Nationalism on the Margins - Brendan Karch

<strong>Nationalism</strong> on the Margins: Silesians between
Germany and Poland, 1848-1945
A dissertation presented
by
Brendan Jeffrey Karch
to
The Department of History
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in the subject of
History
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts
May 2010

© 2010 – Brendan Jeffrey Karch
All rights reserved.

Professor David Blackbourn Brendan Karch
<strong>Nationalism</strong> on the Margins: Silesians between
Germany and Poland, 1848-1945
Abstract
This dissertation examines the inability of modern nationalist movements to divide
Upper Silesians into stable and discrete groups of Germans and Poles. Through a century of
ethnic nationalism, warfare, and political violence in this German-Polish borderland,
committed nationalist activists struggled to convince ethnically ambiguous, largely
bilingual, and nationally apathetic local citizens to forge enduring national loyalties. Upper
Silesians’ tolerance for local ethno-linguistic diversity prompted frustrated activists to adopt
increasingly illiberal and violent measures to achieve utopian visions of homogeneous
nation-states. At the same time, by intentionally crafting their own national ambiguity,
many Upper Silesians avoided the violence and ethnic cleansing of the 1940s, remaining in
their homes even as millions of German citizens were expelled from lands ceded to Poland
after World War II.
Focusing on one city, Oppeln/Opole, and its surrounding county, this study
investigates the texture of national relations at the basic level of communities. <strong>Nationalism</strong>
emerged as but one option for local citizens to define their political and social loyalties, and
competed against alternative regional, confessional, and class-based movements. Before
1890, repressive Prussian measures against the majority Catholic population unified the
region in religious dissent by appealing to multi-ethnic unity, not difference. Polish efforts
to unwind this Catholic solidarity after 1890 succeeded in nationalizing elections, but failed
to divide local societies along national lines.
iii

World War I and the subsequent plebiscite radicalized many activists while
simultaneously convincing the nationally indifferent of the dangers of singular national
loyalty. After the partition of Upper Silesia, a widening gap developed between interwar
activists in German Upper Silesia and locals seeking socio-economic integration while
avoiding national declarations. Nationalist anger at continued indifference to their projects
resulted in increasingly racialist and illiberal policies, first by the Nazi regime and then the
postwar Polish government, to stamp out widespread bilingualism and ethnic ambiguity.
These policies were unable to enact the long-term national division of local communities.
Upper Silesians endured through violent, radical nationalism by intentionally crafting their
ethnic mutability and remaining indifferent to Polish and German nationalization efforts.
iv

CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vi
Abbreviations viii
Note on Translations ix
List of Illustrations x
Introduction: <strong>Nationalism</strong> on the Margins 1
Chapter 1: Oppeln/Opole on the Margins 35
The Pre-National Invention of the Upper Silesian, 1848-1890
Chapter 2: Catholics into Poles and Germans? 88
Nationalizing Elections and Society, 1890-1918
Chapter 3: Breakdown 155
Upper Silesians in the Plebiscite Era, 1918-1921
Chapter 4: Between Apathy and Integration 223
Upper Silesians and Polish <strong>Nationalism</strong> in Weimar Germany
Chapter 5: Broken Heimat 278
The Limits of German <strong>Nationalism</strong> in Weimar Upper Silesia
Chapter 6: The ‘Racial State’ on the Margins 323
The Failed Nazi Germanization Campaign, 1933-1944
Epilogue: From Upper Silesians to German Minority 396
Appendix: Maps 415
Bibliography 419
v

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
While the subjects of my research may be defined largely by apathy and indifference,
those who helped me complete this work showed passion, enthusiasm, and generosity at
every turn. This dissertation would not have been possible without the support of
innumerable professors, colleagues, institutions, fellowships, archivists, friends, and family
members, only some of whom can be thanked here. David Blackbourn graciously took me
on as his student, remained enthusiastic throughout my project, and provided insightful and
constructive criticism while tirelessly scrutinizing every word of every draft I gave him. His
dedication to intellectual rigor and to his students’ success has made this work possible.
From Alison Frank I not only learned what a model historian of Central Europe should be; I
also benefitted from her thorough feedback and sage advice through the many twists and
turns of graduate school. I am grateful to Charles Maier for encouraging me to stay
grounded in strong evidence, but to let my analysis soar. My work also owes an enormous
debt to Pieter Judson, who for over a decade has been an intellectual motivator, advisor, and
life coach.
The extensive archival research necessary for this project was made possible by the
funding of the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Program, with
additional resources provided by the Harvard Center for European Studies and Davis Center
for Russian and Eurasian Studies. Marek Czapliński and Elżbieta Everding in Wrocław, and
Bernard Linek and Maciej Borkowski in Opole, provided me at turns with intellectual
advice, logistical assistance, housing, and friendship. Their combined generosity made my
many months of research in Poland both pleasant and productive. Among the countless
archivists and librarians who have assisted me, those at the Polish National Archives in
vi

Opole deserve special thanks. Daniela Mazur and Anna Caban, in particular, happily
fulfilled my hundreds of requests over several months without second-guessing why an
American had taken interest in so many dusty files on Oppeln/Opole’s history.
Both during the writing process and beyond, my colleagues at Harvard and beyond
provided intellectual stimulation and helpful advice. Mary Lewis, Peter Gordon, Daniel
Ziblatt, and Tara Zahra in particular have helped to shape the content and framing of my
work. Heidi Evans, Kristin Poling and Michael Tworek all graciously read and thoroughly
commented on chapters. Three friends in particular – Konrad Lawson, Maya Peterson, and
Olga Rostapshova – motivated me to work and carry on through the most challenging
phases of writing. All of these people have helped to make Boston and Harvard feel like a
welcoming intellectual home. Finally, my family has kept me grounded throughout this
process, and their love and caring has allowed me to complete this work while maintaining a
healthy perspective on life.
vii

ABBREVIATIONS
AAW Archiwum Archidiecezjalne we Wrocławiu (Archdiocese Archives in
Wrocław)
AMO Acta Miasta Opola (Opole City Archives)
APO Archiwum Państwowe w Opolu (National Archive in Opole)
APW Archiwum Państwowe we Wrocławiu (National Archive in Wrocław)
BArch Bundesarchiv
BdO Bund der Oberschlesier/Związek Górnoślązaków (Union of Upper
Silesians)
BDO Bund Deutscher Osten (League for the German East)
DAF Deutsche Arbeitsfront (German Labor Front)
DDP Deutsche Demokratische Partei (German Democratic Party)
DNVP Deutschnationale Volkspartei (German National People’s Party)
GstA PK Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz (Prussian Secret State
Archives)
IAC Inter-Allied Commission
KPD Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (German Communist Party)
KVP Katholische Volkspartei (Catholic People’s Party, i.e. Weimar-era Center
Party in Upper Silesia)
NO Nadprezydium Opole (Provincial President in Opole)
NSDAP Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (German Nazi Party)
OstDok Ostdokumentation
PKP Polski Komisariat Plebiscytowy (Polish Plebiscite Commission)
POW Polska Organizacja Wojskowa Górnego Śląska (Polish Military
Organization of Upper Silesia)
PSL Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe (Polish People’s Party)
RO Rejencja Opolska (Opole District Administration)
ROBP Rejencja Opolska Biuro Prezydialne (Opole District Governer’s Office)
SA Sturmabteilung
SPD Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (German Social Democratic
Party)
SPO Starostwo Powiatowe w Opolu (County Administration in Opole)
SS Schutzstaffel
USMO Urząd do Spraw Mniejszości w Opolu (Minority Office in Opole)
USPD Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Independent
Social Democratic Party of Germany)
VVHO Vereingte Verbände Heimattreuer Oberschlesier (United Associations of
Upper Silesians True to Heimat)
ZPwN Związek Polaków w Niemczech (Union of Poles in Germany)
viii

NOTE ON TRANSLATIONS
This dissertation undertakes a local history of cities and villages whose names have no
standard English translation. In the interest of clarity and to give an appreciation of the
contested nature of national belonging, I have elected to use both German and Polish place
names for locales in Upper Silesia and Poznań/Posen. For consistency, the official
administrative language of the time for that locale is given priority and listed first. For
locales which I consider outside the realm of national contestation at the time, such as
Breslau in the pre-World War II era, I have chosen to forgo dual naming. Moreover, in
footnote references I have chosen the name which best leads the researcher to the source,
and in direct quotes I typically use only the name as it appeared in the original source.
Just as place names were contested, so too were the names of many individuals – often
with different spellings and first names in German and Polish. I have tried, in all cases
where I have sufficient evidence, to use the spelling of names that best conforms to the
individual’s wishes. In many cases it was difficult or impossible to establish the person’s
wishes, and thus I have chosen to use names from archival and printed sources as they
appear, while editing for clarity and continuity.
Finally, many of the Polish newspaper articles cited in this study were most readily
available through German administrative translations in the archives. This resulted in the
unfortunate practice of indirect translation into English. I hope that the value of this
evidence outweighs the drawbacks in its translation. I have noted all references where this is
the case.
ix

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Figure 1: Minority School Enrollment in German Upper Silesia 252
Figure 2: The German Empire, 1871-1918 415
Figure 3: Silesia, 1740-1918 416
Figure 4: Interwar Partitioned Upper Silesia 417
Figure 5: Poland After World War II 418
x

<strong>Nationalism</strong> on the Margins
1
Introduction
When the 2002 Polish census asked its citizens to declare their nationality, the results
revealed a demographic oddity among Poland’s minorities. Through its own twentieth-
century state formation and through the enormous suffering imposed upon it by
murderous occupiers, Poland had been transformed from a stateless, partitioned nation in
1900 into a multiethnic state by 1920 and then into a practically homogeneous ethnic
nation-state after World War II. By 2002, some 96 percent of Polish citizens declared
themselves simultaneously members of the Polish nation. The largest among modern
Poland’s small minority groups, however, did not represent any of interwar Poland’s four
largest minorities: Most of the country’s Ukrainians, Jews, Belarusians, and Germans had
been murdered or expelled either by wartime occupiers or by Poland itself. 1 Poland’s largest
national minority in 2002 – clustered in a small region in southern Poland around
Katowice – instead declared that they belonged to a nation which had arguably never
existed: Upper Silesia. 2
1 For a work which considers the expulsion of Germans and the resettlement of Poles into western territories as part
of the same historical process, see Philipp Ther, Deutsche und polnische Vertriebene: Gesellschaft und
Vertriebenenpolitik in der SBZ, DDR, und in Polen, 1945 - 1956 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998). Among
the Ukrainians who remained in Poland’s redrawn borders after 1945, nearly 200,000 were expelled in 1947 away from
their eastern Polish homelands to scattered settlements in Central and Western Poland. See Marek Jasiak,
“Overcoming Ukrainian Resistance: The Deportations of Ukrainians within Poland in 1947” in Philipp Ther and
Ana Siljak, eds., Redrawing Nations: Ethnic Cleansing in East-Central Europe, 1944-1948 (Lanham, Md.: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2001), 173-194.
2 The nationality is officially referred to as “śląski,” or Silesian, in the census. In Polish “śląski” has historically referred
to Polish speakers in Upper Silesia, rather than Lower Silesia, which remained predominantly German until 1945 and
was subsequently resettled with Poles from central and eastern Poland. Results of 2002 census in Małgorzata Kałaska
et al., Ludność: Stan i struktura demograficzno-społeczna 2002, Narodowy spis powszechny 2002 (Warszawa: GUS,
2003), 220-221.

These more than 173,000 Upper Silesians in contemporary Poland are the living
artifacts of a historical region which had, for all practical purposes, ceased to exist in 1945.
Along with Poland’s second-largest minority – the nearly 153,000 Germans living mostly
in agricultural areas west of Katowice – these Upper Silesians serve as a stark reminder of
Poland’s tumultuous historical development towards ethnic homogeneity. Before 1945,
Upper Silesia had existed for centuries within Habsburg and Prussian Central Europe as a
distinct political unit and a powerful ordering force for regional identity. Its mixed-
language (and often bilingual) Catholic population largely avoided violent ethnic cleansings
in twentieth century conflicts by defining itself as nationally ambiguous or mutable. While
the development of this Upper Silesian identification has many historical layers, its most
recent expression in 2002 can be tied directly to the dynamics of postwar expulsions.
Germans across Central Europe whose homelands had been ceded to Poland,
Czechoslovakia, or other states in 1945 were brutally expelled into the reduced borders of
defeated Germany. But a vast swath of Upper Silesian society, composed mainly of
bilingual citizens of Polish ancestry – many of whom the Nazis had deemed loyal Germans
just a few years previously – were spared expulsion. These “autochthons,” as they became
known in postwar Poland, were forced to erase public (and often private) signs of their
Germanness to serve the Polish myth of having “reclaimed” ethnically Polish western
territories. 3 Then, in modern democratic Poland, often with no more than a trace of
language ability and with only stories quietly passed down through the generations to link
3 Grzegorz Strauchold, “Die ‘Wiedergewonnene Giebete’ und das ‘Piastische Schlesien’” in Marek Czapliński et al.,
Schlesische Erinnerungsorte: Gedächtnis und Identität einer mitteleuropäischen Region (Görlitz: Neisse Verlag, 2005),
306-322.
2

them to past lives under German rule, many Upper Silesians declared their national
allegiance to a historical region presumed long dead.
The fact that over 750,000 Upper Silesians remained in their homes after World War
II, with up to 90 percent in some rural areas spared ethnic cleansing, forms both the
chronological end point, and the thematic departure point, for this study. 4 While this work
addresses the development of Upper Silesian regional identity, its focus is on the attendant
historical process which made this regionalism possible: the failure of German and Polish
nationalists to divide Upper Silesians into stable and discrete national groups in the century
after 1848. This dissertation investigates “nationalism on the margins” in two senses: It is
simultaneously a study of nationalism on the contested territorial margin between
Germans and Poles, and it is an argument for nationalism’s marginality to the lived
experience and worldview of most citizens inhabiting this border. Its central task is to
unravel the seeming contradiction between these two narratives, that is, to explain how a
region marked by violence and ethnic cleansing in the name of forging homogeneous
nation-states could also produce a population apathetic to nationalism.
In arguing that widespread indifference is actually a logical consequence of modern
nationalist politics in multilingual locales, this work contributes to ongoing debates about
nation-state formation and the links between democracy and nationalism. As a case study
of one city, Oppeln/Opole, and its surrounding county, it examines the long-term failures
of local nationalist activists to transform nationally apathetic communities into nationally
defined communities. 5 Operating at the geographic micro-level, it seeks to bridge the gap
4 Statistics on the proportion of Upper Silesian autochthons (as of 1950) in Michał Lis, Ludność rodzima na Śląsku
Opolskim po II wojnie światowej, 1945-1993 (Opole: Państwowy Instytut Naukowy, 1993), 32.
5 For maps situating Oppeln/Opole and Upper Silesia, see the appendix.
3

etween our understanding of real communities and “imagined” national ones. 6 Before
1890 national difference played virtually no role in the structuring of social or political life
around Oppeln/Opole. Instead, another key marker of loyalty, Catholicism, had already
united Upper Silesians across ethno-linguistic lines. Creating national groups of Poles and
Germans in local communities thus required hard work by activists to unwind this religious
solidarity, while simultaneously battling the growing diversity of rival class and political
movements that appealed to citizens on non-national terms. Nationalist activists shared a
faith that their nations already existed, and that local Germans and Poles simply remained
unawakened to the national cause. Yet citizens around Oppeln/Opole confounded activists’
expectations by repeatedly privileging bilingualism, social integration, and economic
advancement over their own supposedly innate national loyalties. The result was a growing
gap between nationally indifferent communities and increasingly insular and radical groups
of nationalist activists. As I show, this gap produced a negative feedback loop, especially
after 1918, whereby continued indifference prompted activists to endorse illiberal, racialist
policies to achieve their goals.
The present-day revival of Upper Silesian and German identity in Poland has led a
group of Polish historians and sociologists to investigate the salience of this regional
minority. 7 This new literature, however, must work against a dominant narrative which has
6 Many recent works have addressed the changing national landscape in Silesia’s capital and largest city,
Wrocław/Breslau. Lying in Lower Silesia, the city remained primarily German in the modern era, until 1945, and was
never considered part of the Polish nation by activists until after World War II. For a colorful overview history, see
Norman Davies and Roger Moorhouse, Microcosm: Portrait of a Central European City (London: Jonathan Cape,
2001). On Jews’ place in modern Breslau, see Till van Rahden, Jews and other Germans: Civil Society, Religious
Diversity, and Urban Politics in Breslau, 1860-1925 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008). On the postwar
transformation of Breslau into Wrocław, see Gregor Thum, Die fremde Stadt: Breslau 1945 (Berlin: Siedler, 2003).
7 Arkadiusz Faruga, Czy Ślązacy są narodem? Przemilczana historia Górnego Śląska (Radzionków: Rococo - Jarosław
Krawczyk, 2004), Krzysztof Frysztacki, ed., Polacy, Ślązacy, Niemcy: Studia nad stosunkami społeczno-kulturowymi na
Śląsku Opolskim (Kraków: Universitas, 1998), Janusz Janeczek, Dynamika śląskiej tożsamości (Katowice: Wydawn.
4

defined Upper Silesia’s history through the lens of two mutually exclusive national groups.
Postwar scholarship on Upper Silesia was driven by two disparate political imperatives on
either side of the new border, each establishing their own myth: on the Polish side, that
Silesia was entirely Polish and had suffered under two centuries of Prussian occupation; and
on the German side, that national conflict had scarcely ever existed. This German narrative
has persisted thanks in large part to the power of expellee groups, among whose members
were prominent historians. At least three German overview histories of Silesia from as
recently as the 1990s have narrated Upper Silesia’s 1871-1945 history with only passing
reference to Polish speakers or nationalist conflicts. 8 A recent, analogous Polish overview
shows considerably more nuance in addressing Silesia’s nationality issues, 9 but the bulk of
Polish-language literature treats Poles as a distinct, closed ethno-national group. Multiple
generations of Polish historians referred almost exclusively to “Polish society” or “Poles in
Upper Silesia,” ignoring the broader texture of ethnic and national relations. Their works
tend to conflate the small group of Polish activists under consideration with “Polish” society
at large. 10 Since the fall of Communism Upper Silesia has received attention from historians
as a test case precisely of conflicting memories driven by national strife. These studies of
Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 2006), Maria Wanatowicz, Od indyferentnej ludności do śląskiej narodowości? Postawy
narodowe ludności autochtonicznej Górnego Śląska w latach 1945-2003 w świadomości społecznej (Katowice: Wydawn.
Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 2004). Also see the activist work of Dariusz Jerczyński, Historia Narodu Śląskiego: Prawdziwe
dzieje ziem śląskich od średniowiecza do progu trzeciego tysiąclecia (Zabrze: Narodowa Oficyna Śląska, 2003).
8 In two cases, the narrative under consideration was written by Konrad Fuchs, primarily a business historian. See his
contributions in Deutsche Geschichte im Osten Europas, Bd. 3: Schlesien, (Berlin: Siedler, 1994), and Geschichte
Schlesiens: Bd 3. Preussisch-Schlesien 1740-1945, Österreichisch-Schlesien 1740-1918/45, (Stuttgart1999). See also
Joachim Bahlcke and Joachim Rogall, Schlesien und die Schlesier (München: Langen Müller, 1996).
9 Marek Czapliński et al., Historia Śląska (Wrocław: Wydawn. Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 2002).
10 Among this vast literature, see, for example Mieczysław Pater, Polskie dążenia narodowe na Górnym Śląsku, 1891-
1914 (Wrocław: Uniwersytet Wrocławski, 1998), Maria Wanatowicz, Społeczeństwo polskie wobec Górnego Śląska,
1795-1914 (Katowice: Uniwersytet Śląski, 1992), Edward Mendel, Polacy na Górnym Śląsku w latach I Wojny
Sẃiatowej: Położenie i postawa (Katowice: Sląsk, 1971), Michał Lis, Górny Śląsk: Zarys dziejów do połowy XX wieku
(Opole: Uniwersytet Opolski, 2001).
5

diverging memories and their hardening into historical narrative have greatly enriched our
understanding of how Upper Silesia’s historiography became so rigidly divided. Through the
study of lieux de mémoire serving as sites of rapprochement, this literature also resulted in a
welcome détente in conflicts over historical memory in the region. 11 Yet this literature is
also prone to a sort of bilateral national accommodation, whereby each side respects the
other side’s national narrative, thus reinforcing the logic of a nationalist-centered approach.
A more provocative historiography has unearthed the historical origins of Upper Silesian
identity in the century before 1945. 12 In reclaiming Upper Silesian identity as a topic of
inquiry, historians have also opened up questions about the role of regional movements in
resisting the seemingly universal nationalization of modern European societies. Two recent
works, by James Bjork and Guido Hitze, focus on the specific role of Catholicism in forging
an enduring Upper Silesian regional loyalty. 13 Bjork in particular, by tracing the robustness
of Catholic society and politics in countering the regional rise of Polish nationalism before
World War I, has argued eloquently for the national indifference of Upper Silesians. My
work seeks to continue in this tradition by tracing the intersection of indifference and
alternative identities among Upper Silesians in the period from 1848-1945. Rather than
address any one marker of identity, I examine the multiplying political and social loyalties
11 Czapliński et al., Schlesische Erinnerungsorte. See also Kai Struve, ed., Oberschlesien nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg:
Studien zu einem nationalen Konflikt und seine Erinnerung (Marburg: Verlag Herder-Institut, 2003), particularly the
contributions of Masnyk, Nordblom, Suchoński and Büsching.
12 Kai Struve and Philipp Ther, eds., Die Grenzen der Nationen: Identitätenwandel in Oberschlesien in der Neuzeit
(Marburg: Herder-Institut, 2002), Tomasz Kamusella, Silesia and Central European <strong>Nationalism</strong>s: The Emergence of
National and Ethnic Groups in Silesia, 1848-1918 (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2007), Philipp Ther,
"Die einheimische Bevölkerung des Oppelner Schlesiens nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg: Die Entstehung einer
deutschen Minderheit," Geschichte und Gesellschaft 26 (2000).
13 James E. Bjork, Neither German nor Pole: Catholicism and National Indifference in a Central European Borderland
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), Guido Hitze, Carl Ulitzka (1873-1953), oder, Oberschlesien zwischen
den Weltkriegen (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2002).
6

available to local citizens in the modern era, with nationalism representing one option
among many.
The setting for this study is the mid-sized administrative city of Oppeln/Opole in
western Upper Silesia and the surrounding agricultural county which shared its name. As a
study which examines history at the geographic micro-level, it is important to lay out the
locality’s history, for Oppeln/Opole was both a typical Central European borderland and
unique in its historical trajectory. Now resting in southern Poland, over 200 kilometers east
of the German border, Opole/Oppeln forfeited its borderland status with the westward shift
of Poland after World War II. For two centuries prior to that, the town belonged to Prussia
and the German nation-state, serving for most of that time as the administrative capital of
Upper Silesia. Its mixed-language population, the prevalence of Catholicism, and its
millennium of history under multiple states and empires (Polish, Bohemian, Habsburg,
Prussian, and German), are all traits Upper Silesia shares with several other Central
European regions and borderlands. Its long-term historical trajectory arguably resembles
that of more easterly regions, such as today’s western Ukraine, more than it resembles the
history of Hamburg or Bavaria. Upper Silesia belongs to a panoply of multi-lingual
historical regions across Central Europe, such as Bohemia, Galicia, Styria, Transylvania, and
Masuria. These nineteenth-century imperial peripheries all share a history of violent ethnic
cleansing or genocide undertaken in the twentieth century in order to forge homogeneous
nation-states.
Yet in its political history and socio-religious makeup, Upper Silesia also constitutes a
unique region. Named for the upper stretches of the Odra/Oder river which traverses its
landscape, Upper Silesia is distinguished historically from the rest of Silesia (i.e. Lower
7

