What was the Greater Poland Uprising?
A Polish rising against German rule in the Province of Posen. It began in Poznań on 27 December 1918, a day after Ignacy Jan Paderewski arrived, and by mid-January insurgents held most of the region. The Armistice of Trier of 16 February 1919 froze the front, and the Treaty of Versailles gave almost all of Greater Poland to Poland.2
A Prussian province with a Polish majority
Greater Poland, the old Polish heartland around Poznań, fell to Prussia in the partitions of Poland and, after 1815, became first the Grand Duchy and then the Province of Posen. Its Polish-speaking majority lived for a century under a state that tried to make it German.3
The Poles of the province answered with what they called organic work: banks, cooperatives, farmers' circles, self-education societies, the Sokół gymnastic society and, before 1914, scouting. The Bazar hotel in Poznań, opened in 1841, became the heart of Polish political, cultural and economic life. That network of associations would supply the men and the organization of 1918.4
When World War I ended on 11 November 1918, Poland had just regained its independence, but the armistice signed at Compiègne said nothing about a Polish state and left the Province of Posen inside Germany until the peace conference decided its fate.5› The Eastern Front of World War I
November 1918: a Polish authority inside Germany
Germany was shaken by revolution. Across the province workers' and soldiers' councils were formed, and where Poles were in the majority they took a national character. At the same time the Poles prepared institutions of their own.6
Their leadership was the Supreme People's Council (Naczelna Rada Ludowa, NRL), a political body of the Prussian partition that came into the open in November 1918. A Polish district parliament, the Polski Sejm Dzielnicowy, of some 1,400 delegates elected at public meetings, sat in Poznań on 3 to 5 December 1918. From then on the council and its executive, the Commissariat, spoke for the Poles of the Prussian partition.7
In places the Poles moved even before the uprising. In Jarocin, Polish soldiers took over the barracks in the night of 8 to 9 November and set up a soldiers' council that ran the town. Across the old border in Kalisz, in the former Russian partition, volunteers who slipped out of the province formed a border battalion from late November; on 2 December 1918 it forced three German companies out of the barracks at Szczypiorno.8
Two currents pulled against each other. The council's leaders wanted to wait for the peace conference, while younger men of the Polish Military Organization of the Prussian partition, the scouts and the Sokół wanted to fight at once. Both took part in forming armed groups that autumn: a People's Guard (Straż Ludowa) and a Guard and Security Service (Służba Straży i Bezpieczeństwa), which was meant to be half Polish and half German but which the Poles soon dominated, partly by enrolling Poles with German-sounding names as Germans.9
Tomasz Łęcki, director of the Wielkopolska Museum of Independence, says that a rising was being planned for the spring of 1919, not for December.10
Paderewski in Poznań, 26 December
Ignacy Jan Paderewski, the world-famous pianist who had worked for the Polish cause during the war, stopped in Poznań on his way to Warsaw. He arrived on the evening of 26 December with officers of an Allied mission. Polish crowds gave him an enthusiastic welcome, the city was hung with Polish and Allied flags, and he was taken to the Bazar hotel, where he addressed the crowds.11
The historian Marek Rezler stresses that Paderewski did not come to call for a rising. As the envoy of a free Poland in a city that was still formally German, he risked a diplomatic incident if violence were tied to his name, so in his speeches he tried to calm the mood, and after 26 December he stopped appearing in public.12
In Warsaw Paderewski became prime minister and foreign minister in January 1919, and in June, with Roman Dmowski, he signed the Treaty of Versailles for Poland.13
The first shots, 27 December
On the morning of 27 December several thousand Polish children paid tribute to Paderewski outside the Bazar. In the afternoon Germans answered with a march of their own, in which soldiers took part alongside civilians. Soldiers of the 6th Grenadier Regiment tore down Polish and Allied flags.14
Late in the afternoon the German march reached the Bazar, where Poles had gathered. A shot was fired. Nobody knows which side fired it. The time kept by tradition is 4:40 p.m.: Rezler puts the clash at around five, Łęcki says the first shots came after four.15
