Katana VentraIP

Free City of Danzig

The Free City of Danzig (German: Freie Stadt Danzig; Polish: Wolne Miasto Gdańsk) was a city-state under the protection and oversight of the League of Nations between 1920 and 1939, consisting of the Baltic Sea port of Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland) and nearly 200 other small localities in the surrounding areas.[4] The polity was created on 15 November 1920[5] in accordance with the terms of Article 100 (Section XI of Part III)[6] of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles after the end of World War I.

For the Napoleonic client-state, see Free City of Danzig (Napoleonic).

Free City of Danzig
Freie Stadt Danzig (German)
Wolne Miasto Gdańsk (Polish)

Free City under League of Nations protection

Danziger, Gdańszczanie

15 November 1920

1 September 1939

1 August 1945

1,952 km2 (754 sq mi)

366,730

Papiermark
(1920–1923)
Gulden
(1923–1939)

Although predominantly German-populated, the territory was bound by the imposed union with Poland covering foreign policy, defence, customs, railways and post, but remained distinct from both the post-war German Republic and the newly independent Polish Republic.[7] In addition, Poland was given certain rights pertaining to port facilities in the city.[8]


In the 1920 Constituent Assembly election, the Polish Party received over 6% of the vote, but its percentage of votes later declined to about 3%. A large number of Danzig Poles voted for the Catholic Centre Party instead.[9][10] In 1921, Poland began to develop the city of Gdynia, then a midsized fishing town. This completely new port north of Danzig was established on territory awarded in 1919, the so-called Polish Corridor. By 1933, the commerce passing through Gdynia exceeded that of Danzig.[11] By 1936, the city's senate had a majority of local Nazis, and agitation to rejoin Germany was stepped up.[12] Many Jews fled from German antisemitism, persecution, and oppression.


After the German invasion of Poland in 1939, the Nazis abolished the Free City and incorporated the area into the newly formed Reichsgau of Danzig-West Prussia. The Nazis classified the Poles and Jews living in the city as subhumans, subjecting them to discrimination, forced labor, and extermination at Nazi concentration camps, including nearby Stutthof (now Sztutowo, Poland).[13] Upon the city's capture in the early months of 1945 by the Soviet and Polish troops, a significant number of German inhabitants perished in ill-prepared and over-delayed attempts to evacuate by sea, while the remainder fled or were expelled.


The city was fully integrated into Poland as a result of the Potsdam Agreement, while members of the pre-war Polish ethnic minority started returning and new Polish settlers began to come. Gdańsk suffered severe underpopulation from these events and did not recover until the late 1950s.

Establishment[edit]

Periods of independence and autonomy[edit]

Danzig had an early history of independence. It was a leading player in the Prussian Confederation directed against the Teutonic Monastic State of Prussia. The Confederation stipulated with the Polish king, Casimir IV Jagiellon, that the Polish Crown would be invested with the role of head of state of western parts of Prussia (Royal Prussia). In contrast, Ducal Prussia remained a Polish fief. Danzig and other cities such as Elbing and Thorn financed most of the warfare and enjoyed a high level of city autonomy. Danzig used the title Royal Polish City of Danzig.


In 1569, when Royal Prussia's estates agreed to incorporate the region into the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, the city insisted on preserving its special status. It defended itself through the costly Siege of Danzig in 1577 in order to preserve special privileges, and subsequently insisted on negotiating by sending emissaries directly to the Polish king.[14] Danzig's location as a deep-water port where the Vistula river met the Baltic Sea had made it into one of the wealthiest cities in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries as grain from Poland and Ukraine was shipped down the Vistula on barges to be loaded onto ships in Danzig, where it was shipped on to western Europe.[15] As many of the merchants shipping the grain from Danzig were Dutch, who built Dutch-style houses for themselves, leading to other Danzigers imitating them, the city was thus given a distinctively Dutch appearance.[15] Danzig become known as "the Amsterdam of the East", a wealthy seaport and trading crossroads that linked together the economics of western and eastern Europe, and whose location at where the Vistula flowed into the Baltic led to various powers competing to rule the city.[15]


