History
Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler supported this project and sent SS Obersturmbannführer Hans Friedemann Götze to Danzig. Goetze was the commander of the III. Sturmbann (Battalion) of the 4th SS-Totenkopfstandarte "Ostmark," established in October 1938 in Berlin-Adlersheim.
The III. Sturmbann was strengthened with the help of anti-tank defense forces (the Panzerabwehr-Lehrsturm of the SS Totenkopfstandarten) as well as about 500 additional volunteers from Danzig who named their new unit SS Sturmbann "Goetze". The Danzig SS-men had been members a special SS troop established in July 1939 - the Wachsturmbann "Eimann" - and at the beginning of August this self-named Sturmbann "Goetze" reached the peninsula at the mouth of the Vistula called the Danzig Westerplatte. There it kept itself hidden on German ships, including the naval training ship "Schleswig-Holstein."
The Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans) in Danzig "completely spontaneously" founded the 1,550-man strong Heimwehr Danzig (Danzig Militia).
On 1 September 1939, German troops attacked Poland. The Heimwehr Danzig fought on the German side, in the process capturing the Polish post office, an event which Günter Grass dedicated a chapter of his novel The Tin Drum to. During the attacks, the German forces used ADGZ armoured cars, 75mm and 105mm artillery and flamethrowers against Poles armed with pistols, rifles, light machine guns and grenades. The SS-Heimwehr Danzig participated in the attack on the Danzig Westerplatte, and already was considered a part of the SS-Totenkopf Division then forming under Theodor Eicke. Later, it provided coast guard services in Danzig.
On 30 September 1939, the Heimwehr was dissolved. After Poland was overrun, such militias were involved in war crimes perpetrated on Polish civilians in West Prussia.
Read more about this topic: SS Heimwehr Danzig
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“The greatest honor history can bestow is that of peacemaker.”
—Richard M. Nixon (1913–1995)
“False history gets made all day, any day,
the truth of the new is never on the news
False history gets written every day
...
the lesbian archaeologist watches herself
sifting her own life out from the shards she’s piecing,
asking the clay all questions but her own.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)