Germany annexes the Free City of Danzig

On 1 September 1939, in the first hours of the war, Albert Forster, the Nazi Party Gauleiter and for the past week the self-appointed head of state, signed in Gdańsk (Danzig) the “Basic Law on the Reunification of Danzig with the German Reich” (Staatsgrundgesetz). It abolished the constitution of the Free City of Danzig, concentrated all power in Forster’s hands and declared that Gdańsk became part of the Reich with immediate effect. Forster informed Adolf Hitler by telegram, asking him to confirm the act by a law of the Reich. That same day, at a session in the Kroll Opera House in Berlin, after the speech in which Hitler announced the war with Poland, the Reichstag passed the Law on the Reunification of the Free City of Danzig with the German Reich. The small state created in 1920 under the protection of the League of Nations ceased to exist. Mass arrests of Poles began in the city.

The Free City before the war

The Free City of Danzig, separated from Germany under the Treaty of Versailles, had been ruled by the Nazis since 1933. The constitution guaranteed by the League of Nations was formally in force, but the opposition had been crushed, parties dissolved and Jews driven out of public life. Poland’s rights in the city – the customs union, the administration of the railways, the post office, the depot on Westerplatte (PL) and the representation of Danzig abroad – grew harder to exercise year by year. After Ribbentrop’s demands of March 1939 Gdańsk became the crux of the Polish-German dispute, and by the summer it had turned into an armed camp. The British feared that the Nazis would proclaim union with the Reich “from within” and then, if Poland reacted, portray her as the aggressor. That is why on 10 July Chamberlain declared that a unilateral change in the city’s status that threatened Polish independence would bring British obligations into play.

The last step before the war was an assault on the constitutional order of the Free City itself. On 23 August 1939, the day the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was signed, the Danzig Senate made Forster “head of state” (Staatsoberhaupt), although the constitution recognised no such office. Forster, who for years had been the rival of the President of the Senate, Arthur Greiser, thereby became the formal ruler of the city. The League of Nations High Commissioner, the Swiss historian Carl Jakob Burckhardt, no longer had any means of opposing it.

1 September

The war began in Gdańsk. At 4.45 a.m. the old battleship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on Westerplatte, and the Danzig police and SS attacked the Polish Post Office. At the same time units of the SS, the police and the SA were seizing Polish offices and railway stations in the city. Before dawn, at Szymankowo (PL) in the Vistula Delta (Żuławy), Danzig policemen and SA thugs murdered more than twenty Polish railwaymen, customs officers and members of their families, who could have warned Tczew of the train carrying a German assault detachment towards the bridges over the Vistula.

Forster acted according to a prepared script. The Staatsgrundgesetz of 1 September consisted of a few short articles: the constitution of the Free City was repealed; all legislative and executive power was vested in the head of state; the Free City of Danzig, with its territory and population, became part of the German Reich as of that day; and, pending Hitler’s final decisions, existing law other than the constitution remained in force. A proclamation was posted on the walls in which Forster told the “men and women of Danzig” that the hour they had awaited for twenty years had come and that Danzig had returned to the Reich. Danzig radio broadcast announcements of the “return to the Reich”, swastika flags were hung out in the streets and church bells rang. The League of Nations High Commissioner was ordered to leave the city within two hours and left Gdańsk that same day.

Hitler accepted Forster’s act and appointed him head of the civil administration. In Berlin the Reichstag assembled at the Kroll Opera House in the morning. After Hitler’s speech, in which he claimed that Danzig “was and is a German city”, the deputies unanimously adopted the Law on the Reunification of the Free City of Danzig with the German Reich, read out by the President of the Reichstag, Hermann Göring. The law gave the Staatsgrundgesetz the force of Reich law, made the inhabitants of the Free City German citizens and provided for the gradual introduction of Reich law in Danzig. Executive power in the former Free City passed to the command of the German 3rd Army, and legislative power to Forster.

