Westerplatte

A twenty-five-meter-tall granite monument rising toward the sky identifies the Westerplatte peninsula, a quiet, tree-lined strip of land at the mouth of the Vistula River in Gdańsk. This site, once a Polish Military Transit Depot inaugurated in nineteen twenty-five, became the flashpoint for the Second World War. On September first, nineteen thirty-nine, at four forty-five in the morning, the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on the depot, launching the invasion of Poland.