On 9 April 1945, Polish authorities officially took over one of the most valuable library holdings in Europe collected at the Danziger Stadtbibliothek (previously Bibliotheca Senatus Gedanensis). The most important tasks included the protection of the building and the bringing back of the most valuable items which towards the end of the war were taken away from Gdansk. They were found in the cellars of the Old Town Hall, in the Malbork Castle, and in the Pelplin Seminary.
The team of devoted librarians headed by dr. Marian Pelczar, director, spent the first year of their work on the tidying of the interior of the building, cleaning and shelving the relocated book collections and safeguarding the abandoned libraries in Gdansk and in its vicinity. Despite the extremely difficult conditions, it was as early as on 22 June 1946 that the readers and Polish science were provided with access to the Library’s resources which, in particular as regards Polonica, to that date were little known to scholars, not only Polish ones.
The tasks of the reborn Municipal Library were determined in its Organisational Charter adopted by the College of the City Board on 25 April 1946. The facility had a double nature: it functioned both as an educational library (the centre of a network of public reading rooms and libraries) and a scientific library (which included an information and bibliography centre). These two directions of activity determined the history of the Library until the end of 1954, when its scientific department was taken over by the Polish Academy of Sciences, and the educational one was merged with the Provincial Library.

1905 was a milestone year for the Gdansk Municipal Library – its collections were relocated for the very first time in their history to a building erected especially for the purpose, and the entire institution stepped into the 20th century and the world of modern librarianship: a planned collection, scientific cataloguing and indexing, and streamlined circulation. The article presents the specific nature of work at the Library as a Prussian and German facility, as an institution of the Free City of Danzig (Gdansk) and during the two world wars, and shows how it changed over the period of forty years under the supervision of its subsequent directors – Otton Günther, Friedrich Schwarz, and Hermann Hassbargen. In 1945 the century-and-a-half long period of the history of the Gdansk Library as Danziger Stadtbibliothek, the successor of Bibliotheca Senatus Gedanensis and the predecessor of the Gdansk PAS Library, came to an end.