Silesia) by its dominant Catholic heritage and its large population of Polish speakers in the
modern era. At the same time, Upper Silesia is distinguished from other areas along the
contested Polish-German borderland, particularly Poznań/Posen, by its early modern status
as a Habsburg possession, rather than as part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, by
its rapid industrialization in the late nineteenth century, and by its relative distance from
the main national battles between Poles and Germans. The last distinction is crucial, for in
much historiography Upper Silesia is treated as an appendage to the national strife in the
Posen/Poznań area. 14 The latter region contained a core of landed Polish nobles whose
forefathers had constituted the political gentry class of pre-partition Poland; and it was this
group in the nineteenth century who spearheaded the Polish nationalist movement which
Bismarck and his successors fought so bitterly. Upper Silesia entirely lacked this elite Polish
class. Its nobility, often with Polish-speaking ancestry, had long since adopted Prusso-
German culture and patriotic loyalties. Upper Silesia’s German and Polish speakers, unlike
in Posen/Poznań, also shared in common the Catholic faith, making it difficult for
nationalist activists to use religion as a marker of national difference.
The Oppeln/Opole area was thus doubly marginal: It existed on the territorial and
ethnic periphery of the Prusso-German state, but also on the periphery of the main national
battleground of Poznań/Posen. At the same time, Oppeln/Opole was also marginal within
Upper Silesia. Lacking the coal and mineral deposits of eastern Upper Silesia, Oppeln/Opole
did not experience the rapid industrialization of the Kattowitz/Katowice area in the late
14 See Martin Broszat, Zweihundert Jahre deutsche Polenpolitik (München: Ehrenwirth, 1963), William W. Hagen,
Germans, Poles, and Jews: The Nationality Conflict in the Prussian East, 1772-1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1980), Richard Tims, Germanizing Prussian Poland: The H-K-T Society and the Struggle for the Eastern Marches
in the German Empire, 1894-1919 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), Lech Trzeciakowski, The
Kulturkampf in Prussian Poland (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), Richard Blanke, Orphans of Versailles:
The Germans in Western Poland, 1918-1939 (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1993).
8

nineteenth century. At the same time, western Upper Silesia heard only the faintest echoes
of the class conflict which accompanied this industrialization. The worker radicalism which
helped to spark the Polish nationalist movement in eastern Upper Silesia around 1900 was
not replicated in the more agrarian Oppeln/Opole setting, and as a result western parts of
the province remained on the margins of pre-World War I Polish nationalism. Only after
the plebiscite and partition of Upper Silesia in 1921 – an event which most deeply
traumatized the eastern half of the province along the new border – did Oppeln/Opole
become a focal point of nationalist battle in Upper Silesia.
Urban-rural relations around Oppeln/Opole largely mirrored ethno-linguistic dividing
lines. As a growing civil servant city, Oppeln/Opole’s urban core increasingly became a
local fortress of German language and culture, and municipal politics played out with
almost no inkling of national diversity. But in the surrounding suburban villages, and
stretching further into the rural, heavily forested county, local citizens were overwhelmingly
Polish speaking or bilingual (78 percent according to the 1910 census, with many villages
exceeding 90 percent). 15 Thus, while Oppeln/Opole would serve as a nerve center for
German and Polish activists, the latter group found their audience primarily in the
surrounding county. Residents would often simultaneously tend their mid-sized farms while
toiling in cement or cigar-rolling factories on the edge of town. As these social relations
suggest, the ethno-lingistic divide around Oppeln/Opole largely mirrored class and
educational divisions. This social hierarchy of German over Polish would make the two
nationalist projects in the area highly asymmetrical. While German nationalists could rely
15 Local results of 1910 census can be found in APO, RO, Syg. 2096. The large number of Protestant, Germanspeaking
settlements founded by Frederick II resulted in the clustering of German speakers in specific villages, with
most other locales almost universally Polish speaking.
9

on both the mechanisms of state power and the promise of social uplift to convert local
citizens, Polish nationalists were fighting against these tides and relied largely on
transforming social grievances, and what one scholar has called a national “inferiority
complex,” into support for the Polish nation. 16
Although an examination of a unique border zone, this study of local nationalist
politics in Oppeln/Opole is intended to apply to cases beyond the small sub-region.
Limiting the project to this micro-region is more than a convenient delimiting factor in
choosing evidence: its geographic scale is key to both the theoretical framing and
conclusions. This work is intended to help fill a gap in our understanding of nationalization
processes at the level of local politics and everyday society, particularly in areas subject to
two competing national movements. In so doing, it draws into question long-standing
assumptions about the relationship between ethnic groups, modern nations, and national
self-determination.
NATIONALISM, ETHNICITY, AND DEMOCRACY
In analyzing the construction of nation-states at the local level, it is particularly
important to distinguish between elite and popular consciousness, between nationalist
activists and the broader populace. Miroslav Hroch has argued that national development
often depended on an educated, socially elite corps of activists who could lead less-educated
“unawakened” populations towards national consciousness. In the case of Central European
nationalisms, particularly among subject peoples of the Russian, Austrian, and German
Empires, this elite corps was only established in the nineteenth century when nationalists
16 On the “inferiority complex” see Stanisław Ossowski, "Zagadnienia więzi regionalnej i więzi narodowej na Śląsku
Opolskim," Przegląd Socjologiczny IX, no. 1-3 (1947): 119.
10

esisted assimilation into German or Russian high culture, instead choosing to define their
Czech, Ukrainian, or Polish culture as worthy of its own nation. 17 It is the moment
embodied in František Palacký’s famous rejection of an invitation to join the German
Frankfurt Parliament in 1848. “I am not a German – at least I do not feel myself to be
one,” he wrote (in perfect German). “I am a Bohemian of Slavic roots, and have ...
dedicated myself completely and forever to the service of my nation [Volk].” 18 The
establishment of a Polish national elite in Oppeln/Opole, meanwhile, can be traced to a
single nationalist activist, the Posen/Poznań-born Bronisław Koraszewski, who moved to
the city in 1890 in hopes of overturning the traditional assimilation of local Polish speakers
into German culture. Were it not for the decision by these Central European activists to
subvert the cultural hierarchies and administrative languages of their respective regions,
then the masses of Czechs, Poles, and Ukrainians would likely never have identified
themselves as such, let alone gained their own nation-states.
The success or failure of these Central European activists to nationalize societies would
often depend on factors beyond their control, particularly the shifting political and
territorial aims of the region’s three dominant powers. The creation of new nationally-
defined political entities, such as Hungary in 1867 or Czechoslovakia and Poland in 1918,
almost always came on the heels of war defeat, revolution, and the collapse of empires,
whether the German, Austrian, or Russian. Just as Massimo D’Azeglio famously quipped
after Italy’s unification, “We have made Italy, now we must make Italians,” so too across
Central Europe the creation of autonomous states – with their newfound powers over
17 Miroslav Hroch, Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe: A Comparative Analysis of the Social Composition
of Patriotic Groups among the Smaller European Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), Ch. 4.
18 František Palacký, Gedenkblätter: Auswahl von Denkschriften, Aufsätzen und Briefen aus den letzten 50 Jahren
(Prag: F. Tempsky, 1874).
11

language policy and education – often proved the key catalysts in creating coherent
“imagined communities.” 19 Yet activists’ success also depended crucially on social
conditions and ethnic boundaries in local, real communities. Mass nationalism at the local
level across Central Europe strove to create new forms of loyalty and political legitimacy
based on supposedly inherent ethnics traits. 20 Its success, however, ultimately depended on
the ability to transform individuals’ diverse allegiances – to a particular religion, class,
community, state, or brand of politics – into an overriding national loyalty. Especially in
bilingual communities or ones where shared social practices such as religious worship diluted
the salience of ethnic boundaries in everyday interaction, this required the transformation
of “soft boundaries” into national “hard ones.” 21 While nationalist activists reached out to
communities in diverse ways, adapting their appeals to local social conditions, they all
shared a faith in the nation as a naturally ordained model for eternal group identity. For the
ethnic nationalist of the nineteenth century, the nation demanded overriding social and
political loyalty; it was a permanent, all-encompassing entity for which one was already pre-
enrolled as a member.
19 For the context of D’Azeglio’s quote, see Don Doyle, Nations Divided: America, Italy, and the Southern Question
(Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 2002), 39. The term “imagined communities” comes from the seminal work
by Benedict R. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of <strong>Nationalism</strong>, Rev. ed.
(London: Verso, 1991)..
20 Jeremy King has suggested that “nationhood boils down to a set of mutually exclusive and mutually reinforcing
variants on the populist principle of political legitimacy, to a form of loyalty, to a modern discourse structurally
capable of blanketing the political field.” Jeremy King, “The Nationalization of East Central Europe: Ethnicism,
Ethnicity, and Beyond,” in Maria Bucur and Nancy M. Wingfield, eds., Staging the Past: The Politics of
Commemoration in Habsburg Central Europe, 1848 to the Present (West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press,
2001), 128. Gellner has also defined nationalism as a “theory of political legitimacy.” Ernest Gellner, Nations and
<strong>Nationalism</strong> (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 1.
21 Prasenjit Duara has described national identity formation as a process of the reifying difference in heterogeneous
societies, of “differentiating … the self from and Other.” Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation:
Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 65-66.
12

These activists’ shared vision of the nation as a pre-defined membership body has not
only sparked generations of national historiographies, but has also persisted through
subsequent critiques on the origin of nations. The broad constructivist turn in nationalism
studies since the 1980s has reversed primordial concepts of the origin of nations. Rather
than nationalism bubbling up from the wellspring of eternal nations, nations are seen as the
modern constructs of nationalist movements. Constructivists see these national
movements as harnessing the power of modern social transformations – such as increasing
literacy, print culture, language standardization, new transport and communication
networks, secularization, and industrialization – to impose high national cultures on
populations and effect the division of first-order political loyalties along national lines. 22 In
the case of strong pre-modern states with well-defined borders, the nationalization process
often proceeded through a relatively uncontested program of elite cultural conquest, such as
the one that turned peasants into Frenchmen. 23 In Central and Eastern Europe, as noted
above, nationalization often originated, particularly in the case of subject peoples, from the
hard work of activists who declared certain peasant languages and regional cultures as
worthy of their own nations. But while the fate of individual nations in constructivist
models may be contingent, the overall march of nationalism is not. Instead of being
posited as one possible outcome of the processes of modernization, constructivists typically
declare nationalism the only plausible system of political legitimacy for modern
22 Gellner, Nations and <strong>Nationalism</strong>, esp. 55, Anderson, Imagined Communities, Hroch, Social Preconditions, Karl
Wolfgang Deutsch, <strong>Nationalism</strong> and Social Communication: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Nationality
(Cambridge: MIT Press and Wiley, New York, 1953), Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and <strong>Nationalism</strong> since 1780:
Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
23 Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 (Stanford Calif.: Stanford
University Press, 1976).
13

industrialized societies. In this model the nation was not ordained by nature, as
primordialists suggest, but instead was simply ordained by modernity. 24
The thread tying together nationalist activists, historians professing primordial nations,
and their constructivist critics is a belief in the salience of nations as socially coherent
membership groups. Rogers Brubaker has labeled this “groupist” thinking, which assumes
that nations are “substantial, enduring collectivities.” 25 Much groupist thinking stems from
a conflation of nationalist activists with the broader populations whom activists claimed to
represent. Activists portrayed nations, based on their own personal experiences, as a thick
social web of nationalist youth groups, self-help societies, singing choirs, sports teams,
political committees, and paramilitary gangs. Their internalist narratives of national
organization are then subsequently portrayed by historians as a model of societies at large.
In an ideal type of this nationalized society, all citizens constructed their social circles,
educated their children, cast their ballots, organized their economic interests and channeled
their passions within the social bounds constructed by nationalist organizations. Historical
narratives working within various iterations of this model, however, conflate the practices of
a small group of committed nationalist activists with their claims for the existence of clear-
cut national groups. 26 Just because Central European activists envisioned society as divided
into stable national groups of Germans and Czechs, Poles and Ukrainians, does not mean
24 According to Gellner, “<strong>Nationalism</strong> as such is fated to prevail, but not any one particular nationalism.” Gellner,
Nations and <strong>Nationalism</strong>, 47.
25 Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity Without Groups (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 8, ———,
<strong>Nationalism</strong> Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996), 21.
26 Brubaker, <strong>Nationalism</strong> Reframed, 15. Brubaker calls this a conflation of “categories of practice” with “categories of
analysis.”
14

that historians must work from the same assumption. This work thus seeks to maintain a
clear distinction between activists and the communities they claimed to represent.
Historians of Central Europe have recently also found constructivist models of
nationalism inadequate to explain the ethnic origins of national groups. If activists believed
that their nations already existed and were simply unawakened, then they found the raw
material for their nations in supposedly stable, well-defined ethnic groups. According to
their logic the nationalization of Central Europe involved the natural progression of
exclusive, non-overlapping ethnic bodies into their respective national groupings. Those
who assume that all members of an ethnic group were bound to be members of the same
nation practice what one historian, Jeremy King, has labeled ethnicism. 27 As King argues,
ethnicism forms a pervasive fallacy in nationalist thinking, one shared by primordialists and
constructivists. The nationalization of ethnic groups in Central Europe did not always
proceed along parallel, non-intersecting tracks, but rather crossed in unpredictable ways. A
generation ago Gary Cohen examined ethnic relations in Prague in the half-century before
World War I, demonstrating the widespread transformation of urban German speakers into
Czechs. 28 While the findings of Cohen’s pioneering work could be seen as an anomalous
crossing of wires, subsequent research has proven these crossings not the exception in
Central Europe, but the rule. Relations between Germans and Czechs have proven
particularly fruitful. Jeremy King has shown how citizens in the bilingual Czech-German
town of Budějovice/Budweis transformed themselves into national Czechs and Germans
27 Jeremy King, “The Nationalization of East Central Europe,” in Bucur and Wingfield, Staging the Past, 112-152.
28 Gary B. Cohen, The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague, 1861-1914 (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University
Press, 1981).
15

without any premonition of belonging to one group or another. 29 Another recent study has
shown that “frontiers” of mixed German-Czech or German-Slovenian language use proved
too ethnically ambiguous for activists in the late nineteenth century to divide their
populations neatly along ethno-linguistic lines. 30 Well into the twentieth century and even
under Nazi occupation, local populations in Bohemia positioned themselves between the
German and Czech nations, resisting educational or racial policies meant to disentangle
their loyalties into clear national groupings. 31 These findings have combined to show that
the fixing of national identities involved a complex, bloody, and often unpredictable
transformation of ethnic traits into disparate national loyalties.
While the Czech-German case has proven particularly valuable in challenging an
ethnicist model of nationalization, evidence suggests similar complexity in other Central
European regions. Nobles and elites proved particularly adept at adopting national identities
disparate from their cultural roots, such as the Habsburg Archduke Wilhelm von Habsburg,
who became a Ukrainian nationalist. 32 Many peasant communities speaking a mixture of
Polish-Ukrainian dialects in 1920s Soviet Ukraine often appeared to activists a hopeless
national admixture, identifying their language as “Catholic” or simply “tutai’shi” [of here]. 33
29 Jeremy King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics, 1848-1948 (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 2002).
30 Pieter Judson, Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2006).
31 Tara Zahra, Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900-1948
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), Chad Bryant, Prague in Black: Nazi Rule and Czech <strong>Nationalism</strong> (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), Eagle Glassheim, Noble Nationalists: The Transformation of the Bohemian
Aristocracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005).
32 Timothy Snyder, The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke (New York: Basic Books, 2008), ———,
The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999 (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2003). The latter offers a broader examination of national crossings and historical ironies in the lands of the former
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
33 Kate Brown, A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2005), 39. Also see the work on Polish peasant activism in Austrian Galicia by Keely Stauter-Halsted,
16

Even the Nazis, despite brutal racialist rule over vast swaths of the continent, proved willing
to experiment with ethno-national transformation when they kidnapped thousands of
Slavic children during World War II with the intent of Germanizing them. 34 Protestant
Polish speakers in East Prussia, meanwhile, came to define themselves as Prussian loyalists
and in many cases even pro-Nazi supporters in the twentieth century, effectively
Germanizing their loyalties. 35 All of these cases suggest the capacity across Central and
Eastern Europe for ethnic traits to be negated or transformed in the process of
nationalization.
Much of this literature undermining ethnicist assumptions on nationality has also
posited an alternative outcome of processes of nationalization: apathy or indifference. As
Tara Zahra has noted, indifference as an idea is not new, and has worn many labels:
“regionalism, cosmopolitanism, Catholicism, socialism, localism, bilingualism,
intermarriage, opportunism, immorality, backwardness, stubbornness, and false
consciousness, to name a few.” 36 Many of these were pejorative terms applied by nationalist
activists frustrated with apathy among their audiences. Yet contemporary scholars of
national indifference situate the category not as a backward remnant of pre-industrial
society or as a stubborn refusal to nationalize, but rather as a set of alternate allegiances
which continued to appeal to specific populations in spite (or because) of nationalization. As
The Nation in the Village: The Genesis of Peasant National Identity in Austrian Poland, 1848-1914 (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2001).
34 Isabel Heinemann, " 'Until the Last Drop of Good Blood': The Kidnapping of 'Racially Valuable' Children and
Nazi Racial Policy in Occupied Eastern Europe" in A. Dirk Moses, ed., Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence
and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), 244-266.
35 Andreas Kossert, Preussen, Deutsche oder Polen? Die Masuren im Spannungsfeld des ethnischen <strong>Nationalism</strong>us
1870-1956 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2001), Richard Blanke, Polish-speaking Germans? Language and National
Identity among the Masurians since 1871 (Köln: Böhlau, 2001).
36 Tara Zahra, "Imagined Noncommunities: National Indifference as a Category of Analysis," Slavic Review 69, no. 1:
98.
17

Zahra has pointed out, the unifying factor in conceptions of national indifference is
actually the presence of nationalism; without efforts to create national bodies there could be
no response of indifference. 37 While indifference is thus fundamentally a reactive, negative
category, the alternative regional, local, familial, religious, ideological, or class loyalties
which could usurp nationalism’s role serve as positive identifiers. They can tell us, in short,
what someone “was” as powerfully as national indifference tells us what they were “not.”
How do these historiographical trends bear on Upper Silesia? The region has been
described as the home of “perhaps the most famously indifferent population in twentieth-
century Central Europe.” 38 Groupist understandings of national identity have proved
particularly ill-suited to describing the complexity of national relations in Upper Silesia. As
late as World War II it made little sense to speak of Germans and Poles as two stable
collectivities in the region – although German and Polish nationalists did so anyway. These
activists’ belief in ethnicism remained remarkably undisturbed by the cool reaction of most
Upper Silesian citizens to their projects, and by the regular signs of national “switching” or
assimilation. The gap between activists and the broader population only grew with the
radicalization of nationalist politics in the decades after World War I.
If Upper Silesians avoided defining themselves as Germans or Poles, then what did they
feel themselves to be? One compelling answer is “Catholic.” The imagined community of
Upper Silesian Catholicism has been explored in detail as an alternate marker of loyalty in
the region and a buffer against nationalization, from the 1890s through at least the 1930s.
The strength of Catholic practice in structuring social bonds and the moral world of Upper
37 Ibid., 105.
38 Ibid., 99.
18