The annexation was unlawful from every point of view. The statute of the Free City was guaranteed by the League of Nations, and any change to it required the consent of the League Council. The Danzig constitution itself could not be repealed by the decree of one man holding an office it did not provide for. The Treaty of Versailles, under which Germany had renounced Danzig, still formed, for the Western powers, the basis of the order in that part of Europe. After the war the annexation of Danzig was among the charges brought against the leaders of the Third Reich before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, as a breach of the Treaty of Versailles.

Arrests

For the Poles living in Gdańsk the annexation meant immediate terror. The Danzig Nazis had been compiling lists of “undesirable Polish elements” for years, and they were brought up to date in the last weeks before the war. On the morning of 1 September the Gestapo, police and SS began detaining activists of Polish organisations, teachers, priests, doctors, post office, railway and port officials, and employees of Polish institutions and firms. According to German records, some 1,500 people were detained on the first day alone. Among them were the priest and Polish community leader Father Bronisław Komorowski and Father Marian Górecki (PL), chaplain to Polish youth. Both were murdered at Stutthof on Good Friday 1940.

The main place of detention was the Victoriaschule (PL), a former girls’ school on Kładki Street (Holzgasse). Prisoners were beaten in the courtyard and in the classrooms, made to run the gauntlet between lines of their tormentors, humiliated and tortured. Several died or were beaten to death, among them the national activist Roman Ogryczak. According to Polish estimates, some three thousand people passed through the Victoriaschule by mid-September. Some of the prisoners were taken to an internment camp in Nowy Port (Neufahrwasser), others further afield.

As early as 2 September about 150 prisoners from the Victoriaschule were taken to Sztutowo (Stutthof) on the Vistula Spit, some 36 kilometres from Gdańsk. A few tents stood there in a forest clearing, and the prisoners themselves had to fell the trees and string up the barbed wire. Thus was born the Stutthof camp, initially a camp for civilian prisoners under the Danzig police, run by Max Pauly. Its first prisoners were Danzig Poles: activists, priests, teachers and officials. By 1945 some 110,000 people had passed through it, of whom an estimated 65,000 died.

The first weeks of German Danzig

Gdańsk was quickly absorbed into the German system. Polish schools, including the Polish Gymnasium (PL), were closed, Polish property was confiscated and Polish signs were removed. On 8 September Forster became head of the civil administration of the West Prussia military district, which also took in the Polish part of Pomerania occupied by the Wehrmacht, while Greiser left Gdańsk and soon took charge of the administration in Poznań. On 19 September Hitler came to Gdańsk and in Artus Court delivered a speech celebrating the city’s “return” and blaming Poland and Britain for the war. The Jews remaining in the city, most of whom had emigrated before the war, were stripped of what was left of their property and rights and deported in the years that followed.

Significance

The incorporation of Danzig was the first annexation of the Second World War and, at the same time, the fulfilment of the demand with which Hitler had justified his quarrel with Poland since October 1938. As soon as the Wehrmacht crossed the border, it became clear that Danzig had been a pretext, not a goal. Only a few weeks later the Reich incorporated a far larger territory. By Hitler’s decree of 8 October 1939, which came into force on 26 October, the former Free City was joined with Polish Pomerania, Chełmno Land and part of East Prussia to form the new Reichsgau Danzig-West Prussia (Reichsgau Danzig-Westpreußen), with Forster as Gauleiter and Reich Governor. In this territory, in the autumn and winter of 1939, the Germans murdered tens of thousands of Poles, above all members of the leading social strata, at Piaśnica, Szpęgawsk, Fordon and many other places.

The annexation was recognised neither by Poland nor by Britain and France, which declared war on Germany on 3 September. Yet the Free City never returned. In March 1945 the devastated city was taken by the Red Army, and by decision of the great powers it passed to Poland. Its German inhabitants, unless they had fled earlier, were expelled, and in their place came Poles from various parts of the country, including the lost eastern territories.