A German military court sentenced the defenders of the Polish Post Office in Gdańsk to death for ‘partisan activity’. The judgement came in breach of both international conventions and local law. On 5 October 1939, the defenders of the Polish Post Office in Gdańsk were executed by the Germans.

In 1921, the Post and Telegraph Directorate of the Republic of Poland at Heveliusplatz in the then Free City of Gdańsk – a city-state that operated on the rules set out by the League of Nations after the 1st World War and the establishment of an independent Polish state.

In 1930, the Danzig 1 Post Office became the main Polish post office in the Free City of Gdańsk with a telephone connection to Poland.

The office also had a self-defence division; most of the post workers belonged to the local Riflemen’s Association. In April 1939, the General Staff of the Polish Army delegated Second Lieutenant Konrad Guderski to the Polish Post Office Branch in Gdańsk to provide additional combat training for the post’s workers and to prepare the building for defence against military action.

The attack on the Polish Post Office in Gdańsk began on 1 September 1939, together with the offensive on the Polish arms depot in Westerplatte. 

Earlier, at around 4 a.m., the building was cut off from electricity and telephone connections. The post office was attacked by a detachment of the Schutzpolizei, as well as subdivisions of the SS Wachsturmbann ‘Eimann’ and the SS Heimwehr Danzing. 

There were 57 people in the building at the time of the attack. According to the assumptions of the Polish Army Headquarters, the defence of the building was to last about six hours, until the Polish army would send reinforcements. 

Backed by an armoured car and artillery fire, the Germans forced the defenders to hide in the basement, where they continued to defend themselves. Finally, the Germans forced the postal workers to surrender by setting fire to the building. Faced with a significant enemy advantage and no chance of receiving support from regular Polish units, the decision to surrender was made at around 6 pm.

The first two defenders of the Polish Post Office who came out in front of the building to announce their surrender were shot on the spot. 

The postal workers defended themselves for more than 14 hours and faced enormous losses. Only after the bloody fight did they decide to surrender. 

The defenders of the Polish postal service were tried by the War Field Court of the ‘Eberhardt Group’ in two fake trials on 8 and 29 September 1939. 

“This sentence carried out on 5 October was a judicial crime, it was a curiosity in many respects because it even broke the law established by the aggressors, by the Germans,” historian Dr Jan Daniluk said in a Polish Radio programme.

The hearings lasted only a few hours and all ended with verdicts sentencing all defendants to the death penalty. The German court ruled based on laws that were not then in force in the Free City of Danzig. 38 Polish postmen were executed on 5 October 1939 at a training ground in Zaspa, Gdansk.

The place of execution and burial of the bodies of the Defenders of the Polish Post Office was not known until 28 August 1991, when construction workers in the Zaspa housing estate accidentally came across their mass grave. The exhumed remains were reburied at the nearby Cemetery of Victims of Hitlerism in Gdańsk.

At the end of the 1990s, the Lübeck Regional Court reviewed the trial of the Danzig postal workers, finding a violation of the rules of court procedure and cancelled the judgement. 

Dr Hans Werner Giesecke and Dr Kurt Bode, responsible for the judicial murder of the postal workers, were never punished. Both of them remained respected lawyers in the German justice system after the war.

Source: IPN, Polskie Radio

Tomasz Modrzejewski

Photos: British Poles