Silesians allowed for the endurance of the German Catholic Center Party, which strove for,
but did not always achieve, agnosticism in the face of Polish-German nationalist battles.
Yet another answer to the question of Upper Silesian identity lies in the powerful draw of
regionalism: that is to say, locals were simply “Upper Silesians” rather than Germans or
Poles. Although it is difficult to trace an unbroken trajectory of Upper Silesian identity, at
key moments in the region’s history – particularly after both World Wars – claims to a
unique Upper Silesian region (or even nation) served as a powerful form of protest against
German or Polish nationalization. Still other answers to the issue of identity may be found,
among diverse Upper Silesians, in labels such as communist, socialist, Prussian, peasant, or
simply tutejszy, that is, local. 39
This dissertation avoids offering any one answer to the question of identity among
Upper Silesians. Indeed, given the very slipperiness of identity as a category of analysis, it
seems the wrong question to ask. 40 Rather, it examines the outlets for local social and
political organization at specific junctures in Upper Silesian history, of which ethnic
nationalism proved one option in a vibrant field of other potential loyalties to community,
parish, class, state, or abstract humanism. Widening suffrage and democratization
substantially augmented both the political activity of Upper Silesians and the diversity of
options for channeling their loyalties. It became increasingly possible for one person to be a
Polish-speaking son, a German-speaking father, a Catholic union worker, a Socialist voter, a
proud Prussian veteran, and a Polish nationalist sympathizer all at the same time. Yet
modern ethnic nationalism actually posited the opposite result, whereby heterogeneous
39 On tutejszy identity see Kevin Hannan, Borders of Language and Identity in Teschen Silesia (New York: Peter Lang,
1996), 5.
40 On the slipperiness of the term identity, see Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, "Beyond "Identity"," Theory
and Society 29, no. 1 (2000).
19

social practices and multiple loyalties become ironed out by national division. The triumph
of nationalism came through its ability to narrow the field of alternative loyalties, slowly,
over time, such that it became increasingly difficult to be a bilingual Upper Silesian
Catholic. But this triumph was achieved not through the will of local villagers, nor through
the successful homogenization of diverse communities, but rather through the resort to
illiberal mechanisms of state coercion and violence. This dissertation is concerned with the
contrast between the diverse loyalties of local communities and the efforts of nationalist
activists to stamp out these practices.
A BORDERLAND REGION IN PRUSSIA
The history of illiberal nationalism in Upper Silesia cannot be unlinked from a larger
historiography on the role of Prussia in Germany’s dark turn. Yet Upper Silesia’s past is also
positioned in disparate historiographical trends on borderland regions throughout Europe. A
recent resurgence of interest in regions and regionalism has come with the rise of
autonomist and separatist movements such as those in Basque country and Scotland, and
with the European Union’s increasing tendency to bypass nation-states in order to address
regional development issues. But as Celia Applegate has noted, historical inquiry has yet to
mature in its treatment of regions as a unit of analysis. 41 The nation-state still forms the
basic political-geographic framework for historians, thanks in large part to modernization
theories which modeled social homogenization and the attendant elision of regional
difference. Applegate has noted that it is easy “to conceive of regions within that same
capacious category that includes women, minorities, workers, and natural environments –
41 Celia Applegate, "A Europe of Regions: Reflections on the Historiography of Sub-National Places in Modern
Times," American Historical Review 104, no. 4 (1999).
20

the victims of modernity, the ignored, the marginalized, the left-behind.” 42 In the German
case, the recent surge in Heimat studies has reclaimed local and regional patriotisms as the
basic building blocks of national integration. 43 Yet Upper Silesia fits more comfortably
within a broader European narrative of regions that were zones of resistance to national
integration. Aside from obvious policies of ethnic discrimination and racial exclusivity
which hampered national integration in Upper Silesia, another common thread through its
modern history was economic marginalization within the German economy. Upper
Silesians suffered from persistently low wages, high prices, housing shortages, and a lower
quality of life than almost all of their fellow German citizens. Regional economic
differentiation within Prussia and later Germany turned Upper Silesia into a backwater of
Germany, producing material suffering which fed directly into regional calls for autonomy.
Given the persistent structural deficiencies in Upper Silesia’s economy – many of them the
result of political decision-making – Upper Silesia must be considered a distinct economic
zone immune to many of the benefits of German industrialization. Applegate has indeed
noted that economic histories have been the most likely to consider regions as a basic unit
of analysis. 44 The salience of Upper Silesia as a unitary economic region must be considered
nearly as powerful as more traditional definitions based on language or religion.
Upper Silesia was not just a coherent region, but also a mixed-language borderland, and
thus subject to competing national projects. Nation-states all embraced a territorial model
of rule in which the reach of the state extended outward uniformly to the edge of the
42 Ibid.: 1164.
43 See particularly ———, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1990), and Alon Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory,
1871-1918 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
44 Applegate, "A Europe of Regions," 1167-1169.
21

nation. 45 It is thus no surprise that borders and mixed-language regions became the main
sites of securing the ethnic boundaries of the nation. Ever since Fredrik Barth articulated the
process of ethnic formation as one in which boundaries were drawn to mark a group as
distinct from its Other, rather than as a process of internal identity building, historians have
been looking at the creation of nation-states in borderlands as a process of group
differentiation. 46 Peter Sahlins has examined this process of national disentanglement
between Spain and France through border drawing in the Pyrenees mountains. 47 Peripheries
also often share common traits with border zones. Geographically isolated Bretagne, for
example, although not a borderland between two states, formed a rural periphery which
made its integration into the French Third Republic particularly contested. In this case, as in
Upper Silesia, the Catholic Church served as the keystone of both contestation and
integration. 48 Yet the outcome of continued indifference or resistance to nationalization in
border areas is relatively understudied, particularly for Western Europe. In the altogether
more complex and shifting ethno-political topography of Eastern Europe, meanwhile,
nearly everywhere can be considered a border at one point or another in history. Upper
Silesia thus fits somewhat oddly into Western borderland studies, although its regional
boundaries proved more stable than those in most of Eastern Europe during the modern
era.
45 On the relationship between nation-states and territorial concepts of rule, see Charles S. Maier, "Consigning the
Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era," American Historical Review 105, no. 3
(2000).
46 Barth, “Introduction” in Fredrik Barth, ed., Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture
Difference (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969).
47 Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1989).
48 Caroline Ford, Creating the Nation in Provincial France: Religion and Political Identity in Brittany (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton Univ. Press, 1993).
22

Upper Silesia’s place in Prussian history is also ill-defined. The steady dismantlement
of the Sonderweg model in the last thirty years has been accompanied by a de-privileging of
Prussia’s role in German history. As a generation of scholars have increasingly addressed the
non-Prussian ‘margins’ of the Reich as well as marginalized groups within German society
(such as women, the working classes, Catholics, and Jews), they have recast the balance
between center and periphery. According to one recent account, “As a consequence, we
now recognize that the margins were less dominated by the center and more constitutive of
German identity than the conventional paradigm allows.” 49 Through this transformation,
however, the historiography on Prussia itself, particularly in English, has remained static by
comparison. Despite a significant reformulation by German-language scholars that drew
into question Prussia’s legacy as Hitler’s forebear, for many Prussia is still “synonymous
with everything repellent in German history: militarism, conquest, arrogance, and
illiberality.” 50 While it is impossible, and imprudent, to unlink Prussian policies entirely
from the dark turn in twentieth-century German history, only very recently have historians
begun establishing Prussia’s history as autonomous from the Sonderweg paradigm. 51
Among the must crucial subjects with the potential to refashion understanding of
Prussia are its own territorial and national margins, particularly the eastern borderlands. As
the historian Thomas Serrier has noted, “in the course of its history Prussia has profoundly
shaped the development of not one, but rather two large European nations, namely the
German and Polish ones, and Prussia itself has been profoundly shaped by both
49 “Introduction” in Neil Gregor, et. al., German History From the Margins (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2006), 2.
50 Christopher M. Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press,
2006), xv. Clark discusses the rehabilitation of Prussian history in Ibid., xiii-xiv.
51 Ibid. See also, William W. Hagen, Ordinary Prussians: Brandenburg Junkers and Villagers, 1500-1840 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002).
23

[nations].” 52 The Polish-German borderlands and its complex national topography have a
similar potential to rewrite the center-periphery narrative in ways that other German
historians have done beyond Prussia. Not all depictions of this borderland, however, offer
equal potential to rethink the nature of Prussian and German national history. Much of the
literature on Prussia’s east amounts to a genealogy of radical nationalism. From the Polish
anti-German sentiment of 1848, through the Kulturkampf era of anti-Catholic, anti-Polish
persecution, escalating with the Colonization Commission and language ordinances
intended to Germanize the borderland, subsequently wrapped up in a new ideology of
German expansionism during and after World War I, then culminating in Nazi genocide
and opposing ethnic cleansings in the 1939-1947 period, a long-term narrative of the
borderland situates it as a main site for the origins of extreme national violence. 53 The telos
of this narrative, of course, is the near-homogeneous nation-state system of postwar Central
Europe. These histories no doubt serve as a vital accounting of the central policies of Berlin
and later of Warsaw, both of whom are implicated (the Germans very much more so, of
course) in a special illiberal Sonderweg for the Polish-German border zones. Yet these
historical inquires often tell us less about developments in the borderlands themselves;
instead, Poles and Germans are treated largely as two pre-divided groups whose mutual
antagonism was all but fated by the process of nationalization.
One avenue of revision to this narrative comes from a group of historians who have
recently examined the broad contact zone between Germans and Poles through the lens of
colonialism. Closely related to a rise in interest in Germany’s overseas colonial possessions,
52 Thomas Serrier, Provinz Posen, Ostmark, Wielkopolska: Eine Grenzregion zwischen Deutschen und Polen, 1848-1914
(Marburg: Verl. Herder-Inst., 2005), 1.
53 See footnote 13 for relevant literature.
24

this literature has brought the concept of “Germany and the East” into a productive
discourse on global processes of colonization. Representing broader developments in the
study of gender, discourses of power, “inner colonization,” and the environment, these
historians have worked to create a powerful portrait of German expansionism as a
fundamentally colonial project. 54 Yet both the chronological and spatial focus of these works
are less applicable to long-term studies of the borderland. Despite efforts to broaden the
chronological scope of this colonialism narrative, the extreme violence of World War II and
its aftermath continues to exert a strong magnetic pull. In some cases, this literature has run
the risk of depicting non-wartime periods (i.e. most of history) largely as rehearsals for the
main event: wartime expansion, violence, and genocide. With its focus on territorial
conquest, the literature also offers an expansive and often imprecise definition of colonial
space, and in the process tends to overlook areas directly along the territorial German-Polish
border. As fruitful as the colonial narrative on Germany’s east has been, it has tended to
focus on activists, ‘imaginings,’ and conceptualizations of ‘empty space,’ while giving less
attention to the people who actually inhabited this space over the long term.
If colonial and postcolonial studies now often emphasize the ‘colonial encounter’ over
narratives privileging the colonizer, then by analogy a study of the encounter between
Polish speakers and German colonial projects should also come as a welcome revision.
54 The literature on ‘Germany and the East’ includes Vejas Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture,
National Identity and German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), ———,
The German Myth of the East: 1800 to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), Elizabeth Harvey,
Women and the Nazi East: Agents and Witnesses of Germanization (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), Gregor
Thum, Traumland Osten: Deutsche Bilder vom östlichen Europa im 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 2006), Robert Nelson, ed., Germans, Poland, and Colonial Expansion to the East: 1850 Through the Present
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), Jeffrey K. Wilson, "Environmental Chauvinism in the Prussian East: Forestry
as a Civilizing Mission on the Ethnic Frontier, 1871-1914," Central European History 41, no. 1 (2008). For an example
work on the links between German overseas colonialism and eastern expansion see Eric Ames, ed., Germany's
Colonial Pasts (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005).
25

Patterns of state-led discrimination in language, educational, religious, and land settlement
policy did create an exceptional border zone within Germany where rights and privileges
were distinguished by ethnic hierarchy. Yet Polish speakers in German borderlands also
maintained status as full citizens, accorded the same rights and privileges as others in the
German state. Even accounting for widespread non-state discrimination against Poles in
the streets and taverns, it is difficult to conclude that Poles in the borderland constituted a
colonized people, except during World War II.
A separate historiography which focuses on local and regional studies of the border
suggests more nuanced relationships between Polish and German speakers. Matthias
Niendorf has studied a former Prussian county split by the Polish-German border after
World War I. As one of the few recent works to consider Alltagsgeschichte (everyday
history) in the borderland, it suggests the continued dominance of local identity, rather
than loyalty to a “collective body of the nation,” on both sides of the border in the interwar
period. 55 Winson Chu has explored the diversity of German-speaking minority groups in
interwar Poland along the border but also in central Poland, arguing that their geographic,
historical, and ideological differences ultimately outweighed activists’ efforts to define them
as a unified Volksgruppe. 56 Still other works trace the process of nationalization in the
Posen/Poznań region as a complex social dialectic in which Polish and German speakers
distinguished themselves as disparate nations only slowly, and under the pressure of mutual
55 Mathias Niendorf, Minderheiten an der Grenze: Deutsche und Polen in den Kreisen Flatow (Złotów) und
Zempelburg (Sępólno Krajeńskie) 1900-1939 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1997), 136.
56 Winson Chu, "German Political Organizations and Regional Particularisms in Interwar Poland (1918-1939)" (Ph.D.
Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2007).
26

antagonism generated by national activists. 57 These ground-up histories of national relations
suggest complicated processes of national differentiation (or failure to differentiate) which
are difficult to capture through the broad brushstrokes of colonial narratives.
Much of this regional work has focused on the historical ethnic groups which have
largely disappeared in the twentieth century – not just Upper Silesians, but also Masurians
and Kashubians in northern Poland. Masurians in particular have been the subject of studies
demonstrating how a largely Protestant, Polish-speaking population came to identify more
clearly as Germans than as Poles, voting overwhelmingly to remain part of German East
Prussia after World War I. 58 As Helmut Smith has noted, examining these largely defunct
ethnicities allows us to forgo the traditional assessment of “groups that contributed to the
formation of nationalism” in favor of groups “who bridged merging divisions.” 59 Upper
Silesians continued to exist within a state system as (often proud) Prusso-German citizens
while avoiding the pressure to define themselves as belonging to national groups. Such
studies of borderlands and non-national ethnic groups also carry the potential to reflect on
understudied aspects of Prussian history, namely Prussia’s robustness as a Rechtsstaat and its
capacity to create loyal multilingual citizens, even in the era of ethnic nationalism.
Yet in establishing Upper Silesians and other groups as autonomous agents, it is also
important to avoid some of the labels which Smith applies to them, such as liminal, in-
between, hybrid, and cosmopolitan. 60 All of these terms suggest that regional groups lived in
57 Serrier, Provinz Posen, Torsten Lorenz, Von Birnbaum nach Międzychód: Bürgergesellschaft und
Nationalitätenkampf in Großpolen bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg (Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2005).
58 Kossert, Preussen, Deutsche oder Polen, Blanke, Polish-speaking Germans? In the plebiscite of July 1920 nearly 98
percent of East Prussians voted for Germany.
59 Helmut Walser Smith, “Prussia at the Margins, or the World that <strong>Nationalism</strong> Lost,” in Gregor, German History
From the Margins, 71.
60 Ibid., 71-72.
27

a world defined not by their own subjectivity, but rather by the nationalists who saw them
as oddities unable to fit national divisions. These labels therefore privilege a nationalist
frame. Those that lived in these spaces had little consciousness of being hybrids or having
liminal identities. Upper Silesians made sense of their world not as an in-between space lost
between nations, but rather as a real, lived space defined for most by bilingualism, Catholic
practice, and economic hardship. It was this subjectivity which local citizens used to frame
their understanding of their communities, regions, states, and worlds, rather than any sense
of living hybrid or cosmopolitan lives.
Local and regional studies that address the agency of their subjects to construct their
own loyalties are best positioned to answer the fundamental, often overlooked, question of
how Poles and Germans came to be, and why some chose neither loyalty. The relative
success of these three possible outcomes in Oppeln/Opole, as defined by the interplay
between nationalist activists and local citizens, forms the basis of the work that follows.
Gathering evidence for this “interplay” of forces was not a transparent task. One recent
work on Hungarian-Romanian national relations in contemporary Cluj shows the benefits
of ethnography and personal interviews for a truly in-depth study of the salience of national
divisions in everyday life. 61 Such options were not feasible as the evidential basis for a
history which ends with World War II. Local citizens who were indifferent to the nation,
meanwhile, were unlikely to form clubs or otherwise leave behind historical records of their
apathy. This dissertation must thus rely to a significant degree on the records of nationalists
themselves. Rather than take their claims at face value, I attempt a careful reading of
nationalist activity against the grain, seeking out failures, contradictions, or disjunctions in
61 Rogers Brubaker, et. al., Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2006).
28

their projects. To take just one example, when a nationalist newspaper claimed that a bar
fight which injured a Polish speaker amounted to an attack on the Polish nation, this claim
can be cross-referenced with police reports which often found no national conflict between
the brawlers. The claims of nationalists are also juxtaposed with the few nationally
ambiguous or non-national voices which emerge strongly in the historical record – most
often those of priests. While the Polish nation-building project in Oppeln/Opole was subject
to strict surveillance and countless worried reports from Prussian officials, these bureaucrats
saw no need to track German nationalists with equal vigor. Thus local Polish activists
receive the bulk of attention, although their project is arguably more relevant given the
demographic preponderance of Polish speakers. The more limited activity of German
nationalists is addressed primarily through the lenses of state power, voting alliances, and
homeland patriotism, that is to say, Heimat.
Chapter one examines political changes in the generations before Polish national
activism arrived in Oppeln/Opole, from 1848-1890. Linguistic and cultural differences were
salient in everyday interactions around Oppeln/Opole during this time, but did not presage
the division of local societies into competing national groups. While Prussian bureaucrats
had long used hierarchical understandings of national difference to justify policies to
assimilate Polish speakers into German culture, this did not portend a battle of rival ethnic
nationalisms. The Prussian project, I argue, was instead one of Liberal-era assimilatory
nationalism, which allowed for multicultural belonging in the German nation to anyone
with the proper German Bildung and social status. This same spirit of Liberalism held much
less tolerance, however, for modern Catholicism, prompting repressive policies against
Church prerogatives throughout Catholic Europe. Although these policies also targeted
29

Polish language use and learning, public reaction in Upper Silesia did not follow national
dividing lines. A unified social and later political protest of Catholic Upper Silesians against
anti-Church Kulturkampf policy in fact united Polish and German speakers. The sense of
solidarity which emerged from this regional movement created the first popular awareness
of Upper Silesia as a distinct marker of identity; and it was precisely this regional cultural
diversity and bilingualism which established the region as distinct from other German and
Polish lands, rather than any internal national division.
The first attempts by Polish nationalists to transform this Catholic regional solidarity
into nationalist loyalties form the main topic of chapter two. The arrival of Polish
nationalism in Oppeln/Opole can be traced to one man, Bronisław Kroaszewski, who
moved from eastern Upper Silesia in 1890 to establish a Polish newspaper for the city and
surrounding county. His initial success in finding an audience for his Polish nation-building
project depended both on better-off rural farmers attracted to his vision, and on
sympathetic priests who established Polish-Catholic Associations. In the following two
decades, Koraszewski’s local movement, as part of a broader Polish nationalist movement
sweeping across Upper Silesia, was able to launch a successful Polish revolt within the
dominant Catholic Center Party, and eventually create an independent Polish party. Polish
nationalism showed remarkable strength at the polls in Oppeln/Opole, yet it failed to effect
the national division of society beyond election days. Local citizens abandoned the Polish-
Catholic Associations of the 1890s, channeling their interest instead to the newly popular,
and nationally neutral, Catholic Workers Associations in the subsequent decade.
Koraszewski’s inability to bring about the nationalization of local society led to a revolt
within the ranks of Polish activists, with more radical nationalist dissenters believing he had
30

not acted forcefully enough to convince locals of their natural identity as Poles. World War
I, however, would reunite Polish nationalists, who were reinvigorated by German defeat and
the possibility of their homeland joining the new Polish state.
The subsequent battle over Upper Silesia in the immediate postwar years, from 1918-
1921, is examined in the third chapter. The Allied decision to cede Upper Silesia to Poland,
based on its supposedly innate Polish national character, met with massive German protests
and prompted a plebiscite to determine national loyalties. While the vote was intended to
clarify national belonging, the plebiscite campaign fight and the accompanying Allied
occupation actually unleashed greater national ambiguity. German state-sponsored violence
and Polish insurrections framed the plebiscite as a miniature international war. Yet the
plebiscite also amounted to a civil war, where the battle lines between neighbors could just
as easily follow class or personal divides as national ones. The near-complete breakdown of
communal safety and trust in 1920 arguably did more to disillusion local citizens with
nationalist politics than any event in the region’s history. Plebiscite propaganda from both
sides tapped this disillusion, appealing to negative stereotyping of the enemy and stoking
fears of material insecurity, rather than making appeals to group national belonging. In the
end, voter choices were predicated as much on practical concerns of security and economic
well-being as on national affinity. The Upper Silesian plebiscite also forced activists to
invert their typical attitude towards democracy: Instead of assuming national loyalty and
demanding active duty to the nation, activists were forced to compete for the loyalty of
voters in a democratic field. The result was a plebiscite which, though structured around a
fundamentally national choice, gave Upper Silesians exceptional agency to express their
national ambiguity – not least through regional movements for autonomy and separatism.
31

