Wojciech Korfanty: the leader of Upper Silesia’s Poles

To Poles, Wojciech Korfanty is one of the fathers of independence. When the Sejm made 2023 the Year of Wojciech Korfanty, it recalled the Reichstag deputy who demanded all the lands of the Prussian partition for Poland, the plebiscite commissioner and the dictator of the Third Silesian Uprising. To many Germans of his day he was the opposite: the historian Zygmunt Woźniczka, following Marian Orzechowski, describes a German legend that cast Korfanty as a demonic force who cost Germany a large part of Upper Silesia.²

His life runs through the whole fight for the Polish west, from the Prussian parliaments to the Greater Poland Uprising and the Silesian Uprisings, and it belongs to the wider story of Polish independence and its borders, 1914 to 1921.

Early life: a miner’s son from Sadzawki

Korfanty was born on 20 April 1873 in Sadzawki, a mining settlement in Prussian Upper Silesia that is now part of Siemianowice Śląskie. He was the eldest son of Józef and Karolina Korfanty, and his father was a coal miner. He was baptized Albert, a short form of Adalbert, the German equivalent of Wojciech, and he later took the Polish form, which the IPN historian Anna Zaczkowska reads as a declaration of national feeling.³

In 1895 he was expelled from the Prussian gymnasium in Katowice for Polish national activity, but he still obtained his school-leaving certificate. He studied at the technical college in Charlottenburg and then philosophy, law and economics at the universities of Breslau (Wrocław) and Berlin, until 1901.⁴

According to Monika Haber, he met Roman Dmowski and Zygmunt Balicki in Warsaw in 1898 and soon joined their secret National League, the core of the National Democratic movement. Beata Urbanowicz dates his entry to 1901 and calls him a leader and ideologist of that movement.⁵ › Roman Dmowski: the politician who signed for Poland at Versailles

“Down with the Centre!”: the Polish candidate of 1903

Most Polish-speaking Upper Silesians then voted for the German Catholic Centre Party. In 1901 Korfanty launched the slogan “Down with the Centre!”, arguing that Upper Silesians should defend their rights themselves instead of entrusting them to German parties. A Polish encyclopedia of 1934, quoted by Woźniczka, says he fought the Centre because it used Catholicism to Germanize the Silesian people. The campaign also brought him into conflict with the Church authorities of the Breslau diocese.⁶

In 1901 he founded the Polish paper Górnoślązak in Katowice, and in 1902 a court sentenced him to four months in prison for his articles.⁷

The National League then decided to run him for the Reichstag, the first candidate it put up in Upper Silesia. In June 1903 he won the Katowice and Zabrze constituency by 675 votes. He was the first politician there to win on openly Polish national slogans, and he joined the Polish Circle, which until then had grouped only deputies from the Prussian partition.⁸

In 1904 he also won a seat in the Prussian Landtag from Greater Poland, which he kept until 1918. He was re-elected to the Reichstag in 1907 but did not stand again in 1912.⁹

World War I and the speech of October 1918

When World War I began, Korfanty first urged Polish cooperation with the Central Powers in return for an end to Prussia’s anti-Polish policy, and then withdrew when nothing changed. In the Prussian Landtag on 19 January 1917 he admitted that for a time he too had trusted the government, “but our hopes quickly faded.”¹⁰

In June 1918 he returned to the Reichstag in a by-election. In October he drew on a map in the Reichstag lobby the districts Germany would have to give up to Poland, as an American diplomat reported from The Hague on 19 October. According to Grzegorz Bębnik, Sebastian Rosenbaum and Mirosław Węcki, deputies who saw it noticed that it included Upper Silesia.¹¹

On 25 October 1918, in his last speech to the Reichstag, he demanded for Poland “the Polish districts of Upper Silesia, Middle Silesia, Poznań, Polish West Prussia and the Polish districts of East Prussia,” insisting that the Poles wanted not a single German district. The Polish Senate notes that it was the first time he publicly claimed Upper Silesia.¹²

