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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 May 2025
In 1920, the League of Nations implemented the first modern international zones in Europe. While historians have largely presented international zones as unworkable peace-making solutions devoid of resident support, this article draws attention to those figures who saw in zones an opportunity to cash in on the end of empire. It follows the case of Ludwig Noé–a preeminent industrialist in the Free City of Danzig–who was employed to run the city’s imperial shipyard. Noé’s transformation of the Danzig shipyard into a successful international concern demonstrated the economic advantages that internationalisation could facilitate and chimed with calls to exploit the zone further by converting it into a manufacturing free port. The article contributes, therefore, to a growing literature concerned with how abstract international visions were realized locally and independently, and who, ultimately, made internationalism work in the 1920s.
1 Minutes and memoranda on the establishment of Danzig as a Free City, Feb. 1919– July 1919, Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge [hereafter CAC], GBR/0014/HDLM 6/4/79, 1-2.
2 On Headlam-Morley see D. B. Kaufman, ‘“A House of Cards Which Would Not Stand”: James Headlam-Morley, the Role of Experts, and the Danzig Question at the Paris Peace Conference’, Diplomacy & Statecraft 30, no. 2 (2019): 228–52; Alan Sharp, ‘James Headlam-Morley: Creating International History’, Diplomacy & Statecraft 9, no. 3 (1998): 266–83.
3 On international zones see Carsten Stahn, The Law and Practice of International Territorial Administration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Ralph Wilde, International Territorial Administration: How Trusteeship and the Civilizing Mission Never Went Away (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Meir Ydit, Internationalised Territories (Leiden: A. W. Sythoff, 1961); Gregory H. Fox, Humanitarian Occupation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). On the shifting basis for justifying international rule see Anne Orford, International Authority and the Responsibility to Protect (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
4 Sir James Headlam-Morley, A Memoir of the Paris Peace Conference, 1919, ed. Agnes Headlam-Morley, Russell Bryant and Anna Cienciala (London: Methuen, 1972), 69.
5 Or at the very least in the case of Danzig, they emphasise that both Germany and Poland considered the city-state solution an unworkable compromise throughout the inter-war period. Magaret MacMillian, Peacemakers: The Paris Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War (London: John Murray, 2001), 228–9; John Brown Mason, The Danzig Dilemma: A Study in Peacemaking by Compromise (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1946).
6 See for instance Catherine Epstein, Model Nazi: Arthur Greiser and the Occupation of Western Poland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Dieter Schenk, Hitlers Mann in Danzig: Albert Forster und die NS-Verbrechen in Danzig-Westpreussen (Bonn, Dietz, 2000); Christoph Pallaske, Die Hitlerjugend der Freien Stadt Danzig: 1926–1939 (Münster: Waxmann, 1999); Herbert Levine, Hitler’s Free City: A History of the Nazi Party in Danzig, 1935–1939 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1973); Christoph M. Kimmich, The Free City: Danzig and Germany Foreign Policy, 1919–1934 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968). On the particular link between the integrity of zones and the viability of the League see Kaufman, ‘A House of Cards’, 234; Leonard V. Smith, Sovereignty at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 138.
7 Elizabeth Morrow Clark, ‘Poland and the Free City of Danzig, 1926–1927: Foundations for Reconciliation’ (PhD diss., University of Kansas, 1999).
8 Elizabeth Morrow Clark, ‘The Free City of Danzig: Borderland, Hansestadt or Social Democracy?’, The Polish Review 42, no. 3 (1997): 276.
9 In addition to Clark, Peter Oliver Loew’s work is essential for bringing local history to bear on new assessments of the region. See Peter Oliver Loew, Danzig. Biographie einer Stadt (München: C. H. Beck, 2011).
10 To date there is no substantive analysis of Noé. He is best known as the subject of a portrait by Otto Dix, held in the Kunstforum Ostdeutsche Galerie Regensburg. Suggestive remarks about him can be found in: Clark, ‘The Free City of Danzig’, 270; Máté Rigó, Capitalism in Chaos: How the Business Elites of Europe Prospered in the Era of the Great War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022), 207.
