A Danzig Customs Officer on the Day of Annexation

On 1 September 1939, with the first cannon shots fired by the Schleswig-Holstein onto the Westerplatte, the Free City's Nazi Senate proclaimed the immediate incorporation of Danzig into the Reich. The police and the administration, already under National Socialist control for months, applied German law on the spot. The Jewish community, which had numbered more than 10,000 souls in 1929, had organized its own emigration since the start of the year: transports to Palestine as early as March 1939, a Kindertransport of roughly 124 children to the West. Barely 1,600 Jews remained, mostly elderly and destitute.

A customs official at the port sees a few of these last ones present themselves, still hoping for a passport in order, a visa, a berth aboard a ship. The orders are now unambiguous: report, inspect, detain.

The customs officer has a narrow margin. Apply the instructions to the letter, turn a blind eye to an irregular document, or confine himself to a routine obedience that hastens nothing.