What were the Silesian Uprisings?
Three Polish risings in Upper Silesia, then part of Germany, in August 1919, August 1920 and May to July 1921, fought over a region whose fate the Treaty of Versailles left to a plebiscite. Germany won the vote of 20 March 1921, but in October 1921 the Allies divided the region, and Poland received most of its industry.2
Upper Silesia in 1918
At the end of World War I, Upper Silesia was German: the Oppeln (Opole) district of the Prussian province of Silesia. It was one of Germany’s two great industrial districts, beside the Ruhr, with rich deposits of coal and zinc and a highly developed iron and steel industry.3
Its people were divided. A Polish national movement had grown there since the second half of the 19th century, and Upper Silesia sent Polish deputies to the Reichstag, among them Wojciech Korfanty, who became the symbol of the Polish cause in the region. Many inhabitants, however, were uncertain of their nationality, and winning them would become the aim of both sides.4
As Germany lost the war, Korfanty demanded in a Reichstag speech on 25 October 1918 that the Polish lands of the Prussian partition, Upper Silesia among them, be joined to the reborn Polish state.5
Versailles: from cession to plebiscite
The draft peace terms handed to the German delegation on 7 May 1919 gave Upper Silesia to Poland. Germany protested that the region supplied the coal of eastern Germany and that without it Germany could not pay reparations. The Allies replied that, since Germany disputed the region’s Polish character, they were “disposed to leave the question to be determined by those whom it particularly concerns,” and changed the treaty.6
Article 88 of the treaty, signed on 28 June 1919, provided that the inhabitants of a defined area of Upper Silesia would vote on whether to belong to Germany or to Poland. Men and women aged 20 or more who were born in the area or lived there could vote, and the result was to be determined “by communes.” German troops were to leave, and an international commission backed by Allied troops would govern the area and then recommend a border, paying regard “to the wishes of the inhabitants” and to “the geographical and economic conditions of the locality.”7
The First Uprising, August 1919
Until the commission arrived, German authorities kept full control. They had placed the region under a state of siege and held it with the Grenzschutz, or border guard, which was in fact the regular army’s 117th Infantry Division, supported by volunteer units. The Polish side built an underground Polish Military Organization of Upper Silesia (POW GŚl.), commanded by Alfons Zgrzebniok from across the border in Strumień.8
In August 1919 waves of strikes swept the mines. At the Mysłowice mine on 16 August (15 August in a Polish Senate resolution of 2019), soldiers fired on a crowd of miners and their families who had come for their wages. Counts of the dead run from six, the figure most often given in the literature, to ten, and to “more than a dozen” in a Senate resolution of 2020.9
The POW command judged its men too poorly armed against the Grenzschutz and decided against a rising. A call to arms nonetheless went out from Polish refugees at Piotrowice, across the border, and on 17 August local units rose, above all in the Pszczyna (Pless) and Rybnik districts. The Polish Senate dates the uprising 16/17 to 24 August 1919; the IPN’s Katowice branch gives 17 to 26 August.10
The Germans, far stronger, struck back at once. Within days most insurgent units retreated into Poland, which, at war with Soviet Russia and committed to the plebiscite, sent no help. Grenzschutz units carried out executions and arrests, and historians cited in an IPN publication estimate that 14,000 to 22,000 insurgents and Polish activists fled to Poland; the Senate gives more than 20,000. An amnesty agreed in October 1919 let them return.11
The German historian Jens Boysen sees in the 1919 and 1920 risings an attempt by pro-Polish forces to create a fait accompli, as the Greater Poland Uprising had done in Poznania, before a vote whose outcome was hard to predict; both, he writes, were repelled by German counterinsurgents.12
Allied rule and the Second Uprising
The Inter-Allied Governing and Plebiscite Commission took over the plebiscite area by a proclamation issued at Opole (Oppeln) on 11 February 1920. It was made up of French, British and Italian representatives, as the United States never named one, and was chaired by the French general Henri Le Rond. German troops left the region.13