11 On the history of the shipyard, see Günter Stavorinus, Die Geschichte des Königlichen/Kaiserlichen Werft Danzig: 1844–1918 (Köln: Böhlau, 1990).
12 See, for example, the local economist Hermann Thomsen, Danzigs Handel und Industrie in ihren Entwicklungsmöglichkeiten (Danzig: A. W. Kafemann, 1921).
13 See Máté Rigó, Capitalism in Chaos: How the Business Elites of Europe Prospered in the Era of the Great War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022); Dominique Kirchner Reill, The Fiume Crisis: Life in the Wake of the Habsburg Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020); Gábor Egry, ‘Negotiating Post-Imperial Transitions: Local Societies and Nationalizing States in East Central Europe’, in Embers of Empire: Continuity and Rupture in the Habsburg Successor States after 1918, ed. Paul Miller and Claire Morelon (New York: Berghahn, 2019), 15–42; Gábor Egry et al., Momentous Times and Ordinary People: Life on the Ruins of Austria-Hungary (Budapest: Napvilág, 2023). For the German Empire, see the groundbreaking work by Sean Andrew Wempe, Revenants of the German Empire: Colonial Germans, Imperialism, and the League of Nations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
14 On revolution see, for example, Robert Gerwarth, November 1918: The German Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020); Mark Jones, Founding Weimar: Violence and the German Revolution of 1918–1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). On the continuation of violence after the First World War see Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End (London: Penguin, 2016); Jochen Böhler, Civil War in Central Europe, 1918–1921: The Reconstruction of Poland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Jonathan Wyrtzen, Worldmaking in the Long Great War: How Local and Colonial Struggles Shaped the Modern Middle East (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022).
15 Adrian Mitter, ‘The Free City of Danzig: Between the Vistula and the World (1919–1933)’ (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2021).
16 Máté Rigó, ‘Imperial Currencies after the Fall of Empires: The Conversion of the German Paper Mark and the Austro-Hungarian Crown at the End of the First World War’, Central European History 53, no. 3 (2020): 533–63.
17 Marco Bresciani and Klaus Richter, ‘Trieste and Danzig after the Great War: Imperial Collapse, Narratives of Loss, Reconfigured Globalization’, The Journal of Modern History 95, no. 3 (2023): 557–95.
18 Mitter, ‘The Free City of Danzig’, 16. Mitter is building on the work of Manfred Enssle here. Manfred J. Enssle, ‘Five Theses on German Everyday Life after World War II’, Central European History 26, no. 1 (1993): 3.
19 Rigó, Capitalism in Chaos.
20 This contrasts with studies that still see the significance of international zones as being bound to questions of success or failure in peacekeeping. The revisionist shift in the historiography is chartered by Susen Pedersen in ‘Back to the League of Nations’, American Historical Review 112, no. 4 (October 2007): 1091–117. See also Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
21 Peter Becker and Natasha Wheatley, eds., Remaking Central Europe: The League of Nations and the Former Habsburg Lands (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).
22 Jamie Martin, The Meddlers: Sovereignty, Empire, and the Birth of Global Economic Governance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022); Nathan Marcus, Austrian Reconstruction and the Collapse of Global Finance, 1921–1931 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018); David Petruccelli, ‘Banknotes from the Underground: Counterfeiting and the International Order in Interwar Europe’, Journal of Contemporary History 51, no. 3 (2015): 507–30; Patricia Clavin, Securing the World Economy: The Reinvention of the League of Nations, 1920–1946 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
23 Kaufman, ‘A House of Cards’, 234 and 239–41; Alan Sharp, ‘James Headlam-Morley: Creating International History’, Diplomacy and Statecraft 9, no. 3 (1998): 272–3; Stahn, The Law and Practice of International Territorial Administration, 163.
24 Staatshandbuch der Freien Stadt Danzig (Danzig: Verlag des statistischen Landesamts, 1926), 169.
25 For an excellent account of the city’s nineteenth-century history see Mitter, ‘The Free City of Danzig’, 45–54.
26 Treaty of Versailles, Part III, Articles 102 and 103.
27 Treaty of Versailles, Part III, Article 104.
28 Some entities also survived into the modern era on the Franco-Swiss border. James Headlam-Morley to Alec W. G. Randall, 13 Jan. 1925, CAC, GBR/0014/HDLM 6/1/5/8.
