The surrender of Hel

On 2 October 1939 German troops entered the Hel Peninsula and occupied the town of Hel. Some three and a half thousand Polish sailors and soldiers went into captivity. The act of surrender had been signed the day before, on the evening of 1 October, at the Grand Hotel in Sopot. So ended the defence of the Polish coast, which had gone on since the first hours of the war. Hel held out for 32 days, longer than Westerplatte, Gdynia and the Kępa Oksywska, and was the last Polish stronghold on the Baltic. Of all the forces in the September Campaign, only Brigadier General Franciszek Kleeberg’s Independent Operational Group Polesie fought on for longer; its battle at Kock was beginning that very day.

Popular chronologies date the surrender of Hel sometimes to 1 October and sometimes to 2 October. Both dates are correct; they simply refer to different things. On 1 October the defenders ceased fire and a Polish delegation signed the terms of surrender in Sopot. On 2 October the Germans entered the tip of the peninsula, and the Polish garrison laid down its arms and went into captivity. Some accounts also move the signing itself to 2 October, because the formalities in Sopot dragged on until late at night. The talks and the signing of the terms, however, began on the evening of 1 October.

A peninsula alone

Before the war Hel was the main base of the Polish fleet. In 1936 a decree of President Ignacy Mościcki created the Hel Fortified Area, commanded from 1937 by Captain Włodzimierz Steyer. Its strongest point was Battery No. 31, named after Heliodor Laskowski (PL), at the tip of the peninsula, armed with four Swedish 152.4 mm Bofors guns. It was commanded by Lieutenant Commander Zbigniew Przybyszewski. Smaller batteries covered the sea shore and the isthmus, while the 2nd Naval Anti-Aircraft Artillery Battalion protected the port and the batteries. The infantry was provided by the KOP Battalion “Hel” (PL) of Major Jan Wiśniewski, formed in the spring of 1939 and eventually expanded to nearly 1,800 men. Shortly before the war the Fleet Commander, Rear Admiral Józef Unrug, moved to Hel; after mobilisation he took charge of the defence of the entire coast. The naval side of the defence was led by Captain Stefan Frankowski, commander of the Naval Coastal Defence, who moved his headquarters to Hel on 3 September.

Hel was bombed from the air from the first day of the war. On 3 September dive bombers sank the Wicher and the Gryf in the harbour, and their crews reinforced the land defences. The submarines that were to guard the approaches to the Gulf of Gdańsk left after a fortnight or so for Sweden or Britain. One of them, the Orzeł, managed to escape internment in Tallinn. On land the Wehrmacht quickly cut through the Polish Corridor. On 7 September the Westerplatte garrison surrendered, on 14 September the Germans took Gdynia, and on 19 September the Kępa Oksywska fell; there Colonel Stanisław Dąbek, commander of the Land Coastal Defence, was killed. By then Hel had already been cut off for several days: after taking Puck and Władysławowo, the Germans sealed off the neck of the peninsula, and the defenders dug in near Chałupy.

The Germans were in no hurry to attack. The peninsula was blockaded on land by units of General Leonhard Kaupisch’s corps, and from the sea by the forces of Rear Admiral Hubert Schmundt, commander of the German naval forces in the Gulf of Gdańsk. From 21 September Hel was shelled by the old battleships Schleswig-Holstein and Schlesien. On 25 September Przybyszewski’s battery hit the Schleswig-Holstein twice, and on 27 September it struck the battleships again. Przybyszewski, wounded on 25 September, returned to his post after a few days in hospital. According to various sources, the anti-aircraft defences shot down or damaged anywhere from a dozen or so to more than fifty German aircraft. The highest figures are most probably inflated.

The last days

By the end of September the defenders’ position had become hopeless. On 28 September Warsaw surrendered, and Modlin followed a day later. According to accounts, Unrug received a telegram from General Juliusz Rómmel, who, given the grave situation, considered further bloodshed undesirable. Hel was running out of ammunition and food, and German aircraft dropped leaflets calling on the garrison to surrender. Discouragement was growing among the soldiers of the KOP battalion, many of them reservists far from home. On 29 and 30 September two anti-landing companies refused to fight. The mutinies were put down by the military police, and those arrested – about 130 men, according to accounts – were locked up on a ship in the harbour. At sea the fighting still went on: on 1 October the German minesweeper M 85 struck a mine east of Jastarnia and sank, with the loss, according to most sources, of 24 sailors. The mines, according to historians, had been laid in early September by the submarine Żbik as part of the Worek Plan.

On 30 September, after heavy shelling, the Germans took Chałupy. As they withdrew, the Poles detonated, at the narrowest point of the peninsula, a barrier made of torpedo warheads (reportedly 83 of them), prepared in order to cut through the isthmus and turn the end of the peninsula into an island. The explosion did not achieve this, but it destroyed the road and the railway line and halted the attack. Some older works date the explosion to 25 September.

