The creation of the Free City of Danzig

On the afternoon of 15 November 1920 in Gdańsk (Danzig) a constituent assembly, in the presence of the diplomatic corps and numerous guests, solemnly proclaimed the creation of the Free City of Danzig. The proclamation was accepted on behalf of the League of Nations by a British officer, Colonel Edward Lisle Strutt, who acted for a few weeks as the League’s High Commissioner. That same day the Assembly of the League of Nations – the organisation that was henceforth to watch over the new statelet – met for the first time in Geneva. The Free City, covering some 1,900 square kilometres with just under 360,000 inhabitants, the overwhelming majority of them Germans, was a product of the Treaty of Versailles. It was detached from Germany but not given to Poland, which was granted extensive rights there: in the port, on the railways, in customs and in foreign policy. It was meant to be a compromise between the national feelings of the people of Danzig and the “free and secure access to the sea” promised to Poland. It turned out to be one of the most explosive flashpoints in Europe, and nineteen years later it became the pretext for the outbreak of the Second World War.

The dispute in Paris

Gdańsk, the great port at the mouth of the Vistula, had belonged to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth for more than three centuries as a rich and largely self-governing city. In 1793, in the Second Partition, it was seized by Prussia, and in the 19th century it became an ordinary German provincial city, the capital of West Prussia. In 1918 more than 90 per cent of its inhabitants spoke German. For the reborn Poland, however, it was the natural window on the world. The thirteenth of President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points promised an independent Poland “free and secure access to the sea”, and most of the trade of the Polish lands passed through the city. It was in Gdańsk, in December 1918, that Ignacy Jan Paderewski came ashore from a British cruiser on his way to Poznań and Warsaw.

At the Paris Peace Conference Roman Dmowski demanded that Gdańsk be given to Poland. He argued that without the mouth of the Vistula the Polish state would not be economically independent. The Commission on Polish Affairs, and at first the French and the Americans as well, leaned towards this solution. It was opposed by the British prime minister, David Lloyd George. He maintained that handing hundreds of thousands of Germans over to Poland would create a new Alsace-Lorraine, which Germany would never accept. In the spring of 1919 tens of thousands of people demonstrated in Danzig itself against separation from the Reich. In the end Georges Clemenceau and Wilson gave way to the British, and in April 1919 the “Big Four” adopted an intermediate solution: Danzig was to become a free city under the protection of the League of Nations, linked to Poland by a customs union and by Polish rights in the port.

These provisions were set out in Articles 100–108 of the Treaty of Versailles. Germany renounced Danzig and the surrounding districts in favour of the Powers, which were to constitute them as a free city. Its constitution was to be drawn up by local representatives in agreement with the League of Nations High Commissioner, and guaranteed by the League. Relations with Poland were to be defined by a separate treaty, which would guarantee Poland the inclusion of the city in the Polish customs area, free use of the port and waterways, control of the railways, postal and telegraph communication with the port, and the conduct of the Free City’s foreign affairs and the protection of its citizens abroad.

From Versailles to proclamation

The Treaty of Versailles came into force on 10 January 1920, and from that day Danzig ceased to belong to Germany, although the Free City did not yet exist. At the end of January British and then French troops arrived in the city under the command of the British General Richard Haking. On 9 February the last German soldiers left. Authority was assumed by the British diplomat Reginald Tower, administrator on behalf of the Powers and, from 12 February, also provisional High Commissioner of the League of Nations. In May the inhabitants elected a constituent assembly, which spent the summer working on a constitution. About 6 per cent of voters supported the Polish list, although many local Poles and Kashubians backed the Catholic Centre Party.

In the summer of 1920 the test came sooner than anyone had expected. The Polish–Soviet War was raging, the Red Army was advancing on Warsaw, and ammunition for Poland was due to arrive through Danzig. The Danzig dockers, backed by left-wing trade unions across Europe under the slogan “Hands off Russia”, refused to unload the ships. On 20 August the constituent assembly declared the city neutral in the war. The ammunition was eventually unloaded by British soldiers, but Poland remembered that at a moment of mortal danger its only port had proved unreliable. Two decisions grew out of that experience: to build a port of its own at the fishing village of Gdynia, and to establish a permanent Polish ammunition depot in Danzig.

The proclamation depended on an agreement between Poland and Danzig. After difficult negotiations conducted under pressure from the Powers, it was signed in Paris on 9 November 1920, and was therefore known as the Paris Convention. Six days later the Free City was proclaimed. On 17 November the Council of the League of Nations formally took it under its protection and approved the principles of its constitution, and on 6 December the constituent assembly turned itself into a parliament, the Volkstag, and elected the first President of the Senate, the Free City’s government. The post went to the incumbent Lord Mayor, Heinrich Sahm, who led Danzig for ten years.

A state under double tutelage

The Free City comprised Gdańsk, Sopot, Oliwa, Nowy Dwór Gdański, Nowy Staw and several hundred villages in the Vistula delta (Żuławy) and on the Gdańsk Uplands. It had its own constitution, flag, parliament, Senate and police, from 1923 its own currency, the gulden, and its own citizenship, but it had no army and was demilitarised. The official language was German. The 1923 census found that fewer than 4 per cent of the inhabitants spoke Polish or Kashubian, although Polish researchers estimate the proportion of Poles, including Polish citizens living in the city, at about 9–11 per cent.

