One month later on October 2, 30 of the surviving postal workers were sentenced to death and subsequently shot a few weeks later (their bodies were only discovered in Zaspa Cemetery in 1991), and the whole episode has become part of modern Polish folklore.
A wonderful and truly heroic story of David and Goliath proportions, what all accounts of the story fail to tell is just what a bunch of harmless postmen were doing armed to the teeth, and why it required two elite Nazi units to deal with them. The answer it seems lies in the fact that the Polish Post Office in the Free City of Danzig acted as a cover for Polish intelligence. So while the official history of the events of September 1, 1939 suggests the Nazis held Postman Patryk and his colleagues in contempt, the truth is probably a lot more logical and the attack was a strategic attempt to quell Polish resistance in the city.
![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e2/Defenders_of_the_Polish_Post_Office%2C_Gdansk%2C_1939.jpg)
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