Polish Corridor
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The Polish Corridor was the name given to a strip of territory which was transferred from Germany to Poland by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. The transfer of this territory was said to be justified on three grounds:
- Historical. The area had been part of the Kingdom of Poland from the tenth century to the fourteenth century (see Kingdom of Poland (1025–1138), Kingdom of Poland (1138–1320), Kingdom of Poland (1320–1385), and Kingdom of Poland (1385–1569)) and from 1453/66 to 1772, when it was annexed by Prussia during the first partition of Poland.
- Ethnographic. The majority population of the region was either Polish (in the area on the west bank of the Vistula, between Gdańsk (Danzig) and Bydgoszcz (Bromberg)), or Kashubian (a people closely related to the Poles, generally considering themselves Poles as well) in the coastal area north-west of Danzig. There was however a substantial German minority, and the major towns of Bydgoszcz (Bromberg), Toruń (Thorn) and Grudziądz (Graudenz) in 1910 had a German majority (see [1] for data per county)
- Economic and political. The Poles 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 Britain and France wanted a strong Polish state as a counter-weight to Germany, they accepted this argument.
![[1]](http://raven.cc.ku.edu/~eceurope/hist557/lect11_files/11pic2.jpg){kind=link}
Giving Poland access to the sea was one of the guarantees proposed by United States President Woodrow Wilson in his famous 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.
The important seaport of Danzig (Gdańsk), which had a largely German population, was made the "Free City of Danzig" under the protection of the League of Nations without giving the population a choice on the ballot. To reduce their dependence on Danzig the Poles built a new seaport at Gdynia.
The Corridor was a narrow stretch of land (in some places only 40 km wide), which separated East Prussia from the rest of Germany. Administratively it was a part of the Pomeranian Voivodship. As a result East Prussia was cut off from the rest of Germany which resulted in severe economic difficulties for the province. In 1922 the "Seedienst Ostpreußen" (literally: Sea Service East Prussia) was established by the German Ministry for Transport to have a connection to East Prussia that was not dependant on the transit through Polish territory.
The creation of the Corridor aroused great resentment in Germany, and all postwar German 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 acknowledgement of its western borders in the Treaty of Locarno of 1925 with a similar declaration with respect to its eastern borders.
In 1933 the Nazi Party led by Adolf Hitler took power in Germany. Hitler at first ostentatiously pursued a policy of rapprochement with Poland, culminating in the Polish-German Non-Aggression Pact of 1934. But following Germany's annexation of Austria in 1938 and most of Czechoslovakia in 1939, the Nazi regime turned its attention to Poland.
In early 1939, the German government intensified demands for the annexation of Danzig, as well as for construction of an extra-territorial road through the Corridor, connecting East Prussia with the rest of Germany. The Polish government rejected these demands, and were backed in March by guarantees from Britain and France, now concerned at German expansionism. On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and after Poland's defeat, Danzig and the Polish Corridor, as well as much other territory in western Poland, were re-annexed to Germany.
At the Potsdam Conference, 1945, following the German defeat in World War II, Poland's borders were reorganized at the insistence of the Soviet Union, which was in occupation of the whole area. Territories east of the Oder-Neisse Line, including the Corridor and Danzig, were put under Polish control. East Germany recognised this border in 1953, West Germany did so in 1970 and the re-unified Germany did so in 1990.
See also
es:Corredor polaco fr:Corridor de Dantzig it:Corridoio di Danzica he:המסדרון הפולני nl:Poolse Corridor ja:ポーランド回廊 pl:Korytarz gdański sl:Poljski koridor sv:Polska korridoren zh:波兰走廊