Polish Corridor

The Polish Corridor, also known as the Pomeranian Corridor, was a territory located in the region of Pomerelia, which provided the Second Polish Republic with access to the Baltic Sea, thus dividing the bulk of Weimar Germany from the province of East Prussia. At its narrowest point, the Polish territory was just 30 km wide. The Free City of Danzig, situated to the east of the corridor, was a semi-independent German speaking city-state forming part of neither Germany nor Poland, though united with the latter through an imposed union covering customs, mail, foreign policy, railways as well as defence.
After Poland lost Western Pomerania to Germany in the late 13th century, the area of Eastern Pomerania with the strategically important port of Gdańsk remained a narrow strip of land giving Poland access to the Baltic Sea and was also sometimes referred to as Pomeranian corridor.

Terminology

According to German historian Hartmut Boockmann the term corridor was first used by Polish politicians, while Polish historian Grzegorz Lukomski writes that the word was coined by German nationalist propaganda of the 1920s. Internationally the term was used in English as early as March 1919 and whatever its origins it became a widespread term in English.
The equivalent German term is Polnischer Korridor. Polish names include korytarz polski and korytarz gdański ; however, reference to the region as a corridor came to be regarded as offensive by interwar Polish diplomats. Among the harshest critics of the term corridor was Polish Foreign Minister Józef Beck, who in his May 5, 1939 speech in the Sejm said: "I am insisting that the term Pomeranian Voivodeship should be used. The word corridor is an artificial idea, as this land has been Polish for centuries, with a small percentage of German settlers". Poles commonly referred to the region as Pomorze Gdańskie or simply Pomorze, or as województwo pomorskie, which was the administrative name for the region.

Background

History of the area

In the 10th century, Pomerelia was settled by Slavic Pomeranians, ancestors of the Kashubians, who were subdued by Bolesław I of Poland. In the 11th century, they created an independent duchy. In 1116/1121, Pomerania was again conquered by Poland. In 1138, following the death of Duke Bolesław III, Poland was fragmented into several semi-independent principalities. The Samborides, principes in Pomerelia, gradually evolved into independent dukes, who ruled the duchy until 1294. Before Pomerelia regained independence in 1227, their dukes were vassals of Poland and Denmark. Since 1308–1309, following succession wars between Poland and Brandenburg, Pomerelia was subjugated by the Monastic state of the Teutonic Knights in Prussia. In 1466, with the second Peace of Thorn, Pomerelia became part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth as a part of autonomous Royal Prussia. After the First Partition of Poland in 1772 it was annexed by the Kingdom of Prussia and named West Prussia, and became a constituent part of the new German Empire in 1871. Thus the Polish Corridor was not an entirely new creation: the territory assigned to Poland had been an integral part of Poland prior to 1772, but with a large degree of autonomy.

Historical population

Perhaps the earliest census data on the ethnic and national structure of West Prussia is from 1819.

Ethnic or national group	Population	Population
Poles	327,300	52%
Germans	290,000	46%
Jews	12,700	2%
Total	630,077	100%

Karl Andree, in Polen: in geographischer, geschichtlicher und culturhistorischer Hinsicht, gives the total population of West Prussia as 700,000including 50% Poles, 47% Germans and 3% Jews.
Data from the 19th century and early 20th century show the following ethnic changes in four main counties of the corridor :
File:Polish Corridor Four Counties.png|The Polish Corridor: map of Puck, Wejherowo, Kartuzy and Kościerzyna counties, showing percentages of ethnic Poles by the end of World War I, according to the Map of Polish population published in 1919 in Warsaw|right|frame

Allied plans for a corridor after World War I

During the First World War, both sides made bids for Polish support, and in turn Polish leaders were active in soliciting support from both sides. Roman Dmowski, a former deputy in the Russian State Duma and the leader of the Endecja movement was especially active in seeking support from the Allies. Dmowski argued that an independent Poland needed access to the sea on demographic, historical and economic grounds as he maintained that a Poland without access to the sea could never be truly independent. After the war Poland was to be re-established as an independent state. Since a Polish state had not existed since the Congress of Vienna, the future republic's territory had to be defined.
Giving Poland access to the sea was one of the guarantees proposed by United States President Woodrow Wilson in his Fourteen Points of January 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 following arguments were behind the creation of the corridor:

