“Europe’s Big Question” (January 7,1939)
by Milton Rawson Halladay (1874-1961)
15.5 x 18 in., ink on board
Coppola Collection

Halladay was a native of Vermont and a noted political cartoonist for the Providence Journal (Rhode Island) for nearly fifty years (1900-1947). His cartoons were published in countless other newspapers and magazines. He has been called “one of the deans of American political cartooning.” His cartoon commemorating the death of Thomas A. Edison was a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize.

Although World War II “officially” began in September 1939, with the invasion of Poland, following the annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakia the previous year, another early shot in the upcoming was Danzig.

Danzig was an ethnically German city located northwest of Warsaw on the Baltic Sea coast that had been part of Germany from the early 1800’s until the end of World War I. Hitler’s interest in Danzig was long-standing, arguably central to the Nazi ideology, which called for the unification of all German people.

Danzig had been stripped from German control after World War I and established as the Free City of Danzig by the League of Nations. Germany had also lost portions of Posen and West Prussia to Poland. In the post WW2 maps, Danzig and the so-called Polish Corridor ensured Poland’s access to the Baltic Sea, but they also separated East Prussia from the rest of Germany. This outraged many Germans, particularly Hitler, who saw this concession as temporary. Throughout the 1930s, Hitler called for Danzig to be reunited with Germany.

In the classic treatise “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” the division of Prussia was “to Germans, the most heinous crime of the Versailles peacemakers.”

On January 6, 1939, German Chancellor Hitler told Polish Foreign Minister Josef Beck, “Danzig was German, would always remain German, and sooner or later would return to Germany.” A disingenuous proposal was made to crisscross the “Polish land corridor” with new rail lines and highways, connecting Germany with East Prussia and providing a pathway to de facto control. The proposal was declined.