KATOWICE - In Your Pocket

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SILESIAN UPRISINGS
The Silesian Uprisings hold a special place in the Polish
national consciousness, but especially here in Katowice –
the city that most benefitted from the insurrectionary effort.
Formerly the German city of Kattowitz, the town played a key
role in the Uprisings and when it became incorporated into
Poland in 1922 the Polish government rewarded Katowice
by making it the autonomous capital of the newly acquired
territories. All of a sudden, what had been a dismal industrial
border-town was the capital of an autonomous province with
its own legislative body, treasury and Parliament. The good
times didn’t last, but the memories have. Today one of the
largest and most iconic monuments in Poland honours the
heroes of the Silesian Uprisings in downtown Katowice. To
see the truly colossal Uprisings Monument, take a tram to
Rondo Gen Ziętka (B-3). To learn the story behind it, read on.
Setting the Stage
Silesia has been at the geographic and political crossroads
of Europe throughout its entire history - a position which
has seen it sitting ambivalently on the borderlands of this
or that kingdom, or continually placed in the crosshairs
of various land-grabbing empires and nations throughout
history. Going back to the Middle Ages, the region was first
recorded in the history books as a Piast duchy in the late
13th century and was part of the Kingdom of Poland before
King Kazimierz the Great conscientiously spurned it; Silesia
then slipped under the Bohemian Crown in the 14th century,
who passed it like a kidney stone to the Habsburgs in the
16th century before Frederick the Great took a liking to it
and had a little mid-18th century war over the matter until it
was in his Prussian domain. By that time Silesia had passed
hands more than any other territory in Europe, and, as such,
developed a distinctly unique and diverse cultural make-up of
Polish, German, Bohemian, Austrian and Jewish influences,
including its own Silesian dialect of the Polish language
(though some argue it has its own distinct language). By the
time modern nations were being formed across Europe in the
wake of Napoleon, Silesia couldn’t be legitimately claimed
as the byrights homeland of any particular nation (though it
remained within German borders).
Silesia’s true political relevance didn’t begin to take shape
until the 19th century when the revelation spread that the
region was rich in natural resources, particularly coal, and it
developed into a hotbed of heavy industry which would largely
enable the German war machine during World War I. When the
Allies agreed to the reconstitution of the Polish nation in the
aftermath of the war, Silesia became a bone of contention
between the two countries where the local population was
an almost even split between Germans and Poles. In drafting
the Treaty of Versailles, the Allies sought to inflict territorial
losses on Germany and lands east of the Oder River,
particularly Upper Silesia which had a Polish ethnic majority,
were a natural choice. When the Allied intention appeared
in initial drafts of the treaty, the potential loss of Upper
Silesia sent shockwaves through Germany; widespread
unrest and even famine were predicted and the Germans
found an audience with their claim that the country’s war
reparations would be impossible to repay without the
resource-rich region creating revenue for the Rhineland. After
loud German protest, it was finally decided in 1918 that the
territorial matter would be decided democratically when a
mandated plebiscite took place in two years time; until then,
German administration and police would be left in place in
the region. The decision deeply disappointed Warsaw which
had expected the Silesian territories with a Polish majority
east of the Oder River would be incorporated into the new
Polish Republic without debate, and angered the regional
Polish community eager to escape discrimination in Germany.
With the political situation in Silesia extremely precarious,
it’s curious what the Allies expected to happen in those two
years before the plebiscite if not a lot of bickering turning
to bloodshed. The unrest that the Allies sought to avoid by
delaying a decision was already in place, exacerbated by
Allied inaction. Thanks to ‘Germanisation’ in the decades
before WWI and anti-Polish legislation during it, tensions
between Silesian Germans and Poles had been high since
well before the armistice and conflict seemed inevitable.
Both sides had formed citizen militias: German war veterans
created ‘Freikorps’ (Free Corps) specifically to terrorise Polish
activists, most of whom were engaged in their own Warsawsupported
conspiratorial organization, 'Polska Organizacja
Wojskowa' or 'POW' (Polish Military Organisation) – a
precursor to Polish intelligence. In addition to the tough guy
tactics, nationalist propaganda and rhetoric were prolific on
both sides. With the reconstitution of Poland – a country which
hadn’t been on the map for 123 years – Polish nationalism
was at an all time high, spurred locally by the impassioned
speeches of Wojciech Korfanty who encouraged Silesian
Poles to unite and seize control of the region in order to ensure
it would be incorporated into the Second Polish Republic.
The First & Second Uprisings
Tensions finally broke on August 15th, 1919 when rogue
German border guards murdered ten civilians in the
Mysłowice coal mine. Polish armed insurrectionists took
several small towns in the region and opened guerrilla
warfare in the countryside against the Weimar Republic
Provisional National Army as Polish miners across Silesia
went on strike. The uprising was short-lived however, as the
German Army quickly summoned a force of 61,000 troops
and easily broke the back of the uprising within ten days. In
response to the horrible reprisals that followed - as some
2,500 Silesian Poles were rounded up and either hanged
or executed by firing squad – in February 1920 an Allied
Plebiscite Commission composed of Italians, Frenchmen
and Brits was sent to Upper Silesia to try to keep the
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peace. It was soon apparent however that the strength of
the coalition was not enough to establish order, a problem
aggravated by divided sympathies amongst the Allies
between the two sides. While the First Uprising had been
largely spontaneous and reactionary (and ineffective), a
second, slightly better organised uprising was staged one
year later on August 19th when most industrial cities in the
region were quickly captured by insurgents or paralysed
by strikes. Polish insurgents were able to seize control of
government buildings in the districts of Katowice, Pszczyna
and Bytom, and fighting spread throughout the region
before being slowly brought to an end through Allied military
involvement and diplomatic success in getting the two sides
to negotiate terms of a ceasefire. The Polish side succeeded
is dissolving the regional police force and creating a new one
which would be 50% Polish, as well as gaining admission into
local administrative positions; in return the dissolution of the
Polish Military Organisation was guaranteed, although this
never actually took place as the Poles slyly continued with
their secret intelligence operations. As you do.