Although Danzig became part of the Kingdom of Prussia in the Second Partition of Poland in 1793, Prussia was conquered by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1806, and in September 1807 Napoleon declared Danzig a semi-independent client state of the French Empire, known as the Free City of Danzig. It lasted seven years, until it was re-incorporated into the Kingdom of Prussia in 1814, after Napoleon's defeat at the Battle of Leipzig (Battle of Nations) by a coalition that included Russia, Austria, and Prussia. The city remained part of Prussia until 1920, becoming part of the Reich in 1871.


Point 13 of U.S. president Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points called for Polish independence to be restored and for Poland to have "secure access to the sea", a promise that implied that Danzig, which occupied a strategic location where the Vistula river flowed into the Baltic sea, should become part of Poland.[15] At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, the Polish delegation led by Roman Dmowski asked for Wilson to honor point 13 of the Fourteen Points by transferring Danzig to Poland, arguing that Poland would not be economically viable without Danzig and that since the city had been part of Poland until 1793, it was rightfully part of Poland anyway.[16] However, Wilson had promised that national self-determination would be the basis of the Treaty of Versailles. As 90% of the people in Danzig in this period were German, the Allied leaders at the Paris Peace Conference compromised by creating the Free City of Danzig, a city-state in which Poland had certain special rights.[17] It was felt that including a city that was 90% German into Poland would be a violation of the principle of national self-determination, but at the same time the promise in the Fourteen Points of allowing Poland "secure access to the sea" gave Poland a claim on Danzig, hence the compromise of the Free City of Danzig.[17]


The Free City of Danzig was largely the work of British diplomacy as both the French Premier Georges Clemenceau and U.S. President Woodrow Wilson supported the Polish claim to Danzig (Gdańsk), and it was only objections from the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George that prevented Danzig from going to Poland.[18] Despite creating the Free City, the British did not really believe in the viability of the Free City of Danzig with Lloyd George writing at the time: "France would tomorrow fight for Alsace if her right to it were contested. But would we make war for Danzig?"[18] The Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour wrote in the summer of 1918 that the Germans had such a ferocious contempt for Poles that it was unwise for Germany to lose any territory to Poland even if morally justified as the Germans would never accept losing land to the despised Poles and such a situation was bound to cause a war.[19] During the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, the British consistently sought to minimize German territorial losses to Poland under the grounds that the Germans had such an utter contempt for the Poles together with the rest of the Slavic peoples that such losses were bound to deeply wound their feelings and cause a war.[19] For all the bitterness of the French–German enmity, the Germans had a certain grudging respect for the French that did not extend to the Poles at all. During the Paris Peace Conference, a commission of inquiry chaired by a British historian, James Headlam-Morley, investigating where the borders between Germany and Poland should be, started to research Danzig's history.[20] Upon discovering that Danzig had been a Free City in the past, Headlam-Morley came up with what he regarded as a brilliant compromise solution under which Danzig would become a Free City again that would belong to neither Germany nor Poland.[20] As the British were opposed to Danzig becoming part of Poland and the French and the Americans to Danzig remaining part of Germany, Headlam-Morley's compromise of the Free City of Danzig was embraced.[20]


The rural areas around Danzig were overwhelmingly Polish and the representatives of the Polish farmers around Danzig complained about being included in the Free City of Danzig, stating they wanted to join Poland.[21] For their part, the representatives of the German population of Danzig complained about being severed from Germany, and constantly demanded that the Free City of Danzig be reincorporated into the Reich.[22] The Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan wrote that a sense of Danzig national identity emerged during the Free City's existence, and the German population of Danzig not always regarded themselves as Germans who had been unjustly taken out of Germany.[22] The loss of Danzig did although deeply hurt German national pride and in the interwar period, German nationalists spoke of the "open wound in the east" that was the Free City of Danzig.[23] However, until the building of Gdynia, almost all of Poland's exports went through Danzig, and Polish public opinion was opposed to Germany having a "choke-hold" on the Polish economy.[24]

(1925 in Danzig – 2013 in Munich) was a German actor, cabaret artist and comedian.[44] He appeared in 104 films between 1956 and 2002.

