The defence of the Polish Post Office in Gdańsk

At 4.45 a.m. on 1 September 1939, at the very moment the battleship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on Westerplatte, the Danzig police and SS units attacked the Polish Post Office building on Heweliusz Square in the Free City of Danzig. Inside were just over fifty people, most of them postal officials, armed with three light machine guns, several dozen pistols and rifles, and grenades. Under Polish plans they were to hold out for about six hours, until relief arrived from Pomerania. No relief came, yet the defenders held out for some fourteen hours, beating off successive assaults supported by armoured cars and artillery. They surrendered only in the evening, after the Germans had blown up part of a wall, pumped petrol into the cellars and set it alight.

Chronologies say briefly that the defenders were “overcome”. That is true, but it is not the whole story. The defence of the Post Office was one of the first engagements of the Second World War, and its epilogue became one of the war’s first crimes: a German court martial sentenced the surviving postal workers to death as “irregular combatants”, and on 5 October 1939 thirty-eight of them were shot. The verdict was quashed by a German court only in 1998.

A Polish post office in a German city

Poland’s right to run its own postal service in Gdańsk (Danzig) derived from the Treaty of Versailles and from the agreements that accompanied the creation of the Free City in 1920. Poland was entitled to maintain postal, telegraph and telephone services in the city for communications with the port and with other countries. As early as 1925 the installation of Polish letter boxes in the streets of Gdańsk sparked a dispute that was settled by the Council of the League of Nations and the Permanent Court of International Justice at The Hague. From 1930 the main Polish office in the city was the Gdańsk 1 Post Office, in a former building on Heweliusz Square (Heveliusplatz), not far from the Old Town. It also housed a telephone exchange with a direct line to Poland, which in the event of conflict made it a building of military importance. According to the Polish intelligence officer Edmund Charaszkiewicz, from the mid-1930s the building also served as one of his outposts.

In 1939 the Gdańsk branch of the Polish Post employed just over a hundred people. Many of them belonged to the Riflemen’s Association and had undergone military training on courses in Poland. The office’s self-defence was at first led by a postal official and former non-commissioned officer, Alfons Flisykowski. In the spring of 1939, when, after the German demands on Poland, the Danzig question became the crux of the Polish-German dispute, the General Staff sent a reserve second lieutenant, the engineer Konrad Guderski, to the city. Under his direction the postal workers trained and the building was prepared for defence: the trees around it were cut down, doors and windows were reinforced and weapons were stockpiled. In mid-August the garrison was reinforced by ten post office employees from Gdynia and Bydgoszcz, most of them reserve NCOs.

The Danzig Nazis prepared just as carefully. Over the summer the Free City, formally demilitarised, turned into an armed camp, a fact discussed with alarm in London when Chamberlain warned against settling the Danzig question by means of a fait accompli. The SS-Heimwehr Danzig was formed, and the Danzig police received heavy weapons from the Reich. The plan for taking the Post Office was drawn up in July. Three assault groups were to pin down the defenders from the front, while the main blow was to come from the neighbouring State Labour Office building, through a hole knocked in the wall.

The assault

At about 4 a.m. the Germans cut off the building’s electricity and telephone lines. The postal workers had been in place since the evening, as an attack was expected. According to various counts, there were between 52 and 58 people in the building: several dozen Gdańsk postal workers, the ten sent from Gdynia and Bydgoszcz, one Polish railwayman, and the caretaker, Jan Pipka, with his wife and their ten-year-old foster daughter, Erwina. Employees who turned up for work in the morning were stopped outside the building by a police cordon.

At 4.45 a.m. a special unit of the Danzig Schutzpolizei (protection police) went into the attack, supported by SS men from the SS-Heimwehr Danzig and SS-Wachsturmbann E, and by three ADGZ armoured cars. The whole operation was directed by the commander of the Danzig Schutzpolizei, Willi Bethke, while political responsibility lay with the head of the Danzig police, Johannes Schäfer. Journalists and Ufa newsreel cameramen came to the scene: the assault was meant to be a showcase victory.

The first frontal attack collapsed. A few attackers managed to break into the main hall but were driven out; on the German side two men were killed, among them the commander of one of the groups, and several were wounded. An attack from the direction of the Labour Office was also repulsed. When the Germans broke through the wall, Guderski threw a grenade into the opening and was killed by its explosion, halting the attackers. Flisykowski took command. At about 10 a.m. Gauleiter Albert Forster, who a few hours earlier had proclaimed the incorporation of Danzig into the Reich, arrived on Heweliusz Square in one of the armoured cars to watch the fighting.

At about 11 a.m. the attackers were reinforced by two 75-millimetre guns from the Wehrmacht, and later by a 105-millimetre howitzer. Fire at close range wrecked the façade, but the next assault was also beaten off. The Germans even asked for mortar support from the Westerplatte sector, but its fire was so inaccurate that it endangered their own troops more than the defenders, and it was soon stopped. At around 3 p.m. the commander of the attack halted the assault and gave the defenders two hours to think it over. The postal workers did not answer. In the meantime sappers dug a tunnel under the wall of the building and placed an explosive charge in it, weighing about 600 kilograms according to Polish findings.