Ethnographic reasons

The ethnic situation was one of the reasons for returning the area to the restored Poland. The majority of the population in the area was Polish. As the Polish commission report to the Allied Supreme Council noted on 12 March 1919: "Finally the fact must be recognized that 600,000 Poles in West Prussia would under any alternative plan remain under German rule". Also, as David Hunter Miller from president Woodrow Wilson's group of experts and academics noted in his diary from the Paris Peace Conference: "If Poland does not thus secure access to the sea, 600,000 Poles in West Prussia will remain under German rule and 20,000,000 Poles in Poland proper will probably have but a hampered and precarious commercial outlet". The Prussian census of 1910 showed that there were 528,000 Poles in the region, compared with 385,000 Germans. The province of West Prussia as a whole had between 36% and 43% ethnic Poles in 1910, depending on the source. The Poles did not want the Polish population to remain under the control of the German state, which had in the past treated the Polish population and other minorities as second-class citizens and had pursued Germanization. As Professor Lewis Bernstein Namier born to Jewish parents in Lublin Governorate and later a British citizen, a former member of the British Intelligence Bureau throughout World War I and the British delegation at the Versailles conference, known for his anti-Polish and anti-German attitudewrote in the Manchester Guardian on November 7, 1933: "The Poles are the Nation of the Vistula, and their settlements extend from the sources of the river to its estuary. ... It is only fair that the claim of the river-basin should prevail against that of the seaboard."

Economic reasons

The Poles held the view that without direct access to the Baltic Sea, Poland's economic independence would be illusory. Around 60.5% of Polish import trade and 55.1% of exports went through the area. The report of the Polish Commission presented to the Allied Supreme Council said:

1,600,000 Germans in East Prussia can be adequately protected by securing for them freedom of trade across the corridor, whereas it would be impossible to give an adequate outlet to the inhabitants of the new Polish state if this outlet had to be guaranteed across the territory of an alien and probably hostile Power.

The United Kingdom eventually accepted this argument. The suppression of the Polish Corridor would have abolished the economic ability of Poland to resist dependence on Germany. As Lewis Bernstein Namier, Professor of Modern History at the University of Manchester and known for both his "legendary hatred of Germany" and Germanophobia as well as his anti-Polish attitude directed against what he defined as the "aggressive, antisemitic and warmongerily imperialist" part of Poland, wrote in a newspaper article in 1933:

The whole of Poland's transport system ran towards the mouth of the Vistula. ... 90% of Polish exports came from her western provinces. ... Cutting through of the Corridor has meant a minor amputation for Germany; its closing up would mean strangulation for Poland."

By 1938, 77.7% of Polish exports left either through Gdańsk or the newly built port of Gdynia

The Inquiry's opinion

, in his diary from the Paris Peace Conference, noted that the problem of Polish access to the sea was very difficult because leaving the entirety of Pomerelia under German control meant cutting off millions of Poles from their commercial outlet and leaving several hundred thousand Poles under German rule, while granting such access meant cutting off East Prussia from the rest of Germany. The Inquiry recommended that both the Corridor and Danzig should have been ceded directly to Poland.

It is believed that the lesser of these evils is preferable, and that the Corridor and Danzig should be ceded to Poland, as shown on map 6. East Prussia, though territorially cut off from the rest of Germany, could easily be assured railroad transit across the Polish corridor, and has, in addition, excellent communication via Königsberg and the Baltic Sea. In either case a people is asked to entrust large interests to the League of Nations. In the case of Poland they are vital interests; in the case of Germany, aside from Prussian sentiment, they are quite secondary".

In the end, The Inquiry's recommendations were only partially implemented: most of West Prussia was given to Poland, but Danzig became a Free City.