Day: September 1, 2004

  • 65 Years Ago Today

    Wow, a coworker just mentioned the date and it suddenly dawned on me that today is the 65th anniversary of the German invasion of Poland and the start of World War II. I finally found a news story about it.

    Poland’s prime minister marked the 65th anniversary of the start of the Second World War on Wednesday, unveiling a new memorial on the spot where a German warship fired the opening shots at a Polish munitions depot, sparking nearly six years of bloody conflict.

    The ceremony began to the wailing of sirens on the Westerplatte peninsula in the Baltic port of Gdansk at 4:45 a.m., the exact time that the German ship Schleswig-Holstein shelled the depot and its 182-strong garrison on Sept. 1, 1939, starting the war that left an estimated 50 million dead, including six million European Jews at the hands of the Nazis.