The fighting spread through the city. Franciszek Ratajczak, who fell that day, is usually counted as the first Polish insurgent killed; the Poznań street where he died now bears his name. Veterans long argued over whether he or Antoni Andrzejewski fell first, and the first list of the dead in the Kurjer Poznański, printed on 31 December, names both.16
The same day, far to the southeast, a Polish patrol from Szczypiorno was fired on by Germans near Boczków, and nineteen-year-old Jan Mertka was killed. He is remembered as the first insurgent to fall in the Ostrów district.17
Who started it has been argued ever since. The German historian Benjamin Conrad notes that for most of the 20th century each national historiography blamed the other: German historians such as Martin Broszat held that the Poles used Paderewski's visit to set off a rising they had prepared, while Polish accounts blamed the grenadiers who tore down the flags. The Polish press took that line from the start: on 31 December the Kurjer Poznański printed a witness who said a German officer had fired a pistol toward the Bazar.18
Poznań in Polish hands
Within about two days the insurgents held practically all of Poznań; Łęcki notes that in many places it fell without a shot. Rezler says Paderewski did not leave his hotel while the fighting lasted. He left for Warsaw on New Year's Eve and was greeted in Ostrów at six in the morning on 1 January.19
The council had not planned the rising, but after a day of hesitation its Commissariat took charge of it. On 28 December it gave the command to Captain Stanisław Taczak, a former German army officer then serving on the Polish General Staff, who happened to be in Poznań. On 2 January 1919 he was promoted to major and confirmed as commander-in-chief. At first he and his officers wore civilian clothes; Łęcki explains that Taczak did not want to help the Germans brand the events an armed rising.20
One German stronghold near the city remained: the air station at Ławica. The insurgents stormed it on 6 January 1919. One insurgent and two Germans were killed. The Poles took 26 aircraft at the field, by the count of Paweł Głuszek of the IPN, and some 215 more in parts in the airship hall at Winiary (up to 300 by other accounts): the beginning of Poland's military aviation. With Ławica taken, Poznań was free.21› Battle of Ławica, 1919
The rising spreads: the fronts
News from Poznań reached the rest of the province within hours. Local volunteer companies formed around Sokół branches, scouts and soldiers just home from the war; Łęcki notes that many deserters had come home for Christmas in uniform and with their rifles. Town after town rose on its own, often days after Poznań.22
The timing favored the Poles. Most German troops were still on their way home from the fronts, and the historians Tim Buchen and Maciej Górny describe how the Polish side could prevail in the overheated atmosphere of late December while German forces needed weeks to regroup. Łęcki adds that the Germans were taken by surprise and many of their units were stationed outside the region.23
By mid-January the insurgents held almost all of Greater Poland apart from parts of its northwestern and southern edges. Conrad puts their gain at about four-fifths of the province. Heavy fighting went on around Szubin and Nakło in the north, Zbąszyń in the west and Rawicz in the south, which they never took.24
On 18 January the new command divided the line into four fronts: northern, western, southwestern (the Leszno group) and southern.25
Taczak and Dowbor-Muśnicki
In mid-January Taczak handed over to a general sent from Warsaw: Józef Dowbor-Muśnicki, born in 1867, who had served for decades in the Russian army and in 1917 had organized the I Polish Corps in Russia. Proposed by Piłsudski and appointed by the Supreme People's Council, he took command on 16 January 1919.26› Józef Piłsudski
Dowbor-Muśnicki turned volunteer bands into a regular army. Conscription replaced voluntary service, and on 26 January the troops swore their oath on Plac Wolności in Poznań. Łęcki and the IPN historian Janusz Karwat put the army at over 70,000 men; the Polish Press Agency and the IPN exhibition say over 100,000 at its peak.27
The council promoted him to lieutenant general (generał broni) in March 1919. He settled at Lusowo near Poznań and lived there until his death in 1937. His daughters died in the next war: Janina Lewandowska, a pilot, was murdered by the Soviets at Katyń, and Agnieszka was shot by the Germans at Palmiry.28
Taczak, the first commander, later rose to general. He died in Malbork in 1960; in 1988 his remains were moved to the Cemetery of Distinguished Wielkopolanie in Poznań.29
Germany strikes back, and the Armistice of Trier