29 Brown Mason, The Danzig Dilemma, 22–9.
30 Richard S. Thoman, Free Ports and Foreign-Trade Zones (Cambridge, MD: Cornell Maritime Press, 1956), chapter 1; Koen Stapelbroek and Corey Tazzara, ‘The Global History of the Free Port’, Global Intellectual History 8, no. 6 (2023): 680.
31 Minutes and memoranda on the establishment of Danzig as a Free City, Feb. 1919–July 1919, CAC, GBR/0014/HDLM 6/4/79, 1.
32 Headlam-Morley, A Memoir, 69.
33 This discourse would also be deployed by German nationalists in service of very different aims. See Peter Oliver Loew, Danzig und seine Vergangenheit, 1793–1997: Die Geschichtskultur einer Stadt zwischen Deutschland und Polen (Osnabrück: fibre, 2003).
34 Convention of Paris. Treaty between Poland and the Free City of Danzig, Concluded at Paris, 9 November 1920, Article 19.
35 Brown Mason, The Danzig Dilemma, chapter 7.
36 Treaty of Versailles, Part XII, Article 328.
37 Ludwig Noé, ‘Die Umstellung der früheren Reichswerft Danzig nach dem Weltkriege’, in Bilder aus Danzigs Handel, Industrie und Handwerk, ed. Statistisches Amt der Freien Stadt Danzig (Danzig: der Osten, 1924), 5–7, League of Nations Archives, Geneva [hereafter LNA], R131/4/40,274/3525.
38 Confirmation of the police president on behalf of the Einwohnermeldeamt in Saarbrücken, 7 Jan. 1935, LNA, R3728-2C-1861-15,587.
39 ‘Handelsnachrichten’, Berliner Börsen-Zeitung, Morgen-Ausgabe, 275 (16 June 1914), 14; ‘Von den Aktien-Gesellschaften der Textil-Industrie’, Leipziger Wochenschrift für Textil-Industrie, 25 (23 June 1920), 520; Rigó, Capitalism in Chaos, 207–8.
40 ‘Kunst und Wissenschaft’, Hallische Nachrichten: General-Anzeiger für Halle und die Provinz Sachsen, 215 (20 Sept. 1919), 2; Mitter, ‘The Free City of Danzig’, 120.
41 United States Department of Commerce, Commerce Reports, vol. 2, nos. 77-153 (Washington: Government Printing Office: 1920), 1638; Stavorinus, Die Geschichte des Königlichen/Kaiserlichen Werft Danzig, 263.
42 For a glimpse into the rioting in Danzig see the reports of the High Commissioner B. H. Bellero on 30 July and 5 Aug. 1920 in LNA, R136/4/5876/5856.
43 Though not before repurposing some materials in his sheds. See ‘Aeronautical Material at Danzig’, 28 May 1921, LNA, C-31-1921-BI, Annex Q.
44 ‘The Manufacture of Arms in the Free City’, 22 May 1921, LNA, S469-59-5, Annex A.
45 Ibid.
46 F. L. Carsten, The Reichswehr and Politics, 1918–1933 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 50-2.
47 For details on disarmament more generally see Richard J. Shuster, German Disarmament After World War I: The Diplomacy of International Arms Inspection, 1920–1931 (Oxford: Routledge, 2006), chapters 4 and 5.
48 E. A. Masterman, Commodore d’Aviation R.A.F., Berlin, to Richard Haking, High Commissioner of the Free City of Danzig, 26 Mar. 1921, LNA, C-31-1921-BI, Annex P.
49 Ibid.
50 ‘General report and recommendations concerning the aeroplane situation in Danzig adopted on March 28th, 1921’, LNA, C-31-1921-BI, Annex O.
