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The Free City of Danzig
A League of Nations city-state at the mouth of the Vistula, 1920 to 1939
The Treaty of Versailles found an unusual answer for the Baltic port of Danzig: it took the largely German-speaking city out of Germany but did not hand it to the new Polish state that depended on its harbor. Instead it became a self-governing Free City under the protection of the League of Nations, with its own constitution, parliament, currency, and stamps, while Poland ran its customs, railways, and foreign affairs. The compromise satisfied few. German demands for the city's return were among the stated issues on the eve of World War II, and some of the war's first shots in Europe were fired at the Polish depot on Westerplatte on September 1, 1939. The city is now Gdańsk, Poland.
The Free City covered about 1,950 square kilometers where the Vistula reaches the Gulf of Gdańsk on the Baltic. Beyond the walled Hanseatic city it included the seaside resort of Zoppot (Sopot), the old abbey town of Oliva, the flat, diked farmland of the Vistula delta, half of the long sandy Vistula Spit, and wooded moraine hills to the west. The 1923 census counted about 366,700 residents, overwhelmingly German-speaking, with Polish, Kashubian, and Jewish minorities. Poland's corridor to the sea bordered it on the west and German East Prussia on the east, and Poland built the new port of Gdynia nearby to reduce its dependence on Danzig. The territory now lies in Poland's Pomeranian Voivodeship, centered on Gdańsk and Sopot.
Danzig had prospered as a Hanseatic trading city, enjoyed wide autonomy under the Polish crown from 1454, passed to Prussia in 1793, and served as the capital of the province of West Prussia until 1919. The Free City was proclaimed on November 15, 1920, with a League of Nations high commissioner as arbiter between its Senate and Poland. The Nazi party won a majority in the city parliament in 1933, and tensions with Poland grew. Germany annexed the city in September 1939. Heavily damaged in 1945, it was transferred to Poland, and most of its German population fled or was expelled. Polish restorers rebuilt the historic center, and in 1980 the strikes at the Gdańsk Shipyard gave rise to the Solidarity movement.