Gdańsk, situated in the bay on the southern coast of the Baltic Sea, in the delta of Vistula River, is Poland’s principal seaport. It is a part of the Tri-City metropolitan area, which has a population of approximately 1.5 million and also consists of Sopot, Gdynia and surrounding suburban towns.
The city’s history is complex, with periods of Polish, Prussian and German rule, and periods of autonomy as a free city-state. An important shipbuilding port and trade point since the Middle Ages, in 1361 it became a member of the Hanseatic League, an influential commercial and defensive confederation of merchants’ guilds and market towns in northern Europe, which defined its economic, demographic, and urban landscape for several centuries.
It is generally thought that the first Christian ruler of Poland, Mieszko I, erected a stronghold on the site in the 980s, thereby connecting the Polish state ruled by the Piast dynasty with the trade routes of the Baltic Sea. In the 14th century, the city was taken over and its population massacred by the Teutonic Knights, whose brutal rule only ended with the Second Peace Treaty of Thorn (Toruń) in 1466 after a series of wars with Poland.
In the 1575 election to the Polish throne, Gdańsk supported Emperor Maximilian II in his struggle against Hungarian Stephen Báthory. It was Stephen who eventually became the monarch, but the city authorities refused to recognize the legitimacy of his election. After the six months siege and the defeat of the city's mercenary army, a compromise was reached. King Stephen Báthory confirmed Gdańsk’s special status and the privileges granted by earlier Polish kings while the city recognised him as ruler of Poland and paid the large sum of 200,000 guldens in gold as a payoff.
The 1627 naval Battle of Oliwa, which was fought near the city during the Polish–Swedish War of 1626–1629, is considered as one of the greatest victories in the history of the Polish Navy. Thirty years later, during the Swedish invasion of Poland of 1655–1660, commonly known as the Deluge, Gdańsk was unsuccessfully besieged by Sweden. In 1660, the war ended with the Treaty of Oliwa.
In the 18th century, Gdańsk suffered from a great plague and a slow economic decline due to a series of wars. In 1734, during the War of the Polish Succession, it was sieged and taken over by the Russians.
In 1793, Gdańsk was annexed by the Kingdom of Prussia in the Second Partition of Poland. During the Napoleonic Wars, in 1807, the city was besieged and captured by a coalition of French, Polish, Italian, Saxon and Baden forces. It functioned as the Free City of Danzig (Gdańsk) until 1814, but after France's defeat in the Napoleonic Wars, it again became part of Prussia. With the unification of Germany in 1871 under Prussian hegemony, the city became part of the German Empire and remained so until after Germany's defeat in the First World War in 1918.
When Poland regained its independence after the First World War, its territorial access to the sea was promised by the Allies. However, since Germans formed the ethnic majority in Gdańsk, the city was not placed under Polish sovereignty. Instead, in accordance with the terms of the Versailles Treaty, it became the Free City of Danzig (Gdańsk), an independent quasi-state under the auspices of the League of Nations, with its external affairs largely under Polish control. Poland's rights included free use of the harbour, a customs union, a Polish post office and a Polish garrison in Westerplatte district. The Free City of Danzig (Gdańsk) had its own constitution, national anthem, parliament, and government. It issued its own stamps as well as its currency, the Danzig gulden.
In 1930s, the growth of Nazism among Danzig Germans resulted in introduction of segregation and discrimination policies against the city’s ethnic minorities. Polish students were forcibly germanised. German militias carried out numerous beatings of Polish activists, scouts and even mailmen, as punishment for distributing the Polish press. From 1937, the employment of Poles by German companies was prohibited and the use of Polish in public places was banned. Poles were not allowed to enter several German owned restaurants.
An even worse fate awaited the Jewish community. In the 1920s, the Free City of Danzig (Gdańsk) acted as a transit point for Jews leaving Eastern Europe for the United States and Canada. Between 1920 and 1925, some 60,000 Jews passed through it. In 1937, 60 shops and several private Jewish residences were damaged in a Pogrom. This caused the flight of about half of the Jewish community within a year.
