Pomerania historical timeline

Pomerania’s history is maritime, contested, and bracketed by two of the twentieth century’s hinge moments.

Teutonic and Hanseatic

The Teutonic Knights took the region in the fourteenth century and built Malbork as their headquarters — a fortress, monastery and palace of unprecedented scale. Gdansk grew as a Hanseatic port trading Polish grain and timber to western Europe, and after the Knights were defeated it came under the Polish crown while keeping extensive self-government and its German-speaking merchant character. By the sixteenth century it was one of the wealthiest cities on the Baltic.

Prussia and the Free City

The partitions brought Prussian rule. After the First World War the Treaty of Versailles made Gdansk a Free City under League of Nations protection, with Poland given access through a corridor to the sea — an arrangement that satisfied nobody and became a standing grievance. Poland built Gdynia from a fishing village into a modern port in the 1920s precisely to avoid depending on it.

1 September 1939

A German battleship, moored in the harbour on what was billed as a courtesy visit, opened fire on the Polish garrison at Westerplatte at quarter to five in the morning, and the Second World War began. The Polish post office in the city held out the same day. At the war’s end the city was around ninety per cent destroyed.

August 1980

A strike at the Lenin Shipyard over the sacking of a crane driver grew into an occupation, then into an inter-factory committee, and then into the Gdansk Agreement that legalised Solidarity — the first independent trade union in the Soviet bloc. Martial law followed in 1981, but the movement survived, and the partly free elections of June 1989 began the end of communism across the region.