Heinrich Sahm

Who was Heinrich Sahm?

Heinrich Friedrich Wilhelm Martin Sahm, no party affiliation, was a German lawyer, mayor and statesman from the Free City of Danzig.

Sahm was born in Anklam, present-day Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and educated as a lawyer, in 1906 he became a member of the Magdeburg city council and served from 1912 to 1919 as a deputy mayor of Bochum. In the meantime he also worked in the government of occupied Warsaw during World War I.

In 1919 he was elected mayor of Danzig, a city that had formerly belonged to the German Empire. In the same year Danzig and the surrounding territory was to be severed from Germany and turned into a city-state according to the Versailles treaty. After the establishment of the Free City of Danzig in 1920, Sahm became first President of the Senate, the de facto head of state beneath the High Commissioner of the League of Nations. Sahm protested against the take-over of the sea resort town Westerplatte by the League of Nations and Poland's establishment of a military transport depot. He held the office until 1931, re-elected two times.

While Poland was in charge for Danzig's foreign affairs, citizens had to take on a separate Danzig citizenship or, if they wanted to retain their German citizenship, had to move out of the territory. Sahm politics aimed to strengthen the Free City's ties to the Weimar Republic and to ward off Polish claims; nevertheless the relations with Poland intermittently improved after the implementation of a customs union and the institution of the Danzig gulden in 1923, which protected Danzig from the hyperinflation in Germany. A nonpartisan, he proceeded tactically along party lines, which caused several difficulties in his government and finally led to his demise by the Danzig German National People's Party.