Among the political innovations of the Paris Peace Conference, the creation of the Free City of Danzig was undoubtedly one of the least successful. Unlike their treatment of the Saar and Upper Silesia, the peacemakers had neither made provisions for a plebiscite nor prescribed a terminal date for Danzig's special status. The Big Three's last-minute decision to withhold the German port from Poland and create a free city under the authority of the as yet unborn League of Nations—but also to grant the Warsaw government economic and diplomatic control along with special minority rights for Polish inhabitants—led to two decades of conflict between the German-dominated local authority and Geneva as well as to friction between Warsaw and Berlin.

The office of League High Commissioner in Danzig demanded considerable diplomatic skill, particularly after the Nazi seizure of power in Berlin. Between January 1934 and December 1936 Sean Lester, the Irish journalist and diplomat, held this thorny post. As recounted earlier in the works by Christoph M. Kimmich (1968) and Herbert S. Levine (1973) and in the biographies by S. A. Barcroft (1972) and Douglas Gageby (1999), Lester almost immediately made himself notorious by protesting violations of the local constitution. Impeded by his lack of local expertise (he knew neither German nor Polish), Lester conducted a lonely rearguard effort to preserve democratic government in the Free City against the backdrop of an increasingly assertive Third Reich and appeasement-driven politicians in London, Paris, and Warsaw.

Paul McNamara, who has mined Polish sources in Gdańsk and Warsaw as well as the League archives in Geneva and British and German diplomatic records, has set out to detail Lester's three frustrating years at the center of the maelstrom. Certainly conditions were not propitious. The Great Depression had created economic misery in the Free City, exacerbated by Danzig's rivalry with the Polish port of Gdynia. The local Nazi party dominated the Senate; and the two commissioners that preceded Lester had openly sided with the Germans. Lester's appointment was initially welcomed by all sides, largely because of his Irish nationalist background and his exemplary service on the League Council between 1930 and 1933.

But Lester's arrival in Danzig coincided with the ten-year non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and Poland. Occurring three months after the Third Reich's exit from the League, this agreement was a major step in the unraveling of the Versailles system. Berlin and Warsaw now agreed to a “direct-talks” policy aimed at regulating outstanding questions (particularly minority issues and Danzig) without recourse to Geneva. According to McNamara, Polish Foreign Minister Józef Beck was fully prepared to abandon Lester (“a thorn in the side of not only the Nazis but also the Polish Foreign Ministry,” p. 69) in order to maintain friendly relations with Berlin, thus leaving the newly arrived high commissioner “more or less on his own” (p. 70).

Lester began cautiously, establishing amicable relations with Senate President Hermann Rauschning and cooler ones with the local Gauleiter Albert Forster. Within a few months, however, the local situation had changed dramatically with Rauschning's forced resignation, the euphoria among Danzig Germans over the results of the Saar plebiscite, and the Senate's announcement of snap elections in April 1935 that were to be marked by fraud and violence. Abroad, things were also in ferment, with Italy's attack on Ethiopia and the Anglo-German air and naval negotiations. Lester dutifully forwarded several petitions to Geneva only to be disappointed by the Council which, on three separate occasions, “dithered over Danzig” (p. 131).

The more Lester became involved, the more difficult his situation became. In summer 1935 he established close contacts with the local opposition and with Danzig's Jewish community, which brought harassment and surveillance by local Nazi leaders. Arthur Greiser, the Nazi leader of the Danzig Senate, publicly accused Lester of “hinder[ing] any political collaboration” (p. 119).

Lester's last year in Danzig coincided with the German reoccupation of the Rhineland, the collapse of Ethiopia, and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War as well as the looming threat of a Nazi coup in the free city. After delivering a stiff warning to the Council in January 1936 of the increasingly repressive local conditions, Lester concluded that “the League has ceased to count in Danzig” (p. 135), but he also refused to ignore the attacks on the anti-Nazi opposition. The coup de grace occurred on June 25, 1936, when the officers of a visiting German naval cruiser calling at the port of Danzig deliberately snubbed him. That summer, Lester confided his fear that his house “might be occupied any day by the political police or the stormtroopers” (p. 166). As Danzig's connection to the League slipped away, Lester became the public scapegoat, singled out by Hitler himself for removal.

The League, ostensibly directed by France and Britain, arranged a face-saving exit: Lester's promotion to Deputy Secretary General in September 1936. While the Germans exulted, the Poles were glum and Danzig's Jews and political opposition faced the full weight of Nazi vindictiveness now that their “protector” had been dismissed. On February 18, 1937, the Council appointed as Lester's successor the Swiss historian and diplomat, Carl Jacob Burckhardt, who disregarded his League responsibilities and set his sights on a rapprochement with Nazi Germany.

Paul McNamara has depicted Sean Lester as a brave and principled international civil servant, repeatedly faced with “Machiavellian intrigue, isolation, and faits accomplis” (p. 232). A resolute anti-appeaser, Lester replaced Secretary General Joseph Avenol in 1940, thereby saving the League from Axis control, and he turned its remnants over to the Allies in 1945. Despite some infelicitous prose and a few factual errors, Sean Lester vividly relates a singular effort to breathe life into a League obligation precisely when such international collaboration had been overwhelmed by realpolitik.