The democratic Weimar era proved a crucial turning point in the growing divisions
between activists and nationally apathetic Upper Silesians, and thus is the focus of two
separate chapters. Chapter four addresses the failure of the Polish nationalists on the
German side of newly partitioned Upper Silesia to nationalize the population, despite a
greatly augmented social-cultural program. Attempts to target local Polish speakers –
especially youth – through theater and singing groups found short-term success in the later
1920s, but failed to convey an enduring sense of nationalist belonging. The increasingly
insular group of nationalist activists regularly exaggerated threats and violence against
Poles, while at the same time lamenting the apathy of their own Polish-speaking flock
towards their nationalization project. Schools and church catechism remained particularly
potent sites of national apathy, as parents increasingly chose a bilingual or German
education for their children on grounds of social integration. The Catholic Center Party
experienced a resurgence as the protector of these bilingual rights and practices – a position
it had established in the plebiscite period by securing provincial autonomy for the region
and greater control over cultural policies. Polish nationalists, meanwhile, saw their electoral
support plummet over the course of the Weimar period, and entered the Nazi era in
disarray, with another internal revolt among activists. While these activists looked back on
the 1920s in disappointment, many felt an affinity – counter-intuitive though it may seem
– with the new Nazi regime, in that both sides now advocated the racial unmixing of
societies and an end to practices of assimilation and integration.
While efforts to create a Polish national community around Oppeln/Opole resolutely
failed in the Weimar era, so too did efforts to forge German national loyalty among local
citizens, as shown in chapter five. The Polish and German national projects were
32

fundamentally asymmetrical, with Germans having the advantage of state power and the
promise of economic uplift to lure citizens into identifying as Germans. Such efforts failed,
however, primarily because of the persistent economic crisis in 1920s Upper Silesia which
severely limited opportunities for advancement. Arguments about Heimat were used
throughout German-speaking lands as an integrative force in nationalizing disparate
regions, but in Upper Silesia local patriotism failed to appeal to bilingual Catholics. Instead,
Upper Silesian Heimat served a German-speaking population intent on erasing knowledge
about Polish language and culture from the local landscape. By defining Upper Silesia
increasingly as part of a “threatened East” of Prussian territories including East Prussia,
activists denuded Upper Silesia of its unique regional characteristics. Upper Silesian Heimat
thus not only failed to integrate local Polish speakers, but also paved the way for border
revisionism and the racialization of the Polish-German border, processes which would
continue under Nazism.
The ultimately failed efforts of the Nazi state to Germanize or eliminate Polish-
speaking Catholic culture in Upper Silesia are the subject of chapter six. While Nazi leaders
consistently harassed and threatened the small corps of local Polish activists, culminating in
their imprisonment at Buchenwald concentration camp during World War II, the broader
population was targeted for complete assimilation. The Nazis found this task nearly
impossible. Initial efforts at Gleichschaltung faltered when local Polish speakers fled to the
suddenly revived Polish movement. These locals used Polish groups’ protected status under
international minority law as a shield against performing duties to the Nazi state. The
expiration of these protections in 1937 brought a full-scale Nazi assault on public usage of
Polish, above all in the churches. By the eve of World War II, the government had
33

succeeded in eliminating Polish from church sermons and in using selective terror to push
wide-scale linguistic Germanization in public spaces. Nazis briefly savored national victory
through brutal racial policies, but World War II then brought a reversal of their superficial
successes. Polish language use spiked around Oppeln/Opole after 1939, spurred by the large
numbers of Polish wartime laborers working on local farms. Fears of racial fraternization
and the reversal of decades of assimilatory work spread among regional officials, but the
Nazi war machine prioritized the need for Upper Silesian crops and soldiers over a
clampdown on Polish usage. Upper Silesia thus ended its era of German rule under the
myth of German ethnic homogeneity, when the reality looked markedly different.
Just a few years later, the province would exist under another false myth, one of Polish
ethnic homogeneity. In the epilogue, the dual processes of national verification and
repression of native Upper Silesians by the new Polish government are explored as a
continuation of the Nazi logic of racial homogeneity. The Polish regional government,
while arguably more thorough in its efforts to erase German culture than the Nazis had been
in erasing Polish culture, still could not eliminate everyday practices of German language
use among the bilingual population. It was precisely this repression and feelings of
marginalization within the Polish nation-state which led local bilingual citizens to sustain
an underground minority loyalty across generations. While those who had lived in interwar
Poland primarily came to see themselves as Upper Silesians, locals in villages around
postwar Opole/Oppeln declared themselves a German minority. Thus did history come full
circle, and through this modern saga, generations of Upper Silesians revealed the very
instability of the national categories which sought to divide them.
34

Oppeln/Opole on the Margins
The Pre-National Invention of the Upper Silesian, 1848-1890
35
Chapter 1
The tumultuous summer of 1866 in Oppeln/Opole began with a celebration, reached
its climax with a war, and ended with an outbreak of infectious disease. The celebration
came in May to mark the 50th anniversary as the capital of the Oppeln/Opole district, a
development which had turned this sleepy outpost on the Oder/Odra river into a bustling
bureaucratic town. Just as the celebration ended, fears spread of the impending battle
between Prussia and an Austrian-led coalition that threatened to break out in
Oppeln/Opole’s backyard. When the war came, it spared the city directly, but the staging
efforts and backend operations encompassed the region. Then, before the last prisoner of
war had been released from the local hospital, a virulent cholera epidemic spread amid the
late-summer heat, sickening and killing hundreds of local residents over the next two
months. In these three events the town experienced a reassertion of its historical ties to
Prussia, angst for its political future, and horror over the ravages of disease which man could
not control.
The year 1866 marked a crucial turning point in the history of Oppeln/Opole. Prussia’s
victory over Austria in the Seven Weeks’ War solidified the city’s place in the
Kleindeutschland [small Germany] which would be inaugurated less than five years later. By
creating a small German nation-state, Bismarck also ensured that Upper Silesia would
remain a borderland. Amid all the drama of 1866, however, there was no sign of national
battle between Poles and Germans which would come to dominate the public eye in later

decades. For the period from 1848-1890, political and social conflict in Oppeln/Opole and
its surrounding county was waged mainly on non-national terms. The roughly 100,000
people inhabiting this space spoke different languages, with a local Polish dialect
dominating in the countryside, and German the everyday tongue of Oppeln/Opole. 1 Yet
the impulse to define politics or power struggles as a battle between Poles and Germans
before 1890 was as foreign to most locals as the automobile. Nationalist activists and
historians subsequently created a vision of two stable, nationally divided societies, but these
did not yet exist in the region. The present understanding of the terms German and Pole,
to signify both national belonging and civic membership in ethnically defined nation-
states, was largely incomprehensible to a trader, artisan, or factory worker of the time.
The history of Oppeln/Opole before the arrival of mass nationalism, however, is not a
blank slate. Economic life, regional self-identification, and political loyalties underwent
significant changes, which would establish the fault lines in Upper Silesian society for nearly
a century. Increased literacy, political participation, and industrialization challenged
traditional hierarchies of village life and brought locals into greater contact with fellow
Upper Silesians. Yet these changes were accompanied not by the division of society into
two national groups, but rather by the opposite process: the consolidation of a regional
unity based on ethnic and linguistic diversity. The creation of an Upper Silesian regional
patriotism was tied not to nationalism, but to another, very real and socially relevant
marker of local community: religion. With the exception of civil servants and eighteenth-
century settlers, almost the entire local population was practicing Catholic. The strength of
1 The population of the Oppeln/Opole city and county grew from 103,367 in 1876 to138,023 in 1900. Józef Madeja,
et. al., Powiat opolski: Szkice monograficzne (Opole: Wydawnictwa Instytutu Śląskiego, 1969), 16. Wochenblatt für
Stadt und Land, 16 February 1876. APO, SPO, Syg. 219.
36

confessional community was hard-wired by everyday practice, shared belief, and the
hierarchical Catholic system which placed the priest as the arbiter of spirituality, and hence
of moral authority, at the local level. Yet Catholic ties expanded beyond the communal
level in the decades before and after 1866 amid a fervent, clerically-led religious revival.
Through new missions, pilgrimages, and social-religious groups founded after 1848, Upper
Silesians came to embrace a form of Catholic regional universality, that is, a self-
identification with Upper Silesia as a distinct, universally Catholic land. This internal unity
was further solidified by an external enemy, anti-clerical liberalism, which threatened the
prerogatives of the Church from 1848 onwards. The 1870s Kulturkampf [clash of
civilizations] led by Bismarck and Prussian Liberals against Catholics in newly unified
Germany was thus merely the culmination of decades of social and political consolidation
of the socially conservative, clerically-led Catholic milieu in defense of its self-proclaimed
rights. Ethnic nationalists would later have to contend with this robust regional loyalty
which tolerated ethno-national difference in the name of Catholic unity.
Silesia’s political relegation to a nation-state borderland took place concurrently with
its religious marginalization. Added to this was the poor economic integration of the region
into the industrializing economies of Prussia and Germany. Liberal notions of economic
progress driven by free trade and pro-business policies clashed with the interests of the noble
and artisan classes in Upper Silesia, who either fought capitalism tooth-and-nail or corralled
it to their own exclusive benefit. Workers suffered from low wages thanks to cheap labor
from the near abroad, while the economic disadvantages suffered by Silesia’s geopolitical
isolation were merely exacerbated by a mindset of protectionism among local elites. As the
“social question” of lower class pauperization took on crisis proportions throughout Silesia,
37

officials and artisans in Oppeln/Opole sought to protect a small-town mentality, defending
their own classes at the expense of the growing peasant and industrial misery. The Church,
with its extensive network of charity organizations, proved best able to tackle the social
question in Upper Silesia. Upper Silesia became relegated to an economic backwater within
the German Reich, ensuring a steady stream of outmigration and a century of social
conflict over how best to ameliorate the misery of this borderland.
NATIONAL DIFFERENCE BEFORE NATIONALISM
When Poles marched in behind Soviet soldiers to claim nearly all of Silesia 1945, they
couched their presence there not as an occupation, but as a return to natural order.
According to Polish government propaganda, Silesia was returning to its historical roots as a
“Piast” land – one innately tied to the Polish ruling dynasty of the high Middle Ages.
Poland controlled these “reclaimed territories,” the state asserted, through historical right. 2
Reference to the past has served as one of the main rhetorical tools for nationalist activists,
not just in 1945, but throughout the era of nationalism. In order to better understand the
origins of Upper Silesian autonomy and identity, it is essential to reconstruct the region’s
history in dialogue with the nationalists who have represented it for their own ends. While
investigating the history of this region in a linguistic and cultural transition zone, it is also
important to reconstruct ethnic difference as it was understood and interpreted in the era
before mass nationalism – as opposed to its later interpretation by nationalists. While
Prussian officials enacted policies based on hierarchical understandings of the superiority of
2 Grzegorz Strauchold, “Die ‘Wiedergewonnene Giebete’ und das ‘Piastische Schlesien’” in Marek Czapliński et al.,
Schlesische Erinnerungsorte: Gedächtnis und Identität einer mitteleuropäischen Region (Görlitz: Neisse Verlag, 2005),
306-322.
38

German culture, few self-identified Polish nationalists existed in the region to defend their
language on national terms. Instead, most residents had a neutral or positive attitude
towards processes of Germanization.
The name Silesia came into common usage sometime around the twelfth century. By
this time, unified rule of Silesian lands under the Piasts, the ruling dynasty of medieval
Poland, had already ended. The region had been split among two main dynastic lines: the
Breslau/Wrocław line and the Oppeln/Opole-Ratibor/Raciborz line. The border between
these two duchies corresponded roughly to the modern-era division of Upper and Lower
Silesia. To suggest, however, that Upper Silesia developed a distinct territorial identity in the
thirteenth century would be an enormous stretch. The term Upper Silesia does not even
emerge in literature until the end of the fourteenth century. By this time, the lands of
Silesia had been split up through partible inheritance over successive generations into ever-
smaller principalities. 3 The alliance of ruling elites was so weak to begin with that the term
“Piast” was not self-applied, and emerged only in the sixteenth century, after the last
vestiges of Polish rule had ended. 4 The region was by this time already home to a
multilingual population, as Piast rulers invited German settlers beginning in the thirteenth
century.
Territorial unity and linguistic homogeneity thus failed to overlap chronologically with
conceptual definitions of Silesia as a unit. Depicting the Piast era as a golden age for Polish
Silesia ignores the fact that no one at the time imagined Upper Silesia as a unit, and that it
was not even purely Polish speaking. Moreover, even among the tiny ruling elite, notions
3 Peter Moraw, “Das Mittelalter” in Deutsche Geschichte im Osten Europas, Bd. 3: Schlesien, (Berlin: Siedler, 1994), 57.
4 Gregor Thum, Die fremde Stadt: Breslau 1945 (Berlin: Siedler, 2003), 311.
39

of national difference played no discernible role in politics. Rulers, for example, introduced
Germanic law codes, which were implemented in Oppeln/Opole in the late thirteenth
century. 5 The one major institution with any unifying power over Silesia was the Breslau
Diocese, founded in 1000 – but even this proved at best a weak centripetal force in the pre-
modern era. The division of Silesian territories into over a dozen small feuding principalities
by the fourteenth century precipitated its external weakness, which allowed the Bohemian
crown to take possession of Silesian lands starting in 1335. As the various branches of the
Piast dynasty died out, Silesia passed slowly into Bohemian control, a process finalized by
1532.
With the Habsburg acquisition of Bohemia in 1526, Silesia came under the Austrian
crown, and it was under external rule that Silesia’s self-identification as a unified province
took concrete form. Silesian lords and elites defined their lands as tied to, but also distinct
from, their Habsburg rulers. Separated from Bohemia by the Sudetes mountain range, the
lords of the Silesian lands banded together to defend their powers over tax collection and
local military defense. 6 Moreover, Silesians defined themselves in the pre-Reformation era
increasingly against the popular Hussite movements in the Bohemian crownlands. Silesia fit
into Bohemia and later the Habsburg Reich not as a good son, but rather as a distant relative
who fulfilled family obligations but preferred to rule over its own house.
The banding together of Silesian lords to protect regional interests, without any
reference to national solidarity, consolidated regional self-conceptions of Silesia as an
independent unit, several centuries after the Piast era celebrated by Polish nationalists had
5 Franz Idzikowski, Geschichte der Stadt Oppeln (Oppeln: Clar, 1863), 54.
6 Norbert Conrads, “Schlesiens frühe Neuzeit (1469-1740)” in: Deutsche Geschichte im Osten Europas, Bd. 3:
Schlesien, 222.
40

ended. These same early modern rulers commissioned scholarly works on Silesia’s
geography, people, and history to build up a sense of patriotism for their common
landholdings within the Habsburg Empire. As the print revolution gripped Silesia, it enabled
the spread of regional studies such as Joachim Cureus’s Gentis Silesiae Annales (1571) and
Nikolaus Henel’s Silesiographia (1613). 7 Intra-provincial ethnic diversity in Silesia struck
these early modern chroniclers as much as modern observers, yet these early depictions of
difference did not portend national strife or regional disunity. In his Silesiographia from
1512-1513, Bartholomäus Stein noted two nations in Silesia, “who distinguish themselves
not only by the separate locations, but also by their customs.” 8 For Stein, the divide was a
deep cultural and even civilizational one. Sitting in Breslau, of firm German self-
identification, but writing in Latin, Stein described the Poles as “the others,” claiming that
they “are rustic, rough, without industry and ingenuity … Ours, by contrast, as if their
civilization [humanitas] had come from the West, lead a more cultured life and have more
industrious habits, and more open minds.” 9 Yet for all of the national differences Stein
enumerated, he placed more weight on political unity. He not only noted the shared
political sovereignty and similarity of dialects, but he also claimed that all of Silesia formed
its own nation, in the sense of patriotic loyalty. Thus Silesia became two nations in one:
bound by its political unity, but split in its cultural customs. That the latter would interfere
with the former did not seem to occur to Stein, or any pre-modern observer. The presence
of two separate “nations” meant little when the vast majority of the population were
7 The spread of Silesian regional panegyrics in the sixteenth century was, ironically, a result of the region’s rapid shift
to Protestantism. Lutheranism necessitated the razing of papal traditions and allowed space for a humanistinfluenced
defense of local patriotism and glory to emerge among the literate classes. See Manfred P. Fleischer,
"Silesiographia: The Rise of a Regional Historiography," Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 69 (1978).
8 Quoted in Ibid.: 227.
9 Ibid.: 228.
41

subjects, not citizens, and the ruling elites made no use of national difference for political
ends.
The region’s near-total conversion to Protestantism in the sixteenth century and the
limited success of the Catholic Counter-Reformation in the mid-seventeenth century left
Silesia with no single spiritual center of authority. For the next several centuries
confessional division followed a clear pattern: the further upstream – that is, southeast – the
Oder/Odra one went in Silesia, the more Catholic the population became. This religious
divide would only follow geographic language patterns very roughly. While only a minority
of Upper Silesia’s Protestants by the nineteenth century were Polish speaking, a large
proportion of Catholics remained German speaking. 10 Attempts by Polish nationalists
beginning in the late 1800s to turn the religious divide among Upper Silesians into a
national one – asserting that all Upper Silesian Catholics were Poles – betrayed the linguistic
diversity of the region’s Catholic population. Arguably the most important turn in Silesia’s
pre-modern history came in 1740-1742, when the newly anointed Prussian King Frederick
II opportunistically snatched away most of Silesia from the Habsburgs. 11 Settlement
programs under Frederick II in the mid- to late eighteenth century reintroduced many
Protestants to Upper Silesia. While nationalists would later decry this as the beginnings of
Prussian Germanization – even as a precursor to Hitler’s policies – the small pockets of
Protestant settlers only slightly altered the region’s confessional and linguistic
10 In 1837 the Oppeln/Opole district conducted their own, rather imperfect census. For Oppeln/Opole and all
counties east, they counted 87.4% Polish speakers, while for the three counties on the southwestern fringes of the
district, this figure was only 27.4%. Johann Gottfried Hoffmann, Nachlass kleiner Schriften staatswirthschaftlichen
Inhalts (Berlin: Reimer, 1847), 372-394.
11 Two separated stretches of land in the southeast of Silesia remained under the Habsburg crown and became
Austrian Silesia. This work will focus almost exclusively on Prussian Silesia, since Austrian Silesia follows a divergent
historical path.
42

demographics. 12 In the early nineteenth century, Upper Silesia was nearly 90 percent
Catholic, and would remain so through the era of Prussian and German rule. 13
After Prussian victory over Napoleon in 1813, Silesia cast off its special administrative
status from the era of Frederick II to become its own province, normally integrated into
Prussian administration. A provincial assembly was erected, and the province split into
three districts [Regierungsbezirke] – Lower, Middle, and Upper Silesia. 14 The creation of a
separate governing district for Upper Silesia does not seem to have been nationally
motivated, yet it had far-reaching and unforeseen consequences for the future. It created a
district that was overwhelmingly Catholic and Polish speaking, with the exception of its
western fringes. As Stanisław Ossowski has noted, the administrative split “played a large
role in the formation of the regional fatherland: with this governing district the concept of
the Upper Silesian became connected, especially in Germany, to an ethnic concept and
overlapped with the political.” 15 This newly developing concept of a distinct Upper Silesia
12 Of the Prussian settlers into Silesia during the reign of Frederick II, more than 80% actually came out of private
initiative of local landholders, and less than 15% under state stewardship. There were in total around 60,000 settlers
into Silesia, creating 446 new settlements. Of all counties in Silesia, Oppeln/Opole got the most new settlements, with
56. Gabriela Wąs “Dzieje Śląska od 1526 do 1805 roku” in Marek Czapliński et al., Historia Śląska (Wrocław: Wydawn.
Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 2002), 241. For a discussion of Frederick II’s post-war legacy as a precursor to Hitler
see Thum, Die fremde Stadt, 329-333.
13 The 1939 census registered an 89% Catholic and 10% Protestant population in the Oppeln district; a century
earlier the figures were 85% Catholic and 13% Protestant. To compare, the neighboring Breslau district in Lower
Silesia was around 40% Catholic and 60% Protestant in the early twentieth century, while the western Leignitz
district was around 20% Catholic and 80% Protestant. The 1939 census statistics are from Joachim Bahlcke and
Joachim Rogall, Schlesien und die Schlesier (München: Langen Müller, 1996), 160. The 1840 census figures can be
found in Leszek Belzyt, Sprachliche Minderheiten im preussischen Staat 1815-1914 (Marburg: Herder-Institut, 1998),
274.
14 The province was originally split in 1815 into four districts, but the additional district of Reichenbach was
dissolved in 1820 and integrated into the Breslau and Leignitz districts. See Ernst Birke und Ludwig Petry, “Politische
Geschichte 1815-1848” in: Geschichte Schlesiens: Bd 3. Preussisch-Schlesien 1740-1945, Österreichisch-Schlesien 1740-
1918/45, (Stuttgart1999), 26.
15 Stanisław Ossowski, "Zagadnienia więzi regionalnek i więzi narodowej na Śląsku Opolskim," Przegląd Socjologiczny
IX, no. 1-3 (1947): 117.
43

would, over the course of the nineteenth century, become understood as distinct from a
broader Silesia, which had much deeper and older roots in the minds of patriots.
Prussia’s gains from the Polish partitions, meanwhile, eliminated the state border
between Upper Silesia and Polish-speaking Posen/Poznań. The capacity for cross-regional
Polish movements was greater than ever. Yet it would be decades before mainstream Polish
nationalists in Posen/Poznań would take serious interest in Silesia. While the “fringes of the
Polish nationalist movement” in the mid-nineteenth century may have imagined Silesia as
part of a greater Poland, most were hoping for the restoration of the multi-ethnic Polish-
Lithuanian Commonwealth stretching far to the east. 16 The dominant, romantic nationalist
vision among Polish nationalists presupposed the leading role of Polish Catholic culture as a
civilizing force over a broad swath of Eastern Europe. The exiled philosophers and poets of
romantic nationalism imagined Poland as the Christ among nations, martyred by the
partitions but soon to be resurrected as the spiritual savior of Eastern Europe. 17 They hoped
to reconstitute the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as a multi-ethnic state in which Poles
reassumed political and cultural dominance, particularly over peasant cultures in regions
corresponding to today’s Belarus and Ukraine. Upper Silesia, notably, had no place in this
vision of a multi-ethnic Poland.
This romantic nationalist view of Poland’s cultural mission in Eastern Europe had an
analogue among German nationalists advocating their culture as the dominant one in
Central Europe in the nineteenth century. These Germans showed tolerance for a multi-
ethnic state, but one where the path to enlightenment meant learning German. The
16 Tomasz Kamusella, Silesia and Central European <strong>Nationalism</strong>s: The Emergence of National and Ethnic Groups in
Silesia, 1848-1918 (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2007), 66.
17 Andrzej Walicki, Philosophy and Romantic <strong>Nationalism</strong>: The Case of Poland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982).
44

downward cultural slope from West to East, solidified in the eighteenth century by
travelers, writers, and ethnologists, saw Upper Silesia increasingly as a civilizational border:
not one between two competing civilizations, but rather between civilization and its
absence. 18 Polish nationalists have interpreted the Germanization measures growing from
this philosophy as seeking to destroy Polish culture. While Germanization was definitively
on the program of Prussian officials, they imagined a hierarchical relationship where their
superior German culture brought enlightenment to Upper Silesians who lacked any
national self-worth or identity. For the district president Karl Graf von Reichenbach,
speaking in 1819 to an audience of educated Germans, his Upper Silesian subjects were not
in possession of their own culture; rather, they were “a coarse [grobsinnlich] race
undeveloped in outer or inner culture ... engulfed by drunkenness, indolence, and crude
ignorance.” 19 Their morals and social values were so low, he suggested, that they were better
off as serfs in the care of their wise lords. Their true unhappiness, he insisted, stemmed from
lacking a single culture, being stuck “in hermaphroditism between actual Poles and
Germans,” and speaking a regional pidgin. His solution, Germanization through
elementary schooling and the subsequent “eradication” of the Polish dialect in Upper
Silesia, would proceed quickly, he predicted with hubris. “It will truly take less than a half
century to completely wipe out Polish in a German province.” 20
These words from the most powerful official in Upper Silesia certainly appear to the
modern observer, as they did to Polish nationalists, to signal war of extermination against
18 Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 1994).
19 Karl von Reichenbach, "Betrachtung Oberschlesiens," Correspondenz der Schlesischen Gesellschaft für
vaterländische Cultur 1 (1820): 13.
20 Ibid.: 16-17.
45

