A park near the train station contains a memorial to the 1939 defence of the town during the German invasion. Hel was the last place in Poland to surrender; a garrison of some 3000 Polish soldiers defended the town until 2 October. The peninsula became a battlefield once more on 5 April 1945, when about 60,000 Germans were caught in a bottleneck by the Red Army and didn’t lay down their arms until 9 May, making it the last piece of Polish territory to be liberated.
