On September 1, 1939, the greatest war humanity has ever suffered began, a war in which tens of millions of people died.<\/p>\n
At 4:48 a.m. that day, the German battleship SMS Schleswig-Holstein<\/strong>, which was pretending to pay a visit to the Free City of Danzig, fired its cannons at the nearby Polish military position of Westerplatte.<\/strong> They were the first shots of World War II. The Germans thought that the Polish position would soon surrender, as it only had a garrison of 180 men <\/strong> and apparently consisted of only a few barracks. It was not so.<\/p>\n On September 7, 1939, exhausted, without ammunition or food, the Polish defenders raised a white flag. Major Henryk Sucharski handed over his saber to German General Friedrich-Georg Eberhardt, but the latter allowed him to keep it<\/strong> (although it was later confiscated), as a sign of recognition for the heroism he had shown that small polish garrison. Today only a few ruins of the Polish military positions remain on Westerplatte<\/strong>, a place that is revered in Poland as a byword for heroism. In 1966 a huge 25-meter-high monument dedicated to those heroes was erected<\/strong>, which still stands on the peninsula today, designed by Franciszek Dusze\u0144ko, Henryk Kitowski and Adam Haupt.<\/p>\n You can see here a video of the Museum of the World War II in Gda\u0144sk that shows the places of the battle<\/strong> and how they were in 1939 (the video is in English, you can activate the subtitles in Spanish in the lower bar of the player):<\/p>\n
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