Free City of Danzig

The Treaty of Versailles took Danzig away from Germany but did not give it to Poland. The Free City, proclaimed on 15 November 1920, covered about 1,900 square kilometres and had a few hundred thousand inhabitants, the overwhelming majority of them German. It had its own parliament (the Volkstag) and senate, while a League of Nations High Commissioner watched over its status. The Paris Convention of November 1920 gave Poland charge of Danzig's foreign relations, brought the city into the Polish customs area and granted Poland rights in the port, on the railways and in the postal service; from 1924 a Polish Military Transit Depot operated on the Westerplatte peninsula.

The compromise satisfied no one. From 1933 the city was run by the Nazis, and in 1938–1939 Hitler demanded Danzig's return to the Reich and an extraterritorial road across Pomerania. On 1 September 1939 Gauleiter Albert Forster proclaimed the annexation, which the Reichstag approved the same day. In 1945 the Potsdam Conference placed the territory of the former Free City under Polish administration.