The capture of Danzig

On 30 March 1945 the street fighting in Gdańsk (Danzig) came to an end. Troops of Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky’s 2nd Belorussian Front, supported by soldiers of the Polish 1st Armoured Brigade, took control of the city with whose disputed status the war had begun in 1939. The German garrison, which for two weeks had covered the evacuation of refugees through the port, withdrew eastwards into the Vistula delta, and part of it sailed away to Hel. By then the historic Main Town was a sea of ruins and fires – and it went on burning for many days after the fighting had ended.

The capture of Gdańsk concluded a long process lasting several weeks. Lists of wartime events usually record under 7 March that the Germans began to evacuate Gdańsk, and under 18 March that the Red Army approached the city. Both statements need to be made more precise: evacuation by sea had been under way there since the end of January, and Soviet troops reached the outer defensive positions in mid-March. The date of 7 March, on the other hand, was roughly the moment when Gdańsk lost its land connection with the Reich and the sea became the only escape route.

Free City, Reichsgau, fortress

Gdańsk entered the Second World War with a separate status. Under the Treaty of Versailles it had been, since 1920, a Free City under the protection of the League of Nations, linked to Poland by a customs union and by Polish rights in the port, but inhabited overwhelmingly by Germans. From 1930 the Nazi party in the city was led by Gauleiter Albert Forster, who gradually brought both the Senate and the street under his control. Hitler’s demand for “the return of Danzig to the Reich” became one of the pretexts for the attack on Poland in 1939. On 1 September, in the first hours of the war, the Germans attacked the Westerplatte and the Polish Post Office, and Forster proclaimed the city’s incorporation into the Reich.

In the years that followed Gdańsk was the capital of Reichsgau Danzig-West Prussia. The Polish population of the Free City and of Gdańsk Pomerania suffered executions, expulsions and forced registration on the Volksliste; a few dozen kilometres east of the city lay the Stutthof concentration camp. The Gdańsk shipyards built U-boats for the Kriegsmarine, while the port itself lay far from the fronts until 1945.

The Red Army’s winter offensive changed that. In January 1945 Soviet troops cut East Prussia off from the rest of the Reich, and from 10 February, in the East Pomeranian offensive, the 2nd Belorussian Front pushed north-west from the lower Vistula. Gdańsk and Gdynia (Gotenhafen) became at once the rear area of the front, the goal of hundreds of thousands of refugees and the main ports through which the Kriegsmarine conducted the evacuation of civilians and troops.

Port of escape

The evacuation by sea began in the second half of January on the orders of Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz; historians call it Operation Hannibal. Columns of refugees from East Prussia streamed into Gdańsk and Gdynia, including those who had crossed the ice of the Vistula Lagoon, as well as the inhabitants of Pomerania. Forster long forbade the evacuation of his own Reichsgau and announced it belatedly, so many civilians set off only when the front was already upon them.

Escape by sea had its price. On the night of 30–31 January the Soviet submarine S-13 sank the Wilhelm Gustloff off Łeba; she had sailed from Gdynia with refugees, wounded and soldiers, and the death toll is estimated at between about 5,300 and more than 9,000. Even so, ships left Gdynia, Nowy Port and Hel almost every day. According to the Gdańsk Encyclopedia (Gedanopedia), some 119,000 refugees, nearly 46,000 wounded and about 5,000 soldiers were shipped out of the port of Gdańsk alone between January and May; from the Bay of Gdańsk as a whole, many times more.

At the beginning of March the situation changed fundamentally. On 4–5 March Soviet tanks reached the Baltic near Koszalin (Köslin) and Kołobrzeg, splitting the German forces in Pomerania in two. The German Second Army, together with several hundred thousand refugees, was cut off in the east. According to Gedanopedia, rail evacuation from Gdańsk to the west ceased around 5–7 March – and it is this moment that war chronologies record under 7 March as “the beginning of the evacuation of Gdańsk”. It would be more accurate to say that from then on the evacuation could take place only by sea, and the city turned into a crowded bridgehead.