Polish culture. There is no doubt that these hierarchical distinctions between German and
local Polish culture would inform the agenda of many Prussian officials well into the
twentieth century. In an era of embedded hierarchies, however, no one at the time equated
this practice with national extermination; and such language would only meet Polish
national resistance in Upper Silesia much later in the century. There also remained a large
gap between discourse and reality. In the 1820s and 1830s, Berlin did move to limit Polish-
language instruction in schools and curtail Polish at religious services, especially Protestant
ones, but applying these measures in Upper Silesia proved a logistical failure. As education
expanded, new pupils were left clueless in classrooms where the language of instruction was
not their native tongue, and the policies were reversed after 1848. 21 The main opponent of
these policies, moreover, was not a regional group of Polish nationalists (for none such
existed), but rather the Catholic Church, which was concerned with the literacy and religious
salvation of their flock. 22
Nationalists writing generations later presume the defense of Polish culture formed a
central goal for the Upper Silesian population, but very little evidence exists that local
Polish speakers even felt under attack. A key distinction must be made between von
Reichenbach’s nationalism and later forms of ethnic nationalism. The latter, which took
hold only around 1890 in Upper Silesia, assumed that national belonging was outside the
bounds of individual agency, and grew organically from one’s supposedly innate ethnic
traits. Prussian officials in the early nineteenth century (and indeed, into the twentieth)
worked from a different model of liberal assimilatory nationalism. According to their
21 Hoffmann, Nachlass kleiner Schriften staatswirthschaftlichen Inhalts, 384.
22 Kamusella, Silesia and Central European <strong>Nationalism</strong>s, 67-68.
46

understanding, any Polish speaker could become German through attaining the necessary
language skills and Bildung. These officials, in short, hoped to mold subjects into
enlightened Germans. In a society of naturally embedded hierarchies, Prussian officials
mapped the national superiority of Germandom over local Polish Unkultur onto local
subjects, without any understanding from either side that this was an ethnic clash. Liberal
assimilatory nationalism in Upper Silesia allowed room for multi-ethnic tolerance as long as
German culture maintained its place atop this hierarchy. 23 There is little evidence to suggest
that Polish-speaking peasants openly resisted this bargain of social advancement leading to
Germanization. Only at the very end of the nineteenth century was this presupposition
challenged in Oppeln/Opole, as ethnic nationalists attempted to upend the policies and
practices which allowed Polish speakers to become Germans.
OPPELN/OPOLE AND LOCAL SOCIETY BEFORE 1871
“What would have become of Oppeln were it not chosen as the seat of government?”
With this rhetorical question, the local weekly German-language paper – at that time the
only one in Oppeln/Opole – announced the upcoming celebrations on 7 May 1866 to
mark the 50th anniversary of the city’s selection as the capital of the Upper Silesian
district. 24 Indeed, Oppeln/Opole had been transformed primarily through its elevation to a
district capital, and the contours of the city would grow largely in step with changes in the
political landscape well into the twentieth century. When administrators arrived in their
new district capital in 1816-1817, they encountered a walled-in city of 3,000 residents,
23 Till van Rahden has explained this dynamic in the later nineteenth century for the Jews of Breslau. Till van
Rahden, Jews and other Germans: Civil Society, Religious Diversity, and Urban Politics in Breslau, 1860-1925 (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), 10-13.
24 Wochenblatt für Stadt und Land, 18 April 1866.
47

tightly packed along the Oder/Odra River and dominated by a dilapidated Piast castle from
the early thirteenth century. The 1800 census showed the city as 15 percent Protestant,
many of them civil servants. The remaining 85 percent Catholic population consisted
mainly of local artisans, traders, and their families, with weaving and brandy distilling the
two most common trades. 25 Locals were known for their penchant for strong drink. 26
By 1870, Oppeln/Opole had grown to a regional administrative and trading center of
nearly 12,000 residents, of whom only 44 percent had been born in the city. 27 The city’s
growth had been fed by the influx of government workers – both higher level, mainly
Protestant bureaucrats from afar as well as middling civil servants from the immediate
region. When, in 1863, Franz Idzikowski wrote an exhaustive history of Oppeln/Opole, he
depicted the city as not much different from a typical German town. The main divisions in
society, he suggested, stemmed primarily from class rather than linguistic differences.
Artisans had pubs for their own class, while the upper reaches of society gathered in the
Bürger-Ressource. When social mixing did take place, it was most likely on the favorite
Sunday promenade, the Bolko island nestled in a bend in the river on the edge of town.
Amid this class diversity, the public sphere in Oppeln/Opole, according to Idzikowski, “in
general exhibits a completely German character.” 28
25 Paul Vogt, Denkschrift für die Stadt Oppeln beim Eintritt in das Jahr 1900 (Oppeln: Erdmann Raabe, 1900), 4-6.
26 A doctor dispatched to Upper Silesia in 1848 noted the prevalence of brandy and other hard liquors. Alcoholism
was so prevalent, he claimed, that “the child is already fed with schnapps from the mother’s breast.” Rudolf
Virchow, "Mittheilungen über die in Oberschlesien erscheinene Typhus-Epidemie," Archiv für patholigische
Anatomie und Physiologie 2 (1849): 153. As a Progressive Liberal parliamentarian in the 1870s, Virchow would give the
Germany’s anti-Catholic campaign its enduring name, the Kulturkampf.
27 The 1871 census reported 11,879 people, of whom 5,216 had been born in Oppeln/Opole. Statistics of the 1871
census in Gemeindelexikon für die Regierungsbezirke Allenstein, Danzig, Marienwerder, Posen, Bromberg und Oppeln:
Auf Grund der Ergebnisse der Volkszählung vom 1. Dezember 1910 und anderer amtlicher Quellen, (Berlin:
Königliches Statistisches Landesamt, 1912), 304-311.
28 Idzikowski, Geschichte der Stadt Oppeln, 335-336.
48

When national difference was evident, it was enmeshed in everyday social interaction,
and brought with it no overt signs of social or political tension. The domestic help,
Idzikowski noted, was comprised mainly of young female Polish speakers from nearby
villages. The best way to tell local Polish speakers from the parvenus, Idzikowski claimed,
was their continued preference for spirits over beer. At times, however, the appearance of
being in a regular German-language town melted under the influx of nearby traders, and
never more obviously so than on market days. “On holidays and at the yearly and weekly
markets the German-speaking and urban-dressed residents disappear beneath the mass of
the rural Polish population, and one believes oneself suddenly snatched away to a Polish
city,” Idzikowski wrote. 29 The most crucial intermediaries, the shop owners and traders, were
typically bilingual.
Nearby villages, much like the town of Oppeln/Opole, defined themselves largely on
non-national terms. The parish and the village served as the two, often co-terminous,
boundaries of community for Upper Silesians. Both the villages and the city also
maintained a small-town attitude of self-defense from outside economic and political
forces. This was more than evident in Idzikowski’s treatment of the 1740 Prussian takeover.
While Prussian officials and historians in later decades would laud the event as the dawn of
civilization in Oppeln/Opole, Idzikowski saw it instead as usurpation of local prerogatives
and Catholic culture. The burdens of warfare, the naming of outside, Protestant bureaucrats
to run local affairs, and the presence of a new Prussian garrison in town, according to
Idzikowski, “elicited some discontent.” 30
29 Ibid., 336.
30 Ibid., 251.
49

The international tumult of the 1866-1871 period, however, forced those around
Oppeln/Opole’s to grapple with their political place in the German-speaking world. As
Bismarck ratcheted up antagonism towards Austria between 1864 and 1866, seeking to
exclude the multi-national empire on the Danube from a future German nation-state, fears
in Upper Silesia rose in kind. A war between Prussia and an Austrian-led alliance of German
states held the very real possibility of Silesia’s return to Habsburg rule. Most of Silesia had
been snatched from Austria by Frederick II only 125 years earlier. In an age when ancient
dynastic claims to land could spark wars, the Prussian hold over the province still had a
question mark attached. When the Seven Weeks’ War broke out in June 1866, Austria and
its allies were favored by many. Prussian defeat likely would have meant the return of
Oppeln/Opole to the Habsburg crown; unexpected victory for Prussia in the summer of
1866 instead cemented the state’s hold over Silesia. Although the city was spared direct
fighting, its hospitals and sick wards swelled with the ill and the injured from both sides of
the war; in mid-July, of the 279 soldiers laid up in the city, 96 were actually enemy
combatants from Austria. 31 Local dialect speakers would have had no more difficulty
communicating with these enemies than with Berliners or Rhinelanders in the Prussian
army. This was a civil war, one which presaged the “divorce of Germany,” and for local
residents of Oppeln/Opole, especially Catholics, the enemy seemed no more foreign than
their fellow Prussians. 32
While life soon returned to normal, the events of 1866 would have tremendous
regional-political consequences. The war determined the fate of Silesia within the political
31 Wochenblatt für Stadt und Land, 18 July 1866.
32 David Blackbourn, The Long Nineteenth Century: A History of Germany, 1780-1918 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1998), 243-244.
50

geography of the German national question. First in the North German Confederation and
later in the German Empire, Silesia became an eastern outpost within a Prussian-
dominated, majority Protestant Kleindeutschland [little Germany]. In the Großdeutschland
[large Germany] that was not in fact established, Oppeln/Opole would have served as a vital
crossroads between agrarian eastern Prussia and the heartland of Catholic Germans in
Bohemia and Lower Austria. But Bismarck’s project of Austrian exclusion from Germany
relegated Silesia to a borderland, hemmed in on three sides by foreign states. While 1866
was the key turning point in relegating Upper Silesia to a borderland, its cultural and
economic marginalization within Prussia and the German Empire is a story that stretches
across several decades, from at least 1848 into the 1880s. Through two key markers –
Catholicism and economic impoverishment – Upper Silesians came to feel internally united
as a distinct social-cultural unit, and opposed to the Prussian policies which had helped turn
their region increasingly into a backwater of Germany.
RELIGIOUS REVIVAL AND MASS REGIONAL IDENTITY
The strength of Catholic group identity in Upper Silesia solidified slowly over an
intense and politically tumultuous period from 1848 until the 1880s, and led to the first
stirrings of a mass regional self-identification. The two decades after 1848 witnessed a
Catholic revival in Silesia, which had previously been dogged by religious apathy and moral
laxity. In the half-century before 1848, a combination of secularizing policies, such as those
that opened the taverns on Sundays, and social dislocation caused by a slow end to serfdom,
left priests with only a weak grip on their parishes. “The appearance of godliness is there, but
unfortunately only the appearance,” reported the district president in 1819, who added that
51

outside churches, locals would indulge in the “binges of the crudest carnality.” Pilgrimages
often served as an “inducement to debauchery,” and drunkenness was ubiquitous. 33 This
widespread mixing of the sacred and profane was combined with a mixing of confessions:
churches were often used for both Protestant and Catholic services, religious festivals were
attended without regard to confessional loyalty, and even funerals were known to mix
confessions. 34 All of this led Heinrich Förster, the future bishop of the Breslau Diocese, to
depict Silesian Catholics in 1848 as a religiously indifferent people, driven into fear by
recent typhus and famine epidemics but unwilling to turn to the Church for help. 35 The
popular apathy was hardly confined to Silesia: in Western Prussia as well, the decades after
1815 were a low point for Catholic piety. 36
Religious revival in Silesia had its origins in the decade before 1848. The first clerically-
led mass movement came in 1844, a wildly successful temperance campaign under the
direction of Father Jan Fiecek. The movement reached Oppeln/Opole in June 1844, as
priests founded the local Temperance Association which, thanks to strong anti-alcohol
preaching, attracted 5,000 local members within the first six weeks. Some two-thirds of the
adult members of the parish had signed up, including women who entered the public realm
as a moral voice. The clergy reported enormous success in quieting the streets and taverns,
to the extent that alcohol merchants and taverns were threatened with financial ruin. 37 The
campaign provoked increasing piety in other domains. When, in August 1845 German
33 von Reichenbach, "Betrachtung Oberschlesiens," 20.
34 Paul Mazura, Die Entwicklung des politischen Katholizismus in Schlesien (Breslau: Marcus 1925), 1-2.
35 Wolfgang Mohr, Schlesien: Vorort des Katholizismus (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1989), 37.
36 Jonathan Sperber, Popular Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1984), Ch. 1.
37 Schlesisches Kirchenblatt, 20 July 1844, nr. 29, 231-232.
52

speakers in the Oppeln/Opole parish set off for a pilgrimage to St. Anna Mountain to
celebrate the Feast of the Assumption of Mary, they requested a priest accompany them, for
the first time in recent memory. Upon their return, the procession went not to the tavern,
but rather to the parish church to pray. 38 Moral revolutions rarely happen all at once – the
regional Catholic press in 1847 still denounced the “poverty of belief and the immorality of
our times” – but some saw a silver lining. 39 Among them was Förster, who in 1848
recognized the nascent potential of the church as a social bulwark capable of rallying the
masses. In a religious call to arms, he proclaimed “Let us together choose the motto to solve
[the 1848 crisis], und let it be: stand watch, fight, pray!” 40
The 1848 Revolution proved the greatest spark in igniting a new, enduring Catholic
revival. A huge number of new Catholic-social organizations sprouted up under clerical
leadership as part of the public self-organization of spring 1848. The Silesian Catholic
Association, a political-social umbrella organization founded by the Breslau Diocese in
spring 1848, signed up 20,000 members across 140 subgroups within its first year. This
association worked to found numerous offspring, including a Women’s Association,
people’s libraries, and Sunday and evening classes. 41 Although the Silesian Catholic
Assocation’s political activities were banned in 1850 under the weight of Prussian reaction,
clerical leaders in Breslau continued to introduce a multitude of new social-religious
organizations over the next decade. The St. Vincent Association charity group, the
Journeyman’s Association, the Apprentice Association and the student group Winfridia
38 Ibid., 13 September 1845, nr. 37, 477-478.
39 Ibid., 28 August 1847, nr. 35, 420-421.
40 Mohr, Schlesien: Vorort des Katholizismus, 37.
41 Ibid., 43.
53

were but a few of the organizations which came to encompass all aspects of social life for
Catholics, including many groups for women. Most groups only increased in popularity in
the decades after 1848: the St. Vincent Association jumped from 1,339 active members in
Silesia in 1857 to 3,221 in 1866, while more than doubling its donations. The Journeyman’s
Association, meanwhile, grew from 22 branches in 1859 to 80 in 1867. 42 Almost all groups
were under the watchful guidance of local clergy, whose goal was not only to awaken
religious life, but also develop faith more in line with Vatican orthodoxy. 43 Whereas in
previous generations the church had allowed the profane world to infiltrate its sacred
domain, now the church was leading the expansion of its sacred values into the profane
world. Just as importantly, the regional scope of such social-religious groups also produced
new connections. Members of a charity group in one corner of Upper Silesia could meet
co-religionists of the same group from another corner of the region at annual conventions,
and even support the poor in each other’s communities. Upper Silesia was increasingly
imagined as a singular unit in religious terms by clerical leaders spreading a uniform social-
religious network across their territory.
This Catholic revival benefitted from the Prussian constitution of 1850, a hallmark of
religious freedom compared to the pre-1848 era. It allowed religious orders a free hand to
settle and grow, as well as greater Vatican control over the appointment process of priests
and bishops. 44 Church leaders were also pleased with new leeway in educational policy.
Upper Silesia took particular advantage of new opportunities for bilingual education, thanks
to the vigorous activism of Bernard Bogedain, a theologian from Lower Silesia who was
42 Mazura, Die Entwicklung des politischen Katholizismus, 42-46.
43 Ibid., 46-47.
44 Sperber, Popular Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Germany, 52.
54

served as chief school inspector in Oppeln/Opole from 1848–1858. Bilingual from
childhood, Bogedain supported instruction in one’s mother tongue in order to defend
Upper Silesians’ “religion, morals, and customs.” 45 He took an active approach to the
implementation of Polish-language instruction, penning newer, more pedagogically
updated textbooks in Polish. His work helped to ensure that a generation of Upper Silesians
grew up mostly fluent in both Polish and German. Although Polish nationalists have
appropriated Bogedain, deeming his work a noble effort to “defend the Polish cause,” it
seems that Bogedain’s own motivations were wholly non-national. 46 While he founded the
first Polish-language paper in Oppeln/Opole, the short-lived Gazeta Wiejska dla Górnego
Śląska [Rural Newspaper for Upper Silesia], in its pages he consistently referred to his
readers not as Poles, but rather as “Polish-speaking Silesians.” 47 He also justified his
educational policy in wholly non-national terms, claiming that “with the language forced
upon people they lose the intimacy of religious ideas, morals, and customs.” 48 Bogedain
never seems to have mentioned the defense of Poles as a national group, rather only as a
regional group bound by language and religion. Bogedain’s tenure thus marks not the
beginning of a Polish national backlash against Germanization, but rather the last era when
educational policy proceeded without the meddling of nationalist activists or interests. The
result was a generation of Upper Silesians whose widespread bilingualism distinguished them
from both their Catholic neighbors in Lower Silesia, and from those in Russian and Austrian
45 Schlesisches Kirchenblatt, 13 August 1864, nr. 33, 402-403.
46 For the nationalist view of Bogedain, see Piotr Świerc, Ks. Bernard Bogedain (Katowice1990), esp. 15.
47 Ibid., 9.
48 Schlesisches Kirchenblatt, 13 August 1864, nr. 33, 402-403.
55

Poland. Thus Upper Silesians were increasingly marked as a distinctive regional group
united by biligualism.
In addition to local social-religious groups and increased bilingual education, a new
network of missions proved particularly vital in promoting a sense of regional belonging
and community among Catholic Upper Silesians. Bishop Melchoir von Diepenbrock, who
held office from 1845 to 1853, reintroduced the Jesuit missions to Silesia, and also brought
many previously unknown orders into the diocese. Among them were the Franciscans, who
set up a mission in Oppeln/Opole and soon took over control of the orphanage and local St.
Adalbert hospital. 49 Within a short time around 1850 the order had grown into a central
institution in Oppeln/Opole’s social-religious community. The Jesuits, meanwhile, became
known throughout Upper Silesia as vigorous and energetic promoters of piety. As they
traveled across Upper Silesia to deliver their sermons, the regional Catholic press organ
exclaimed in 1857 that, “God willing, in two or three years we won’t find a single parish in
our area which has not yet been newly fortified in its belief … [and] inspired in its love of
God and fellow man through the splendid sermons of these revered Jesuit fathers.” 50
The pilgrimages organized by the missions proved the most important mechanism for
forging mass regional solidarity among faithful Upper Silesians. The events were imagined
from the beginning as a regional phenomenon, as clergy encouraged travel and mutual
participation of parishes from throughout Upper Silesia. The first major Jesuit-led pilgrimage
took place in June and July 1851 in Piekar/Piekary to honor the recent completion of the
Basilica of St. Mary and St. Bartholomew, home of a Marian shrine. The small town of only
49 Karl Kastner, Kirchengeschichte Schlesiens (Breslau: Goerlich, 1920), 37-39.
50 Schlesisches Kirchenblatt, 7 February 1857, nr. 6, 79.
56

a few thousand managed to attract 15,000 pilgrims from throughout Upper Silesia. 51 In
March 1852 it was Oppeln/Opole’s turn to host a pilgrimage, organized by local
Franciscans. The pilgrimage, like many others, was really two in one: a German-language
version and a Polish one. Many of the participants came from the 14,000-member local
parish, but outsiders also streamed in for the event. Because Polish speakers dominated in
the small towns surrounding Oppeln/Opole, the main church was used for Polish-language
services. By Palm Sunday, the last day of the eight-day pilgrimage, some 20,000 Catholics,
including 12,000 who attended Polish-language masses, flooded the city. 52 These were
serious affairs, stressing piety and sacrifice – and especially for the traveling pilgrims such
treks represented significant discomforts in the name of religious observance. Those who
attended the full regimen of services would have experienced four masses a day for over a
week. The events were tightly scripted by priests, who ensured in most cases that masses in
German and Polish were identical in content. The pilgrimages thus embodied a separate but
equal mentality, with language as but a natural form of difference irrelevant to religious
content.
Such pilgrimages served as the single most important Catholic practice to develop a
sense of regional solidarity among Upper Silesians. As pilgrims traveled across the district,
they came into contact with co-religionists who shared their faith and their bilingualism.
This increasing regional solidarity among Catholic Silesians was on full display in August
1857 for the 600th anniversary celebration of the birth of the apostle Hyacinth. As pilgrims
flocked to his birthplace in Groß Stein/Kamień, Bishop Förster delivered the opening
51 Kastner, Kirchengeschichte Schlesiens, 392.
52 Ibid., 395-396.
57

emarks, encouraging regional solidarity by referring to “we Catholic Silesians.” He
cautiously lauded the recent religious revival, stating that Catholic Silesians “for a long time,
but especially in the last decade, have gone through a solemn schooling in faith and –
thanks be to Heaven – not without benefits.” For the next eight days the town overflowed
with pilgrims, including an Oppeln/Opole contingent accompanied by three priests. With
over 2,000 confessions heard, the regional Catholic paper wondered if Förster had
underestimated the strength of Catholic piety: “The Silesians can now reject the
admonishment that they have not sufficiently respected and praised the heroes of faith and
the saints of their province.” 53 What Förster and the Catholic press seemed to agree on was a
strong regional solidarity among these Silesian Catholics, driven together by a revival in
religious piety and social-religious activity under the guidance of the clergy. Their
bilingualism and ethnic diversity, in the eyes of the Church, served as primary traits linking
together Upper Silesians.
The more the Catholic Church was able to solidify its internal control over its flock in
Upper Silesia, the more it feared external political threats to its power. Indeed, the two went
together, for the fear of the profane world of secularizing liberals – the external threat –
served as a common enemy against which Catholics could be united. Just as for nationalists,
the rallying together in the face of an enemy served as a powerful centripetal force for the
Church. 54 This threat did not appear suddenly to Silesian Catholics with the onset of the
Kulturkampf in the early 1870s. Rather, the process of entrenchment began no later than
1858, with the increased powers of Liberal parties within Prussian politics and fears of a
53 Schlesisches Kirchenblatt, 12 September 1857, nr. 37, 457-458.
54 For an argument on the power of external enemies in solidifying national loyalties, see Linda Colley, Britons:
Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 18.
58

