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Polish Corridor (Template:Lang-de; Template:Lang-pl, województwo pomorskie) was the term used between the World Wars to refer to the Polish territory which separated the German exclave of East Prussia from the German province of Pomerania. The area belonged to the Polish state which regained independence after World War I, as a result of the Treaty of Versailles. The "corridor" consisted of the part of Polish Pomerania along the Vistula River, forming the Pomeranian Voivodeship but excluding the Free City of Danzig. The term was a translation of the German one, criticised by Polish politicians as German nationalistic one.

Background

Giving Poland access to the sea was one of the guarantees proposed by the United States President Woodrow Wilson in his Fourteen Points of 1918. The thirteenth of Wilson's points was:

An independent Polish state should be erected which should include the territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations, which should be assured a free and secure access to the sea, and whose political and economic independence and territorial integrity should be guaranteed by international covenant.

Rationale

The transfer of this territory to Poland in 1920 was justified on these grounds:

• Historical: The area had been part of the state of Poland (and later the Duchy of Pomerania) from its creation at the end of the 10th century until 1772 with the exception of 1309-1454 when the Teutonic Knights ruled Pomerelia. According to the Peace of Toruń (1466), this area became part of the Polish-Lithuanian union as Royal Prussia in 1466. Over 300 years later it was annexed by the Kingdom of Prussia during the First Partition of Poland in 1772.

• Economic and political: It was argued that if the newly independent Polish state did not have an outlet to the Baltic Sea, it would be economically and therefore politically dependent on Germany. Since the United Kingdom and France wanted a strong Polish state as a counter-weight to Germany, they accepted this argument.

• Ethnic: As argued by Antoni Abraham, Polish delegate to the Versailles Conference, most of the population of the region was Polish (in the area on the west bank of the Vistula, between Gdańsk (Danzig) and Bydgoszcz (Bromberg), including Kashubians (the direct descendants of the medieval West Slavic tribe of Pomeranians) in the coastal area north-west of Danzig.

Percentage of Ethnic Composition

German viewpoint

In the post-World War I period, the primarily German-speaking seaport of Danzig (Gdańsk) became the Free City of Danzig and was placed under the protection of the League of Nations, without consulting the local populace. Taking advantage of the corridor and reducing their dependence on Danzig, the Poles built a new seaport at Gdynia.

Following the creation of the Polish Corridor, the German province of East Prussia became an exclave. In 1922 the Seedienst Ostpreußen ("Sea Service East Prussia") was established by the German Ministry for Transport to have a ferry connection to East Prussia that was not dependent on the transit through Polish territory. Throughout the 1920s and especially the 1930s, according to German propaganda, German planes and buses were reported to have been shot at by Polish police and militia while passing through or flying over the Polish Republic's territory on their way to or from German East Prussia.

The creation of the corridor aroused great resentment in Germany, and all post-war German Weimar governments refused to recognize the eastern borders agreed on at Versailles. The German statesman Gustav Stresemann, for instance, known for his policy of conciliation with the Western Allies, several times declared that Germany's eastern borders would have to be revised, and refused to follow Germany's acknowledgment of its western borders in the Treaty of Locarno of 1925 with a similar declaration with respect to its eastern borders..

View by H. G. Wells

In 1933, H. G. Wells denounced the corridor in The Shape of Things to Come, a fictional history book in which he called "Versailles: Seed Bed of Disasters", and predicted the Polish Corridor as a cause for a future Second World War. A longer quote is available at WikiSource (H.G. Wells on the Polish Corridor), and the full text on the Internet.

Not only were the Good Poles to be given dominion over Ruthenians, Ukrainians, Jews (whom particularly they detested), Lithuanians, White Russians and Germans, they were to have also something of profound economic importance — “access to the sea”.

On that President Wilson had been very insistent. Switzerland had done very well in pre-war Europe without access to the sea, but that was another story. The difficulty was that by no stretch of ethnic map-colouring could Poland be shown to border on the sea. A belt of Pomeranians and Germans stretched across the mouth of the Vistula, and the only possibility of a reasonable trading outlet to the sea, so far as Poland needed such an outlet — for most of its trade was with its immediate neighbours — was through an understanding with that belt of people. That would have been easy enough to arrange. At the mouth of the Vistula stood the entirely German city of Danzig. It lived mainly as an outlet for Polish trade, and it could prosper in no other way. There was no reason to suppose it would put any difficulties in the way of Polish imports and exports. It was an ancient, honest, clean and prosperous German city. Ninety-six per cent of its inhabitants were German.

And to keep the waters of the Vistula as pure and sweet for Poland as the existence of Danzig at the estuary allowed, the peace-makers ran the Vistula boundary between Poland and east Prussia, not in the usual fashion midway along the stream, but at a little distance on the east Prussian side (Jacques Kayser, La Paix en Péril, 1931). So that the east German population, the peasant cultivator, the erstwhile fisherman, the shepherd with his flocks to water, was pulled up by a line of frontier posts and a Polish rifle within sight of the stream.

Within a dozen years of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles the Polish Corridor was plainly the most dangerous factor in the European situation. It mocked every projection of disarmament. It pointed the hypnotized and impotent statescraft of Europe straight towards a resumption of war.