Eddi Arent

(1923 in Danzig – 2009 Israel) captain of the immigrant ship SS Exodus, which unsuccessfully tried to dock in Mandatory Palestine with Holocaust survivors on July 11, 1947.[45]

Ike Aronowicz

(1923 in Danzig – executed 1946 in Biskupia Górka) was a concentration camp guard in World War II.[46]

Elisabeth Becker

(born 1931 in Danzig) is a German film actress.[47] She has appeared in 100 films since 1954. Convicted of manslaughter in 1977.

Ingrid van Bergen

(1923 in Danzig – 1998 in Athens) was a German-Greek conductor, his family moved to Greece in 1938.

Miltiades Caridis

(1926 in Gdańsk – 2009 in Hamburg) was a Polish boxer.[48] He won the Olympic gold medal for Poland at the 1952 Summer Olympics.

Zygmunt Chychła

(1929 in Danzig – 2014 in Florida) was a Polish-American historian and author.[49]

Anna M. Cienciala

(1938 in Danzig – 2017 in Weilerswist) was a German musician, co-founder of the krautrock group Can.[50]

Holger Czukay

(1927 in Danzig – 2017 in Bonn) was a German lawyer, law professor and SPD politician, served as Federal Minister of Justice (1969).[51]

Horst Ehmke

(born 1938 in Danzig) is a German neurophysiologist and researcher into Neuroethology.[52]

Jörg-Peter Ewert

(1927 in Danzig – 2015 in Lübeck) was a German novelist, poet, playwright, illustrator, graphic artist, sculptor, and recipient of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature.[53]

Günter Grass

(1926 in Danzig – 2021 in Dortmund) was a German swimmer and Olympic champion.[54] She competed at the 1956 Summer Olympics and won the gold medal in 200 m breaststroke.

Ursula Happe

(1897 in Neufahrwasser – 1948) Nazi Party Gauleiter in Danzig.

Hans Albert Hohnfeldt

(1926 in Zopot – 1991 in Lagunitas, California) was a controversial German actor.[55]

Klaus Kinski

(1922 in Danzig – executed 1946 in Biskupia Górka) was a Nazi camp overseer.[46]

Wanda Klaff

(1925 in Danzig – 2011 in Berlin) was an aeronautical engineer, and made the preliminary designs for Saturn I.[56]

Heinz-Hermann Koelle

(1931 in Danzig – 2000 in Berlin) was an East German politician and mayor of East Berlin from 1974 to 1990.

Erhard Krack

(born 1931 in Gdańsk) is a Polish actor.[57]

Zdzisław Kuźniar

(1928 in Danzig – 2010 in Berlin) was a German CDU politician.[58]

Hanna-Renate Laurien

(1927 in Danzig – 2023 Naples, Florida) was a Holocaust survivor.[59]

Jack Mandelbaum

(1939 in Danzig – 2016 in Siegburg) correspondent for Deutschlandfunk and founder of Cap Anamur, a humanitarian organisation.[60]

Rupert Neudeck

(1927 in Danzig – 2010 in Gdańsk) ordained a Catholic priest in 1952, was the Polish Auxiliary bishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Gdańsk from 1985 until 2005.[61]

Zygmunt Pawłowicz

(born 1937 in Danzig) is a retired Israeli diplomat.[62]

Avi Pazner

(1934 in Danzig – 2009 in Kew, Victoria) was a prominent Australian businessman, chairman of Visy.[63] His family moved to Australia in 1938.