German forces had been slow to react. By the start of February new units were ready, and they opened a counteroffensive along the whole front; the IPN exhibition places the bloodiest battles in the north and west.30
The Poles were saved by diplomacy. The Compiègne armistice ran for a month at a time. When it was renewed at Trier, Marshal Ferdinand Foch threatened to break off the talks, and on 16 February 1919 Germany agreed to stop all offensive action against the Poles in the Posen region and to keep its troops behind a demarcation line. The Greater Poland front was in effect recognized as an Allied front.31
The armistice ended the uprising proper. Paweł Anders notes that the line gave the insurgents even more ground than they had won, but skirmishes went on along it until June.32
How Germans saw it
In January 1919, the IPN historian Piotr Grzelczak writes, the German government told London that it would not tolerate Polish subjects of the Reich preparing what it called rebellion and high treason. Conrad notes that German writers long liked to blame the rising on the Polish Military Organization.33
Conrad, writing from Mainz, questions part of the Polish story too. In his reading the Allies had already agreed that most of the province would go to Poland because of its Polish-speaking majority, so the claim that Greater Poland would have stayed German without the rising is speculation. Measured against the wider aim of winning every Polish-speaking region of Germany, he calls it a partial success, and he notes that the Western Allies saw the rising as needless bloodshed. Łęcki argues the opposite: before the uprising the region's future was not settled.34
On the German side, the historian Olgierd Kiec writes, the fighting fed a regional memory in the new border province of Posen-West Prussia, where officials and veterans' books described the defense of the 'Ostmark' against the Poles. One of the first, Karl Stephan's Der Todeskampf der Ostmark (1919), presented the fighting as a struggle to the death for a homeland built by generations of German settlers. The German Historical Museum's LeMO portal notes that most Germans rejected the Treaty of Versailles, which took Posen and West Prussia, as a dictated peace.35
A 2019 event page of Tim Buchen's chair at TU Dresden, introducing a talk with Maciej Górny, calls the extension of the armistice at Trier the first victory of the Polish side since the last partition of Poland.36
Versailles and the Greater Poland Army
The Treaty of Versailles, signed on 28 June 1919, gave almost all of Greater Poland to Poland. It came into force on 10 January 1920, and in the following weeks Polish troops took over the rest of the land awarded to Poland. The IPN exhibition counts towns the insurgents never took, such as Zbąszyń, Leszno and Bydgoszcz, as a success of Polish diplomacy.37
The Greater Poland Army did not stay separate for long. On 25 May 1919 the Commissariat offered to place it under Piłsudski as Commander-in-Chief, and in the second half of the year it was merged into the Polish Army; the IPN exhibition dates the merger to the end of August, while Łukasz Jastrząb of the IPN puts the incorporation of the insurgent units in May 1919. Dowbor-Muśnicki then commanded the Greater Poland Front.38
Greater Poland units went on to fight in the war against the Ukrainians in eastern Galicia, in the Silesian uprisings and in the Polish-Soviet War.39› The Polish-Soviet War
What it cost
The losses were modest by the standards of the age. The IPN cites recent research on the named list of losses that counts 2,261 dead, 136 of them unidentified, against an older estimate of almost 2,500 dead and 6,000 wounded; Paweł Anders gave about 2,000 killed and 4,000 to 6,000 wounded. The sources used here give no total for the German side, though Anders notes that in most clashes more German soldiers died than Poles.40
Remembrance
For Poles the uprising is the rising that won. The IPN historian Łukasz Jastrząb counts it as one of four victorious Polish uprisings and notes that it is often wrongly called the only one; Anders makes the same point.41
Since 2021, 27 December has been a Polish state holiday, the National Day of the Victorious Greater Poland Uprising. Each year on that day the commemorations in Poznań culminate at the Monument to the Greater Poland Insurgents, unveiled in 1965, and flowers are laid at the grave of General Stanisław Taczak in the Cemetery of Distinguished Wielkopolanie.42
Greater Poland's rising belongs with the battles that won Polish independence, alongside the defense of Lwów fought at the same time in the east.
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