The Third Uprising
During negotiations over the fast-approaching fixed date
of the dubious plebiscite to be held March 20th, 1921,
the Polish side lobbied hard to restrict voting to Silesian
residents only. However, the near-sighted western powers
didn’t see it that way and made anyone over 20 who was
born in Silesia eligible to vote in the plebiscite. The result
was an influx of some 200,000 Germans from outside the
region taking place in the crucial vote, which - when it finally
occurred – was questioned by the Allies and deemed to be
largely inconclusive, though that’s not what the numbers said.
The results which sat before them officially revealed 59.4%
in favour of Silesia remaining in Germany, and only 40.5% for
joining the new Polish Republic. Berlin was claiming it had won
the whole of Silesia, Warsaw was crying foul, and the Allies
seemed confused or perhaps forgetful as to why they held
the plebiscite in the first place. The conversation returned
to what to do with the crucial ‘Black Triangle’ of important
industrial cities east of the Oder – Katowice, Bytom and
Gliwice. The French remained preoccupied with weakening
their aggressive neighbour and unflaggingly supported
Silesia’s incorporation into Poland; the Brits and Italians
remained recalcitrant about reparations. Day 1,000 of the
debate was sounding a lot like Day 1.
Though the Allies continued their wheel-spinning spat over
the fate of the region, rumours spread that the pro-German
position would soon prevail and the Poles prepared for what
they perceived would be their last chance to seize control
of the region and force its incorporation into the Polish
Republic. To the fore came Wojciech Korfanty, a politician
turned revolutionary, well-known for his defence of Germany’s
Polish minorities and inspiring rhetoric. Able to quickly
organise a volunteer army of 40,000, Korfanty initiated the
Third Silesian Uprising on May 2nd, 1921 with the strategic
destruction of rail bridges, which essentially severed all
connections between Silesia and Germany, thus thwarting
the potential assistance of the German government to the
local Freiburg paramilitary units his men were now pitched
against (all official military troops had been removed from
Silesia by that time). Korfanty’s surprise offensive pushed the
small German forces he faced westward and by June 4th he
had crossed the Oder River and captured the strategic 400
metre-high hill of Annaberg from which he could apparently
dominate the entire Oder Valley. As the Germans spent the
next two weeks preparing a counter-offensive, Korfanty’s
insurgents essentially seized all of Upper Silesia and had
things well enough in hand to gain some diplomatic leverage
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SILESIAN UPRISINGS
with the Allied Commission. The Germans would eventually
engage Korfanty’s men in The Battle of Annaberg - the only
proper engagement during the Silesian Uprisings, which had
up to that point featured mostly skirmishes and positional
guerrilla battles – and what ensued was a crude battle of
epic inconclusiveness (a running theme through this story)
lasting several days with large numbers of senseless losses
on both sides. The Allied Commission meanwhile made a few
speeches condemning the Uprising, but generally did little to
curb the violence. In fact in-fighting within the Commission
actually led to the active prevention of Allied troops getting
involved in the conflict to benefit one side or the other.
That Korfanty thought his uprising was sustainable is highly
doubtful. Taking the opportunity for diplomacy while he was
still in a position of strength, Korfanty offered to withdraw
his men behind a demarcation line on the condition that
the released territory be occupied by Allied troops only, not
Germans. Essentially Korfanty’s strategy forced the Allies
to enter the conflict at a time when his uprising could be
perceived as a success, the Allies agreed to Korfanty’s
proposal and the move was later given credit for earning
a more favourable Polish result when national boundaries
were finally drawn. On July 1st British troops finally began
the advance into Upper Silesia that would produce a general
amnesty and withdrawal of all the weary combatants who
foolishly expected some sort of decision regarding the
territory to have already been made while they were doing
all of that killing and dying. None was forthcoming. Finally the
Allied Commission could agree on only one solution: pass
the decision on to the council of the League Of Nations. To
continue the comic diplomacy, the League Of Nations then
handed the matter over to an investigative committee of
four representatives, one each from the apparently much
more decisive countries of Belgium, Brazil, China and
Spain. Gathering their own data and conducting their own
interviews with Germans and Poles from Upper Silesia, in
October 1921 – after a mere six week investigation - the
crack committee came down with a decision. It was their
determination that the territory should be basically be split
down the middle following ethnic lines as much as possible.
The earth shook, stars exploded, an angel grew its wings…
and Katowice became part of Poland.
At the final tally, Poland had actually obtained less than a third
of the geographic territory, but it was generally considered to
be 'the good part.' Of 61 coal mines, 50 fell to PL; of the 37
furnaces, 22 to PL; of the 16 zinc and lead mines, 12 went to
Poland along with all the iron mines, and on and on. Germany
had lost the war and to Poland went the spoils. In addition to
Katowice, the main towns of Chorzów and Tarnowskie Góry
were also incorporated into Poland, all three of which had
very small to negligible German minorities. Although today it
may not seem like such a great outcome to the disappointed
tourist walking around downtown Katowice, the Silesian
Uprisings were considered a major success for Poland and
are today an extreme point of pride for Silesians.
July - October 2012
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