Richard Pratt

(1920 in Danzig – 1991 Clenze) was a mid-ranking commander in the Waffen-SS, a convicted war criminal.

Georg Preuß

(1903–1981) one of seven members of the Communist Party (Free City of Danzig), elected to the Volkstag in 1930.

Meta Preuß

(1927 in Danzig – 2022 in Cambridge, Massachusetts) was an economic historian, specializing in East Asia, born of Russian Jewish parents.[64]

Henry Rosovsky

(1938 in Danzig – 2020 in Mainz) was a German javelin thrower who competed in the 1960, 1964, and 1968 Summer Olympics.[65]

Hermann Salomon

(1925 in Danzig – 2019 in Jerusalem) was President of the Israeli Supreme Court from 1983 to 1995.[66]

Meir Shamgar

(born 1930 in Danzig) is an Israeli politician and diplomat.[67]

Zalman Shoval

(1930 in Danzig – 2018 in Berlin) was a German actor, known for his roles in theatre plays, TV shows, feature films and taped radio shows.[68]

Wolfgang Völz

(1937 in Danzig – 2005 in Frankfurt) was a German cartoonist, author and playwright.

F. K. Waechter

(1923 in Danzig - 2021 in Munich) was Jewish-Soviet Red Army soldier, assisted in the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.

David Dushman

Administrations of Danzig before April 1945

Allgemeiner Arbeiterverband der Freien Stadt Danzig

Areas annexed by Nazi Germany

Danzig Corridor

Danzig Research Society

Alfons Flisykowski

History of Gdańsk

Free city of Trieste

Shanghai International Settlement

, ed. (1911). "Danzig" . Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 7 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 825–826.

Chisholm, Hugh

Clark, Elizabeth Morrow (1997). "The Free City of Danzig: Borderland, Hansestadt or Social Democracy?". . 42 (3): 259–76. JSTOR 25779004.

The Polish Review

Tadeusz Maciejewski and Maja Maciejewska-Szałas. 2019. "." in Modernisation, National Identity and Legal Instrumentalism. Brill.

Constitutional Systems of Free European States (1918–1939)

Olzewska, Izabela (2013). . Colloquia Humanistica (2). Institute of Slavic Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences: 133–57. doi:10.11649/ch.2013.007. – Polish abstract title: "Tożsamości kulturowa gdańszczan w ujęciu etnolingwistycznym na przykładzie wybranych tekstów publicystycznych Wolnego Miasta Gdańska"

"Cultural Identity of Citizens of Gdańsk from an Ethnolinguistic Perspective on the Basis of Chosen Texts of the Free City of Danzig"

Stilke, George (1924). . – At Pomeranian Digital Library (Polish: Pomorska Biblioteka Cyfrowa, German: Pommern Digitale Bibliothek, Kashubian: Pòmòrskô Cyfrowô Biblioteka)

"A Short Guide through the Free City of Danzig"

. (May 20, 1939). Bulletin of International News, Royal Institute of International Affairs; 16(10), 3–13.

Poland, Germany, and Danzig

. (Jul. 15, 1939). Bulletin of International News, Royal Institute of International Affairs; 16(14), 11–12.

Mr. Chamberlain’s Review of the Danzig Question

. (Aug. 26, 1939). Bulletin of International News, Royal Institute of International Affairs; 16(17), 12–18.

Danzig, Germany, and Poland

Archived 2014-09-14 at the Wayback Machine (many in German)

Extensive Prussian/ Danzig Historical Materials

Map of the Free City

Jewish community history

History of Gdańsk / Danzig

Danzig Online

Gdańsk history

Celebration of Gdańsk's centenary in 1997

Wanderlust, Salon.com, January 5, 1998.

History & Hallucination

at the Wayback Machine (archived September 30, 2007)

The power of Gdansk

from passportland.com.

1933 Danzig passport

a video interview.

First hand account of growing up in Danzig in the 1930s