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The first shots of the war

Name: The first shots of the war
Start: 1939-09-01
Location: Westerplatte, Gdańsk, Poland

Westerplatte · Gdańsk, Poland · 1939-09-01

The German battleship Schleswig-Holstein shelled the Polish garrison at 4:45 in the morning; the post held out for seven days.

The record

Date	1939-09-01
Place	Westerplatte, Gdańsk, Poland
Coordinates	54.407, 18.672 (landmark-level precision)
Scope	World-historic
Sources	Wikipedia
Added	2026-08-14 · source: editors

Go deeper. This page records the place, the date and what is tied to them — the full story is told better elsewhere: Wikipedia. What you will not find there is this location’s other time layers, the map, and the memories readers add below.

Coordinates are given at landmark level. A landmark-level coordinate points at the structure; a city-level one points at the settlement, not at a parcel.

Finding photographs

Every one of these is a search, not a guess: the event is documented, so the pictures exist somewhere. Start here.

Wikimedia Commons — freely licensed images, with the licence stated on every file. This is the only source we republish from.
The reference article — its own illustrations, and its citations to archives.
Image search filtered to reusable licences — useful for tracing which institution holds a picture.
National and municipal archives of Poland, and the picture desks of newspapers published there at the time.

Check the licence before you reuse anything. A photograph being online, or being old, does not make it free; in most countries a 1960s press photograph is still in copyright.

Footage

Newsreel and archive film of events like this often survives. Search YouTube for this event If you find good footage, send us the link and we will attach it to this page.

Time layers within the surrounding city

One place, several moments in time. This location has 2 recorded time layers between 1939 and 1980 — slide through them:

1939

The first shots of the war

1980

The Gdańsk Agreement

1939 — The first shots of the war this page
1980 — The Gdańsk Agreement

Seeded by the editors. This entry was compiled by us from public reference works and is labelled as such, not presented as a reader’s contribution. Sources are listed on the entry. If you know more, or we have it wrong, tell us — corrections are published.

You can add to this page

This entry is a skeleton on purpose. If you were there, if your family was, or if you simply know the place: photographs (yours or ones you have the right to share), comments and corrections to the record above, and observations — what the place was like before, after, what the books get wrong. Everything is read by a person before publication and credited the way you ask.

What readers have added

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Do you know something about Westerplatte, Gdańsk?

Old photographs, what your family remembers being on the corner, a shop that is not on any map we have. Contributions are read by a person before anything is published, and we never publish the names of living people.

Nearby in Europe

An event, not a property assessment. This page records what happened at a location. It says nothing about the condition, value or safety of any property there, and it is not part of any environmental record. Methodology and limits.