Polish Corridor
The Polish Corridor was the name given to a strip of territory which was transfered from Germany to Poland by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, to give Poland an outlet to the Baltic Sea.
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 13th 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.
After the Treaty of Versailles, the Corridor came into being along the Vistula River in the German region of West Prussia (known in Poland as East Pomerania or Royal Prussia). The important seaport of Danzig (now Gdansk), which had a largely German population, was however made the "Free City of Danzig" under the protection of the League of Nations. 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. Before 1772, this territory had belonged to the the Kingdom of Poland. Then it was annexed by Prussia in the first partition of Poland. The population of the region was predominantly Polish or Kashubian.
Postwar Germany 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 Czechsolvakia 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. German territories west as far as the Oder-Neisse Line, including the Corridor and Danzig, were annexed to Poland. The German Democratic Republic recognised this border in 1953 and the Federal Republic of Germany did so in 1972.