Business envelope with cancellation dated 1 September 1939. The envelope was never sealed, and it is likely that it was a “favor cancel.”
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At 4:17 a.m. on Friday, September 1, a group of overzealous Nazi irregulars surrounded the Polish post office and demanded its surrender. The response was a hail of gunfire—the postal workers in that troubled city were armed—and a small but bitter engagement began that would last all day. Citizens awakened by the small-arms fire thought they were hearing another skirmish in the long agony of the free city, but the booming sound fr om the harbor at a quarter to five could not be dismissed so lightly. The obsolete but still potent battleship Schleswig-Holstein, supposedly on a ceremonial visit, opened fire at point-blank range on the Westerplate, an old fortress located four miles north of Danzig wh ere the Poles had a military installation. About the same time, other sounds of doomsday reverberated over Poland as the Luftwaffe dropped bombs on air bases, railroads, highways, and cities.
“The Reach for Empire”
Volume V, The Third Reich Series