Polish Corridor was a strip of territory taken from Germany and granted to Poland after World War I (1914-1918). The Treaty of Versailles, which officially ended the war, established the corridor in 1919 to give Poland direct access to the Baltic Sea. The corridor separated Germany from East Prussia, which was still part of Germany, and from Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland), a “free city” under protection of the League of Nations.
Poland ruled the region of the corridor until 1772, when Prussia took it over. Prussia became the leading state of a united Germany in 1871. Before World War I, about half of the people in the corridor area spoke Polish and about half spoke German. After the war, many of the region’s ethnic Germans migrated to Germany.
In 1939, Adolf Hitler used reclaiming the corridor as an excuse for Germany to invade Poland. Germany then expelled the Poles from the region. In 1945, at the end of World War II, the corridor area and half of East Prussia became part of Poland. The Poles then expelled the Germans from the region.