Over everything watched the League of Nations High Commissioner, who decided disputes between Danzig and Poland at first instance. His decisions could be appealed to the League Council in Geneva. Poland was represented in the city by the Commissioner-General of the Republic of Poland (PL), the first of whom was Maciej Biesiadecki (PL). The Paris Convention was supplemented by the Warsaw Agreement of 24 October 1921. From 1922 Danzig belonged to the Polish customs area, and Polish customs officers guarded its border with Germany. The Polish State Railways managed the railway lines within the city’s territory. The port was run by the Harbour and Waterways Board, on which Poles and Danzigers had equal representation, with a Swiss chairman.

So complicated an arrangement generated constant disputes. The Senate made it difficult for Poles to settle, to set up Polish businesses and to acquire property. In January 1925 the Poles put up their own postboxes in the city, which caused a storm, and the case went all the way to the Permanent Court of International Justice in The Hague. In 1924 the League Council agreed that Poland could establish a military ammunition depot with a guard on the Westerplatte peninsula, and at the end of 1925 it decided that it could be protected by 88 soldiers. The first detachment arrived there in January 1926. In 1932, in a dispute over the right of Polish warships to call at the port of Danzig, Józef Piłsudski sent the destroyer ORP Wicher to Danzig with orders to open fire on government buildings if the Polish ensign were insulted. The Danzigers backed down.

Meanwhile Poland was building Gdynia. An act of 1922 launched a vast investment, and by the early 1930s the new port’s turnover had overtaken Danzig’s. For the Danzigers this was proof that Poland wanted to ruin them; for the Poles, proof that they could not rely on a city that might shut its gates on them at any moment.

Nazi Danzig

Most of the inhabitants never accepted separation from Germany, and throughout the interwar period German governments discreetly financed the Danzig authorities and kept alive hopes of a return to the Reich. In Germany, Danzig and the Polish “Corridor” were regarded as the most painful wounds inflicted by Versailles. In 1930 Albert Forster, a young activist from Franconia and a confidant of Hitler’s, became Gauleiter of the Danzig NSDAP. Once Adolf Hitler had taken power in Germany, the Nazis quickly seized it in Danzig too. In the election of 28 May 1933 they won an absolute majority in the Volkstag, and Hermann Rauschning became President of the Senate; in November 1934 he was replaced by Arthur Greiser.

The constitution guaranteed by the League of Nations formally remained in force, but the Nazis dealt in turn with the Social Democrats, the Catholic Centre and the Communists, banned parties, closed newspapers and discriminated against Jews. The Irishman Seán Lester, High Commissioner from 1934 to 1937, received the opposition’s complaints and tried to defend the constitution, but he lacked the backing of the Powers and became the target of a Nazi smear campaign. His successor, the Swiss Carl Jacob Burckhardt, was mainly concerned with easing tensions. The League, which Germany had left in the autumn of 1933, was losing control over Danzig. Until 1938, however, Hitler restrained the Danzig Nazis, because he valued good relations with Poland, with which he had signed a declaration of non-aggression in January 1934.

Danzig in 1939

The change came after Munich. On 24 October 1938 the Reich Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, proposed to the Polish ambassador, Józef Lipski, a “general settlement” of relations: the incorporation of the Free City into the Reich and an extraterritorial motorway and railway line across Pomerania. Foreign Minister Józef Beck refused, and in March 1939, after the occupation of the Czech lands, Hitler repeated his demands in a sharper form. In Danzig the Nazis stockpiled weapons and formed armed units. In France the journalist Marcel Déat headed an article in May with the question “Die for Danzig?”, suggesting that Frenchmen should not lay down their lives for the affairs of Eastern Europe. On 23 August 1939, the day the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was signed, the Danzig Senate, in breach of the constitution, proclaimed Forster head of state.

Shortly before 5 a.m. on 1 September 1939 the battleship Schleswig-Holstein, which had come to Danzig on a “courtesy visit”, opened fire on Westerplatte. Almost simultaneously the Danzig police and SS men attacked the Polish Post Office. Forster proclaimed the Free City’s incorporation into the Reich, and the High Commissioner was given two hours to leave. Westerplatte held out until 7 September. The defenders of the Post Office who had surrendered were sentenced to death by a German court martial and shot in October. As early as 2 September the Stutthof camp was set up near Danzig, and Polish activists from the Free City were sent there; in the autumn, in the forests of Piaśnica, the Germans murdered thousands of people, above all Poles from Pomerania.

Significance

The Free City of Danzig was an attempt to reconcile two principles on which the peace had been built: the right of nations to self-determination and the economic needs of the new states. In practice it satisfied no one. The Danzigers felt they had been torn from their homeland against their will, without a plebiscite. The Poles had rights in the port that they could not fully exercise, and built a port of their own so as not to depend on them. The Germans treated Danzig as a symbol of humiliation, and the League of Nations, which was supposed to protect it, proved powerless in the 1930s.

For Hitler, Danzig was the perfect pretext. His demands looked modest and, in the eyes of many in Britain and France, justified: it was, after all, a German city. But for Poland, a concession over Danzig and the Corridor would have meant – as the fate of Czechoslovakia had shown – the beginning of dependence on the Reich. The compromise devised in Paris by Lloyd George, who had feared that a Poland with a German Danzig would become the cause of a new war, itself became the spark for one. The first shots of the Second World War were fired on the territory of the Free City.