History of Gdansk

30s to 1660, causing the city to decline. Danzig faced yet another crisis in 1734 when besieging Russian and Saxon soldiers forced the city into a humiliating surrender after the city sided with Stanisław I over Augustus III during the War of the Polish Secession. Danzig fiercely resisted the First Partition of Poland by the nearby Kingdom of Prussia in 1772, though it was later annexed by the Prussians in the Second Partition of 1793. Briefly a Napoleonic client state from 1807 to 1814, Danzig remained in the Prussian kingdom, and later the German Empire, for over the next hundred years. Under Prussia and Germany, Danzig industrialized, becoming a key German commercial port.

With the collapse of the German Empire and the rapid creation of the Second Polish Republic at the end of World War I in 1918, tensions between the new Weimar and Polish governments ran high as both groups laid claims over Danzig. Concurring with ethnic Polish uprisings against Weimar German rule in Silesia at the end of the war, the Treaty of Versailles forcibly split Danzig from the rest of Germany, establishing a semi-independent Free City of Danzig administered by a high commissioner from the League of Nations with an elected local assembly. The treaty additionally established a customs union between the free city and Poland, as well as giving Poland rights over all railways within the free city's territory. In response to the treaty and semi-international rule, the German majority rapidly grew deeply critical of the free city's creation, resenting its political separation from Germany. Popular anger spilled into a wave of anti-Slavic sentiment felt throughout the city in the 1920s and 1930s, targeting the city's Polish and Kashubian minorities. The Nazi Party gained an electoral foothold over the city beginning in the early 1930s, whose regional platform called on the unification of Danzig with the rest of the Third Reich.

The opening salvos