Sean Lester was League of Nations High Commissioner in Danzig from 1934 to 1936, at the height of the Nazi rise to power. Before becoming a diplomat he had been a journalist and a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood; he joined the Irish Free State’s civil service with its establishment in 1922. In Danzig he fought a hard diplomatic battle to hold the Nazi government in check. He had the peculiar honour, during his years as High Commissioner, to be known as ‘the most hated man in Nazi Germany’. After his departure Nazi dominance in the Free City increased and in 1938, despite the presence of the last High Commissioner, an Enabling Act finally abolished all opposition parties and Nuremberg racial policies placed Danzig’s Jewish community utterly outside the law. From that point it was only a question of time until Danzig turned into a trigger for war.
Lester became the last Secretary General of the League of Nations. He sat out the Second World War in an empty Palace of Nations in Geneva, knowing that if Germany won he was on a Nazi death list; as the League of Nations fell apart he had prevented it becoming a tool of German domination in Europe. In 1946 he was the man who handed the vision of peace and cooperation that had been the League of Nations over to the newly formed United Nations. His retirement in Ireland was quiet and uneventful, first in Wicklow, then in Galway. He is one of the twentieth century’s greatest Irishmen, but he is barely known in Ireland. Being too anti-Nazi once carried the taint of being too close to Britain.
Count Edward O’Rourke was appointed Bishop of Danzig in 1922. He was forced to resign in 1937 as a result of increasing conflict with the Nazi authorities, although he was under as much pressure from the Vatican itself, which did not want to antagonise Germany. His successor, Cardinal Carl Maria Splett, a native Danziger, became little more than a puppet of Nazi policy. Edward O’Rourke’s ancestors had fled Ireland after the battle of the Boyne and had subsequently become Russian soldiers and aristocratic landowners. His family lost its estates after the Russian Revolution in 1917. He died in Rome in 1943, having fled Poland when the Germans invaded. Like Sean Lester he was on a Nazi death list. As one of the Catholic Church’s most prominent opponents of Nazism, Edward O’Rourke has also been largely forgotten.
In the streets of Gda?nsk’s old town now you see much of what was there in 1930s Danzig. So successful has the rebuilding been that it is hard to believe it was almost totally destroyed at the end of the war. Its reconstruction was an extraordinary achievement by a Polish nation that lay in ruins everywhere. Yet Gda?nsk is a city of ghosts. The people who originally built it have disappeared from its history.