51 Treaty of Versailles, Part II, Article 191.
52 Mitter, ‘The Free City of Danzig’, 119.
53 Haking, to the Secretary-General, League of Nations, 19 Mar. 1921, LNA, C-31-1921-BI, Annex G.
54 Erik Colban, ‘Minute’, 22 Mar. 1921, LNA, C-31-1921-BI, Annex M.
55 Haking, to the Secretary-General, League of Nations, 19 Mar. 1921, LNA, C-31-1921-BI, Annex G.
56 Eric Colban, ‘Minute’, 31 Mar. 1921, LNA, C-31-1921-BI, Annex S.
57 Kimmich, The Free City, 46.
58 ‘Danzigs wirtschaftliche Entwicklung’, Danziger Wirtschafts-Zeitung (25 June 1923), 117, Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amts, Berlin [hereafter PA AA], RAV66/112.
59 ‘Danzig als Handelsplatz des Ostens’, Hamburger Freundlichest (1 June 1921), PA AA, RAV 66/3.
60 Gesetzblatt für die Freie Stadt Danzig (10 Jan. 1923), 11–12; ‘Lease Agreement between the Government of the Free City of Danzig and the Government of the Republic of Poland on the one part, and the International Shipbuilding and Engineering Company, Limited, of the other part’, in Convention Relative to the Cession of German Public Property Situated in Danzig, and Also to the Transfer of a Part of This Property to the Harbour Board of the Free City. Signed at Danzig, May 3, 1923 (London, 1924), 31–5, LNA, R181-4-61,450-61,450, II. Annex.
61 ‘Werft und Eisenbahnhauptwerkstätte. Das Ergebnis der Londoner Verhandlungen: Errichtung eines internationalen Unternehmens’, Danziger Neueste Nachrichten, 267 (13 Nov. 1922), PP AA, RAV 66/118, unpaginated.
62 ‘Danziger Werft und Eisenbahn-Hauptwerkstätte’, Danziger Neueste Nachrichten (23 Sept. 1922), PA AA, RAV 66/118, unpaginated.
63 ‘Danziger Nachrichten’, Danziger Volksstimme, 303 (28 Dec. 1922), PA AA, RAV 66/118, unpaginated.
64 Rigó, Capitalism in Chaos, 207–8.
65 Mitter, ‘The Free City of Danzig’, 122.
66 Noé, ‘Die Umstellung der früheren Reichswerft Danzig nach dem Weltkriege’.
67 Eric Colban, ‘Minute’, 31 Mar. 1921, LNA, C-31-1921-BI, Annex S.
68 Haking, to the Secretary-General, League of Nations, 22 May 1921, LNA, S469/59/5, Annex A.
69 Noé, ‘Die Umstellung’.
70 Mitter, ‘The Free City of Danzig’, 122.
71 See the numerous accounts and rebuttals by Noé in PA AA, RAV 66/135.
72 Danziger Neueste Nachrichten, 219 (18 Sept. 1922), PA AA, RAV 66/118, unpaginated.
73 Willi Wolfradt, ‘Danziger Bildnesse von Otto Dix’, Der Cicerone 21 (1929): 136–9.
74 Kimmich, The Free City, 84; Alfred Siebeneichen, Polen und der Hafen von Danzig (Danzig: Danziger Zeitungsgesellschaft m. b. H. ‘Baltische Presse’, 1926), 19, PA AA, RAV 66/120A.
75 Ibid., 18 and 32.
76 Mitter, ‘The Free City of Danzig’, 132.
77 Thomsen, Danzigs Handel, chapter 3.
78 Mitter, ‘The Free City of Danzig’, 134.
79 Kimmich, The Free City, 89.
80 Speech by Noé in the sub-committee II (industry), 11 May 1927, LNA, S-C-E-II-7 EN.
81 Ibid.
82 Brown Mason, The Danzig Dilemma, 130–3.
83 See the files on the ‘Case of the International Shipbuilding Company in Danzig’ in the National Archives, Kew, FO 371/56,584.
84 ‘Memorandum on the ‘Free Zones’ of Upper Savoy and the Gex District’, 20 May 1949, COM.JER/W.19, available at https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-211437/ (last visited Feb. 2025).
85 Emphasis in original. Ibid.