Polish Corridor

• 1. Introduction

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  The Polish Corridor was a strip of territory so narrow that at its tightest point it measured just 30 kilometers across. This sliver of land gave the Second Polish Republic its only connection to the Baltic Sea, but in doing so it cut the German province of East Prussia off from the rest of Germany. A strip of territory that thin, carrying that much weight, was never going to stay quiet for long.

  The name itself was contested. Polish Foreign Minister Józef Beck told the Sejm on the 5th of May 1939 that the word corridor was an artificial idea, that the land had been Polish for centuries. German historian Hartmut Boockmann believed the term was introduced by Polish politicians; Polish historian Grzegorz Lukomski argued it was coined by German nationalist propaganda in the 1920s. Whatever its origins, the word was already in English-language use by March 1919.

  This documentary follows the corridor from its deep medieval roots through its creation after the First World War, the demographic upheavals that followed, and the diplomatic crises that made it the stated pretext for the start of the Second World War.

• 2. Centuries of Contested Ground

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  In the 10th century, Slavic Pomeranians settled Pomerelia and were subdued by Bolesław I of Poland. By the 11th century they had formed an independent duchy, only for Poland to reconquer the region in 1116-1121. The area changed hands repeatedly across the following centuries: after Duke Bolesław III died in 1138 and Poland fragmented, the Samborides evolved into independent dukes who ruled until 1294. Before that, they had served as vassals of both Poland and Denmark.

  From 1308-1309, following succession wars between Poland and Brandenburg, Pomerelia fell under the Monastic state of the Teutonic Knights. It returned to Poland in 1466 through the second Peace of Thorn, becoming part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as Royal Prussia. That arrangement lasted until 1772, when the First Partition of Poland delivered the territory to the Kingdom of Prussia, which renamed it West Prussia. It became part of the German Empire in 1871.

  The census record from 1819 captured a snapshot of that transition period: out of a total population of around 630,000, Poles made up 52 percent and Germans 46 percent. Karl Andree's 1831 survey from Leipzig gave slightly different figures but confirmed the same basic balance: roughly half Polish, nearly half German, with a small Jewish minority. Across the following century, school and population censuses tracked the slow movement of those proportions, county by county, decade by decade.

• 3. The Fourteen Points and Paris

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  Roman Dmowski, a former deputy in the Russian State Duma and the leader of the Endecja movement, was among the most determined advocates for Polish sea access. His argument rested on three pillars: demographics, history, and economics. A Poland without the coast, he maintained, could never achieve genuine independence.

  President Woodrow Wilson gave that argument international standing. His thirteenth point, announced in January 1918, called for an independent Polish state with territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations and a free and secure access to the sea. The commission that advised the Allied Supreme Council reported on the 12th of March 1919 that 600,000 Poles in West Prussia would remain under German rule under any other arrangement.

  David Hunter Miller, a member of the Inquiry, the group of American experts accompanying Wilson to Paris, recorded the dilemma in his diary. Leaving Pomerelia under Germany meant cutting off millions of Poles commercially and leaving hundreds of thousands under German rule; granting the corridor meant severing East Prussia from the rest of Germany. The Inquiry recommended both the Corridor and Danzig be transferred directly to Poland, reasoning that railroad transit across the corridor for East Prussia was a simple matter compared with assuring port facilities to Poland. That recommendation was only partially followed. The corridor was established, but Danzig became a semi-independent Free City under League of Nations protection, without a plebiscite.

  The economic stakes were explicit in the commission's report: around 60.5 percent of Polish import trade and 55.1 percent of exports passed through the area. Professor Lewis Bernstein Namier, writing in 1933, put it bluntly: cutting through the corridor meant a minor amputation for Germany, while closing it up would mean strangulation for Poland.

• 4. Building a New Poland

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  The Treaty of Versailles, signed on the 28th of June 1919 and put into effect on the 20th of January 1920, defined the corridor in articles 27 and 28 and addressed transit, citizenship, and property in articles 89 to 93. Poland received roughly 70 percent of the dissolved province of West Prussia, including around 140 kilometers of coastline with the Hel Peninsula.

  Danzig, the primarily German-speaking seaport at the mouth of the Vistula, sat just outside the corridor to the east. Its dock workers complicated matters almost immediately when, during the Polish-Soviet War, they refused to unload ammunition for Poland. The Polish government responded by deciding to build an ammunition depot at Westerplatte and a seaport at Gdynia, within the corridor itself. The new port was connected to the Upper Silesian industrial centers by the Polish Coal Trunk Line railways.

  By 1938, that investment had transformed Poland's trade geography. Of Polish exports that year, 31.6 percent left through Gdańsk and 46.1 percent through the newer port of Gdynia, meaning that 77.7 percent of Polish exports passed through the corridor's coastline. Germany, meanwhile, established the Seedienst Ostpreußen in 1922, a ferry service to East Prussia designed to reduce dependence on Polish transit. Sealed train carriages, the Korridorzug, allowed passengers to cross without formal Polish visas, though the inspections before and after sealing were, as the source records, strongly feared.

