In accordance with Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, an independent
Poland emerged after the war, ending a situation dating from the partitions
of Poland in the late eighteenth century that had placed the Polish people
under Russian, Austrian, and Prussian (later German) rule. To fulfill Wilson's
pledge that Poland have "free and secure access to the sea," the
victorious powers compelled Germany to surrender an area known as the
Polish Corridor to the newly created state. This step promoted Poland's
economic stability, but at the cost of embittering German public opinion
and providing a potent theme for Hitler's propaganda. The Corridor not only
cut East Prussia off from the rest of postwar Germany; it also meant that 1
million Germans were to be incorporated into the Polish state. In fact,
hundreds of thousands chose instead to flee across the new border into
Germany. The decisions of the peacemakers likewise returned Alsace-Lorraine
to France, with a consequent exodus of Germans from this region.
The creation of Poland, with its substantial German minority, illustrates
how difficult it was to realize the principle of national self-determination
that Woodrow Wilson saw as a key to a stable and secure European order.
The same explosive minority issue was also on display in Czechoslovakia.
To provide that newly created country with a secure western border,
Czechoslovakia received the Sudetenland, a territory with more than 3
million ethnically German inhabitants. These Germans were former subjects
of the Habsburg Empire and had never lived in a united Germany, but
Hitler was to make their supposed plight under foreign rule into a potent
weapon for his expansionist plans in 1938. The refusal of the victorious
Allies to permit the rump state of Austria to form a union with postwar
Germany likewise raised the explosive issue of ethnic Germans stranded
outside Germany proper.
The peace treaties violated the principle of national self-determination
for numerous groups besides the Germans. For example, Rumania was
rewarded for being on the winning side with vast territorial gains such as
Transylvania; consequently, its population of 16 million now included 1.5
million Hungarians. The Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (soon
renamed Yugoslavia), with 12 million inhabitants, likewise included some
400,000 Albanians, nearly 500,000 Hungarians, and half a million ethnic
Germans. Nearly 4 million Ukrainians and more than a million White
Russians found themselves, willing or not, made citizens of Poland.
World History