In 1939, an official policy of repression against Jews was initiated with the adoption of the Nuremberg Race Law Jewish businesses were seized and handed over to German Danzigers, Jews were forbidden to enter theatres, cinemas, public baths, swimming pools and hotels, and they were barred from the medical, legal and notary professions. In the same year, the Kristallnacht riots in Germany were followed by similar attacks on Jews in Gdańsk. The Synagogues in Langfuhr (Wrzeszcz), Mattenbuden (Szopy), and Zoppot (Sopot) were destroyed. The Great Synagogue in Gdańsk was only saved because Jewish war veterans guarded the building.
Faced with the prospect of continuing repressions, the Jewish community decided to organize its emigration. All properties, including the Synagogues and cemeteries, were sold to finance it. The Great Synagogue was taken over by the municipal administration and torn down in May 1939. The first transport of Danzig Jewry to Palestine departed in March 1939, and by September 1939 only 1,700, mostly elderly, Jews remained. About 140 children were evacuated to Great Britain by the Kindertransport in 1938/39. By early 1941, just 600 Jews were still living in Gdańsk, most of whom were later murdered in the Holocaust.
Hitler used the issue of the status of the city as a pretext for attacking Poland in 1939. Before the onset of the war, the German government officially demanded the return of Gdańsk to Germany along with an extraterritorial highway through Polish Corridor for land-based access from the rest of Germany.
The German attack began on the 1st of September 1939 with the bombardment of Polish positions in the Gdańsk area of Westerplatte by the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein, and the landing of German infantry on the peninsula. Outnumbered Polish defenders at Westerplatte resisted for seven days before running out of ammunition. Another Polish position in Gdańsk, the Post Office, also saw an attack on the first day of the war. Polish personnel defended the building for some 15 hours against assaults by the SS Heimwehr Danzig, local SA formations and special units of police. All captured defenders were court martialled and executed. Meanwhile, approximately 1,500 ethnic Poles were arrested for their social, political and economic activism. On the second day of war 150 of them were deported to the Stutthof concentration camp near Gdańsk and murdered. The city was officially annexed by Nazi Germany.
In 1941, Hitler ordered the invasion of the Soviet Union, eventually causing the fortunes of war to turn against Germany. In the final stages of Soviet offensive, hundreds of thousands of German refugees converged on Gdańsk. Some tried to escape through the city's port in a large-scale evacuation involving hundreds of German cargo and passenger ships. Tens of thousands were killed after some of the refugee ships were sunk by the Soviets, who captured the heavily damaged city on the 30th of March 1945.
After the war, in line with the decisions made by the Allies in Yalta and Potsdam, Gdańsk was reintegrated into Poland, under the Soviet-installed communist regime. The remaining German residents of the city fled or were expelled to post-war Germany. Gdańsk was repopulated by ethnic Poles, some of whom had been deported by the Soviets from pre-war eastern Polish areas annexed by the Soviet Union. Parts of the historic old city, which had suffered large-scale destruction during the war, were rebuilt. Boosted by heavy investment in the development of its port and shipyards, Gdańsk became the major shipping and industrial centre of the People's Republic of Poland.
In 1970, Gdańsk and nearby Gdynia became a scene of anti-communist regime demonstrations during which the military and the police opened fire on protesters causing several dozen deaths. Ten years later, in August 1980, the Gdańsk Shipyard was the birthplace of the Solidarity trade union movement, which played a major role in bringing an end to communism in Poland and helped to precipitate the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. Solidarity's leader, Lech Wałęsa, former worker at Gdańsk Shipyard, became the President of Poland in 1990.
Dramatic events of the 20th century struggle against the terror of Nazism and Communism are now remembered in two thematic museums in Gdańsk – the Museum of the Second World War and the European Solidarity Centre.
