If Cieslak says that 7.127 million tons came in through Danzig and 9.173 million tons came in through Gdynia in 1938 then we have a total of 16.3 million tons for total imports by way of the Baltic. Bertram says that for 1938 a total 14.7 million tons came in so someone is wrong but I trust Cieslak.
AFAIK, Cieslak's figures are for complete turnover - imports
and exports. They could both therefore be right, but if that is the case, it puts an altogether different and interesting light on the matter.
there seems to be a correlation in the rise of the Gdynia figures from 1931 when they suddenly shoot up and the fall in Danzig’s figures from 1932.
If you plot out Cieslak's figures on a graph, you will see that there is very little correlation between the throughput of both ports over the 1924-39 period. The figures for Gdynia after 1931 do not shoot up. 1931-32 sees the only negative growth period and overall, there is a definite albeit small levelling off of growth between 1931- 1936. Danzig clearly suffers in the same period but far more dramatically than Gdynia. After 1936 both towns resume good rates of growth. However, while Gdynia resumes its pre 1931 rate of growth 1936-39, that of Danzig is more rapid and by 1939 appears to be overtaking Gdynia in absolute tonnage.
doubling Danzig’s figures gives you 11,042 tons which is out of line with 1938.
However it is very much in line with the figures for 1936-37 - in other words it is 1938 that may well be out of line - a 'blip'.
It seems that the world depression of the 1930s did not impact Gdynia though it clearly impacts Danzig
As discussed above, Gdynia does appear to be impacted by the world depression, albeit to a much lesser degree than Danzig.
Though Gdynia’s tonnage is very slightly down, its percentage of Poland’s total tonnage shoots up so clearly it was getting priority.
That is absolutely the case. However, I think one has to view the matter in the context of Poland's export history overall. At the very least you have to vector in the impact of the Customs War with Germany (1925-34). Without getting into the ins and outs of it, the primary outcome was that Poland, deprived of its traditional export markets in Germany, had to find new customers and did so successfully - overseas. Initially, the biggest beneficiary was Danzig, with 1925-26 seeing the fastest rate of growth in tonnage ever during the interbellum. However as Gdynia steadily expanded its capacity, Danzig's portion of this particular pie declined resulting in slowing growth until 1931/32 before the doldrums of 1931-35. I would certainly agree that in all likelihood, this slow-down of growth and a more severe impact of the depression than would have been otherwise, would not have occurred had Gdynia not been there. In short, it would appear that Danzig is profiting less and less from the
new Polish business. However, there is little to suggest that its old business streams were affected by Gdynia to any great extent and it would appear that, towards the end of the period, it had developed new business streams on which it is doing very nicely, thank you very much with a faster rate of growth that that of Gdynia.
I guess the point is that for me the traditional narrative - and I make it shamelessly facile -
that Danzig's sole reason for existence was export and import into Poland; that despite this the city embarked from the outset on a policy of corporate harry-curry by insulting and generally obstructing its sole customer when doing business with them; that Poland irked by this behaviour built Gdynia which, over time, took the vast majority of Danzig's business away, causing gloom and despondence; consequently the gloomy and despondent Danzigers became Nazis and demanded reunification with Germany which, presumably, would have sealed their commercial fate
makes no rational sense whatsoever and is largely untrue in its base assumptions. Firstly I cannot believe that Poland was Danzig's sole customer and that all of East Prussia's import/export flowed through Kongsberg and, at the end, Memel. Secondly, there is zero evidence that Danzig was heading for commercial oblivion in 1939 - on the contrary it was enjoying a boom and overall the rate of growth of both towns (in volume at least) of the entire interbellum, is quite similar - the main difference being that the rate of growth of Gdynia appears to have been steady while that of Danzig followed more of a pattern of boom and bust.
If, however, we make the assumption that Danzig's main income streams were associated with Germany, both the patterns of behaviour and the throughput volume data would make an awful lot more sense. To me at least.
Trouble is we are dealing with very incomplete and potentially misleading data:
- raw tonnage does not necessarily immediately translate into profit, nor for that matter does value of the goods.
- what was the split between import and export and what was being imported and exported
- what was the human cost of modernising Danzig's infrastructure to compete with Gdynia (and the rest of the world for that matter)?
- what was the profit derived from doing business with Germany?
- What was the potential profit of re-unification with Germany?
I would suggest that only if we have answers to these questions, would we be able to have a more rational understanding of the tensions. However, I am painfully aware that we are straying ever-further from the topic of this thread and perhaps this segment should be excised and put in a separate thread?