Chamberlain on Danzig

On the afternoon of Monday 10 July 1939 the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, made a carefully prepared statement in the House of Commons on the Free City of Danzig. Five MPs, among them the Conservative Harold Macmillan, had asked him whether a change in the city’s status, brought about by Germany from outside or by a movement stirred up “from within”, would be regarded as aggression covered by Britain’s commitments to Poland. Chamberlain asked them to wait until the end of questions and then read out a carefully drafted text, noting that the government remained in close contact with the Polish and French governments. Its key passages ran as follows: if the future of Danzig were to be settled unilaterally and by stealth, so as to confront Poland with a fait accompli, the matter “could not be regarded as a purely local matter” but would at once affect “Polish national existence and independence”. Britain had guaranteed Poland assistance in the event of a clear threat to its independence which Poland decided to resist by force of arms, and was “firmly resolved to carry out this undertaking”.

The statement is usually summed up as an assurance that Britain did not regard Danzig as an internal Polish–German matter and would come to Poland’s defence if fighting broke out. The gist is right, but Chamberlain’s words were more cautious. The Prime Minister did not promise to defend the status of the Free City as such. He repeated the formula of the guarantee of 31 March, which depended on a threat to Polish independence, and at the same time described the existing arrangement in Danzig as one that might be improved. It was thus both a warning to Berlin and an opening for future talks.

The Free City in 1939

The Free City of Danzig, created under the Treaty of Versailles under the protection of the League of Nations, had about 400,000 inhabitants in 1939, the overwhelming majority of them Germans. Poland had extensive rights there: the city belonged to the Polish customs area, the Poles ran the railway, had their own post office and a military depot on the Westerplatte (PL), and the Polish Republic conducted the Free City’s foreign affairs. Since 1933 the city had been ruled by the Nazis. The Gauleiter Albert Forster and the President of the Senate Arthur Greiser, although they loathed each other, carried out Berlin’s orders. The constitution guaranteed by the League was a fiction, and the League’s High Commissioner, the Swiss historian Carl Jakob Burckhardt, tried to smooth over disputes rather than uphold the law.

As long as Hitler was courting Poland and relations were governed by the non-aggression declaration of 1934, the Danzig question was frozen. That changed after Munich. In October 1938 Joachim von Ribbentrop proposed to Ambassador Józef Lipski that Danzig be incorporated into the Reich and that an extraterritorial motorway be built across Pomerania, and on 21 March 1939, just after the seizure of the Czech lands, he repeated these demands in a sharper tone. The Foreign Minister, Józef Beck, refused. On 31 March Chamberlain announced the British guarantee to Poland. On 28 April Hitler renounced the 1934 declaration, and on 5 May Beck answered him in the Sejm with a speech that ended with the words that peace is precious, but honour is beyond price.

From then on Danzig became the touchstone of the whole dispute. For Hitler it was a convenient pretext: in the West, a demand for the return of a German city looked moderate. As early as 23 May, however, he told his generals that “it is not Danzig that is at stake” but living space in the east, and since April the General Staff had been preparing Case White. For Poland, giving up Danzig would have meant losing control of the mouth of the Vistula and, as the fate of Czechoslovakia had shown, the first step towards dependence on the Reich. Beck said that Danzig had become a symbol. In France the journalist Marcel Déat headed his article of 4 May with the question “Die for Danzig?” and answered that the French should not.

A hot summer in Danzig

In the spring and summer the situation in the city itself deteriorated rapidly. On the night of 20/21 May a crowd of Danzigers attacked the Polish customs post at Kałdowo (PL) near Malbork. The driver of a Polish official shot dead one of the attackers, Max Grübnau, which Danzig and German propaganda presented all summer as proof of Polish terror. In July Danzig Nazis shot a Polish guard on the Free City’s border; the Polish government regarded this as premeditated murder, though in public it treated it as a local incident. The Senate and the police obstructed the work of the Polish customs inspectors ever more insistently, and the Senate sent note after note to the Commissioner General of the Polish Republic, Marian Chodacki.

Meanwhile the Free City, formally demilitarised, was turning into an armed camp. On 1 July the British consul in Danzig reported that four Wehrmacht officers had arrived from Berlin in civilian clothes to organise the local Heimwehr, and that the hills on the outskirts of the city had been closed off with barbed wire. Weapons, including anti-tank and anti-aircraft guns, were flowing in through East Prussia and the port. In June, after a visit by Heinrich Himmler, the Senate resolved to create its own “home defence”. Its core was an SS battalion brought in from the Reich in civilian clothes, and from volunteers and police there were formed the SS-Heimwehr Danzig and a whole brigade, command of which was taken over in July by the German General Friedrich-Georg Eberhardt. The British consul estimated that the Danzig Nazis already had several thousand armed men, and in Warsaw and London a coup proclaiming the city’s return to the Reich was expected.

This was precisely what London feared most. The British guarantee covered an attack on Poland. But if the Danzig Nazis simply voted for union with Germany, and Poland marched into the city to restore the previous state of affairs, Berlin could present Poland as the aggressor. British diplomats feared that Beck would decide on his own, without consultation. The opposition and some Conservatives, led by Winston Churchill, for their part demanded a clear statement that Britain would not accept such a scenario. On 29 June the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, said at Chatham House that Britain’s most urgent task was to resist aggression. Ten days later the Prime Minister repeated the same message in Parliament.

