The Treaty of Versailles and Poland: what the 1919 peace gave

On 28 June 1919 the Polish delegates Ignacy Jan Paderewski and Roman Dmowski put their names to the peace treaty with Germany in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. The treaty lists them as the plenipotentiaries of the President of the Polish Republic, Paderewski as prime minister and foreign minister and Dmowski as president of the Polish National Committee. Poland signed as one of the victorious states, and the historian Oskar Halecki, quoted in the Museum of Independence’s centenary volume, called it the first treaty since the partitions to recognize Polish independence solemnly.²

The treaty did not, however, draw all of Poland’s borders. It settled the frontier with Germany only in part, sent three disputed regions to a vote of their inhabitants, made Danzig a Free City and left the east to be decided later. It belongs to our guide to Polish independence, 1914 to 1921.³

Poland’s case at the Paris Peace Conference

The principle the Poles appealed to was American. On 8 January 1918 President Woodrow Wilson listed his Fourteen Points, and the thirteenth said that “an independent Polish state should be erected which should include the territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations, which should be assured a free and secure access to the sea.” Its independence and territorial integrity were to be guaranteed by international covenant.⁴

When the conference opened in January 1919, Poland was represented by a joint delegation of the Polish National Committee in Paris, which France had recognized as Poland’s representation during the war, and of the government in Warsaw. According to the political scientist Piotr Marszałek, Poland’s full participation in the conference amounted to recognition of the state by the Allies. Its plenipotentiaries were Paderewski, now prime minister and foreign minister, and Dmowski, the committee’s president.⁵› Roman Dmowski

Dmowski before the Council of Ten, 29 January 1919

On 29 January 1919 Dmowski set out Poland’s claims to the Council of Ten, the conference’s leading body, with President Wilson, Georges Clemenceau and David Lloyd George present. The American minutes record his starting point: the settlement should begin from 1772, the year before the first partition. This did not mean, he said, the frontiers of that year, but in the west Poland could not be satisfied with them, because Silesia, lost in the fourteenth century, had kept its Polish language.⁶

In the afternoon he argued that eastern Germany was “not naturally German but was Germanised.” In Danzig, he said, German statistics counted 3 percent Poles, while he believed that at least 40 percent were Polish. For East Prussia he proposed a small separate republic with its capital at Königsberg, so that Poland would not be cut off from the sea. Waldemar Brenda of the Institute of National Remembrance quotes Dmowski’s later book Polityka polska i odbudowanie państwa, which called a German island in East Prussia a permanent source of unrest.⁷

Lloyd George against Danzig, France for a strong Poland

The frontier with Germany was drafted by a commission on Polish affairs under the French diplomat Jules Cambon. Its report of 12 March 1919, Tadeusz Dziedzic writes, largely followed the Polish claims, Upper Silesia included. The minutes of the Council of Ten show that it gave Poland Danzig, the two railways linking the port with the interior and the Marienwerder area, and proposed a plebiscite in the Allenstein district.⁸

When the report came before the Council of Ten on 19 March, Lloyd George objected. The line, he said, put not less than 2,132,000 Germans inside Poland, 412,000 of them in the Danzig district alone, and he thought it “very dangerous to assign two million Germans to Poland.” He warned that Germany might hesitate to sign, and that “to hand over millions of people to a distasteful allegiance merely because of a railway” was a mistake. Cambon replied that without Danzig and the railways to it Poland could not live, and Wilson pointed out that the Germans had colonized the region on purpose to cut Danzig off from Poland.⁹

Dziedzic argues that Lloyd George opposed a strong Poland at Germany’s expense because he saw Germany as a counterweight to French dominance. France, by contrast, wanted Poland “grande et forte, très forte,” as the French foreign minister Stéphen Pichon told a group of Polish experts, according to the legal historian Stanisław Kutrzeba. Kutrzeba also wrote that Britain opposed giving Poland Danzig and was reluctant even about Gdańsk Pomerania and Silesia.¹⁰

The British view prevailed on Danzig. Instead of being ceded to Poland, the city and its surroundings were given up by Germany to the Principal Allied and Associated Powers, to be set up as a Free City under the protection of the League of Nations.¹¹

From the draft of 7 May to the final text

The draft treaty handed to the German delegation on 7 May 1919 still gave Upper Silesia to Poland outright. The Germans protested that the region had not belonged to Poland since 1163, that its people had voted for German candidates and that Germany could not pay reparations without its coal. They also rejected the loss of West Prussia and the separation of East Prussia from the Reich. The Allied reply kept the corridor but, while holding that the majority in Upper Silesia was “indisputably Polish,” agreed that the question should be settled by a plebiscite.¹²

Kutrzeba wrote that Britain had brought about the change of the original decision to give Upper Silesia to Poland unconditionally, and Dziedzic describes Lloyd George’s position on Upper Silesia as uncompromising.¹³› Upper Silesia Plebiscite 1921

What did the Treaty of Versailles give Poland?