At successive conferences at headquarters some officers, Steyer among them, wanted to hold out into October. The decision was settled by the lack of ammunition, food and any hope of relief. The final decision to open negotiations was taken by Rear Admiral Unrug; sources date it to 30 September or 1 October. Unrug himself later explained that the coast had been reduced to a mere “islet” and that further fighting was hopeless. On the morning of 1 October the Polish units ceased fire, and the Germans did the same in the afternoon. The arrival of envoys was arranged by radio.

The act signed in Sopot

The Polish delegation consisted of the Fleet Command’s chief of staff, Captain Marian Majewski, and Captain Antoni Kasztelan (PL), head of counter-intelligence for the Coastal Defence, who spoke fluent German. The talks took place on the evening of 1 October in Sopot, at the Grand Hotel (also known as the Kasino Hotel). The act of surrender was accepted by Rear Admiral Schmundt. Some works also list Captain Frankowski among the Polish signatories, with Kasztelan only as interpreter, and, on the German side, General Kaupisch as well, whose corps blockaded the peninsula from the landward side.

It was an honourable surrender. Officers were allowed to keep their swords. The peninsula was to be occupied the next morning: the stretch from Chałupy to Jastarnia by the Wehrmacht, and from Jastarnia to Hel by the Kriegsmarine. The Poles undertook to hand over their equipment and fortifications, but during the night of 1–2 October weapons, gun sights, ciphers and files were destroyed on Hel. Some of the armament was scuttled or buried. The soldiers were paid three months’ wages in advance.

That same night some sailors tried to escape across the sea to Sweden. Only the Border Guard patrol cutter ORP Batory succeeded; she slipped through the German blockade and reached Gotland, where she was interned. The other vessels turned back or were intercepted.

2 October

On the morning of 2 October, at around 10–11 a.m., the Germans entered the peninsula. Steyer and Frankowski met Rear Admiral Schmundt on Hel. According to accounts, Steyer bade farewell to his men with the words: “Be prepared for a long captivity. But remember that Poland is a great thing! The time will come when you will return here.” The Germans searched the tip of the peninsula for heavy guns in disbelief. They were convinced that such accurate fire against the battleships could not have come from four 152 mm guns. The guns of the Laskowski battery and three guns from the wreck of the Gryf, set up towards the end of the defence as Battery No. 34, were either destroyed by their crews before the surrender or taken by the Germans as booty.

Polish losses in the defence of Hel were small given the length of the fighting. Between about 50 and about 100 men were killed and about 150 wounded; the exact figures are unknown. Some 3,600 sailors and soldiers went into captivity, and according to some calculations slightly more, if civilian staff and survivors from the ships are included. German losses are estimated at several dozen killed and wounded on land, not counting the crew of M 85 and the airmen.

Captivity

The officers were taken to Oflags, first to Nienburg and then to other camps, the largest of which was Oflag II C Woldenberg. Privates and NCOs were sent to Stalags, and many of them were later released by the Germans for labour or sent home. Unrug, born in Germany and brought up in the German navy, in which he had commanded submarines in the First World War, rejected all inducements in captivity to go over to the German side. He spoke to the Germans only through an interpreter, saying that he had forgotten German on 1 September. He passed through several camps and from 1941 was held at Oflag VII A Murnau, where he lived to see liberation in 1945. Captain Frankowski died in captivity in September 1940.

A harsh fate awaited Captain Kasztelan, who before the war had broken up German spy networks on the coast. As early as November 1939 he was taken from his Oflag for interrogation by the Gestapo in Gdańsk. In 1940, in breach of the Geneva Convention, he was “released” from captivity and handed over to the police. Imprisoned in the Stutthof camp and in Gdańsk, he was sentenced to death by the Danzig Special Court in January 1942 and executed in Königsberg in December of that year.

Place in the war

The surrender of Hel ended the fighting on the Polish coast. A few weeks later the whole of the Pomeranian borderland, together with the Free City of Danzig, was incorporated into the Reich as the Reichsgau Danzig-West Prussia under Gauleiter Albert Forster. The port of Gdynia became German Gotenhafen, and in 1940 the Germans built the Schleswig-Holstein battery with 406 mm guns on Hel. The defence of the peninsula had no influence on the outcome of the September Campaign, which was already lost by the middle of the month, but for a whole month it tied down German forces on land, at sea and in the air. Polish memory of September would later look back to it, to Westerplatte and to Oksywie. The inscription “Westerplatte – Oksywie – Hel 1 IX – 2 X 1939” is today on a plaque at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Warsaw.

The final chord of the campaign was the Battle of Kock, fought from 2 to 6 October. The Polish Navy, however, did not stop fighting. The destroyers Burza and Błyskawica and the submarines Orzeł and Wilk fought on alongside the Royal Navy. In May 1945 Hel once again became a last pocket of resistance, this time for the Germans: the Wehrmacht units gathered on the peninsula laid down their arms to the Red Army only after the surrender of the Reich. Unrug did not return to communist Poland. He died in France in 1973, and his remains were brought to Gdynia in 2018. Steyer did return, and from 1947 to 1950 he commanded the Polish Navy. Przybyszewski, after the war commander of the coastal artillery battalion on Hel, was sentenced to death in a show trial in 1952 and executed in Warsaw. He was later rehabilitated.