The statement

Chamberlain began by setting out the matter as the government saw it. Danzig was an almost entirely German city in terms of nationality, but its inhabitants’ prosperity depended on Polish trade. The Vistula was Poland’s only waterway to the Baltic, and the port at its mouth was of vital economic and strategic importance to it. Another power established in Danzig could cut Poland off from the sea and take it by the throat. The Danzig Germans were not oppressed, since the administration was in their hands. The present settlement, though it might perhaps be improved, was neither “in itself unjust” nor illogical. Indeed, the German Chancellor himself had guaranteed the status quo until 1944 by concluding a ten-year agreement with Marshal Piłsudski.

The Prime Minister then answered German propaganda, which claimed that the British guarantee had emboldened the Poles. He listed the dates: Poland had taken defensive measures on 23 March and sent its reply to Berlin on 26 March, before anyone had discussed a guarantee with it. The guarantee was announced only on 31 March. Then came the core of the statement: events in the Free City aroused fears that its fate was to be settled unilaterally, by surreptitious methods, and that any Polish attempt to restore order would be presented as aggression. Should that happen, it would not be a local matter but a question of Polish independence, which Britain had undertaken to defend.

The final part was conciliatory. Chamberlain recalled that Beck in his speech of 5 May and Hitler in his speech of 28 April had both spoken of the possibility of talks, and expressed the hope that once the atmosphere had cleared it would be possible to discuss improving Danzig’s status. He praised the Polish government’s calm and appealed to everyone to avoid incidents that might endanger the peace of Europe. When Macmillan asked a supplementary question – whether the government would regard a change in the city’s de facto status, and not only its legal status, as equally serious – the Prime Minister declined to answer, saying that he would not comment on a carefully considered statement.

Reception

In Warsaw the statement was received with relief, since it removed the doubts raised since April by signals from London, including articles in The Times suggesting that the guarantee covered Poland’s independence rather than its borders. In Berlin it was treated as further proof of the “encirclement” of Germany. The British also tried to show that their words were not empty. In mid-July the Inspector General of Overseas Forces, General Edmund Ironside, came to Warsaw and held talks with Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły. The negotiations conducted in London by the Polish mission of Colonel Adam Koc for a credit for armaments, however, yielded far less than Warsaw had hoped.

At the same time British policy remained twin-track. The government was still seeking an understanding with Hitler, and in July unofficial talks took place in London between the Prime Minister’s adviser Horace Wilson and Göring’s envoy Helmuth Wohlthat about possible economic benefits for Germany. A leak to the press caused a scandal. London’s attention was also drawn to the Far East, where the blockade of the British concession in Tianjin had been under way since mid-June. Finally, negotiations for an alliance with the Soviet Union, begun with the Soviet proposal of April, dragged on without much progress.

The dispute over the customs inspectors

The most serious clash in Danzig came a few weeks after Chamberlain’s statement. On 19 July Forster assured Burckhardt that Hitler was not changing his demands but that the matter could wait, even until the following year. The Poles did not believe it. At the end of July the Senate demanded the withdrawal of the Polish frontier guards who accompanied the customs inspectors. According to the Polish Deputy Foreign Minister, Mirosław Arciszewski (PL), some thirty inspectors and about eighty guards were then working in the city. On 4 August, at four posts on the border with East Prussia, Danzig customs officers informed the Polish inspectors that by decision of the Senate they could no longer carry out their duties.

That same day Chodacki delivered a note to the Senate demanding immediate confirmation that the inspectors could continue their work and warning that Poland would respond “in the sharpest manner”. The reply was due by the evening of 5 August. Greiser backed down, claiming that no such decision had been taken. On 9 August the Reich government intervened directly in the dispute for the first time: State Secretary Ernst von Weizsäcker warned the Polish chargé d’affaires in Berlin that repeating such demands “in the form of an ultimatum” would worsen Polish–German relations. The next day Poland replied that it saw no legal basis for such an intervention and would regard any further German interference to the detriment of Polish rights in Danzig as an act of aggression. On the same day Forster made a speech in Danzig, and on 11 August Hitler received Burckhardt at the Obersalzberg near Berchtesgaden, close to his residence, the Berghof. According to the account the High Commissioner gave British and French diplomats immediately afterwards, Hitler threatened to crush the Poles at the slightest incident. In memoirs published years later Burckhardt also attributed to him the words that everything he was doing was directed against Russia, and that if the West failed to grasp this he would come to an understanding with the Russians. Historians have doubts about this part of the account, written after the war.

Significance

The statement of 10 July closed the loophole through which Hitler might have hoped for a repeat of the Sudetenland: an annexation “from within”, presented as the will of the inhabitants, from which the West would wash its hands. Chamberlain explicitly linked the fate of Danzig to Polish independence and made it clear that Britain would not let Germany settle the matter by faits accomplis. At the same time he did not rule out a change in the city’s status through negotiation, which Berlin read as a sign that London was still looking for a compromise. Hitler, in any case, wanted no compromise. On 22 August he told his generals that his only fear was that at the last moment some “swine” would come forward with a plan for mediation.

What followed confirmed the fears voiced in the House of Commons. On 23 August, the day the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was signed, the Danzig Senate, in breach of the constitution, proclaimed Forster head of state. On 25 August the old battleship Schleswig-Holstein entered the port on a “courtesy visit”, and on the same day Poland and Britain concluded an alliance in London. On the morning of 1 September the battleship opened fire on the Westerplatte, the Danzig police and SS men attacked the Polish Post Office, and Forster proclaimed the Free City’s incorporation into the Reich. The attack on Poland thus began where Chamberlain had foreseen, but not through a coup “from within” – rather through open war. On 3 September Britain and France declared war on Germany. In 1939, however, they were unable to make good on the battlefield their promise to defend Polish independence, and Gdańsk, over which the whole summer had been spent quarrelling, returned to Poland only in 1945, as a ruined city whose German inhabitants were expelled.