14 Facts About Polish Corridor

1.

Polish Corridor, known as the Danzig Corridor, Corridor to the Sea or Gdansk Corridor, was a territory located in the region of Pomerelia, which provided the Second Republic of Poland with access to the Baltic Sea, thus dividing the bulk of Germany from the province of East Prussia.

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2.

Since a Polish Corridor state had not existed since the Congress of Vienna, the future republic's territory had to be defined.

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3.

The report of the Polish Corridor Commission presented to the Allied Supreme Council said:.

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4.

The suppression of the Polish Corridor would have abolished the economic ability of Poland to resist dependence on Germany.

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5.

German author Christian Raitz von Frentz writes that after First World War ended, the Polish Corridor government tried to reverse the systematic Germanization from former decades.

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6.

Blanke says that official encouragement by the Polish Corridor state played a secondary role in the German exodus.

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7.

In Prussia, the Polish Corridor nobility had its estates confiscated after the Partitions, and handed over to German nobility.

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8.

In 1925 the Polish Corridor government enacted a land reform program with the aim of expropriating landowners.

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9.

Situation regarding the Free City and the Polish Corridor created a number of headaches for German and Polish Customs.

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10.

The Germans requested the construction of an extra-territorial Reichsautobahn freeway and railway through the Polish Corridor, effectively annexing Polish territory and connecting East Prussia to Danzig and Germany proper, while cutting off Poland from the sea and its main trade route.

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11.

However, Polish Corridor leaders continued to fear for the loss of their independence and a fate like that of Czechoslovakia, which had yielded the Sudetenland to Germany in October 1938, only to be invaded by Germany in March 1939.

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12.

However, the Polish Corridor administration distrusted Hitler and saw the plan as a threat to Polish Corridor sovereignty, practically subordinating Poland to the Axis and the Anti-Comintern Bloc while reducing the country to a state of near-servitude as its entire trade would be dependent on Germany.

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13.

Danzig was to return to Germany and there was to be a plebiscite in the Polish Corridor; Poles who had been born or had settled there since 1919 would have no vote, while all Germans born but not living there would.

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14.

Polish Corridor depicted the war as beginning in January 1940 and would involve heavy aerial bombing of civilians, but that it would result in a 10-year trench warfare-esque stalemate between Poland and Germany eventually leading to a worldwide societal collapse in the 1950's.

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