European-wide attack on the domains of Church authority. While a Catholic Party would
not coalesce until around 1870, Upper Silesians nonetheless elected Catholic conservatives
supported by the Church. The Catholic press and clergy preached a clash of civilizations to
their newly devout flock long before German anti-Church measures of the 1870s. The
developing political solidarity of a Catholic bloc must thus be seen as part of a longer-term
process that began in 1848 and culminated in the 1870s.
The Catholic Church asserted its political stake in the questions of German unification
and democratization continuously from 1848 onwards. Silesian clergy and church leaders
organized rapidly to defend a conservative, patriarchal political order against the
Revolution: in the spring and summer of 1848 they gathered over 100,000 signatures to
oppose early drafts of the new constitution. 55 But this did not translate immediately into
political solidarity. Clergy stumped for practically any candidate who promised to defend
Catholic rights, regardless of party affiliation, and the Oppeln/Opole representatives tended
to be local elites (such as the mayor or Landrat) who voted mainly with Conservatives in the
Prussian parliament [Landtag]. 56 Alliances at the regional level often competed against other
interests and factions in the Prussian Landtag in Berlin. 57 Political Catholicism still lacked
coherence and, above all, a coherent external enemy.
The increasing strength of Liberals, with their secularizing agenda, combined with the
end of Prussian reactionary policies in the late 1850s, caused a political realignment for
55 Mieczysław Pater, Katolicki ruch polityczny na Ślasku w latach 1848-1871 (Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im
Ossolińskich, 1967), 56-57.
56 Landtag election results in Zdzisław Surman, “Wyniki wyborów do pruskiego konstytucyjnego zgromadzenia
narodowego i izby posłów sejmu pruskiego na Śląsku w latach 1848-1914” in Studia i materiały z dziejów Śląska. T.
VII. Wyniki wyborów parlamentarnych na Śląsku, (Zakład narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1966), 120-121.
57 Mazura, Die Entwicklung des politischen Katholizismus, 26-28. For the case of Rhineland and Westphalia, see
Sperber, Popular Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Germany, 100.
59

Catholics. Liberalism emerged as the steady enemy. Already in 1857 the Church strongly
opposed a Prussian divorce law being proposed by Liberals. 58 In the next ten years Liberal
policies became increasingly anti-Church, embracing civil marriage and non-
denominational schools. In 1860, the Silesian Catholic press attacked the Liberals without
reserve: they claimed Liberalism “has stood definitively against the Church and defined its
politics through outbursts against the Pope, against the Bishops, against the whole
Church.” 59 The split with Liberals reached the point of no return after the constitutional
conflict over military spending which brought Bismarck to power in 1862. 60 For the Church,
Liberalism represented nothing more than revolution in respectable clothing, the
destruction of order akin to Napoleon’s sweep across Europe. The Church, in its own eyes,
remained the foundation bedrock of society, and Liberal nationalism its natural enemy,
representing disorder and extremism. “As soon as one leaves the solid and sure foundation
of rights [Recht], one comes to the system of nationalities, of natural borders, or in other
words: despotism,” the Church press organ wrote. 61 Priests agitated openly for anti-Liberal,
pro-Catholic candidates, garnering the suspicion and persecution of Prussian authorities. In
1861, the priest Jakub Czogalla from Brinnitz/Brynica just outside Oppeln/Opole came
under official investigation for spreading anti-Liberal, pro-Catholic propaganda before the
parliamentary elections. In his pamphlets – written in German and Polish with near-
identical content – Czogalla warned his parishioners of a haughty minority who ignored
majority opinion. This minority, of course, consisted not of Poles or Germans, but rather
58 Schlesisches Kirchenblatt, 14 March 1857, nr. 11, 137-138.
59 Ibid., 21 April 1860, nr. 16, 188-189.
60 Pater, Katolicki ruch polityczny na Ślasku w latach 1848-1871, 155.
61 Schlesisches Kirchenblatt, 21 April 1860, nr. 16, 188-189.
60

Protestants. He warned of Liberal meddling in education and the churches, combining a
self-defense of local prerogatives with an appeal to the “seven million Catholics of Prussia”
who he hoped could gain enough electoral power to direct Prussian policy “for the benefit of
the church interests.” 62 Villagers were being taught to fear the incursion of Liberal secularism
on local communities while simultaneously recognizing the numerical power and strength
of the Catholic community throughout Prussia. In this sense, Czogalla was promoting an
imagined community of Catholics to defend against Liberal policies.
Notably, the clerically-led press imagined the scourge of Liberalism as not just a
Prussian threat, but a universal (i.e. European) existential challenge to the Church. 63 In
1857, the Church already noted the irony of the Central European political order: the more
demographically Catholic the country, the more vulnerable it seemed to the threat of
Liberalism. Throughout the next decade the Catholic press would point towards majority
Catholic states such as Austria, Bavaria, Belgium, and above all Baden as bastions of liberal
or democratic-radical thought and anti-Catholic repression. 64 The Silesian Catholic press
envisioned an encirclement by anti-Catholic forces, which were seemingly strongest in
some of the most universally Catholic lands of Europe. The greatest vitriol, however, was
reserved for Italy, where Piedmontese-led unification sought to deprive Pope Pius IX of his
authority as ruler of the Papal States. For Catholics across Europe, this was nothing less than
a civilizational, life-or-death battle. In 1859, as Cavour savored victory over Austria and
Prussian Liberals cheered, Silesian Catholic authorities denigrated Italian revolutionaries as
62 GStA PK, Rep 76 IV Sekt. 7 Abt. IX Nr 7 Bd. I.
63 This was not merely a matter of perception: Throughout much of Catholic Europe, the half-century after 1848
witnessed anti-Church consolidation of state power. For an overview of various measures, see Winfried Becker, "Der
Kulturkampf als europäisches und als deutsches Phänomen," Historisches Jahrbuch 101 (1981).
64 Schlesisches Kirchenblatt, 14 March 1857, nr. 11, 137-38; 2 July 1864, nr. 27; 13 October 1866, nr. 41, 485-87; 9
November 1867, nr. 45, 529-530.
61

the “deadly enemy of the Catholic Church.” 65 Bishop Förster organized a massive campaign
in his diocese in 1859-1860 to support the beleaguered Pope, gathering 107,000 signatures
for a devotional letter to Pius IX. 66 The Silesian Church continued to demean the Italian
state, and Liberalism generally, in the most alarmist, morally Manichean terms possible. It
claimed that Liberalism “demands servility, and is thus not freedom, but rather slavery.” 67
Moral certainty proved the Church’s greatest weapon. Christianity represented the last
bastion of civilizational order against revolution, despotism, and moral anarchy. Italy,
France, Belgium, southern German states, and even Austria threatened with their strong
Liberal presence. This vision of a Catholic world order under threat became an integral part
of Catholic political education in the 1860s. Local Catholics were being taught by the
Silesian Church to imagine their own lives, and those of co-religionists across the region and
across Europe, as under common siege.
In this logic, Prussia actually represented a refreshing anomaly: a strong ministerial
state able to ward off the Liberal threat and protect biconfessional rights. The Silesian
Church lauded the multi-confessional state as a model of parity and protection for religious
rights, in stark contrast to officially Catholic states where bishops and priests supposedly
sacrificed piety for political power. 68 While Silesian clerical leaders no doubt wished to avoid
offending their worldly rulers in Berlin, they could also realistically point to a stronger
revival and more pro-Church policies in Prussia than in Catholic countries. It would prove
ever more difficult to maintain this posture, however, as the prospects for a
65 Ibid., 3 December 1859, nr. 49, 596-598.
66 Mazura, Die Entwicklung des politischen Katholizismus, 47.
67 Schlesisches Kirchenblatt, 2 July 1864, nr. 27.
68 Ibid., 14 March 1857, nr. 11, 137-138.
62

Großdeutschland dimmed in the 1860s. The Silesian Church stood firmly behind the
historical model of a reunited Holy Roman Empire under Catholic Austrian leadership.
Bismarck’s aggressive pursuit of the kleindeutsch option, excluding Austria from national
unification to allow for Prussian dominance, represented to Catholics a violation of the
natural, moral, and historical unity of the German-speaking lands. As war loomed between
Prussia and Austria in 1866, the Church warned that any remaking of the European map
threatened religious order as well, and that “Germany” was distancing itself from Christian
principles. 69 The sense of defeat and concern among Catholics after Prussia’s victory in 1866
was heightened by increased accusations of ultramontanism, which the Church initially tried
to deflect. Even in 1867, after Prussia had founded the North German Confederation, the
Catholic press tried to put a positive spin on events, noting that formerly repressed or lax
Catholics in areas such as Saxony and Frankfurt would benefit from Prussia’s pro-Church
policies. Considering the political turmoil of 1866-1867 in foreign Catholic lands, especially
in Austria, the Silesian Church felt relative safety under Prussian rule, and saw accusations
of ultramontainsm as unwarranted and blinkered. 70
When Prussia began its all-out assault on the Catholic Church in the 1870s, then,
Catholics believed they were witnessing not the beginning of a Sonderweg [special path] for
Germany, but rather its end. Prussia’s own special path defending its biconfessional subjects
was giving way to typical Liberal repression. Catholics experienced the new German Reich
as a threat akin to Baden or the Italian Risorgimento: a liberalizing, secularizing state intent
on destroying long-standing church prerogatives in education, marriage, and social life.
69 Ibid., 26 May 1866, nr. 21, 243-244.
70 Ibid., 16 February 1867, nr. 7, 76-77.
63

Germany’s downfall, Catholics insisted with moral certainty, would come not from
German pursuit of a special path of conservative preservation, but rather from an all-too-
typical European Liberal nationalism now endorsed by Bismarck.
Prior to the introduction of universal male suffrage, however, it was difficult for the
Church to forge a mass movement of voters to defend against the perceived Liberal scourge.
As elsewhere in Prussia, the Catholic faction in Upper Silesia was in fact losing its coherence
in the 1860s, with the 1866 elections (amid the Seven Weeks’ War) marking a low point.
Not a single member of the Catholic faction was elected from Upper Silesia; in the
Oppeln/Opole district, the Conservative Party candidates easily won. Much of this can
likely be attributed to Bishop Förster’s declaration ahead of the 1866 elections that no priests
should run for office, since they were needed in their parishes during a period of war. 71 It
remains, however, difficult to gauge the political solidarity of the mass of Catholics in an era
of three-class, non-secret balloting and low turnout among the lower classes.
Yet when universal male suffrage did come with the new North German
Confederation in 1867, the Catholic clerical leadership proved exceedingly ready, as they
quickly moved to form a Catholic People’s Association [Volksverein] in June 1867. This was
as a mass movement with explicitly political goals. Although officially loyal to Prussia and
the North German Confederation, the Volksverein defended itself vigorously against the
rising anti-Catholic sentiment of Liberals in the wake of the War of 1866. Initially weaker
at the polls in Oppeln/Opole than the Free Conservative Party, the movement would
quickly gain steam as the civilizational battle over Catholicism intensified after 1871. Te
previous two decades of religious revival had created a regional Catholic solidarity which was
71 Mazura, Die Entwicklung des politischen Katholizismus, 32.
64

olstered by fears of a European-wide war against the Church. Still guided by priests and
local elites, the Catholic movement could now enlist the support of the masses. The coming
of the Kulturkampf would provide the political consolidation of the newly enfranchised
masses, built on a solid foundation of social-religious regional solidarity.
THE KULTURKAMPF CONSOLIDATION OF CATHOLIC DISSENT
The program of anti-Catholic repression spearheaded by the Liberal-Bismarck alliance
of the 1870s, known as the Kulturkampf, sought to extinguish the lines of authority and
power within the church, which led to Rome, and realign them in the direction of Berlin.
Although it followed German unification in 1871, the Kulturkampf remained a mainly
Prussian affair. The most important measures, the May Laws of 1873, which put the
education and appointment of priests under state control, applied only to Prussia and not
the rest of newly unified Germany. Only the laws prohibiting politicking from the pulpit
(1871) and expelling the Jesuits (1872) were German-wide. 72 Persecution of priests and high
church officials was combined with the demotion or removal of Catholic civil servants
deemed potentially disloyal. Among the latter victims was the Catholic president of Silesia,
Ferdinand von Nordenflycht, who was forced to retire in 1874 for not enforcing the
Kulturkampf laws vigorously enough in his province. 73
Prussian motives, particularly those of Bismarck himself, have been pored over
endlessly without any definitive conclusions. National considerations no doubt played a
part in launching the Kulturkampf. Bismarck himself retrospectively tied his decision
72 Sperber, Popular Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Germany, 209-210.
73 Ronald J. Ross, The Failure of Bismarck's Kulturkampf: Catholicism and State Power in Imperial Germany, 1871-1887
(Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1998), 112-113.
65

primarily to tolerant language policies in Eastern Prussian territories, including Upper
Silesia. These policies, in the Chancellor’s eyes, had allowed Polish nationalists to use schools
to Polonize the population. 74 Bismarck noted at an October 1871 meeting of Prussian
ministers that “There exists a Slavic propaganda together with the ultramontanes and
reactionaries, from the Russian border to the Adriatic Sea.” He continued, “it is necessary to
defend our national interests, our language against such hostile endeavors.” 75
For many historians, the Kulturkampf represents the first blow in a life-or-death
struggle between Germans and Poles which would continue until 1945. 76 A more precise
look at Bismarck’s motivations, however, reveals not a deep antipathy to all Slavic speakers,
but rather to those who sought to upset the liberal model of assimilatory German
nationalism. This was most obvious in Posen/Poznań, where a Polish landed elite mobilized
increasingly after 1848 to stem the processes of integration of Polish speakers into Prussia.
It was these nobles and clerical leaders for whom Bismarck reserved his greatest antipathy,
not the Polish-speaking masses. Bismarck explained this dynamic in November 1871:
The extension of the German language in Polish parts of the country deserves
special attention. The laws do not hinder it; but the influence of the local clergy
hinders the use of German, because Slavs … in alliance with ultramontainsm,
try to maintain crudeness and ignorance, and everywhere fight Germanism,
which attempts to propagate enlightenment. 77
The conservative Bismarck thus espoused his own liberally motivated form of cultural
superiority, which saw German as the path to enlightenment. Yet he famously said that he
74 Richard Blanke, Prussian Poland in the German Empire (1871-1900) (Boulder, Colorado: Columbia University
Press, 1981), 17-18.
75 Adelheid Constabel, Die Vorgeschichte des Kulturkampfes (Berlin: Rütten & Loening, 1957), 128.
76 Lech Trzeciakowski, The Kulturkampf in Prussian Poland (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), William W.
Hagen, Germans, Poles, and Jews: The Nationality Conflict in the Prussian East, 1772-1914 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1980), Blanke, Prussian Poland.
77 Constabel, Die Vorgeschichte des Kulturkampfes, 137.
66

harbored no ill will towards the Polish-speaking masses, whom he felt had merely been
duped by clergy and elites into skirting the path to Germanization. 78
It is particularly counter-productive to speak of a national battle in Upper Silesia, for
no one yet rose to the defense of Polish rights as national rights. Most Upper Silesians
seemed less interested in enlightenment than in their rights to specific religious freedoms –
rights they had grown accustomed to in the era of religious revival. The impact of the
Kultirkampf on everyday, social-religious life in Upper Silesia remains woefully
understudied. Yet the burden was clearly huge: as priests died or were imprisoned, and no
one was appointed to replace them, parishes survived with chaplains or without any religious
authority at all. By 1882 it was estimated that around 25 percent of Silesian Catholics, some
545,500 souls, lacked a head priest in their parish. 79 In the Oppeln/Opole district there were
68 vacant parishes, of which 22 had a chaplain but another 46 were totally abandoned.
Around 283,700 Upper Silesian Catholics out of nearly 1.3 million (over 20 percent) were
missing a head priest in their diocese. 80 A whole generation of potential priests was barred
from their regular course of education and assignment by the Kulturkampf measures.
Parishoners, meanwhile, adapted as best they could. Some were forced to walk long
distances to attend masses, while chaplains struggled to fill in for priests in prison or in
exile, sometimes only offering masses sporadically. Catholics also resisted, sometimes
violently, the persecution of priests. Two policemen were injured in
Laurahütte/Siemianowice during a riot in April 1874 for posting announcements of the
charges against local chaplain Victor Ganczarski, who was convicted that month of being
78 Trzeciakowski, The Kulturkampf in Prussian Poland, 116.
79 Schlesische Volkszeitung, 30 December 1881, nr. 298.
80 Germania, 7 January 1882, nr. 10.
67

appointed without government approval. Local officials described, with official restraint, an
“embittered popular mood” during the riot. 81 Such punishments against local priests were
commonplace, as they were across Prussia. Yet just as often, lay Catholics would pay the
priests’ fines or buy back their confiscated property, then welcome them with applause when
they returned to their parishes. 82 Efforts to decapitate the Silesian Church by persecuting
Bishop Förster also backfired. After refusing to pay 11,600 Thaler in fines for subverting the
May Laws, Förster fled in 1875 to the Austrian sliver of his diocese, where he continued to
assert authority until his death in 1881. Förster’s case was far from unique; at the height of
the Kulturkampf, nearly every Prussian Catholic bishop was in prison or in exile. This
widespread persecution prompted vigorous defense from Catholics, who learned as a
community to despise the anti-Church policies of the Prussian and German states. While
some historians have emphasized the immaturity of the Prussian state bureaucracy and
political missteps as keys to the Kulturkampf’s failure, one must not underestimate the scale
and fervor of civil disobedience among Catholics in Prussia. 83
With the help of local and regional elites, Catholics channeled this disobedience into
the political realm through overwhelming electoral support for the emerging Catholic
Center Party [Zentrum]. Because Silesia was largely cut off from the mass of Prussian
Catholics in the Rhineland and Westphalia, local Center Party leaders decided not to join
the largest Catholic resistance group, the Mainz Association, when it was founded in 1872. 84
Instead, Silesian Catholic politicians asserted their regional distinctiveness by founding the
81 GStA PK Rep 76 IV Sekt. 7 Abt. XII Nr 6 Bd. I.
82 For example, a Breslau merchant twice bought Archbishop Förster’s personal belongings and dutifully returned
them after they were auctioned off to pay for his fines. Trzeciakowski, The Kulturkampf in Prussian Poland, 66-67.
83 Ross, The Failure of Bismarck's Kulturkampf: Catholicism and State Power in Imperial Germany, 1871-1887, 13-14.
84 Sperber, Popular Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Germany, 211.
68

