Danzig crisis
| Danzig crisis | ||||||||
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| Part of the interwar period | ||||||||
Danzig policemen on foot patrol | ||||||||
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Supported by: France United Kingdom | Free City of Danzig | Germany | ||||||
| Events leading to World War II |
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The Danzig crisis was an important prelude to World War II. The crisis lasted from March 1939 until the outbreak of war on 1 September 1939. The crisis began when tensions escalated between Nazi Germany and the Second Polish Republic over the Free City of Danzig (present-day Gdańsk, Poland).
The city of Danzig, at the time of the crisis largely German-speaking, had been ruled variously by Polish and Germanic authorities in its long history. After the Partition of Poland, it had been ruled by Prussia from 1793 and the German Empire from 1871. At the end of World War I, Danzig was made into a free city under the governance of the League of Nations (via the Treaty of Versailles) but politically tied to Poland, which controlled its external affairs. The population of the Danzig was strongly in favour of annexation by Germany, as were many of the ethnic German inhabitants of the Polish territory that separated the German exclave of East Prussia from the rest of the Reich. In 1933, the Nazi Party won more than 50% of the vote in the 1933 Free City of Danzig parliamentary election and received 38 of the 72 seats in the Volkstag of Danzig, the first time any party had won a majority of seats in the legislature.
After Adolf Hitler's rise to power, he sought to bring Danzig back under German control, and also wished Poland to sign the Anti-Comintern Pact. Poland refused these demands, and Hitler began to plan a full-scale invasion, informing his subordinates that he was no longer interested in a peaceful settlement.
Despite Britain and France guaranteeing Poland's territorial integrity, key German officials such as Joachim von Ribbentrop were convinced that Britain and France would not go to war over Poland. The crisis reached its peak when Germany, on 1 September 1939, invaded Poland in the planned Fall Weiss. Following the invasion, Britain and France declared war on Germany, which started the World War II. The Danzig issue, therefore, was central to the breakdown of diplomacy and the onset of the war in Europe.