Upper Silesia Plebiscite 1921: the vote that divided a region

On 20 March 1921, about 1.2 million people in part of German Upper Silesia went to the polls under the eyes of Allied troops. They were asked one question: Germany or Poland. The answer was a German majority overall and a Polish majority in hundreds of villages, and that double answer led to a third armed rising, a decision by the League of Nations and a border that cut through the middle of one of Europe's great coal and steel districts. The plebiscite belongs to the wider story of Polish independence and its border wars, 1914 to 1921.²

Why was there a plebiscite in Upper Silesia?

The draft peace terms handed to the German delegation on 7 May 1919 gave Upper Silesia to Poland outright. Germany protested, and the Allies changed the treaty: since Germany denied that separation matched the wishes of the population, they agreed to let the inhabitants decide. The historian Maciej Fic of the University of Silesia attributes the change above all to the British prime minister, David Lloyd George, and dates the decision of the Supreme Council of the Peace Conference to 4 June 1919.³

Article 88 of the Treaty of Versailles, signed on 28 June 1919, laid down that the inhabitants of a defined part of Upper Silesia would be called on to show by a vote whether they wished to be attached to Germany or to Poland. German troops and senior officials were to leave within fifteen days, and an international commission backed by Allied troops would take over. The result was to be counted by communes, and the commission would then recommend a frontier, paying regard to the wishes of the inhabitants and to the geographical and economic conditions of each locality.⁴

The Inter-Allied Commission in Opole

The commission took over the plebiscite area by a proclamation issued at Opole (Oppeln) on 11 February 1920. The treaty had foreseen four members, but the United States never named one, so it was made up of France, the British Empire and Italy. Its chairman was the French general Henri Le Rond.⁵

French and Italian troops arrived with the commission, and British troops only in 1921. German civil authorities and the army left, but lower officials, judges, teachers and the police stayed in place under Allied authority. Poles resented above all the German security police, the Sicherheitspolizei (Sipo), which in their view favored the German population.⁶

The plebiscite area and its people

The plebiscite area covered about 11,000 square kilometers, by Fic's count, and was home to more than 2 million people according to the census of 1910. George Finch, writing in the American Journal of International Law in 1922, gave about 4,100 square miles and 2,060,000 inhabitants in 1919. It ran from Opole and Racibórz (Ratibor) in the west to the industrial towns of Gliwice (Gleiwitz), Bytom (Beuthen) and Katowice (Kattowitz) in the east, where the region's coal, zinc and iron industry lay.⁷

Its people did not divide neatly into two nations. Many were bilingual, and before 1914, Maren Hachmeister writes following Juliane Haubold-Stolle, languages and cultures had lived side by side there with little regard to national labels. The American historian Brendan Karch argues that most Upper Silesians took an instrumental stance toward nationalism, putting family, village, work and religion before national belonging. T. Hunt Tooley called the German win "in the face of an actual majority of 'ethnic' Poles" a drama in itself.⁸

Two campaigns: Korfanty in Bytom, Urbanek in Katowice

The Polish campaign was run by the Polish Plebiscite Commissariat, set up in February 1920 in the Hotel Lomnitz in Bytom (Beuthen) and led by the plebiscite commissioner Wojciech Korfanty, a former member of the Reichstag. The IPN historian Aleksandra Korol-Chudy calls it the main and only organizer and center of Polish propaganda.⁹

Its German counterpart, the Plebiscite Commissariat for Germany (Plebiszit-Kommissariat für Deutschland), had its seat in Katowice and was led from April 1920 by Kurt Urbanek, the mayor of Rozbark (Rossberg) near Bytom. Korol-Chudy notes that it was less central to the German effort than Korfanty's office was to the Polish one, because many German associations worked alongside it. The most important were the associations of "Upper Silesians loyal to the homeland" (heimattreue Oberschlesier), which campaigned for Germany and organized the journey of eligible voters from the rest of the Reich. Their handbook for the vote, published in Breslau in 1920, guided voters through the rules.¹⁰

