How fifty-six postal workers held off the SS for fifteen hours in 1939
On September 1, 1939, as the invasion of Poland began, a small group of Polish postmen in Danzig mounted a desperate defense of their office. Outnumbered and outgunned, they resisted German police and SS forces for fifteen hours, becoming a symbol of defiance that remains etched in Polish history.
The Polish Post Office in the Free City of Danzig was an extraterritorial property established in 1920. By 1939, as tensions escalated, the Polish High Command prepared the staff for potential conflict. Led by sublieutenant Konrad Guderski, the 56 occupants—including local employees and reinforcements from Gdynia and Bydgoszcz—fortified the building with light machine guns and grenades. Their goal was to hold the position for six hours until a relief force could arrive, but no help came.
The German assault, involving Danzig police, SA formations, and SS units, began at 04:45 on September 1. Despite artillery support and the use of heavy armored cars, the defenders repelled multiple attacks. Frustrated by the resistance, German forces eventually used a 600 kg explosive device to breach the walls and pumped gasoline into the basement, setting it ablaze. When the survivors finally surrendered, the director was shot while carrying a white flag, and others were executed by flamethrowers or later sentenced to death by a military court.
The legal aftermath was as brutal as the battle. The defenders were tried as illegal combatants and executed on October 5, 1939. While the presiding judge, Kurt Bode, and prosecutor Hans-Werner Giesecke escaped accountability and continued their careers in post-war Germany, the convictions were finally invalidated in 1997–1998. A German court cited the work of author Dieter Schenk, who exposed the trial as a judicial murder, noting that the military penal law used to condemn the men had not even been in effect in Danzig at the time of the siege.
