THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS MONDAY, MARCH 13, 1933 THE POLISH CORRIDOR

Among the earliest foreign reactions to Hitler's dominance in Germany is evident anxiety in Poland. This is already expressing itself in military activity, promoted as a defensive precaution against a possible German assault. Poland's fear is reflected in gravely disquieting reports from London. Poland is not afraid of a Germany disarmed, but of a Germany assured of a right to rearm, if general disarmament be not speedily achieved to a considerable extent, and a Germany now inflamed by a political turbulence of

nationalism. Hitler openly hates the Treaty of Versailles and all its works. He has deliberately fomented intolerance of the territorial losses suffered through it by Germany, and none of these is so galling, none so unreasonable to the German mind, as the creation of the Polish Corridor separating East Prussia from the rest of the Reich, when dismembered Poland regained a national existence as an outcome of Germany's defeat in the war. This severance did more than take away territory: it broke the geographical contact between the bulk of Germany and the home of those Junkers or powerful landed proprietors that continue to be an aggressive force in German politics.' The fact that President Hindenburc's home is in East Prussia and that he must travel across Polish territory to get there whenever he'takes a holiday from official cares—being locked in his railway compartment, it is said, for th *t portion of his journey—has been' employed by German trouble-make rs to impress "the shame of the Corridor." Their self-chosen task is easy. The map talks for them. In the history of German unification is a ready warrant for protest against this gap —especially the cherished scheme of Frederick the Great, at the time of the first partition of Poland, to turn what was then a Polish Corridor be-

tween Prussia and East Prussia into a German Corridor uniting them—and so cutting off Poland from the Baltic. Thus the subject lends itself to furious recital of a grievance: it is the staple item of a complaint that a legitimate German desire for territorial unity has been ruthlessly trampled under alien feet. What was done by the Versailles Supreme Council, however, took account of the needs of resurrected Poland as well as those of Germany. To give Poland access to the sea was deemed essential, and to do this by taking from Germany a broad strip of territory was justified, in the eyes of the council, by the preponderatingly Polish character of its population. Some German objectors demurred at

first to this opinion on the racial aspect of the question, but nobody on their side of the boundary now calls for a plebiscite. The census of 1931 revealed that 89.9 of the people

in the region declared Polish to be their mother tongue, and a recent English writer who travels there a good deal says that "undoubtedly the Corridor to-day is even more indisputably and enthusiastically Polish, and in another ten years the proportion of Poles, with their higher birth , rate, will doubtless attain the overwhelming proportion of 95 per cent." Thus there is much more than access to the sea to be considered. To undo the work of 1919 would violate a principle, that of nationality, prevailing in the redrawing of the map of Europe then undertaken. But Germany has never ceased to grumble about her new

frontier on the east. Its alteration was offensively occasioned by granting Polish independence. As long ago as 1863 there was known to be a greater German repugnance to

:hat idea than even Russia had mani

fested, and this repugnance was admittedly based on a fear that Prussia would find herself between two Powers, Poland and France, ready to sympathise with each other in a policy of aggression inimical to Gernlan interests. This view persists. Last September, in the course of his brief reign as Chancellor, General von Schleicher asserted that East Prussia in particular was threatened by enemies, and that "everyone must know how and where to defend his Fatherland." Hitlerism has done no more than give point to such utterances as Poland naturally interprets them. For the fear expressed to-day, that the "vigorous revival of the question may be provocative of international trouble, there is obvious ground. Marshal Foch, not long before his death, told a visitor that it was along the frontiers of the Cori'idor that the next great war would start. The locality is certainly a potential centre of a grave clash, and under the Locarno agreements of mutual defence Poland would not be left alone to bear the brunt of any German assault. What is painfully clear is that a collision of purposes persists. In 1925, Stresemann laid down as a principal aim of Germany the retaking of the Corridor: in 1927, Zaleski, a Polish Foreign Secretary, declared that "every Pole would sacrifice life and fortune to defend this same territory against any attempt to take it, from whatever quarter that attempt might come." The menace to peace is real. Sir Austen Chamberlain, discussing disarmament in November last, disclosed to the House of Commons that his assertion at Locarno that Germany had renounced the right to use war as a means of changing the eastern frontier was vaguely questioned there by the German Ambassador. Confirmation of the British view was afterwards got from the German Government, but Sir Austen's further reference in the same speech implied a misgiving. As Danzig, occupying a portion of the Baltic seaboard of the Corridor, is directly under League administration as a "free city," fear of trouble from that quarter may be discounted ; but Poland's costly development of Gydnia as an adjacent port is evidence of a determination to hold the national outlet at all costs. The position is not above revision, but to reconcile, interests so diametrically opposed woidd be immensely difficult