -- a predominantly German city with a significant Polish minority guaranteed certain rights under the Versailles Treaty. The post office employed approximately 150 people, most of them ethnic Poles. They were not soldiers. They were postmen, clerks, telegraph operators, and sorters. But on September 1, 1939, they became something else entirely.
When the SS and German police surrounded the building, the post office workers barricaded themselves inside. They had access to a small arsenal -- mostly hunting rifles and handguns kept in the building for protection -- that had been accumulated over the preceding years as tensions in the Free City escalated.
The first assault came at noon on September 1. The defenders, fighting from upper-floor windows, repulsed it. The second assault came at 3 PM, and was again repelled. By evening, the Germans had brought up a field gun. The building's brick walls were thick enough to withstand small-arms fire but not artillery. The defenders dug in for a siege.
The battle raged for three days. During this time, the post office workers maintained telegraph contact with Polish command, transmitting intelligence about German troop movements until the wires were cut. They rationed ammunition with mathematical precision. They treated the wounded in the basement. They sang patriotic songs between volleys to keep their morale up.
On September 3, the Germans brought up additional artillery and began systematic bombardment. By the afternoon of September 3, the building was burning. The defenders, running low on ammunition and water, made the decision to attempt a breakout under cover of smoke. It was a desperate gamble.
Of the 150 workers who had barricaded themselves inside, approximately 50 made it out during the breakout. Many were shot in the street or drowned trying to escape through the canals. Twenty-eight were captured. The remainder were killed.
The captured defenders were subjected to a farcical trial by a Nazi court within the week. Eighteen of them were sentenced to death and executed. The remaining ten received prison sentences. Among the executed was the postmaster, Sebastian Bago, who had organized the defense. He was 51 years old.
After the war, the defenders of the Polish Post Office became national heroes in Poland. The building was destroyed during the war and rebuilt in 1972 as a museum. A monument stands outside: a bronze group of postal workers with rifles, frozen in the moment of their last stand.
Mike, who has been to Normandy, might find it instructive to know that this battle -- arguably the first military engagement of the entire Second World War -- was fought not by professional soldiers but by the people who had sorted your letters and weighed your packages for years. The building is now the Muzeum Poczty Polskiej w Gdansku, and it contains one of the most extraordinary collections of wartime postal history in Europe.