Questions about Polish Corridor
Short answers, pulled from the story.
What was the Polish Corridor and why was it created?
The Polish Corridor was a strip of territory in Pomerelia that gave the Second Polish Republic access to the Baltic Sea, separating the German province of East Prussia from the rest of Germany. It was created by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, coming into effect on the 20th of January 1920, primarily because around 60.5 percent of Polish import trade and 55.1 percent of exports passed through the area, and because the majority of the population in the region was Polish.
How wide was the Polish Corridor at its narrowest point?
At its narrowest point, the Polish Corridor was just 30 kilometers wide. It comprised roughly 70 percent of the dissolved German province of West Prussia and included around 140 kilometers of Baltic Sea coastline including the Hel Peninsula.
Why did so many Germans leave the Polish Corridor after World War I?
Estimates of German departures range from 575,000 to 800,000 people between 1918 and the mid-1920s. Reasons included the loss of state employment for civil servants, fear of reprisals after decades of Prussian discrimination against Poles, refusal to live under Polish rule, economic hardship in a poorer country, and social isolation once Polish became the sole official language. Richard Blanke noted that official encouragement by the Polish state played only a secondary role, and Lewis Bernstein Namier raised the question of how many departing Germans had originally been settled there artificially by the Prussian government.
What role did the Polish Corridor play in the outbreak of World War II?
Hitler used the status of Danzig and the corridor as the stated pretext for invading Poland on the 1st of September 1939. At a high-level military meeting in May 1939, however, he explained that his real goal was obtaining Lebensraum, not settling the corridor dispute. The German Fourth Army captured the corridor by the 5th of September 1939 during the Battle of Tuchola Forest.
What was the ethnic composition of the Polish Corridor?
The 1910 census recorded 528,000 Poles, including West Slavic Kashubians, compared to 385,000 Germans in the region, though that German figure included soldiers and civil servants stationed there. By 1921, after the corridor was incorporated into Poland, Germans made up 18.8 percent of the population (175,771 people), falling to 9.6 percent over the following decade. A December 1939 German census found that 71 percent of residents declared themselves Polish and 188,000 declared Kashubian as their language.
What was the Free City of Danzig and how did it relate to the Polish Corridor?
Danzig was a semi-independent, primarily German-speaking city-state placed under League of Nations protection by the Treaty of Versailles, without a plebiscite. It sat to the east of the corridor at the mouth of the Vistula River and was united with Poland through an imposed union covering customs, mail, foreign policy, railways, and defence. The Inquiry, the group of American experts at the Paris Peace Conference, had recommended that both the corridor and Danzig be ceded directly to Poland, but only the corridor recommendation was implemented.