On 1 September 1939, at 4:50 AM, only five minutes after the outbreak of hostilities, he was alarmed by strange noises and left his outpost to check what was happening, only to find a German military unit heading for the nearby Westerplatte military outpost. He received numerous heavy machine gun wounds and died instantly, as the first Polish victim of the Battle of Westerplatte and one of the first victims of World War II. In 1945 he was posthumously awarded the Virtuti Militari, the highest Polish military decoration. In the 1970s the place of his death was marked with a memorial stone.