Propaganda and violence

Both sides ran an intense propaganda campaign, with posters, leaflets and the press. Both promised prosperity and threatened ruin: Polish posters spoke of freedom, German ones of lasting prosperity in Germany and poverty and emigration under Poland.¹¹

The campaign was also violent. The Polish risings of August 1919 and August 1920, the first two Silesian Uprisings, framed it. The second, which broke out after a Polish doctor, Andrzej Mielęcki, was killed during riots in Katowice in August 1920, forced the commission to dissolve the Sipo and set up a plebiscite police of Poles and Germans. Tooley's study of German political violence and the German historian Maren Hachmeister both show the other side of the coin: pro-German Upper Silesians also fled the violence of Polish insurgents, while pro-Polish ones fled German paramilitaries.¹²

Who could vote: the outvoters dispute

The treaty gave the vote to every man and woman who would be 20 years old on 1 January of the year of the vote and who had been born in the plebiscite area or had lived there since a date the commission would fix.¹³

The clause on people born in the area but living elsewhere caused the bitterest quarrel. Hundreds of thousands of Upper Silesians had left to work in western Germany, and Fic writes that both sides at first welcomed the rule: Warsaw counted on Polish-speaking emigrants in Westphalia and the Rhineland, Berlin on former officials and settled workers loyal to Germany. Polish diplomats then tried to make the outvoters cast their ballots weeks after the residents, or outside the area, but the final rules let everyone vote on the same day.¹⁴

The counts of these outvoters differ. The State Department's annotations give 191,154 outvoters and non-domiciled natives, and the IPN 191,303. The joint German-Polish textbook commission rounds the figure to about 200,000. Germany brought many of them in by train, a good number from the Ruhr, and most of them voted for Germany.¹⁵

The Polish side argued that this imported vote distorted the result and that German officials had far easier access to the emigrants' data and to the emigrants themselves, and could just as easily make the journey hard for pro-Polish Upper Silesians in western Germany. The German side's answer rested on the treaty itself: the outvoters were Upper Silesians by birth with a right written into Article 88. The joint textbook commission of German and Polish historians concluded in 1976 that the participation of Upper Silesians from the Reich, provided for by the treaty and promoted by Germany, did influence the outcome.¹⁶

Voting day, 20 March 1921

The vote took place on Sunday, 20 March 1921, which was Palm Sunday. Polling ran under Allied guard, and French tanks stood in the streets of Katowice.¹⁷

Upper Silesia plebiscite results

Turnout was about 97.5 percent. Of about 1.19 million votes cast, Germany received 707,393 to 707,605 and Poland 479,359 to 479,365, depending on the count: 59.4 to 59.7 percent for Germany and 40.3 percent for Poland.¹⁸

Counted by communes, as the treaty required, the picture changed. By the State Department's count, 678 communes and manor districts (42.5 percent) voted for Poland and 844 for Germany, while the IPN puts the Polish share at 44.7 percent of communes. The towns, including those of the industrial district, voted mostly German, while much of the countryside in the south and east voted Polish.¹⁹

Competing partition lines

Both sides claimed victory. The German government demanded the whole plebiscite area, arguing that the overall majority had spoken and that the region could not be divided. On 22 March 1921 Korfanty answered with a proclamation and a line of his own, the Korfanty Line, which ran from Bohumín on the Czechoslovak border along the Oder toward Opole and then to the Polish border. By Korfanty's own reckoning, as the IPN historians Renata Skoczek and Mirosław Węcki report, it would have given Poland 59.1 percent of the area and 70.1 percent of its people.²⁰

The commission could not agree. The British and Italian members proposed what IPN historians call the Percival-de Marinis Line, which would have given Poland little more than the districts of Pszczyna (Pless) and Rybnik and left the industrial towns with Germany. In the end the commission passed conflicting proposals to the Allies instead of an agreed frontier.²¹