At 5 p.m. the charge went off, bringing down part of the wall. Covered by three guns, the Germans burst into the building and took most of it. The defenders withdrew to the cellars. The fire brigade was then brought to the square. At about 6 p.m. petrol was pumped into the cellars and ignited, according to some accounts with flamethrowers, according to others with a grenade. Several postal workers were burned alive, and others suffered severe burns.

The surrender

At about 7 p.m. the defenders decided to surrender. The first to come out of the burning building, carrying a white flag, was the acting director of the post office, Dr Jan Michoń (PL). He was shot dead. The postmaster, Józef Wąsik (PL), who came out after him, was killed by a jet of fire from a flamethrower. The Germans captured the rest. On the Polish side eight men were killed in the fighting or at the moment of surrender (two of them were never identified). Sixteen wounded and burned were taken to hospital, where six more died, among them the caretaker Pipka. The youngest victim was Erwina Barzychowska (PL), who was burned by a flamethrower as she left the building and died on 20 October after seven weeks of suffering.

Six postal workers managed to escape from the building in the confusion. Two of them, including the wounded Flisykowski, were caught in the following days; four survived the war. The attackers’ losses are not known precisely. The exact figures differ between sources in any case, since not all authors count the caretaker’s family and the civilians among the defenders.

Trial and execution

The captured defenders were first held in the police headquarters building and, a few days later, in the Victoriaschule (PL), a former school on Kładki Street turned into a prison, where Gdańsk Poles arrested in the first days of the war were held and beaten. On 8 September twenty-eight postal workers were brought before the court martial of the troop group commanded by General Friedrich-Georg Eberhardt, and at the end of September, on 29 or 30 September (sources differ), ten more who had been discharged from hospital. All were sentenced to death for acting as irregular combatants (Freischärlerei) under the German decree on special wartime criminal law of 1938. The presiding judge was Kurt Bode, the prosecutor was the military judicial counsellor Hans-Werner Giesecke, and the defence counsel was an appointed Wehrmacht officer. The sentences were confirmed by the military superiors, and the plea for clemency was rejected by the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, General Walther von Brauchitsch.

The sentence was most probably carried out at dawn on 5 October 1939 at the police firing range at Zaspa, next to Gdańsk airport. The execution was directed by SS-Sturmbannführer Max Pauly, commandant of the Stutthof camp, then being set up. According to witnesses, the condemned were led out in fours, bound. The grave, dug by Stutthof prisoners, was covered with lime and turfed over. The postal workers’ families were persecuted as well. At least two other defenders later died in camps.

The long road to the truth

For half a century the place of execution remained unknown. The mass grave of the thirty-eight postal workers was discovered by chance on 28 August 1991 by workmen digging foundations on the Zaspa housing estate. Among the remains was the wedding ring of the counter clerk Franciszek Klinkosz, engraved with his wife’s initials and the date of their wedding, which made it possible to confirm whose grave it was. The remains were reburied in the nearby Cemetery of the Victims of Hitlerism.

The question of the verdict was taken up by the German criminologist Dieter Schenk, who in 1995 published the book Die Post von Danzig. Geschichte eines deutschen Justizmords (“The Danzig Post Office: The Story of a German Judicial Murder”). As a result, the Regional Court in Lübeck reopened the case and in 1998 quashed the 1939 verdicts, acquitting the postal workers. The court found that the German decree on which the verdict had been based had come into force in the Danzig area only in November 1939; that the criminal code of the Free City did not provide for the death penalty; that the post office had been attacked by the Danzig police and the SS, not by the Wehrmacht; and that the Polish Post Office was Polish territory, defended by Poles who could not be treated as irregular combatants. The presiding judge in 1939 was found to have perverted the course of justice. Neither Bode nor Giesecke was ever punished. After the war they went through denazification and built legal careers in the Federal Republic; both died in the 1970s. In 1998 Gdańsk City Council granted the defenders honorary citizenship posthumously, and in 2002 Schenk received the same distinction.

Significance

The defence of the Polish Post Office had no influence on the course of the German invasion of Poland. The relief plan was unrealistic: the Pomorze Army had no intention of defending the whole Corridor, and the Polish command neither cancelled the order to defend the building nor told the postal workers that help would not come. Yet the event carried enormous symbolic weight. In the city over which the powers had wrangled all summer, a group of officials in civilian clothes resisted the police and SS, backed by artillery, for an entire day, and their fate foreshadowed how the Germans intended to treat the defeated. The judicial murder of the defenders was one of the first signs of a policy that in the following months took the form, in Pomerania, of mass executions of the Polish intelligentsia, priests and activists, above all in the forests of Piaśnica.

In Polish memory the defence of the Post Office became, alongside Westerplatte, a symbol of September 1939. In 1946 the State National Council awarded the Virtuti Militari to the Gdańsk branch of the postal workers’ trade union, and many defenders received the Virtuti Militari cross posthumously; in 1958 the film Wolne miasto (PL) (Free City) was made; and in 1979 a monument was unveiled on the square now called Polish Post Office Defenders’ Square (PL), and a museum (PL) opened in the former building. The event entered German consciousness thanks to the Danzig-born Günter Grass, who described the defence of the Post Office in his novel The Tin Drum (1959), and, many years later, thanks to Schenk’s work, which led to the rehabilitation of the condemned.