Nazi Era

The Nazi Party, led by Adolf Hitler, took power in Germany in 1933 through the Machtergreifung. Hitler at first ostentatiously pursued a policy of rapprochement with Poland, culminating in the ten year Polish-German Non-Aggression Pact of 1934. In the coming years, Germany placed an emphasis on rearmament, as did Poland and other European powers. Regardless, the Nazis were able to achieve their immediate goals without provoking armed conflict; in 1938 Nazi Germany annexed Austria in the Anschluss and the Sudetenland after the Munich Agreement. In October 1938, Germany tried to get Poland to join the Anti-Comintern Pact. Poland refused, as the alliance was quickly becoming a sphere of influence for an increasingly powerful Germany.

Following negotiations with Hitler for the Munich Agreement, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain reported that, "He told me privately, and last night he repeated publicly, that after this Sudeten German question is settled, that is the end of Germany's territorial claims in Europe". Almost immediately following the agreement, however, Hitler reneged. The Nazis increased their requests for the incorporation of the Free State of Danzig into the Reich, citing the "protection" of the German majority as a motive. In November 1938, Danzig's district administrator, Albert Forster reported to the League of Nations that Hitler had told him Polish frontiers would be guaranteed if the Poles were "reasonable like the Czechs." German State Secretary Ernst von Weizsäcker reaffirmed this alleged guarantee in December 1938.

The situation regarding the Free State of Danzig and the Polish Corridor created a number of headaches for German and Polish Customs. The Germans requested the construction of an extra-territorial highway (Berlinka) and railway through the Polish Corridor, connecting East Prussia to Danzig and Germany proper. Poland agreed on building a German highway and to allow German railway traffic. However, no agreement was reached concerning the Free State of Danzig.

This seemed to conflict with Hitler's plans and with Poland's rejection of the Anti-Comintern Pact, his desire to either isolate or gain support against the Soviet Union. German newspapers in Danzig and Nazi Germany played an important role inciting nationalist sentiment; headlines buzzed about how Poland was misusing its economic rights in Danzig and German Danzigers were increasingly subjugated to the will of the Polish state. At the same time, Hitler also offered Poland additional territory as an enticement, such as the possible annexation of Lithuania, the Memel Territory, Soviet Ukraine and Czech inhabited lands. However, Polish leaders continued to fear for the loss of their independence and a shared fate with Czechoslovakia, although they had also taken part in its partitioning. Some felt that the Danzig question was inextricably tied to the problems in the Polish Corridor and any settlement regarding Danzig would be one step towards the eventual loss of Poland's access to the sea. Nevertheless, Hitler's credibility outside of Germany was very low after the occupation of Czechoslovakia.

In 1939, Nazi Germany made another attempt to renegotiate the status of Danzig; the city was to be incorporated into the Reich while the Polish section of the population was to be "evacuated" and resettled elsewhere. Poland was to retain a permanent right to use the seaport and the route through the Polish Corridor was to be constructed. However, the Poles distrusted Hitler and saw the plan as a threat to Polish sovereignty, practically subordinating Poland to the Axis and the Anti-Comintern Bloc while reducing the country to a state of near-servitude. Additionally, Poland was backed by guarantees of support from both the United Kingdom and France in regard to Danzig.

A revised and less favorable proposal came in the form of an ultimatum made by the Nazis in late August, after the orders had already been given to attack Poland on September 1 1939. Nevertheless, at midnight on August 29, Joachim von Ribbentrop handed British Ambassador Sir Neville Henderson a list of terms which would allegedly ensure peace in regard to Poland. Danzig was to return to Germany and there was to be a plebiscite in the Polish Corridor; all Poles who were born or settled there since 1919 would have no vote, while all Germans born but not living there would. An exchange of minority populations between the two countries was proposed. If Poland accepted these terms, Germany would agree to the British offer of an international guarantee, which would include the Soviet Union. A Polish plenipotentiary, with full powers, was to arrive in Berlin and accept these terms by noon the next day. The British Cabinet viewed the terms as "reasonable," except the demand for a Polish Plenipotentiary, which was seen as similar to Czechoslovak President Emil Hácha accepting Hitler’s terms in mid-March 1939.

When Ambassador Józef Lipski went to see Ribbentrop on August 30, he was presented with Hitler’s demands. However, he did not have the full power to sign and Ribbentrop ended the meeting. It was then broadcasted that Poland had rejected Germany's offer.

On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and German forces captured the corridor during the Battle of Tuchola Forest by 5 September. Other notable battles were at Westerplatte, the Polish post office in Danzig, Oksywie, and Hel.

Postwar era

At the 1945 Potsdam Conference following the German defeat in World War II, Poland's borders were reorganized at the insistence of the Soviet Union, which occupied the entire area. Territories east of the Oder-Neisse line, including the corridor and Danzig, were put under Polish administration. East Germany recognised this border in 1953, West Germany recognised it with the Treaty of Warsaw (1970), and re-unified Germany did so in 1990 with the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany.

See also

• Czech Corridor, Czech demands for a corridor across Austria and Hungary to Yugoslavia

References

1. The text of Woodrow's Fourteen Points Speech
2. see Kingdom of Poland (1025–1138) and Kingdom of Poland (1138–1320)
3. Richard Blanke, Orphans of Versailles: The Germans in Western Poland 1918-1939, University of Kentucky Press, 1993, ISBN 0-8131-1803-4, page 244 (Appendix B.Population of Western Poland) University Press of Kentucky 1993

External links

• H.G. Wells on the Polish Corridor (WikiSource)

• Aftermath of World War I
• History of Poland (1918–1939)