Christian-Conservative Electoral Association for Silesia in October 1872. 85 As the
committee set about running candidates for German and Prussian parliament seats, they
imagined themselves in terms of regional unity over local loyalty: leaders saw no problem
in nominating candidates born outside their own specific electoral district, and instead
sought to maximize the strength and unity of the party for all of Silesia, with Upper Silesia
as their main target. This political conception of Upper Silesia as a distinct religious-regional
unit was only possible thanks to the previous decades of Catholic revival.
Among the original founders of the Christian-Conservative Electoral Association was
Franz Graf von Ballestrem, who would play a vital role in Oppeln/Opole politics for the
next two decades. Ballestrem was born in 1834 into one of the wealthiest noble families in
Upper Silesia, his father Karl Wolfgang having turned their landholdings into a profitable
industrial mining enterprise. After schooling in Lemberg/Lwów/L’viv, Jesuit education in
Belgium, and courses at a mining academy in Liège, Ballestrem joined the Prussian officer
corps in 1855, and served in both the Seven Weeks’ War and the Franco-Prussian War.
Forced to withdraw from the Army after sustaining injuries from a horse fall on the march
to Paris, Ballestrem returned to Upper Silesia in 1871 as both a staunch Catholic and a loyal,
military-bred conservative. He was known for his self-imposed class boundaries, socializing
mainly with fellow noblemen. 86 The Kulturkampf would not shake his deep social
conservatism, but it would turn him against the German state. When the Oppeln/Opole
district’s Reichstag seat opened up in early 1872 after the death of Conservative
representative Graf von Strachowitz, Ballestrem decided to run. He won convincingly,
85 Leonhard Müller, Der Kampf zwischen politischen Katholizismus und Bismarcks Politik im Spiegel der Schlesischen
Volkszeitung (Breslau: Müller & Seiffert, 1929), 177.
86 Helmut Neubach, Franz Graf von Ballestrem, ein Reichstagspräsident aus Oberschlesien (Dülmen: Oberschlesischer
Heimatverlag, 1984), 8.
69

despite having no direct connections to the district, which was at the other end of Upper
Silesia from his estate. Catholics who voted for Ballestrem, like those across Upper Silesia,
saw the elections as “less a matter of the person, and more a matter of principles.” 87 The
success of candidates drawn from beyond local districts points to a consolidation of Catholic
political regionalism which proved more powerful than local notable politics
[Honorationenpolitik].
Ballestrem would become the undisputed lay figurehead of Upper Silesia’s Center Party
and one of the most important representatives at the national level, holding his Reichstag
seat for over 20 years and occupying another seat in the Prussian Landtag. 88 As the
representative for Oppeln/Opole, however, Ballestrem seemed to take little interest in
specifically local affairs, instead choosing to represent his district as part of a regional
alliance of Catholics resisting the Kulturkampf. Religious politics came first, and nationalism
proved almost entirely irrelevant to Ballestrem; in his eyes, Polish speakers were seen as
having the full potential to become German citizens. Speaking at the September 1872
German-wide Catholic Assembly in Breslau in 1872, Ballestrem noted that “we are a
collection of German Catholics.” He added, “You will find here virtuous German Catholics,
even when they speak Polish,” which was answered with hearty applause. 89 Nor was
Ballestrem ignoring a tide of national sentiment in his statements; almost no one of
importance saw nationalism as a salient issue or noted any stirrings among the local
Catholic population. Even Karol Miarka, the publisher of the Polish-language newspaper
87 Mazura, Die Entwicklung des politischen Katholizismus, 90.
88 Ballestrem eventually reached the position of Reichstagpräsident later in his career while representing another
Upper Silesian district from 1898-1906. Neubach, Franz Graf von Ballestrem, ein Reichstagspräsident aus
Oberschlesien, 9.
89 Mohr, Schlesien: Vorort des Katholizismus, 95.
70

Katolik [The Catholic], who has been canonized as a Polish national hero, remained a
staunch defender of the Center Party and rarely if ever spoke of Upper Silesians as national
Poles. 90 Miarka even self-identified mainly as a German until he was almost 40 years old. 91
Even in fighting seemingly anti-Polish policies, the party still steered clear of defining
the battle lines in national terms. The September 1872 language ordinance for Upper
Silesian schools serves as a prime example. While measures in 1863 had already started
shifting education more towards the German tongue, the 1872 district-wide ordinance put
a blanket ban on Polish as the language of instruction, with the exception of religious
instruction in the lower grades. 92 Polish could be taught as a foreign language, but otherwise
it was only to be used for strict purposes of translation to help comprehension in non-
religious subjects. Yet Church protests against school policy in Upper Silesia focused more
on the removal of priests from schools as religion teachers and threats to the confessional
divisions between schools. Protests against the language law, when raised, focused solely on
the moral danger to the Church of students losing their God-given right to pray in their
mother tongue. 93 Nor did the school policy spill over into a generalized persecution against
the Polish language in Oppeln/Opole. Oppeln/Opole’s Polish high school teacher, Father
Józef Cytronowski, continued to teach through the Kulturkampf years; Father Karol Nerlich
founded a Polish-language magazine in the city at the height of the persecution; and in
1883 Father Konstanty Damrot became director of seminary academy in Oppeln/Opole,
90 Trzeciakowski, The Kulturkampf in Prussian Poland, 26-28. Trzeciakowski generally portrays Miarka and his
newspaper as a defender of Polish national interests even while admitting that Miarka himself waged most of his
battles on firmly religious grounds.
91 Kamusella, Silesia and Central European <strong>Nationalism</strong>s, 81.
92 Eduard Kupfer, Schul-Verordnungen der Königlichen Regierung zu Oppeln (Breslau: F. Hirt, 1892), 288-291,
Trzeciakowski, The Kulturkampf in Prussian Poland, 124. The ordinance remained after the drawdown of the
Kulturkampf, at which point it appeared more explicitly anti-Polish in nature.
93 AAW, 1 A 22 a 37, Schlesische Volkszeitung, 10 July 1877.
71

despite being a major defender of Polish language. 94 This evidence of a lack of nationalist
persecution against Polish speakers contradicts attempts to portray the Kulturkampf in
Upper Silesia as a battle between Poles and Germans.
This focus on the defense of religious rights regardless of language seemed to satisfy the
Catholic male population as they headed to the polls. Beginning in 1872, the Center Party
would win every German Reichstag election for Oppeln/Opole for the next 34 years. 95 It
won every local seat in the Prussian Landtag from 1876 until 1908. 96 The party enjoyed a
rise to near-total domination not just in Oppeln/Opole but throughout Catholic Upper
Silesia. By 1874 the party already controlled 15 of 21 Landtag seats and 8 of 12 Reichstag
seats in Upper Silesia. Its dominance only increased, lasting a full generation after the end
of the Kulturkampf. From 1884 until 1903 the Oppeln/Opole Regierungsbezirk was
represented continuously by 11 Center Party Reichstag parliamentarians and just one
Conservative (from the German-speaking and more heavily Protestant western fringe of
the district). The Center Party held a similar regional monopoly in the Prussian Landtag
from 1882-1903 (with the exception of 1893-98), holding 20 of 21 seats. 97 The Center
Party’s share of votes for the Reichstag in Upper Silesia never dropped below 60 percent
during a 27-year stretch from 1877-1903, and at its height topped 80 percent in the
elections of 1881, 1884, and 1893. 98
94 Władysław Dziewulski and Franciszek Hawranek, Opole : monografia miasta (Opole: Instytut Śląski, 1975), 329-330.
95 Studia i materiały z dziejów Śląska. T. VII., 120-123, 278-297.
96 Thomas Kühne, Handbuch der Wahlen zum preussischen Abgeordnetenhaus, 1867-1918: Wahlergebnisse,
Wahlbündnisse und Wahlkandidaten (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1994), 103-104.
97 Michael Gerber, “Politische Geschichte 1848-1918” in: Geschichte Schlesiens: Bd 3, 60, 70-71.
98 Ibid., 69.
72

Jonathan Sperber has estimated that, for the Catholic strongholds of Rhineland and
Westphalia, up to 99 percent of Catholic voters cast their ballots for the Center Party by the
end of the 1870s. 99 It is difficult to do a similar analysis for Upper Silesia, if only because
Catholic dominance was so complete that Conservatives had begun boycotting many
elections by the 1880s. In the 1884 Reichstag election, Ballestrem won 95.7 percent of the
votes in his district, but with a turnout rate of only 50 percent, thanks in large part to a
boycott from Conservatives. In the city itself, the turnout rate was an abysmal 29.2 percent,
as Conservatives (and many Catholics as well), sure of the outcome, stayed home.
Nonetheless, in the towns and villages outside Oppeln/Opole, of the 9,656 votes cast in
1884, only 300 went to candidates other than Ballestrem, giving him 96.9 percent of the
vote. Even assuming a total boycott of the election by non-Catholics, it is clear that
Catholic votes for the Center easily topped 95 percent. 100 Clergy skirted or even openly
defied Kulturkampf laws to inform parishioners of their duty to vote for Catholic
candidates, and Catholics followed in kind. 101 For a Catholic movement grounded in piety
and social-religious work, the political solidarity against the Kulturkampf created what one
Silesian historian has deemed a grand “Catholic wholeness.” 102
No event brought this more to the fore for locals than the July 1877 regional meeting
of Silesian Catholics in Oppeln/Opole. Despite a typhus epidemic in the eastern stretches of
the province and stormy weather, around 3,000 Silesian Catholics flooded the city for the
99 Sperber, Popular Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Germany, 255.
100 Wochenblatt für Stadt und Land, 29 October and 5 November 1884.
101 Electioneering from the pulpit and from clerical publications would generally not advocate a specific party, but
rather make clear that voters must only elect representatives who strictly adhered to a pro-Catholic agenda. See, for
example, the 1873 campaigning in Müller, Der Kampf, 180.
102 Mohr, Schlesien: Vorort des Katholizismus, 136.
73

nearly weeklong event. Banners and decorations adorned the main thoroughfares, and local
residents put up the majority of visitors in their homes. Social solidarity and regional
connections were thus bred in the most intimate of social spaces. Ballestrem’s speech to the
crowd built off this regional solidarity, asserting that Silesians were also part of a global
community: he counted one pope, 1,000 bishops, 100,000 priests, and 200 million
worldwide among the faithful. 103 Most speeches, however, focused on concrete policy issues,
especially in the schools. The Breslau parliamentarian and newspaper editor Dr. Adolph
Franz spoke at the plenary session for one-and-a-half hours on the school issue, claiming
that Upper Silesian Catholic schools “suffer under a double burden,” not just from
Kulturkampf policies, but also from anti-Polish language ordinances. This remained a
religious issue for him, as “children are falling behind in their spiritual development.” 104
Polish was only a natural right insofar as it promised Upper Silesians a pious life. At a day-
long Polish language meeting during the convention, attended by around 1,000 Polish-
speakers, essentially the same message was given. Father Franciszek Przyniczyński, editor of
a Polish-language Center-Party paper in Beuthen/Bytom, spoke in terms of regional, not
national solidarities, driven by a religious defense of language. He claimed, “Upper Silesia’s
virtuous people must defend not only their religion, but also their language, so that they
can pray to God in the language they think in and understand.” 105 At this and many other
events arranged for every possible demographic, including women, citizens of
Oppeln/Opole experienced the consummation of a regional religious solidarity, bred
103 Ibid., 118.
104 Schlesische Volkszeitung, 13 July 1877.
105 Ibid., 12 July 1877.
74

through a common opposition to anti-Church policies, and undivided by national
difference.
This internal religious unity propelled by external opposition manifested itself
concretely at the everyday level of experiences. Outsiders or those with alternative ideas
were treated harshly. As locals in Oppeln/Opole rang in the New Year of 1875 at the North-
German Beer Hall, an interloper, a so-called “Culturkämpfer … expressed his modern ideas
a bit too loudly to others.” A professed Old Catholic, this rowdy patron rejected the 1870
decree of papal infallibility and supported Bismarck’s drive against Catholics. After two
hours of waxing about the ills of the Catholic Church and the pope, he was eventually
kicked out by the barman, “to the great cheers and applause of other guests.” 106 A visceral
distaste for the commemorations of the new German Empire, particularly the Sedan Day
celebration of Prussian victory over France in 1870, also united Catholics across Germany.
The Sedan Day celebrations in Oppeln/Opole shifted from being a state-run celebration
with widespread participation in the early 1870s to a mild affair in the 1880s limited to local
patriotic groups such as the Veterans’ Association and to the schools. City officials resigned
themselves to lackluster participation, and in some years, such as 1882, there was no
celebration at all besides those in private clubs. 107 The Catholic population almost entirely
abstained from celebrating Prussian victory and the founding of the small German
Empire. 108
This dual alienation from Prussia and from Germany is important, for it signaled a
profound dissatisfaction with Prussia as a state (which had enacted the majority of anti-
106 Ibid., 13 January 1875.
107 Wochenblatt für Stadt und Land, 6 September 1882.
108 See the various documents on Sedantag celebrations from 1872-1894 in APO, AMO, Syg. 397.
75

Church legislation), as well as with German nationalism and its Protestant antipathy for
Catholic values. This was particularly troubling for local Conservatives in Oppeln/Opole,
most of them from the bureaucratic and landowning classes, who also felt strong ties
between Prussian patriotism and German nationalism, and worried about the local
denigration of both. This was a group who had imagined the founding of the German
Empire not as the creation of a new democratic political body, but rather as the extension of
Prussian royal privileges and a glorification of King Wilhelm I. In their eyes mass politics
was a dirty phrase, as voting was seen instead, according to the local newspaper in 1871, as
“such an honorable and also serious task.” 109 Their desire for “apolitical” notable politics
controlled by local elites was being upset by Catholic mass politics, with its appeals to party
principles and civil opposition over patriotic duty and the personal qualities of candidates.
Ahead of 1875 election, the Conservative newspaper cried out “Away with this pernicious
camaraderie!” This group declared themselves free of any political or class loyalties, beholden
only to patriotic duty combined with a firm hierarchical belief that the best man for office
was he who possessed the greatest “sense of honor.” 110
That confessional opposition should disrupt these patterns of dual loyalty to Prussia and
to German nationalism was considered blasphemous in the bureaucratic public sphere,
which was also growing larger in Oppeln/Opole thanks to government expansion. Civil
servants and their allies claimed the mantle of apolitical patriotism, imagining themselves as
the defenders of the state’s honor, and by extension their own. The inability of this class to
cope with the arrival of mass politics and the dissent of the Catholic population would drive
109 Wochenblatt für Stadt und Land, 22 Febrary 1871.
110 Ibid., 27 October 1875.
76

officials to boycott several elections in the Kulturkampf era. This class would also form the
core constituency of an expanding nationalist milieu in Oppeln/Opole which would,
beginning around the turn of the century, prove a powerful force against Catholicism and
nascent Polish nationalism. For the time being however, everyone in Oppeln/Opole had to
live with the political dominance of the organized, united, and socially powerful Catholic
opposition.
ECONOMIC MARGINALIZATION
In the nineteenth century Silesia earned the dubious distinction of becoming Prussia’s,
and later Germany’s, economic backwater. Structural deficiencies in the regional economy
and elite self-interest combined with Reich-wide protectionist measures combined to make
Silesians among the poorest in all of Germany. Prussia’s westward expansion in the early
1800s, and its pursuit of the kleindeutsch solution after 1848, relegated the province
increasingly to an economic borderland. Surrounded on three sides by foreign borders and
lacking efficient transport networks to other parts of Germany, Silesia suffered especially
from protective tariffs which hampered the flow of goods from the near abroad. Meanwhile,
the integration of Silesia into European and then global trading networks left its
agricultural and proto-industrial sectors severely disadvantaged. Although Silesia faced
enormous geographic and geopolitical hurdles to becoming economically successful, its
deficiencies were only exacerbated by the decisions of politically powerful classes within the
province to protect their own interests.
A slow, painful end to serfdom for peasants in Prussia in the first half of the nineteenth
century was made all the worse in Silesia by the overwhelming power of large estate owners.
77

These nobles negotiated the continuation of indirect services from peasants, and
maintained economic dominance over the small landholders who had managed to buy their
freedom. Many former serfs lost their historical rights to gather wood or pasture their
livestock. Moreover, nobles maintained nearly complete administrative control over their
estates, commandeering court systems to their favor as complaints against them rose in the
1830s and 1840s. 111 The introduction of money exchange to the property market forced
many debt-burdened small landholders to sell or parcel their holdings, resulting in a
consolidation of landholdings among nobles or well-off farmers. The increase in landless
peasants was exacerbated by Upper Silesia’s population explosion in the mid-nineteenth
century: from 500,000 in 1817 to over 1.3 million in 1871. Meanwhile, Silesia’s main
proto-industry, textiles, suffered under the flood of cheap, mass-produced cloth coming
from industrialized England, as well as from Saxony and the Rhineland. 112 The famous
weavers’ rebellion in 1844 in Lower Silesia became a symbol of the widespread pauperization
of textile workers and the peasantry in the pre-1848 years. Despite such advances as the
early introduction of railroads (Oppeln/Opole was connected to Breslau in 1843 and Berlin
in 1846), Silesia was already known by the 1850s as the “poor house of Prussia.” 113
The process of industrialization would only accentuate the developing internal
differentiation of Prussia that was turning Upper Silesia into a backwater. While the region
had enjoyed cameralist development of its mineral riches under the Prussian crown in the
111 Wilhelm Magura, Geschichte der Landwirtschaft Schlesiens: 2000 Jahre Bauernkultur (Hamburg: P. Parey, 1986), 76-
80.
112 Arno Herzig “Die unruhige Provinz: Schlesien zwischen 1806 und 1871” in: Deutsche Geschichte im Osten Europas,
Bd. 3: Schlesien, 478, 487.
113 Ibid., 494.
78

eighteenth century, these enterprises remained small compared to the overall economy. 114
Nonetheless, they proved central to Prussia, whose territory still consisted mainly of marshy
plains east of Berlin. Silesia’s economic role would slowly change after Prussia’s acquisition
of western territories along the Rhine in 1815. The subsequent reorientation of Prussia’s
economic gaze westward brought with it customs reforms, and while these freed up new
markets within German lands, they made it harder for Upper Silesia, tucked against the
Russian border and removed from most Prussian population centers, to compete. While
Ruhr and Rhineland industrialists would travel to Upper Silesia in the early nineteenth
century to learn the most modern mining techniques, by the 1860s Upper Silesia had ceded
its technical supremacy in heavy industry, as western areas developed more efficient mining
and smelting processes. 115
Industrialization was also subject to the enormous power of Silesian nobles, like the
Ballestrem family, who invested their wealth increasingly into the industrial realm. As the
state loosened its hold over the mining labor market and production in the decades after
1848, magnates bankrolled new projects, often converting their holdings into corporations
by the 1870s. 116 Around this time, Upper Silesia also shifted from iron and zinc production
to being primarily a coal mining region. In 1870 Upper Silesia counted 23,000 coal miners,
and in 1885 some 40,000 – a number which would rise to 123,000 before World War I. 117
Despite its rapid growth, the industry suffered from structural disadvantages and lack of
114 Konrad Fuchs, Wirtschaftsgeschichte Oberschlesiens, 1871-1945: Aufsätze (Dortmund: Forschungsstelle
Ostmitteleuropa, 1981), 20-23.
115 Ibid., 1, Lawrence Schofer, The Formation of a Modern Labor Force, Upper Silesia, 1865-1914 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1975), 12.
116 Schofer, The Formation of a Modern Labor Force, Upper Silesia, 1865-1914, 29-30.
117 Ibid., 14.
79

capital development. The single most common complaint among Upper Silesian
industrialists centered on the rail system: the distance to Prussia’s main population centers
and the high transport costs put Silesian coal at a competitive disadvantage. These high costs
put a downward pressure on wages, as did the cross-border migration of laborers from
poorer lands in Austrian and Russian Poland (including Ukrainian-speaking Galicia).
Miners in Upper Silesia in 1888 earned just 63 percent as much as their fellow miners in
Westphalia. 118 Financially conservative magnate capitalists in turn preferred to rely on
cheaper labor rather than investing in heavy machinery to streamline mining extraction. 119
Hand mining remained the norm in Upper Silesia until the 1920s, decades after heavy
mining machinery had been introduced in the Ruhr region. 120 The low wages and
outmigration of Silesians to other parts of Germany (some 600,000 from 1871 to 1910)
created labor shortages. The work was so unrewarding, dangerous, and dirty, and the pay so
low, that many Upper Silesians worked only transiently in the mines, leaving after less than
one year. 121 Still, the combination of depressed wages, high transport costs, and conservative
financial investment by landed magnates create a negative feedback cycle whereby industry
remained only moderately profitable, and Upper Silesians remained poor.
The land around Oppeln/Opole in western Upper Silesia lacked the geological
properties of the eastern coal belt, but beneath its sandy soil sat another potentially valuable
raw material: limestone. The extraction of limestone would prove vital to the concrete
118 Sigmund Karski, Albert (Wojciech) Korfanty: Eine Biographie (Dülmen: Laumann-Verlag, 1990), 24.
119 The Prussian expulsions of 1885 heralded a new era of tighter controls on cross-border labor migration;
nonetheless, in the long-term Upper Silesian industry continued to rely on a fresh supply of labor either from
abroad or from the impoverished nearby countryside.
120 Schofer, The Formation of a Modern Labor Force, Upper Silesia, 1865-1914, 10-11.
121 Ibid., 21.
80

factories which grew up around Oppeln/Opole in the mid-1800s and would remain its most
important industry for the next century. By the early 1880s yearly production of concrete
and lime hovered around 75 million kilograms, and the factories employed 1,500 men and
women from the county. 122 Along with a concurrent rise in local cigar production, which
would form Oppeln/Opole’s second industry throughout the next century, many workers
were now shifted into factory work. The economic patterns of the cement industry would
follow those of the coal industry in miniature. Wages remained low – equal to miners’
wages or even lower – and conditions abysmal, leading to bouts of workers unrest. In June
1877 cement and brewery workers in and around Oppeln/Opole led an unsuccessful strike,
demanding a shorter workday (by two hours) and a 40 percent increase in pay. 123
Nonetheless, the concrete and cigar industries still employed only around five to six
percent of all non-agricultural laborers in the city and county of Oppeln/Opole in the
1880s. 124 The majority of citizens in Oppen/Opole county were farmers, artisans, or traders.
While a full 45 percent of the county’s territory consisted of royal forestry domains, the
remaining arable land was mostly in the hands of small to mid-sized farmers. This stood in
stark contrast with the cast noble estates in eastern Upper Silesia. By World War I nearly 73
percent of the county’s private land was in the hands of small farmers owning less than 25
hectares (61.8 acres). 125 Still, these farmers suffered just as much, if not more, under liberal
trade policies which allowed cheap grain from overseas to flood the German market and
depress prices. In the 1870s and the mid-1880s grain prices had entered a free fall,
122 Wochenblatt für Stadt und Land, 6 August 1884, Die Ergebnisse der Berufszählung vom 5. Juni 1882, vol. 76: 1,
Preussische Statistik (Berlin: Landesamt Berlin, 1884).
123 Wochenblatt für Stadt und Land, 27 June 1877.
124 Die Ergebnisse der Berufszählung vom 5. Juni 1882.
125 Statistics calculated from land survey of 1918 in APO, SPO, Syg 1335.
81

