Something no Prime Minister could contemplate
The Foreign Office records regarding the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 must be amongst the most regularly requested papers held at the National Archives. One file, FO 608/65, is part of the herculean effort to redraw the map of Europe after the First World War. It recounts the efforts of officials and ministers to work out how to provide Poland with meaningful access to the Baltic. The focus of this attention was the port city of Danzig. The two options before the Council of Ten were to include the city as part of Poland, but place limits on how Poland exercised its national sovereignty over this part of its territory, or to create a “free city”, administered by a League of Nations High Commissioner, which was tied into a customs union with Poland. In late March 1919 Lloyd George expressed the UK’s support…
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