On the afternoon of 27 December 1918 shooting broke out in the streets of Poznań, then still a German city, outside the Bazar hotel where the pianist and statesman Ignacy Jan Paderewski was staying. Within days the Polish insurgents held most of the city, and by mid-January they had freed almost all of the region of Greater Poland. The Armistice of Trier in February 1919 confirmed their gains, and the Treaty of Versailles brought nearly the whole region into the reborn Polish state. It is counted among the few Polish uprisings that ended in victory.
A German province with a Polish majority
When the First World War ended in November 1918, Poland was independent again, but the province of Posen, the heart of Greater Poland, was still part of Germany. The Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) explains that while Germany itself was shaken by revolution, the German garrison in Greater Poland stayed largely in place, and local Polish leaders feared that the region would be left inside the borders of the new Germany.1
On the evening of 26 December Paderewski arrived in Poznań on his way from Britain to Warsaw, with his wife and officers of an Allied mission. Huge crowds greeted him, and he spoke from a window of the Bazar hotel. The historian Marek Rezler, quoted by the Polish Press Agency, stresses that Paderewski did not call for an uprising and tried to calm the mood, since a fight in a city that was still formally German could cause a diplomatic incident.2
The first shots
On 27 December German nationalists marched through the city in a counterdemonstration, angered above all by the Allied flags that Poles had hung out for Paderewski's visit. At about 5 p.m. they reached the area of the Bazar, where they faced a cordon of the Polish People's Guard. It is not known which side fired the first shot. The fighting spread, and by the end of the year the insurgents had taken most of Poznań.3
The last German force that could threaten the city was the air station at Ławica. Paweł Głuszek of the IPN describes how it was taken on 6 January 1919 after a short fight, with 110 Germans captured along with 26 aircraft, and how an airship hangar at Winiary held about 215 more aircraft in parts, or as many as 300 by other accounts. Głuszek calls it the largest haul of booty in the history of the Polish army, and the aircraft became the core of the Polish air arm.4 › Battle of Ławica, 1919
From uprising to front
By 15 January 1919 the Polish units had freed almost all of Greater Poland apart from parts of the northwest and south. The uprising was led at first by Major Stanisław Taczak and then by General Józef Dowbor-Muśnicki. Under the Armistice of Trier, signed by Germany and the Allies on 16 February 1919, the fighting was suspended along a demarcation line; skirmishes went on until June, and the Treaty of Versailles, signed on 28 June 1919, gave almost all of Greater Poland to Poland. The insurgent units joined the Polish Army in May 1919 and fought in the border wars of 1919 to 1921.5
The IPN cites research on the named list of casualties that counts 2,261 dead, and estimates of about 6,000 wounded. Since 2021, 27 December has been a Polish state holiday, the National Day of the Victorious Greater Poland Uprising. The wider story of how Poland's borders were won is told in The Battles That Won Polish Independence.6