Each side ran a plebiscite commissariat, and Korfanty headed the Polish one. A German security police, the Sicherheitspolizei (Sipo), stayed in place; the Polish Senate’s resolution calls it formally neutral but in fact favorable to the Germans.14
On 17 August 1920, during riots in Katowice, German militants killed the Polish doctor Andrzej Mielęcki. The Second Uprising, coordinated by the POW of Upper Silesia, broke out on the night of 19 to 20 August with a limited aim: to drive out the Sipo. It ended on 25 August.15
It got what it wanted. On 24 August the commission dissolved the Sipo and created a plebiscite police of Poles and Germans in equal parts. Sabine Bamberger-Stemmann, writing in a German journal, calls the rising, pointedly, a second front for Poland, fought while the Battle of Warsaw raged; it won no territory, she notes, but brought pro-Polish Upper Silesians a great deal of prestige.16
The plebiscite of 20 March 1921
The vote was held on 20 March 1921; the Peace of Riga, signed on 18 March, had just ended the Polish-Soviet War. The treaty let people born in the area but living elsewhere vote there, and Germany brought them in by train, many from the Ruhr. The counts differ: 191,154 “outvoters” in the State Department’s figures, about 200,000 in Mirosław Węcki’s account and in the joint German-Polish textbook recommendations, 182,000 from Germany and 10,000 from Poland according to dzieje.pl.17
Turnout was very high: about 97 percent by dzieje.pl’s count, “almost one hundred percent” in Węcki’s words. Germany received 707,605 votes and Poland 479,359: 59.4 to 59.6 percent for Germany and 40.3 to 40.4 percent for Poland, depending on the source. The towns of the industrial district voted mostly German, much of the countryside Polish. The joint German-Polish textbook commission concluded that the outvoters had influenced the result.18
Both sides claimed victory. The German government demanded the whole area. Korfanty pointed to the treaty’s count by communes and proposed a division roughly along the Oder, the “Korfanty Line,” which gave Poland the east, where most communes had voted Polish. The commission split: the French favored the Polish reading, while the British and Italians proposed a line leaving Poland little more than the less industrial districts of Pszczyna and Rybnik. Its report of 30 April 1921 made no recommendation.19
The Third Uprising, May 1921
Fearing a division that would leave Poland little, the Polish side rose again on the night of 2 to 3 May 1921, the anniversary of the Polish Constitution of 1791, after a general strike. Korfanty, by Węcki’s account at heart reluctant, led it as “dictator” of its civil authority. Its declared aim, in the words of the Polish Senate, was an armed demonstration of the will to join Poland.20
This time Poland supported the rising with men and weapons, including armored trains, which crossed the border unhindered. The insurgents numbered about 40,000 at first and about 60,000 later, and within a week they reached the Korfanty Line. The Allied control powers leaned toward the Poles, and the French occupation troops supported them.21
The German answer was the Selbstschutz Oberschlesien, the “Self-Defense of Upper Silesia,” formed from local volunteers and joined by volunteers from across Germany, many of them from former Freikorps, such as the Freikorps Oberland from Bavaria. Britain, the German Historical Museum notes, tolerated the formation of German fighting units. The historian Ryszard Kaczmarek describes tense relations between the democratic government of the Weimar Republic and its officers, who sympathized with the nationalist right.22
Annaberg (Góra Świętej Anny)
The decisive German blow fell at Góra Świętej Anny (Annaberg), a hill east of the Oder. Under the overall command of Gen. Karl Hoefer, with Gen. Bernhard von Hülsen leading the southern group, German units attacked from their bridgehead across the Oder on the morning of 21 May 1921, with battalions of the Freikorps Oberland in the lead.23
The sources date the capture of the hill differently. Węcki and Bamberger-Stemmann give 21 May, Węcki at noon; the German Historical Museum gives 23 May, and Boysen “late May.” Our ranking of the battles that won Polish independence therefore says only that it fell in May.24
Polish counterattacks failed to retake the hill, and the fighting around Kędzierzyn and Góra Świętej Anny was the heaviest of the rising. Yet the Germans did not reach their real goal, the industrial district. On the Polish side the setbacks brought a crisis of command: on 31 May Korfanty removed the commander, Lt. Col. Maciej Mielżyński, and then faced a revolt of officers who wanted to fight on.25
Allied troops then moved in between the two sides. The German command agreed to withdraw, and the evacuation of both forces ended on 5 July 1921.26
