DBWI: A Polish Corridor got granted after WW1?

JJohnson

Banned
So, what would the world be like had a so-called "Polish Corridor" been created after WW1? Poland's a landlocked country today, but what if it had had sea access? Germany lost part of Schleswig-Holstein and Alsace-Lorraine, but other than that, it didn't really lose anything but money, coal, and its army after the war to repay all the Allies.

And what if Austria hadn't been allowed the southwestern part of Tyrol, and Sudetenland and German Bohemia?
 
Well, Germany, instead of becoming part of the new European order like post-Napoleonic France, would have become a vengeful and bitter country calling for revenge if the Polish Corridor was created and harsher military restrictions were placed on Germany (IIRC, Germany was allowed 300,000 men, a small airforce, a few (coastal) submarines, it's first-generation Dreadnoughts (the Nassau and Helgoland classes, IIRC), and a handful of tanks and heavy artillery).
 
Poland might not have fallen to Stalin. If the ports had remained open, if ammunition could have kept flowing from the West, the Second Bolshevik War could have gone very differently. If perfidious Albion had stood with France to grind Germany down into the mud where it belonged after starting the Great War, the suffering and death of millions of Poles and Czechs could have been averted.
 

JJohnson

Banned
They were definitely all in on the old League of Nations afterwards, weren't they? A big help to the creation of the Armenian state after the genocide there was exposed to the public.
 
Perhaps democracy might have taken hold in Germany. And I mean real democracy, not the farce we have now in post-Volkish Germany with Herr Putisch's party getting 90% of the vote for the fourth time in a row. The anti-democratic measures imposed in 1930 which started the undermining of the democratic system and eventually allowed the Volkish Party to assume absolute power so easily in 1936 were not guaranteed to happen. They started out as attempts to suppress the Poles in eastern Germany after the government concluded that assimilating them through legal means was impossible. If Germany had lost its Polish provinces in the east after the war there would have been no reason to impose the Minorities Law which started its slide into dictatorship.
 
Poland might not have fallen to Stalin. If the ports had remained open, if ammunition could have kept flowing from the West, the Second Bolshevik War could have gone very differently. If perfidious Albion had stood with France to grind Germany down into the mud where it belonged after starting the Great War, the suffering and death of millions of Poles and Czechs could have been averted.

The poles got liberated eventally, after every one freaked out about having the communists right next door, and germany bleed and died during the second Bolshevik war, yes mainly to get their buffer state back..but germans still fought and bleed to help free Poland.
 
Perhaps democracy might have taken hold in Germany. And I mean real democracy, not the farce we have now in post-Volkish Germany with Herr Putisch's party getting 90% of the vote for the fourth time in a row. The anti-democratic measures imposed in 1930 which started the undermining of the democratic system and eventually allowed the Volkish Party to assume absolute power so easily in 1936 were not guaranteed to happen. They started out as attempts to suppress the Poles in eastern Germany after the government concluded that assimilating them through legal means was impossible. If Germany had lost its Polish provinces in the east after the war there would have been no reason to impose the Minorities Law which started its slide into dictatorship.
On the other hand, the loss of land to Poland might create a regime more extreme than the Volkish regime like in the timeline "A Harsher Versailles" with it's "National Socialist Party".
 
There are some interesting butterfly like possibilities here.

The most obvious one is whether Poland having a port turns out to make the difference in preventing the Russian armies from taking over and making Poland the Communist Russian puppet state that they and we wound up getting. The Russian and Communist threat also was instrumental in strengthening both the German right and the Anglo-German alliance.

The other one is whether a harsher peace treaty pushes Germany into revanchanism. I think just continuing the British blockade into the 1920s could do that on its own.

What happens to East Prussia in this scenario? Is it given to Poland as well?
 
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