Poznań, the Supreme People’s Council and Piłsudski

In November 1918 Korfanty left Berlin for Poznań and joined the Supreme People’s Council (Naczelna Rada Ludowa). He became one of its commissioners, responsible for military and foreign affairs.¹³

For the council he went to Warsaw to negotiate the role of the Prussian partition in the first government of independent Poland. The talks failed, and his conversation with Józef Piłsudski in November 1918 ended in a quarrel. Polish historians date the lasting hostility between the two men from that meeting.¹⁴ › Józef Piłsudski: the marshal who restored Poland

In December 1918 the arrival of Ignacy Jan Paderewski in Poznań set off the Greater Poland Uprising. The IPN historian Grzegorz Bębnik writes that Korfanty did not favor an armed solution, yet as the council’s commissioner for military affairs he oversaw the organization of the Greater Poland army and helped negotiate the armistice of Trier of 16 February 1919, which secured the uprising’s gains.¹⁵

Polish plebiscite commissioner in Bytom

The Treaty of Versailles left Upper Silesia to a plebiscite under Allied supervision. In August 1919 the Polish Military Organization of Upper Silesia rose against his wishes. Korfanty, a convinced opponent of armed struggle there, expected the victorious Entente powers to decide the region’s fate, and the First Silesian Uprising ended in defeat.¹⁶

Piłsudski’s government nevertheless gave him the decisive post. It chose him as Polish plebiscite commissioner in December 1919 and formally appointed him on 20 February 1920. From Bytom he led the Polish Plebiscite Commissariat. Marius Urbanik, a historian of the German press, writes that although the Polish side was weaker in money, organization and staff, Korfanty quickly built an efficient plebiscite apparatus and became the central figure of the campaign.¹⁷

In August 1920 a second uprising broke out. Korfanty put himself at its head once it had begun and sought to end it quickly, and it was over by 28 August. It brought the withdrawal of the German security police from the plebiscite area.¹⁸

The vote of 20 March 1921 gave Germany about 59.6 percent and Poland about 40.3 percent. Both sides claimed victory. Korfanty pointed to the treaty’s count by communes and proposed a border roughly along the Oder, the Korfanty line, which by the reckoning of IPN historians would have given Poland 59.1 percent of the area and 70.1 percent of its people, including the whole industrial district. The German government demanded the entire plebiscite area. Britain, backed by Italy, leaned to the German reading, France to the Polish one.¹⁹

More on the vote itself: the Upper Silesia plebiscite of 1921.

Dictator of the Third Silesian Uprising

The British and Italian proposal would have left Poland little more than the districts of Pszczyna and Rybnik. The Polish side chose an armed demonstration. On the night of 2 to 3 May 1921 the Third Silesian Uprising broke out, and on 3 May Korfanty proclaimed himself its dictator.²⁰

According to the IPN historian Anna Zaczkowska, he knew that a rising could turn into a Polish-German war, and in his view it had to be surprising, victorious and short, and support the diplomacy of Poland and France. The insurgents quickly took almost the whole area up to the Korfanty line.²¹

Korfanty then ordered a halt. Mirosław Węcki writes that he saw the rising above all as an armed demonstration with a political and psychological effect on the Allies, and that the halt sowed confusion in the insurgent ranks. On 21 May German forces counterattacked and stormed Annaberg (Góra Świętej Anny).²²

Węcki traces Korfanty’s later feud with Michał Grażyński, then chief of staff of the insurgent Group East, to a revolt of its officers against the dictator in June 1921, when they wanted to fight on. Under Allied and Polish government pressure Korfanty wound the fighting down.²³

On 20 October 1921, on a recommendation of the League of Nations, the Allies divided Upper Silesia and gave Poland the most industrialized part. The IPN calls the incorporation of part of Upper Silesia in 1922 undoubtedly Korfanty’s personal success.²⁴

How Germans saw Korfanty

Marius Urbanik studied four liberal German dailies of the plebiscite years, from the Berliner Tageblatt to the Kölnische Zeitung. He found that they first granted Korfanty some respect for his oratory and skill as a propagandist, but soon made him the main target of German attacks. They portrayed him as the instigator of the uprising who terrorized the German population, and wrote of “Korfanty bands.” For many Germans, Urbanik concludes, he long remained a symbol of insatiable Polish greed.²⁵