Wojciech Korfanty
Korfanty, born on 20 April 1873 in Sadzawka near Siemianowice into a mining family, studied in Charlottenburg and Breslau, edited Polish newspapers and was elected to the Reichstag in 1903.27
His role in the risings is told in two ways. German accounts present him as their organizer: Porta Polonica writes of the uprisings “he organised” in 1919 and 1920, and the historian Georg Eckert says he organized all three. Polish accounts stress restraint: dzieje.pl records that in June 1919 he stopped a planned rising, and Węcki describes him in 1921 as reluctant, seeking an armed demonstration rather than a war.28
The fame he won nearly made him prime minister in July 1922, but Józef Piłsudski, the Chief of State, blocked him. He remained an opponent of Piłsudski, was arrested in 1930 and held in the Brześć fortress, later went into exile in Czechoslovakia, and was imprisoned again on his return in 1939. Released because of illness, he died in Warsaw on 17 August 1939.29
The League of Nations draws the line
The Allies could not agree on a border. On 12 August 1921 they referred the question to the Council of the League of Nations. On 12 October the Council recommended a line, concluding that “it is necessary to divide the industrial region of Upper Silesia,” and proposed rules to keep the region’s economy working and to protect minorities on both sides.30
The Conference of Ambassadors adopted the recommendation as its decision. The State Department’s annotations date this 19 October 1921; most sources, Polish and German, give 20 October.31
Poland received about 29 percent of the plebiscite area and 46 percent of its people (47 percent in a 1922 American estimate), including Katowice, Królewska Huta (Chorzów), Rybnik, Pszczyna, Tarnowskie Góry and Lubliniec, with 53 coal mines and 22 blast furnaces. Germany kept the larger, mainly agricultural part.32
In Germany the decision caused outrage across all parties; the German Historical Museum describes it as taken against the wishes of the population. The government of Chancellor Joseph Wirth resigned in protest on 25 October 1921.33
The Geneva Convention and the handover
Germany and Poland then negotiated the details under a president named by the League. The German-Polish Convention on Upper Silesia, signed in Geneva on 15 May 1922, ran to 606 articles and was to last 15 years. It kept the divided industrial region working as an economic whole and protected minorities, with a Mixed Commission to hear complaints. The Polish Sejm approved it on 24 May 1922, and ratifications were exchanged in Opole on 3 June.34
Poland took over its part in the summer of 1922, marked by a ceremony in Katowice on 16 July 1922. It became the Silesian Voivodeship, while the larger western part stayed with Germany.35
What it cost
No source used here gives an agreed total. The IPN estimates Polish losses in all three uprisings at about 2,700, and the Polish Senate writes that several thousand people gave their lives in them. For the Third Uprising the figures run from 1,218 insurgents killed (dzieje.pl) to about 2,000 (Węcki); Eckert speaks of several thousand dead. For the first two uprisings no figure is given by two independent sources used here, and no total of German dead appears in them.36
Two memories of one conflict
In Poland the uprisings are remembered as a fight that returned part of Upper Silesia to Poland after six centuries under Czech and German rule, in the words of the Senate, which made 2021 the Year of the Silesian Uprisings; the Sejm called the third a victorious rising whose insurgents should be a model for future generations. Węcki quotes the historian Ryszard Kaczmarek, who called the struggle for Upper Silesia an “undeclared Polish-German war.”37
German historians such as Boysen and Bamberger-Stemmann describe the risings as Polish attempts to create a fait accompli. The joint German-Polish textbook commission of the 1970s wrote that the three uprisings, supported by the Polish state, were meant to create faits accomplis, that they brought a kind of state of war which marked relations between the two peoples for a long time, and that the national struggles in Upper Silesia contributed to the rise of an exaggerated German nationalism and its historical myth. Bamberger-Stemmann notes that the battle of Annaberg became a symbol of the German “Volkstumskampf,” the struggle for nationhood, in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich.38
The uprisings belong with the battles that won Polish independence and with the wider story of Polish independence and its border wars, 1914 to 1921.