According to some accounts, some 200,000 soldiers and – together with the inhabitants – as many as a million refugees were in the Gdynia and Gdańsk area. On 12 March General Dietrich von Saucken took command of the Second Army. His task was to hold the Gdańsk–Gdynia fortified area as long as possible in order to keep the ports open. The defence was supported by heavy ships of the Kriegsmarine, which shelled the attacking troops from the waters of the bay. There was a change at the top as well: on 20 March Gotthard Heinrici replaced Heinrich Himmler at the head of Army Group Vistula, but the Second Army had by then been effectively cut off from it and was fighting on its own.

A ring around the Tricity

Having reached the sea, Rokossovsky turned his front eastwards. From 6 March his armies, reinforced by the 1st Guards Tank Army handed over by Zhukov and by the Polish 1st Armoured Brigade “Heroes of Westerplatte”, pushed towards the Bay of Gdańsk. By 9 March Słupsk, Bytów and Kościerzyna had been taken; on 10 March Soviet troops stood before Lębork and Kartuzy; on 12 March Tczew fell, and on 17 March Malbork surrendered. From 12 to 17 March the Polish tank crews fought for Rumia, on the western approaches to Gdynia.

According to some accounts, the leading Soviet units reached the Gdańsk area on 13 March, and the next day the fighting for the outer defensive positions began; from 14 March the city was systematically bombed and shelled. War chronologies note under 18 March that the Red Army was “approaching Gdańsk” – a simplification, since by that day Soviet troops had already been storming the fortified moraine hills above Sopot, Oliwa and Wielki Kack for several days. The fighting for these hills was exceptionally bloody. Of the bombing raids, the most damaging were the night attacks by Soviet aircraft of 18–19 and 20 March, which started fires in the city centre; according to Gedanopedia, the Main Town Hall, the City Museum and the telegraph office building were among those damaged.

Rokossovsky decided to separate the two cities with a wedge driven in near Sopot. On 22 March the Soviet 70th Army reached the sea between Sopot and Orłowo, and by 25 March Sopot and Oliwa had been taken. The defence was split into two parts: Gdynia and Gdańsk. On 24 March Rokossovsky sent the defenders an ultimatum calling on them to surrender, declaring that he wished to spare the city and its people. The Germans did not accept it – according to Gedanopedia, the garrison of Gdańsk, which had been declared a fortress, was to defend itself to the last man on Hitler’s orders.

The assault

The decisive assault on Gdańsk began on 27 March. According to Gdańsk studies, four armies attacked: General Ivan Fedyuninsky’s 2nd Shock Army from the south-east, General Pavel Batov’s 65th Army from the south-west, and the 49th (PL) and 70th Armies from the west and north. Batov directed the assault on the city centre from a command post on Biskupia Górka, a hill overlooking the Main Town. The German defenders – elements of several shattered divisions, the Volkssturm and sailors – fought on in the ruins, supported by the guns of warships in the bay.

At the same time the fate of Gdynia was decided. It was attacked by the Soviet 19th Army, which included the main body of the Polish armoured brigade. The assault on the city began on 26 March; on 28 March the Germans were driven out of the city and the port onto the Oksywie Heights (PL) (Kępa Oksywska), from where the Kriegsmarine ferried soldiers and civilians to Hel by night. Polish sources take 28 March as the date of Gdynia’s liberation; some Western accounts give 26 March, when street fighting was already going on in the city. For the Polish tank crews this was a battle for a city that the Polish Republic had built from scratch between the wars as its window on the sea.

In Gdańsk on 28 March tanks, Polish ones among them, broke into the burning centre, and Soviet units reached the Motława. Part of the 1st Armoured Brigade – a motorised infantry battalion with a tank platoon – was fighting in the western part of the city and, according to some accounts, reached the Long Market (Długi Targ) that same day. The plan had been to hoist a flag on the town hall tower, but it was on fire. So two nineteen-year-old tank crewmen, Second Lieutenant Bronisław Wilczewski and Warrant Officer Zbigniew Michel, tore down the Nazi flag from the mast on Artus Court and raised the white-and-red Polish flag in its place. The date of this event is uncertain: the Museum of Gdańsk, Gedanopedia and the account of the brigade’s combat record give 28 March, other accounts 29 or 30 March. In communist Poland the scene became one of the symbols of “Gdańsk’s return to the Motherland”.

By the evening of 29 March resistance in the city centre had been broken, and on 30 March the street fighting ceased; this date was adopted as the day of the city’s capture. The remnants of the garrison withdrew eastwards across the Vistula into the river’s delta and onto the Vistula Spit, and some sailed away to Hel. The area of the Westerplatte and the Wisłoujście fortress was not taken until the beginning of April.

