That same month, he ordered preparations for an invasion of Poland. Hitler believed, however, that the two nations were bluffing and would only offer token resistance to a German invasion of Poland, or none at all. Faced with the prospect of unrestrained German aggression, Britain and France offered security guarantees to Poland in March 1939. In early 1939, Hitler annexed the Czechoslovakian provinces of Bohemia and Moravia and forced Lithuania to surrender the Baltic port city of Memel. The memory of World War II remains potent across Europe, especially for Poles, and conditions the way many there respond to current events. No surprise since the Russian act of aggression came just before the 75 th anniversary of the German invasion of Poland. In 2014, when Russia forcibly annexed the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine, Poles were among those who protested most loudly. It was the beginning of a war over the future of Poland it was the beginning of the Second World War, a struggle for the fate of the world. The assault on Danzig was the opening act of the full-scale invasion of Poland as some one-and-a-half million men of the German Army moved out of their encampments and into combat. The survivors staggered outside to surrender where the SS men gunned them down.
Their attackers then lit the building on fire. The workers in the post office held out until, outgunned, they retreated into the basement. The shooting started in the early morning, 4:45 AM, September 1, 1939, when the obsolete German battleship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire from its berth in the Free City of Danzig.Īs the ship’s big guns hammered Polish fortifications on the Westerplatte peninsula, undercover agents of the Schutzstaffel, the SS, began seizing control of key buildings in the city.
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