• 5. German Departure and Land Reform

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  In May 1925, a train crossing the corridor on its way to East Prussia crashed after spikes had been removed from the tracks and fishplates unbolted. Twenty-five people died, including twelve women and two children; around thirty others were injured.

  That episode sat within a broader, fractious demographic transformation. According to Richard Blanke, 421,029 Germans had lived in the area in 1910, making up 42.5 percent of the population. By 1921 that share had fallen to 18.8 percent, representing 175,771 people. Over the following decade the German population dropped by another 70,000, to a share of 9.6 percent.

  Estimates of how many Germans left Poland after 1918 range widely across the sources. German political scientist Stefan Wolff, citing conditions of assimilation and pressure, put the figure at 800,000 by 1923. Gotthold Rhode counted 575,000 departures from Posen and the corridor. Contemporary German statistics recorded 592,000 gone by 1921. Polish author Władysław Kulski noted that a substantial portion were civil servants with no roots in the province and counted around 378,000 in that category. Lewis Bernstein Namier raised the question of how many had originally been placed there artificially by the Prussian government.

  Frederick the Great, who ruled Prussia from 1740 to 1786, had settled around 300,000 colonists in the eastern provinces and treated the Polish nobility with contempt. The Prussian Settlement Commission before the First World War established a further 154,000 colonists in Posen and West Prussia. In 1925 the Polish government enacted a land reform program. That first annual list targeted 10,800 hectares from 32 German landowners and only 950 hectares from seven Poles. The voivode of Pomorze, Wiktor Lamot, stated explicitly that the corridor region had to be settled with a nationally conscious Polish population and that German estates in a ten-kilometer border strip must be reduced without concern for economic value.

• 6. Diplomacy, Pacts, and Pretexts

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  Adolf Hitler took power in Germany in 1933 and at first pursued a public policy of rapprochement with Poland, which culminated in the ten-year Polish-German Non-Aggression Pact of 1934. Behind that facade, German planning moved in a different direction.

  On the 24th of October 1938, German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop asked Polish ambassador Józef Lipski to have Poland sign the Anti-Comintern Pact. In a secret speech before 200 German journalists on the 10th of November 1938, Hitler complained that his peace propaganda had been too successful and called for a new campaign to create a more bellicose mood. The enemies he named in that speech were not Poland but France and Britain. On the 17th of January 1939, Hitler approved the Z Plan for a fleet capable of challenging the Royal Navy, and on the 27th of January he ordered that the Kriegsmarine receive first priority for defence spending.

  American historian Gerhard Weinberg described the Anti-Comintern Pact as a formal gesture of political obeisance to Berlin, designed to separate Poland from any other international ties and having nothing to do with the Soviet Union. Germany offered Poland territorial enticements including possible annexation of Lithuania, the Memel Territory, Soviet Ukraine, and parts of the Czech lands. Polish leaders, watching what had happened to Czechoslovakia after the Munich Agreement, declined. Robert Coulondre, the French ambassador in Berlin, reported to Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet on the 30th of April 1939 that the German proposals would practically subordinate Poland to the Axis while Germany retained complete liberty of action.

  In a high-level meeting of German military officials in May 1939, Hitler explained that his real goal was obtaining Lebensraum, not settling the Danzig question. Danzig was the pretext. The real plan was to isolate Poland from its western allies and then attack, avoiding a repetition of the international intervention that had complicated Czechoslovakia.

• 7. The Final Hours

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  The orders to attack Poland on the 1st of September 1939 had already been issued when, at midnight on the 29th of August, von Ribbentrop handed British Ambassador Sir Nevile Henderson a list of conditions. Danzig was to return to Germany. A plebiscite in the corridor would exclude Poles who had been born or settled there since 1919, while all Germans born there but not living there would be allowed to vote. Poland would have to send a plenipotentiary to Berlin with full powers by noon the next day.

  The British Cabinet described the terms as reasonable, with the single exception of the plenipotentiary demand, which they compared to Czechoslovak President Emil Hácha's capitulation to Hitler in mid-March 1939. Polish Ambassador Józef Lipski appeared at the German Foreign Office at noon the following day. He was kept waiting five hours, then shown in without the negotiating authority Hitler had demanded. Ribbentrop dismissed him with word that the Führer would be informed. German-Polish diplomatic relations were severed.

  On the 1st of September 1939, Germany invaded Poland. The German Fourth Army defeated the Polish Pomorze Army and captured the corridor during the Battle of Tuchola Forest by the 5th of September. Battles also took place at Westerplatte, at the Polish post office in Danzig, at Oksywie, and at Hel. The corridor was annexed by Germany until the Red Army recaptured it at the end of the war. At the Potsdam Conference in 1945, territories east of the Oder-Neisse line were placed under Polish administration. H. G. Wells had written in The Shape of Things to Come, published in 1933, that the corridor would be the starting point of a future war. He was right about that, though his prediction that the conflict would produce a decade-long trench stalemate was not.