Danzig (or Gdańsk) was the last microstate that the Fascists absorbed, after Fiume and the Saar Basin. Many of Danzig’s gentile gadje welcomed the annexation of 1939, and it was soon in close neighbourhood with a concentration camp. Quoting Ruth Schwertfeger’s A Nazi Camp near Danzig: Perspectives on Shame and on the Holocaust from Stutthof, pages 47–48:

After September 1, 1939, Stutthof/Sztutowo lost forever its former identity as a pleasant village near Danzig and the Baltic beaches, and its namesake camp began to receive first hundreds, then thousands of prisoners.

These “civilian prisoners,” as they were called, were local people from Danzig and Pomerania who were either representatives of the Polish intelligentsia—clerics, teachers, lawyers, doctors, and other professionals, or Jews from the Danzig community. All of them were arrested because they were seen through the one lens of “Germandom”—any deviation from the ideal meant treatment as an opponent and an enemy of the Third Reich.

Not every prisoner who was arrested in these early September days was sent right away to Stutthof, but it was soon to become central in the camp system of Danzig–West Prussia. For many reasons, but especially its proximity to Danzig, it was ideal. Every publication and pamphlet on Stutthof points out that it had water on all sides—the Baltic to the north, a lagoon (das Frische Haff) to the south and east, as well as canals and marshes, and to the west, the Vistula River.¹

Stutthof was clearly an ideal spot for the purposes of internment. No one could easily escape from Stutthof, surrounded as it was by such forbidding terrain; few attempted in the course of the next five plus years.

Besides, it was extensive enough in acreage to accommodate opponents of the regime beyond Danzig in Pomerania that was soon to be officially annexed to the [Third] Reich as Danzig–West Prussia. From approximately eleven acres, it grew to over 300 acres in size, accommodating initially around 250 prisoners. This is how Waclaw Lewandowski, one of the first to arrive on September 2, 1939, describes his reception:

After getting us off the closed trucks and buses that brought us there, we were again brutally searched, with frequently raining fists and whips […] We were immediately put to digging foundations for huts under construction, felling trees and clearing stumps. The tempo was murderous […] Late in the evening we were issued some 500 grams of very watery, lukewarm turnip soup and about 100 grams of dark bread. Dead tired, we fell to our pallets in the tents without undressing or washing. Even the physically strongest broke down, weeping with pain, exhaustion and humiliation.²

Grabowska‐Chałka describes Stutthof as striking “fear in the hearts of Polish inhabitants of Pomerania and synonymous with bestial cruelty, terror, murder and finally mass extermination.”³ It is a fair summary of what will follow.⁴

In 1979, scientists found and examined dozens of skeleta from a mass grave near the camp. Decades later, other scientists used modern utilities to reexamine them. Quoting Skeletal evidence of the ethnic cleansing actions in the Free City of Danzig (1939-1942) based on the KL Stutthof victims analysis:

The first arrests and deportations to the nearby concentration camp KL Stutthof began as soon as September 2nd 1939, even though Polish defenders fighting in the Westerplatte peninsula were yet to surrender [10]. The first transportation of 150 people to KL Stutthof included, among others, members of the clergy, teachers, political leaders and clerks. Most of them were killed within months of their arrival [5 11].

[…]

Our trauma analysis shows that the prevalent killing method in the KL Stutthof sample was blunt force trauma to the head, as the rib cage trauma had to be excluded from the analysis (it was impossible to associated singular rib with particular skeleton, nor was it possible to determine time of the trauma occurrence on majority of the fractured ribs). The majority of the perimortem lesions were found above the hat brim line (HBL), which is a common indicator of a violent attack in medico‐legal studies [48,49].

Even before 1939, Fascism had substantial support in Danzig, and it was normal for anticommunist gentiles to harass Jews. Quoting one example from Krzysztof Ulanowski’s ‘Record of Violence. The Socio‐Political German–Jewish Relations in Free City of Danzig in the Years 1933–1939’:

1938 was an extremely difficult for the Jewish Community on all possible levels; the political, religious and social. The degradation of the Jews eventually affected the religious sphere as well. This tragic event was reported on August 1938 by both Nowy Dziennik (published in Warsaw) and The New York Times in the article: “Nazis Plunder Synagogue in Danzig.” The report states that on 29 August 1938, about 40 […] SA militants broke into the synagogue, demolished its interior, desecrated and tore the Torah scrolls. The police, summoned by the Jewish community for help, refused to provide assistance.

For a few years, Danzig was of great concern to the international community. Quoting Anita J. Prazmowska’s ‘Poland, the ‘Danzig Question’ and the Outbreak of the Second World War’:

At the beginning of August, the Polish government and the Senate were once more in conflict. Since May, Polish customs inspectors had been under constant attack, which made their job impossible. This allowed the [Fascists] to militarize Danzig to the point that it became a fortress.

In August, the Senate informed the Poles that it would no longer recognize Polish customs guards.⁴⁸ This led the Poles to warn the Senate that it was acting outside its jurisdiction. Beck also took an opportunity to attack Burckhardt for supposedly disseminating false information about the city.⁴⁹

[Berlin] intervened only to be informed by [Warsaw] that it had no right to make representations on behalf of the Danzig Senate. When the Poles had decided to confront the Danzig authorities they did not seek British advice, but merely informed the Foreign Office of the crisis after the fact. The Poles threatened to bomb Danzig from the sea and the Senate backed down. The Foreign Office was appalled to hear how close the two had come to a military conflict.

The Danzig issue continued to be a bone of contention between [Warsaw] and [Berlin] with Britain desperately trying to wrestle from the Poles an agreement not to proceed without British approval. While Beck belligerently refused to do so, [London] sought means of ascertaining whether indeed Danzig was merely a pretext for a conflict with Poland or a difficulty that could be resolved with a modicum of good will.

The British Cabinet chose to believe that the latter was the case, whereas the Poles increasingly acted on the assumption that war with [the Third Reich] was likely to break out in the near future. To the Poles the Danzig crisis, like reports of tension on the Polish–German border in Silesia and [Fascist] claims that Poland was mistreating the German minority were seen as signs of a German propaganda campaign, which inevitably preceded an outright attack.

In the end, it was the Poles who were correct. On 23 August the Danzig Senate voted for the city to return to the Reich. The Danzig Gauleiter Albert Forster was appointed Head of the Danzig state. These actions contravened the League charter and in principle should have been a matter for the League. Instead the British and French government spoke of negotiations and used their diplomatic offices to try and persuade Beck to appoint a negotiator or at least to accept the appointment of a suitable person to negotiate between [Warsaw] and [Berlin].

Events nevertheless fast overtook these efforts for on 1 September the [Fascist] battleship Schleswig‐Holstein attacked the Polish fort and ammunition dump of Westerplatte on the tip of the Hel peninsula. Danzig was officially incorporated into Germany on that day. Burckhardt, who was in the city, was instructed to leave immediately. Wholesale attacks on Polish property and citizens completed the picture.

On 1 September 1939 developments taking place in Danzig were of little consequence as on the same day, in the early hours of the morning, [the Fascists] initiated a military attack on Poland. In the end the war did not start because of Danzig, though the city had always been a reliable barometer of relations between the two states.

Further reading:

Comparison of the situation of Freistaat Danzig and Saarland under the auspices of the League of Nations