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What Happened in the Danzig Corridor 1939? Poles Slaughtering Germans? [133]
Hmmmm , fascinating, so what did happen in the Danzig Corridor in 1939? Thank God they didn't have the internet then!
In 1934, Iosef Pilsudski and Adolph Hitler signed a non-aggression pact between Germany and Poland...part of this pact specified that the issue of the Danzig Corridor, which was piece of land that formerly linked East Prussian with the German
heartland would be resolved in a peaceful manner...Iosef Pilsudski died, and his succesors never made serious attempts to resolve the issue, for a number of reasons, probably the main one being that the corridor gave Poland access to the Baltic Sea through the port of Danzig/Gdansk...Hitler wanted this 'free city of Danzig' returned to Germany, and also wanted secure passage for Germany through the corridor, so that the link with East Prussia could be restored...he offered Poland
free access to the port in return for the city...he even offered a military alliance in case of any attacks...the Poles 'prevaricated', and in the interim, especially early in 1939, many German natives in the area were slaughtered in 'pogroms'...some reports I have read say that the instigators of these pogroms were 'Polish' communists who wished to provoke war, drawing the Soviet communists in...remember that the Red Army tries to conquer Poland in 1919, as a way of linking up with German Communists, but were stopped by Pilsudski's army at the Battle of Warsaw...Pilsudski opposed Bolshevism, as did Hitler...it seems as if a settlement of this problem could have been reached, but there was intransigence on the part of the Polish government...at the midnight hour, 1939, the British promised the Poles that they would intervene if Germany invaded...of course, they didn't, and Poland was cut up by Germany and the Soviet Union...this is the story in a nutshell...looking back, we can only speculate on alternative histories...the Communists always had their eyes on Poland, and the signing of the German-Soviet non-aggression treaty certainly was an ominous sign that Hitler considered the 'Polish problem' unsolvable by negotiations with the Poles...as far as the Danzig slaughters, some historians contend that Jewish communist elements were the perpetrators, not native Poles...this is open to debate.