Poland’s part of the treaty is Section VIII, Articles 87 to 93. In Article 87 Germany, “in conformity with the action already taken by the Allied and Associated Powers,” recognized “the complete independence of Poland” and renounced in her favor its rights to a territory bounded by the Baltic and the new German frontier. In practice this meant most of the province of Posen, the heart of Greater Poland, and most of West Prussia, the Gdańsk Pomerania that gave Poland a strip of coast.¹⁴

Danzig was treated in Articles 100 to 108. The Free City was to be included in Poland’s customs frontier, Poland was to have free use of its port, control of the Vistula and of the railways in the territory, and the Polish government was to conduct the Free City’s foreign relations. A High Commissioner of the League of Nations, resident in Danzig, was to settle disputes between the two in the first instance.¹⁶

Three regions were to vote. Article 88 put Upper Silesia to a plebiscite under an inter-Allied commission, with the result counted commune by commune. Articles 94 to 97 did the same for the Allenstein district of southern East Prussia, today’s Olsztyn region, and for the area of Marienwerder (Kwidzyn) east of the Vistula, where the inhabitants were to choose between Poland and East Prussia. In return Poland had to grant Germany free transit between East Prussia and the rest of the Reich (Article 89).¹⁷

The east was not decided at all. “The boundaries of Poland not laid down in the present Treaty,” Article 87 says, “will be subsequently determined by the Principal Allied and Associated Powers.” The general and historian Marian Kukiel, quoted by the Museum of Independence, wrote that the treaty did not settle Poland’s eastern frontier, neither Eastern Galicia nor the lands taken by Russia.¹⁸

For Germany this was the heaviest territorial loss of the treaty. The German Historical Museum notes that Germany lost Posen and West Prussia to Poland, and in all about a seventh of its territory and a tenth of its population. The historian Beate Kosmala puts the total loss at 13 percent of the Reich’s former territory, with the most important losses in the east.¹⁹

The Little Treaty of Versailles: minorities

On the same day, 28 June 1919, Poland signed a second treaty, with the United States, the British Empire, France, Italy and Japan. Article 93 of the peace treaty had bound Poland to accept it. Its preamble confirmed the recognition of Poland as “a sovereign and independent member of the Family of Nations.” In return Poland promised equal rights for all citizens regardless of “race, language or religion,” the right of minorities to run their own schools and institutions, primary teaching in their own language where they formed a considerable proportion, school committees for Jewish communities and protection from being forced to break the Sabbath.²⁰

The most contested article was the twelfth. It made these obligations “of international concern,” placed them under the guarantee of the League of Nations, allowed any member of the League Council to raise an infraction and sent disputes to the Permanent Court of International Justice. Marszałek writes that the Poles received the final text from Clemenceau on 24 June as a version not open to further discussion. The Museum of Independence’s authors note that the provisions were never negotiated with the Polish delegation, which left a lasting resentment.²¹

In Poland the treaty was felt as a slight. Kutrzeba wrote that it made a painful impression, not because of its content, since Poland was ready to give minorities more rights, but because it had been prepared in secret and allowed foreign interference in the state’s internal affairs. Marszałek reads it as a limit on Polish sovereignty. On 13 September 1934 the foreign minister Józef Beck told the League Assembly that, pending a general system for all states, Poland refused “all co-operation with the international organs” supervising its minority obligations.²²

Ratification and entry into force, 10 January 1920

The Legislative Sejm ratified the peace treaty and the minority treaty together on 31 July 1919. Marszałek shows that the government treated the two as one whole, since rejecting the second would have put the gains of the first at risk.²³

The treaty came into force on 10 January 1920. Only from that day could its territorial clauses be carried out, and Poland began to take over the lands awarded to it a week later.²⁴

The handover of Pomerania, January and February 1920

Only now could Poland take what the treaty gave it. Pomerania was taken over by the troops of the Pomeranian Front under General Józef Haller. On 18 January 1920 Polish troops entered Toruń, which became the capital of the new Pomeranian voivodeship, and Haller arrived there three days later.²⁵› Józef Haller

Over the next three weeks the troops moved north through Pomerania, and on 10 February 1920 Haller reached the sea at Puck, where the ceremony remembered as Poland’s Wedding to the Sea took place. Danzig, the port the Poles had wanted most, stayed outside the new frontier as a Free City.²⁶

The East Prussian plebiscites of 11 July 1920

The plebiscites in southern East Prussia were held on 11 July 1920, in Allenstein and in Marienwerder on the same day. Voters had a choice between Poland and East Prussia, not Germany, a wording that Brenda says appealed to separatist feeling among some Masurians.²⁷