The losses in the fighting for the city are known only approximately. According to some accounts, more than 3,000 Soviet soldiers were killed, among them the commander of the 37th Guards Rifle Division, General Sobir Rahimov (Sabir Rakhimov), who was mortally wounded a few days before the city fell, and the Polish armoured brigade lost 88 killed and 193 wounded in the fighting for Gdańsk. Soviet communiqués spoke of 39,000 Germans killed and 10,000 taken prisoner in the Gdańsk operation as a whole – figures that historians, like much Soviet data from this period, treat with caution.

A city in flames

Gdańsk, which had come through almost the entire war without major damage, ceased to exist as a historic city within a few weeks. According to the Museum of Gdańsk, the city centre was about 90 per cent destroyed; across the city as a whole, according to some sources, about 55 per cent of the buildings lay in ruins, and of 87 port installations only seven survived. The retreating Germans blew up quays and breakwaters; St Mary’s Basilica, the town hall, Artus Court and almost all the townhouses of the Main Town were left in ruins.

Not all this destruction was the result of the fighting. Polish and German historians stress that a large part of the city centre burned down after the city had been taken, when Soviet soldiers looted and set fire to abandoned townhouses; according to estimates cited in some accounts, roughly half the destruction was due to air raids and shelling and the other half to demolition and arson after the fighting had ended. Fires continued to burn in Gdańsk for many days after 30 March.

Tens of thousands of civilians remained in the city, most of them Germans – residents and refugees who had not managed to get away by sea – but also Poles, forced labourers and prisoners of war. Many of them suffered violence at the hands of the victorious soldiers: German and Polish witnesses describe mass rape, killings and looting, and Polish and Kashubian women were among the victims. Many people took their own lives. The full number of civilian victims cannot be established; according to Gedanopedia, some 6,000 dead were exhumed and buried in mass graves in April and May 1945 alone.

The assessment of those days remains contested. In communist Poland people spoke only of “the liberation of Gdańsk” and “the return to the Motherland”. For the Poles of the Free City, persecuted since 1939, it was indeed the end of German terror, and for the Polish state it meant regaining the mouth of the Vistula. For the German inhabitants it was the end of their city, and for many Poles the beginning of a new, communist dependence and of arrests by the NKVD. The Museum of Gdańsk, which recalls all these perspectives on successive anniversaries, asks the question directly: liberation, return to the Motherland or a new subjugation?

What the capture of Gdańsk brought

The fighting in Gdańsk Pomerania did not end on 30 March. On the Oksywie Heights the Germans held out until 4–5 April, and the remnants of the Second Army – in the Vistula delta, on the Vistula Spit and on the Hel peninsula, where in September 1939 the Polish coast had held out longest – kept going until the surrender on 9 May. Until the last days of the war the Kriegsmarine shipped people westwards from there. On 16 April a Soviet submarine sank the transport Goya, sailing from Hel, with the loss of some 6,000–7,000 lives – one of the greatest maritime disasters in history.

The capture of Gdańsk and Gdynia allowed Rokossovsky to transfer his forces to the lower Oder, where in the second half of April the 2nd Belorussian Front took part in the last offensive of the war, north of Berlin. For Germany, the loss of the ports of the Bay of Gdańsk meant the end of evacuation on a large scale and the final isolation of its forces in East Prussia and Courland.

By a decree issued on the same day, 30 March 1945, the Polish authorities created the Gdańsk Voivodeship, with Sopot as its temporary seat. The city’s future was formally settled in the summer by the Potsdam Conference, which placed Gdańsk under Polish administration. Most of the German inhabitants – according to some accounts, about 120,000–130,000 people in mid-1945 – were expelled over the following years, and their place was taken by settlers from central Poland and from the eastern borderlands seized by the USSR. The Polish inhabitants of the former Free City had to undergo nationality verification.

Thus ended the history of Gdańsk as a German city and of the dispute that in 1939 had become one of the pretexts for war. The rebuilding of the Main Town, carried out from the late 1940s on the basis of old views and plans, took decades; as a result Gdańsk regained its historic appearance, though as an entirely different, Polish city.