According to the German Navy’s secret plan, the battleship Schleswig-Holstein arrived at the port of Danzig on the morning of 25 August 1939. No one was allowed to disembark from the ship, not even the naval personnel it had secretly taken aboard. On the night of September 1, the sailors were told, “Everyone out. We have been assigned to liberate Danzig.”

At 4:45 am, the attack began on Westerplatte, a peninsula situated in front of Danzig. Approximately 218 Polish soldiers were stationed there, guarding a fortified ammunition depot. The shells fired from the Schleswig-Holstein are still widely regarded as the opening shots of World War II.

On 1 September 1939, in a speech delivered at the Reichstag in Berlin, Führer and Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler presented his justification for the invasion of Poland. That day, the German people were instructed to gather around their radio sets to listen to the speech of the Führer, their leader, Hitler. At around 10 am, Adolf Hitler was taken to the Reichstag in Berlin. There, he made a number of unsolicited and unnecessary statements that attempted to completely distort the actual events and convince the German people that Germany was supposedly fighting a just and defensive war.

He said that day, “I do not want to wage war against women and children. I have ordered my air force to restrict itself exclusively to military targets during the attacks. But if the enemy believes that this gives them the freedom to wage war using the same methods, they will receive such a response that it will leave them stunned! Tonight, Poland fired upon our own territory for the first time, even using regular troops. We have been returning fire since 5:45 this morning!”