German historians still stress his role as organizer. Georg Eckert of the University of Wuppertal says Korfanty organized all three Silesian uprisings, and the German lexicon Porta Polonica writes that he sparked the third after the vote went against Poland. Sabine Bamberger-Stemmann describes the risings as Polish attempts to create a fait accompli, and the battle of Annaberg as a symbol of the German struggle for nationhood in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. Polish historians stress his restraint: he opposed the first rising and saw the third as an armed demonstration.²⁶

The German Historical Museum describes the partition as made against the wishes of the population, and Eckert notes that many Germans took it as proof that the Allies’ democratic ideals were a tool to keep humiliating the defeated.²⁷

Why Piłsudski blocked Korfanty as prime minister

In June 1922, as Poland took over its part of Upper Silesia, the right put Korfanty forward for prime minister, but the left opposed him and the bid was dropped. In July a Sejm majority backed him again, and the Sejm’s main committee entrusted him with forming a government. Piłsudski, then Chief of State, refused to accept him and threatened to resign.²⁸

The veto ended his hopes of leading the country. In late 1923 he served for a few weeks as deputy prime minister in the government of Wincenty Witos, which resigned in December.²⁹

In the elections of autumn 1922 he finally broke with National Democracy and tied his fate to Christian Democracy. He sat in the Sejm from 1922 to 1930 and led the Christian Democrats in the Silesian Sejm in Katowice. From 1924 he published the daily Polonia, one of the most modern papers in Poland.³⁰

Against the Sanacja: Brest, 1930

Korfanty called Piłsudski’s armed seizure of power in May 1926 a political crime, and Polonia took a hostile line. In 1926 Michał Grażyński became voivode (governor) of the Silesian Voivodeship and waged a long campaign against him.³¹

In 1927 a Marshal’s Court heard charges that he had taken money from German industrialists. Węcki calls the verdict a compromise, rather favorable to Korfanty, while a 1934 encyclopedia entry quoted by Woźniczka says the court found that the Upper Silesian mining association had subsidized his papers in its own interest.³²

In September 1930 the Silesian Sejm was dissolved and Korfanty lost his immunity. He was arrested on 26 September and taken to the fortress of Brest, where opposition deputies of the Centrolew were held, although he did not belong to it. The charge, defrauding the Silesian Bank and forging bills of exchange, was widely seen as a mere pretext.³³

In the elections of November 1930 he won a seat in the Senate, and he was released in December 1930. Mirosław Węcki notes that at the Brest trial of 1931 to 1932 he appeared only as a witness for the defense.³⁴

Exile in Czechoslovakia and death in 1939

Facing another arrest, he crossed into Czechoslovakia in April 1935. In exile he worked with the anti-Sanacja Front Morges, and he became president of the Labor Party (Stronnictwo Pracy).³⁵

When Germany occupied Czechoslovakia in March 1939, he left Prague for Paris and then Poland, reaching Gdynia on 27 April 1939. He was arrested and held in Warsaw’s Pawiak prison, and released after 82 days only because he was gravely ill.³⁶

He died on 17 August 1939 in St. Joseph’s Hospital in Warsaw. His funeral drew large crowds in Warsaw and in Katowice, where he was buried on 20 August, and turned into a great patriotic demonstration.³⁷

Legacy and memory

Communist Poland had little use for a Catholic hero who stood for Silesian distinctiveness. Woźniczka writes that his memory was pushed aside until the 1970s, when Marian Orzechowski published his political biography (1975). Full rehabilitation came after 1989.³⁸

On 3 May 1997 the president awarded him the Order of the White Eagle posthumously. In 1999 a monument to him by Zygmunt Brachmański was unveiled outside the former Silesian Sejm building in Katowice.³⁹

The Sejm made 2023, the 150th anniversary of his birth, the Year of Wojciech Korfanty, and the Senate called him one of the fathers of independence of the reborn Polish state.⁴⁰ › The Battles That Won Polish Independence, 1914 to 1921