The Third Silesian Uprising and Annaberg

According to Fic, reports that the Percival-de Marinis Line was gaining ground led Korfanty to agree to a rising. The Third Silesian Uprising began on the night of 2 to 3 May 1921 and lasted until 5 July, an armed demonstration, in the words of the Polish Senate, of the will to join Poland. German volunteer units of the Selbstschutz fought back, and the best-known battle was fought for Góra Świętej Anny (Annaberg), which German units stormed on 21 May (23 May in the German Historical Museum's account).²² › The Silesian Uprisings, 1919 to 1921

The League of Nations decides

The Allies still could not agree, and on 12 August 1921 they referred the question to the Council of the League of Nations. The Council handed it to a committee of four of its members, which the IPN historian Mirosław Węcki lists as China, Belgium, Brazil and Spain. On 12 October 1921 the Council unanimously recommended a frontier line. It concluded that the industrial region had to be divided, and to keep its economy working it proposed transitional rules for railways, water, power, currency, coal and the movement of people, together with protection for minorities.²³

The Conference of Ambassadors adopted the recommendation as its decision on 20 October 1921.²⁴

What Poland received

Poland received about 29 percent of the plebiscite area and about 46 percent of its people (47 percent in a 1922 American estimate), including Katowice, Królewska Huta (Chorzów), Rybnik, Pszczyna, Tarnowskie Góry and Lubliniec. Germany kept the larger, mostly agricultural part, about seven-tenths of the area, together with the industrial cities of Bytom and Gliwice.²⁵

The industrial balance was the other way round. The historian Georg Eckert notes that Poland received the heart of the industrial region, with most of the iron and steel mills and most of the chemical industry. American trade figures cited by Finch put about three-quarters of the region's coal output, all of its zinc mines and works and half of its steel capacity on the Polish side. In Germany the decision caused outrage across the political parties.²⁶

The Geneva Convention and the handover

Germany and Poland then negotiated the details. The German-Polish Convention on Upper Silesia, signed in Geneva on 15 May 1922, was to run for 15 years and kept the divided region working as one economic unit while protecting minorities on both sides. The Polish Sejm approved it on 24 May 1922, ratifications were exchanged in Opole on 3 June, and it remained in force until 1937.²⁷

Polish troops under Gen. Stanisław Szeptycki crossed the old border at Szopienice on 20 June 1922 and entered Katowice the same day. The other districts followed, Rybnik last on 4 July, and the act of taking over Upper Silesia was signed in Katowice on 16 July 1922.²⁸

Two memories of one vote

In Germany the partition left a lasting grievance. The German Historical Museum calls the partition unfavorable to Germany and records the outrage it caused across the parties. A 2022 University of Wuppertal interview with Eckert recalls the verdict of the Upper Silesian politician Hans Lukaschek that the episode undermined the German people's faith in justice, and Sabine Bamberger-Stemmann notes that Annaberg became a symbol of the German "Volkstumskampf," the struggle for nationhood, in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. The joint textbook commission wrote that the national struggles in Upper Silesia helped create an exaggerated German nationalism and its historical myth.²⁹

In Poland the plebiscite is remembered as part of the fight that, with the uprisings, brought part of Upper Silesia into the reborn state. The Senate marked the centenary of the Third Uprising in 2021 by recalling the vote and the share of the area and people that Poland won, and since 2022 Poland has marked 20 June, the day Polish troops entered Katowice, as the National Day of the Silesian Uprisings. Recent scholarship, such as Karch's study of loyalty and Tooley's work on the vote, reads the result less as a census of nations than as a choice made by people of mixed loyalties under heavy pressure.³⁰

The vote completed the western border that Versailles had left open, alongside the Greater Poland Uprising and the Treaty of Versailles, while in the east the frontier was decided in the Polish-Soviet War and by the Treaty of Riga.