The result was a crushing defeat for Poland. In the Allenstein district, according to the annotation of the American official edition of the treaty, 363,209 votes were cast for East Prussia and 7,980 for Poland, and only 9 of 1,704 communes voted Polish. Robert Traba, quoted by Maciej Motas, gives 7,924 Polish votes, 2.14 percent, against 97.86 percent for East Prussia. In Marienwerder the count was 96,923 for East Prussia and 8,018 for Poland, which Brenda gives as 92 and 8 percent.²⁹

Polish historians name several causes. The vote came when the Red Army was advancing on Warsaw, and a report for the Polish High Command written after the vote blamed the news from the front, intimidation and fear of revenge. The German administration stayed in place until the vote, and more than 150,000 people born in the region but living in the Rhineland and Westphalia were registered to vote. Both also point to the weakness of the Polish movement, and Brenda quotes Polish activists who had warned before the vote that the Masurians, though attached to their Polish speech, lacked a Polish national consciousness.³⁰› The Polish-Soviet War (1919 to 1921)

For the German side the result confirmed that the region was German: the German Historical Museum describes the vote as almost unanimous for remaining with the Reich. Germany kept nearly the whole area. Poland received eight villages, three from the Allenstein district and five on the Vistula from Marienwerder, which gave it control of the river bank.³¹

What the treaty left to fight over: Upper Silesia and Cieszyn

The Upper Silesian plebiscite was held only on 20 March 1921, after two Silesian uprisings. About 60 percent of the votes went to Germany and 40 percent to Poland, but the result differed from commune to commune. In October 1921 the region was divided: Poland received less than a third of the plebiscite area but most of its industry.³²› Silesian Uprisings (1919 to 1921)

The treaty with Germany said nothing about Cieszyn Silesia, the former Austrian duchy of Teschen claimed by both Poland and Czechoslovakia. A plebiscite planned there never took place, and the Conference of Ambassadors divided the region on 28 July 1920, while Poland was fighting for its life against Soviet Russia. Czechoslovakia received the Ostrava and Karviná coal basin and the Košice to Bohumín railway, its only link between the Czech lands and Slovakia. Poland received the eastern part along the Olza. The Muzeum Těšínska in Český Těšín writes that Czechoslovakia was moderately satisfied while Poles saw the decision as entirely unjust.³³

The eastern border Versailles left open

The Allies made a first attempt at the eastern frontier on 8 December 1919. The Supreme Council recognized Poland’s right to organize a regular administration west of a line running roughly along the Bug, “without prejudging” the final frontier and reserving Poland’s rights east of it. In July 1920, during the Soviet advance on Warsaw, the British foreign secretary Lord Curzon proposed the same line, extended south along the western edge of Eastern Galicia, as an armistice line between Poland and Soviet Russia, which gave it the name Curzon Line.³⁴

In the end the east was settled by war and by the Treaty of Riga of 18 March 1921 with Soviet Russia and Soviet Ukraine, which placed the frontier well east of that line. For Ukrainian historiography, as the Encyclopedia of Ukraine puts it, the Curzon Line was the line meant to be Poland’s border with Ukraine.³⁵

How Germany saw it: the “Diktat” and the Corridor

In Germany the treaty was rejected across the political spectrum. The German Historical Museum notes that the parties from the far right to the Social Democrats called it a “Diktat” and a peace of shame, above all because of the war guilt clause. The Hamburg historian Peter Borowsky adds that the territorial terms in the east caused particular anger, above all the cession without a plebiscite of Danzig and of West Prussia, whose population was largely German.³⁶

The strip of Pomerania that separated East Prussia from the Reich became “the Corridor.” Kosmala writes that the word was a propaganda device to make an area about 80 kilometers wide look small, and that the Polish access to the sea was presented as a discriminatory dismemberment. Revision of the border with Poland, she argues, was the supreme aim of German foreign policy throughout the Weimar Republic, shared by all parties.³⁷

Gustav Stresemann pursued it by diplomacy. At Locarno in 1925 Germany guaranteed its western frontiers but avoided an “Eastern Locarno,” and it used the League of Nations to raise complaints of the German minority in Poland. Borowsky points to the paradox of a peaceful revision: Germany could have peace or revision, not both, and Hitler chose the second road.³⁸

Why it mattered and what it left unresolved

For Poland the treaty became a foundation. Borowsky observes that Warsaw accepted the settlement far more easily than Berlin, and that defending the territorial status quo became the first aim of Polish foreign policy, supported by every party. Dziedzic judges the unconditional award of Pomerania and Greater Poland to have been in line with Poland’s vital interests, and the grant of Pomerania a complete novelty in British policy.³⁹

Polish historians also warn against overrating it. Piotr Łossowski, quoted by the Museum of Independence, wrote that Poland was not, despite claims in foreign literature, a child of the Treaty of Versailles. The state had been reborn through the effort of the Polish nation, and the treaty confirmed an existing fact. What it left open, from Danzig and Upper Silesia to Cieszyn and the east, Poland had to settle in the plebiscites, the uprisings and the battles that won Polish independence.⁴⁰