prompting the Central Agricultural Association for Silesia to conclude in 1885 that it was all
but impossible to turn a profit growing wheat or rye. With credit typically available only to
the richest landowners, farmers were often forced to sell or parcel their holdings after just
one bad crop. 126
Many workers in Oppeln/Opole were caught halfway between the land and non-
agricultural jobs. For every ten independent farmers in Oppeln/Opole county who listed
tending their land as their main profression in 1882, there were nine who listed it as a
secondary profession [Nebenberuf]. Likewise, 25 percent of those who farmed as a main
profession also had a secondary job. Industrial and small artisanal work also was often
combined with a secondary profession, most often tending to one’s land: 60 percent of
Oppeln/Opole’s transportation workers and 54 percent of its independent food producers,
for example, claimed a second profession in 1882. While these figures were not outside the
norm for Prussia as a whole, when combined with the region’s low wages and economic
disadvantages, a portrait emerges of locals around Oppeln/Opole with one foot in the soil,
and one in the factory, toiling in both just to survive. 127
The city’s response to these emerging crises in the agricultural and industrial sectors was
mainly to ignore them. Instead, the municipality chose to deal with what it saw as a greater
crisis in the downfall of the politically powerful artisan class. Already in 1866 the decline in
local handworker industries was being felt, with exports beyond the immediate area
126 Magura, Geschichte der Landwirtschaft Schlesiens: 2000 Jahre Bauernkultur, 224-226.
127 Wiesława Korzeniowska, Codzienność społeczności wsi rejencji opolskiej w aspekcie zachodzących przemian, 1815-
1914 (Opole: Instytut Śla!ski, 1993), 124, Die Ergebnisse der Berufszählung vom 5. Juni 1882. In the 1882 census, 27% of
men and women living in Prussian villages with under 2,000 residents had a secondary profession, compared to 17%
of those in Prussian cities with 5,000-20,000 residents.
82

particularly hard hit. 128 Yet it was the global economic crisis beginning in the 1870s that
most directly and durably impacted Oppeln/Opole’s small-town economy. After long-
standing guild rights had been gradually eroded by Prussia and then eliminated in the new
Germany, artisans and politicians busied themselves in the late 1870s reconstituting
professional guild organizations in voluntary form. While these groups were to adapt to a
new capitalist era, their mantra was entirely bound to a defense of local artisan traditions
against the leveling force of capitalism. The local newspaper proclaimed in 1879 that the
guilds would continue to bring prosperity in years to come. 129 Given the poor economic
outlook for artisans, this formulation implied the prosperity of a moral economy over the
amassing of material riches.
This moral economy of handworkers was supposedly driven by Christian values of
honor, fair exchange, and quality service, not the profit motive of free trade. This “Christian
consciousness” of communal belonging through a virtuous economy was being overrun by
the “lazy individualism” of freedom in trades, according to the local press. 130 The
prototypical enemy was not just the large industrialist, but also the individual traveling
salesman, who used the efficient rail network and freedom from municipal taxes to
undermine local businesses. In response, local artisans reconstituted the guild movement on
a voluntary basis, establishing an umbrella Small Business Association in 1879 to oversee
the various professions. 131 By 1900 there was a network of 14 local guilds covering most
128 Wochenblatt für Stadt und Land, 2 May 1866.
129 Ibid., 19 March 1879.
130 Ibid., 19 May 1880.
131 Ibid., 2 April 1879.
83

major artisan professions and counting 555 members. 132 These groups had the support of the
Chamber of Commerce (founded in 1882) and continued to portray themselves as the heart
of the local economy, even as their economic influence waned. Although not yet seemingly
concerned by national issues, the beleaguered artisan class would come, in later decades, to
represent itself as the embodiment of a German Heimat, as the core defenders of local
patriotism against Polish nationalism.
As the artisan class circled the wagons around their declining economic status, the city
also took an attitude of self-defense against the increasing economic misery of the
countryside. In 1883 a city magistrate warned the public that Oppeln/Opole was being
overrun by villagers from the area seeking poor relief. These men and women came to the
city hoping to enroll in the Oppeln/Opole’s own public welfare program, and to beg in the
richer neighborhoods of the city. But because they could only apply for public assistance
after two years of residence, these people took to selling personal effects, pick pocketing,
and petty crime. This moral blight on the city, according to the magistrate, could have been
prevented if local residents refused to rent out beds to these degenerate beggars. 133 For all of
the moral bluster, the city was nearly perpetually in a crisis mode financially. By 1877 there
was a dire need for money in the city’s coffers, as the combination of decreased tax
revenues from the economic downturn (which hit the cement industry especially hard) and
increased city infrastructure projects had rendered the city nearly bankrupt. 134 The city
threatened to raise certain taxes by as much as 500 percent in the early 1880s, and often
132 Bericht über die Gemeindeangelegenheiten der Stadt Oppeln, (Oppeln: E. Raabe, 1904), 113.
133 Wochenblatt für Stadt und Land, 9 May 1883.
134 Ibid., 28 February 1877.
84

succeeded in smaller increases. 135 This trend – of a poor, hamstrung municipal government
– would continue throughout the capitalist era in Oppeln/Opole.
With city officials unable and often unwilling to engage significantly in the social
question, the Catholic Church and its lay charity groups became the most effective center of
social help for Oppeln/Opole and its surrounding county. Along with Prussian and German
national policies of social security and insurance, these religious groups founded during the
post-1848 revival period provided an essential safety net. 136 Among the 11 different
Catholic charities in the city of Oppeln/Opole by 1859, there were multiple ones for general
poor relief, then specific groups to fund funerals for those who died destitute, books for
those who couldn’t afford them, social services for orphans (who were housed with local
Catholic sisters), and a charity for girls’ vocational instruction. 137 Philanthropy was thus an
integral part of Catholic revival, and involved all aspects of society: children, women, the
unemployed, the hard-luck, and even the dead. Church leaders and clergy relished the
chance to insert themselves in the social question and provide what they saw as moral
guidance through an era of prolonged crisis. 138 This tightly bounded conservative moral
community not only preceded the arrival of socialism in Oppeln/Opole, it also guaranteed
the early weakness of the latter movement. 139 The strength of the Church in dealing with
the social question where municipal government had failed once again points to the
135 Ibid., 25 January 1882.
136 On German-wide social policies of the Bismarck, see George Steinmetz, Regulating the Social: The Welfare State
and Local Politics in Imperial Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), Ch. 5.
137 Schlesisches Kirchenblatt, 12 February 1859, nr. 7, 82-83.
138 Ibid., 16 January 1864, n. 3, 29-32.
139 Wochenblatt für Stadt und Land, 7 May and 5 November 1873.
85

Church’s centrality in the social life of Upper Silesians during the pre-national era of
religious revival.
CONCLUSION
In March 1886 the leading Catholic paper in Silesia wrote, without any overt irony,
that the Kulturkampf had impeded the path of Germanization for Upper Silesians. It
suggested that the attempted suppression of the Polish language in schools had merely
created a backlash of Catholic self-defense in the name of religion, but one which hampered
the integration of Polish speakers into German-language society. 140 The Polish historian
Mieczysław Pater has labeled this attitude among Silesian Catholics during the Kulturkampf
“gentle Germanization.” 141 While Pater ultimately sees this as an offense against the still-
unawakened Polish national body, his term proves useful in thinking through the
differences in national policy before the era of mass nationalism. In reality, ethno-national
bodies did not exist and were becoming ever more unlikely through increased bilingualism
in schools and economic transformations which brought speakers of the two languages into
greater contact. Rather than unleashing the nationalization of society, modern political and
economic transformations had worked to solidify a bilingual, ethnically ambiguous regional
loyalty. Had Prussia maintained its tolerant policies vis-à-vis Catholics instead of launching
the Kulturkampf, it is far more likely that the process of integrating Polish speakers into the
German Empire would have made greater progress. This was the case in East Prussia, where
a group of Protestant, Polish-speaking Masurians were undergoing similar Germanization
140 Mieczysław Pater, Centrum a ruch polski na Górnym ślasku (1879-1893) (Katowice: Śląsk, 1971), 32.
141 Ibid., 33-34.
86

policies in the schools without any significant resistance. 142 Instead, the policies of anti-
Catholic repression rallied Upper Silesians to resist Germanization measures on religious
grounds, without an overt reference to national difference.
By the time Bismarck realized the failure of the Kulturkampf and its main measures
had been withdrawn in the 1880s, a complete paradigm shift had occurred in Upper Silesian
politics and society. The bounds of local society had been expanded by a Catholic revival
which, through vigorous clerical organization and regional religious practices such as
pilgrimages, allowed local Catholics to envision themselves as part of a universally Catholic,
bilingual province. The solidification of anti-Catholic repression in the Kulturkampf served
as the final step in the regional consolidation of the Catholic milieu. Upper Silesians
imagined themselves – for the first time on a mass scale – as existing on the religious and
political margins of the state (Prussia) and the nation (Germany). Suffering economic
disadvantages stemming from the maintenance of privileges for elites and artisans, many
Upper Silesians became materially marginalized as well over the course of the nineteenth
century. Yet any social or political self-awareness of living on the ethno-national margins
between Germans and Poles had not yet crystallized in Upper Silesia. But the arrival of
Polish nationalist activists in Oppeln/Opole at the end of the nineteenth century would
force locals to confront a powerful doctrine that attempted to redraw the boundaries of
community and politics along ethno-linguistic dividing lines.
142 Richard Blanke, Polish-speaking Germans? Language and National Identity among the Masurians since 1871 (Köln:
Böhlau, 2001), 52-53.
87

Catholics into Poles and Germans?
Nationalizing Elections and Society, 1890-1918
88
Chapter 2
In the last 100 years Germanness has proceeded inexorably, steadily, and
gradually from Breslau and Brieg east and north, and has from generation to
generation won more and more terrain, “slowly but surely.” Perhaps now, as
soon as the new “Measures for the Protection of Germannness” are enacted,
things will be different; and the intended and hoped-for success will instead
sprout the opposite result according to the old saying: every action creates an
opposite reaction. 1
These comments on the process of Germanization were made in 1886 by Juliusz
Szmula, a bilingual native Upper Silesian and member of the then hegemonic Center Party
in the region. A Prussian military major whose conversion to the Catholic faith through
marriage had forced him out of the army, Szmula would later represent the Polish faction of
the Catholic Center Party in Oppeln/Opole. Along with several other commentators of
different national persuasions, Szmula tied Bismarck and his anti-Polish, anti-Catholic
policies to the potential flourishing of a newfound Polish national self-identity in Upper
Silesia. 2 The year 1886 proved a crucial turning point in Prussia’s overall policies: while
effectively winding down the Kulturkampf, new laws aiming to Germanize Prussia’s east
through land colonization and expulsion of foreign Jews and Poles went into effect. While
these laws were directed most forcefully at Posen/Poznań, Upper Silesia was slowly being
wrapped up in larger national questions. Polish nationalists may have been an oblique target
1 Schlesische Volkszeitung, 4 March 1886, morning ed.
2 For reference to other commentators see Ilse Schwidetzky, Die polnische Wahlbewegung in Oberschlesien (Breslau:
F. Hirt, 1934), 29.

of the Kulturkampf, but now they were directly in the cross-hairs of Prussian nationalization
policy. 3
The “counter-reaction” which spread through Upper Silesia brought about the
remarkable and swift rise of a Polish nationalist movement. In Oppeln/Opole, one man,
Bronisław Koraszewski, and his local newspaper venture grew into the centerpiece of a
fledging community of Polish activists. Mediating their message of Polish self-awareness
through Catholic belief, these activists were able to convert a growing body of Polish
speakers to their political cause. The sudden rise of a powerful Polish-speaking electorate
voting on national and linguistic interests upset the structure of politics at the local level,
prompting German nationalists to likewise solidify an alliance of nationally-minded voters.
The result, by World War I, was nationalized elections which pitted Polish candidates
against a coalition of German-minded Protestants and Catholics. Yet the national division
of electorates in this generation did not portend the greater nationalization of local society.
Just as a Polish voting bloc coalesced, initial efforts to forge a vibrant national associational
life floundered. Local citizens, concerned by the day-to-day struggles of economic survival,
instead channeled much of their organizational interest into clerically-led Workers
Associations. In between the drama of elections, many Upper Silesians continued to exist in
a social world where national divisions made little sense, and where bilingualism and the
enticement of upward mobility through Germanization continued to be an accepted norm.
Only the trauma of World War I – and particularly the social ills and crisis of faith in the
state unleashed by war defeat – would prove a serious test of national loyalty for most Polish
speakers.
3 William W. Hagen, Germans, Poles, and Jews: The Nationality Conflict in the Prussian East, 1772-1914 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1980), Ch. 5.
89

NEWSPAPER NATIONALISM
In the summer of 1890, Polish nationalism arrived in Oppeln/Opole in the form of an
ambitious young newspaper man. Bronisław Koraszewski would eventually become the
grandfather of Polish nationalism for the western stretches of Upper Silesia. His successful
newspaper career earned him minor nationalist canonization, as well as a bourgeois lifestyle
and a home in the wealthy city center, on a street now named after him. 4 But when he
arrived in Oppeln/Opole, Koraszewski was a 26-year old without university education or
personal wealth, and with scant journalism experience. What he did possess in abundance
was ambition, the backing of powerful Posen-born Poles, and the desire to lead the workers
and farmers of the Oppeln/Opole area in what he imagined to be their natural Polish
awakening.
Koraszewski was born in 1864 in the Posen/Poznań region, where he spent most of his
childhood. A strict Catholic, he came of age during the height of the Kulturkampf in a
province where religious divisions between Catholics and Protestants largely mirrored
ethno-linguistic divides between Poles and Germans. A convinced Polish nationalist from
his adolescent years, Koraszewski first came to Silesia after fleeing his high school when his
membership in a secret Polish organization was revealed. In order to care for his mother he
later returned to Posen/Poznań, where he found work in a Polish bookstore. After a
promotion, he found himself transferred in 1888 to Konigshütte/Chorzów in the Upper
Silesian industrial belt to run a branch of the bookstore. It was there that he became
involved in the growing Polish nationalist milieu led by a mix of native Upper Silesians and
4 The Koraszewski family lived on Oderstrasse, current-day ul. Koraszewskiego, just off the City Hall Square of
Oppeln/Opole. Stefania Mazurek, Z dziejów polskiego ruchu kobiecego na Górnym Śląsku w latach 1900-1907 (Opole
1969), 67-69.
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fellow migrants from Posen/Poznań. After a brief stint in 1888 at the Głos Ludu
Górnośląskiego [Upper Silesian People’s Voice] he took over in 1889 as editor of the
Katolik. At the time the Polish-language newspaper industry in Upper Silesia still had a wild
west quality, full of fly-by-night publications, regular changes in ownership, and monthly
personnel shifts. This atmosphere allowed a young, ambitious man with virtually no
training to rise quickly in the journalistic ranks. Koraszewski was soon succeeded at the
Katolik by Adam Napieralski – the future king of regional Polish-language publishing.
Koraszewski continued his work in the industrial zone in 1889 by leading, along with
Napieraliski, the first large Polish-Catholic labor union in the region, the Mutual Aid
Association [Związek Wzajemnej Pomocy]. 5 Koraszewski’s fellow nationalists, particularly
Stanisław Bełza, urged him to move west to the seemingly untapped market of
Oppeln/Opole. With modest financial support from the growing Katolik press and its
network of nationalist activists, Koraszewski moved to Oppeln/Opole in the summer of
1890. On 10 September, he printed the first edition of the Gazeta Opolska [Opole Paper]. 6
Motivating Koraszewski’s largely one-man printing venture was a firm faith in the
ideology of ethnic nationalism combined with a youthful desire for prestige. Committed
nationalist activists in Koraszewski’s circle viewed the Polish speakers around Oppeln/Opole
as raw putty to be molded in their own national image. These farmers and cement workers
west of the industrial area were undeveloped Poles, but Poles nonetheless, whose ethnic raw
material could be shaped into firm national consciousness. Koraszewski stood to benefit
personally as a national pioneer, and by entering uncharted national territories he was able
5 Mieczysław Tobiasz, Bronisław Koraszewski: wydawca Gazety Opolskiej, 1864-1922 (Warszawa: Państwowe Zakłady
Wydawnictw Szkolnych, 1948), 14-17.
6 Alojzy Targ, Bronisław Koraszewski, 1864 - 1924 (Opole: Instytut Śląski, 1965), 21-22.
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to declare himself de facto leader in Oppeln/Opole, a position he would hold through World
War I. Koraszewski found great success within a decade of founding his paper, growing the
subscription base from 400 in the first year to around 5,000 by 1898. 7 In order for
Koraszewski’s venture to work, however, he needed a receptive audience and the
cooperation of key local figures, namely priests.
In his paper’s first issue on 10 September, Koraszewski led with the call, “I greet you,
dear fellow combatants.” 8 At the time, however, Koraszewski lacked a defined set of “fellow
combatants.” This was still an imagined community in the strictest sense, and forging an
actual national community would take hard work. Koraszewski found his receptive audience
mainly among the independent farmers, shopkeepers, and artisans of the villages around
Oppeln/Opole. 9 These Polish speakers often constituted the economic elite of small-town
life; important and respected within their communities, they decried a lack of respect for the
Polish language beyond their village borders. These men – the early movement was
comprised almost entirely of men – found in Polish nationalism a rebuke to the pathways
which led many of their neighbors out of the villages in search of education or work, and
thus down the path to Germanization. At a basic level, the newspaper gave these nationally-
minded Polish speakers around Oppeln/Opole a forum to share their common experiences.
Reader contributions were so prevalent that the newspaper at times resembled the
nineteenth-century version of a chat room. For many readers, the newspaper also would
have been their first exposure to standard written Polish aside from Catholic hymnals and
7 Władysław Dziewulski and Franciszek Hawranek, Opole: monografia miasta (Opole: Instytut Śląski, 1975), 334.
8 Mieczysław Tobiasz, Na froncie walki narodowej w Opolskiem: Bronisław Koraszewski, 1888-1922 (Katowice: Nasza
Księgarnia, 1938), 40.
9 Mieczysław Pater, Centrum a ruch polski na Górnym ślasku (1879-1893) (Katowice: Śląsk, 1971), 135.
92

prayer books. Regular cables from points east also allowed locals to feel temporal and spatial
ties to a Polish national world that extended from Upper Silesia across the Prussian,
Austrian, and Russian partitions. This development of the Gazeta Opolska serves as a case of
print-capitalism working explicitly to forge a new imagined community out of local Polish
speakers. 10
Yet the early readership of the Gazeta Opolska remained a community largely bounded
by the socio-economic constraints of pre-industrial village life. For the readership of the
Gazeta, Polish self-identification was naturally filtered through the specific class and cultural
lens of the small-town farmer or artisan. The Gazeta Opolska mediated its understandings
of Polishness through local grievances of economic disadvantage and cultural repression at
the hands of Prussian bureaucrats and capitalists. In the game of upward mobility,
Protestants and especially Jews were blamed for continuously besting the Poles. “For lack of
Polish lawyers or doctors, the Pole is often forced to proceed to a Jew and thus enrich other
nations,” the paper complained in 1891. In the same article, the regular complaint about
high school enrollments came to light: the number of Jews at the Oppeln/Opole
Gymnasium was at least 10 times as high, proportional to their overall population, as
Catholic enrollment, and according to the paper only a small proportion of Catholics at the
school were ethnic Poles. 11 The paper also harped on the decline of the Polish-speaking small
shopkeeper at the hands of supposedly Jewish-German capital. One such shopkeeper from
the village of Dometzko/Domecko used the Gazeta Opolska as a soapbox to complain
about the decline of the local Polish-speaking butcher or brewer, “for it is difficult for them
10 See Benedict R. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of <strong>Nationalism</strong>, Rev. ed.
(London: Verso, 1991), Ch. 3.
11 Gazeta Opolska, 27 March 1891, from German translation in APO, RO, Syg. 163. See also 6 May 1892, 29 July 1892.
93

to compete with well-to-do Jewish salesmen, as long as there is a lack of capital and
earnings.” 12 The same shopkeeper from Dometzko/Domecko complained that upward
mobility threatened Polishness: as soon as a fellow salesman accumulated capital and
expanded their business, suddenly they stopped speaking Polish and “disown their
nationality.” Economic transformations disadvantaging rural and small-town artisans took
on the contours of ethno-national threat in the pages of the Gazeta Opolska.
Key to this process of imagining a Polish nation was ascribing group identity to a
whole mass of nationally unawakened Polish speakers. The most common complaint about
national indifference centered, as it would for generations to come, on the parents who did
little to resist the linguistic Germanization of their children. Although Polish-language
instruction was limited to religious instruction in the lower elementary grades, preparation
for communion with priests still regularly took place in Polish. Nonetheless, many Polish-
speaking parents clearly chose to send their children to German-language communion
instruction. This practice garnered constant admonishments from the Gazeta Opolska.
“There are parents who hardly worry about the matter and who are indifferent to the
language in which their child prepares for Holy Communion; on the contrary they urge
their children to take part in German instruction, so that they can show others the
refinement of their children.” Koraszewski imagined his newspaper enterprise as a crusade
against such national indifference, and against the “many irrational people, who regard a
Pole and a German as hardly different from each other.” 13 Upward mobility was readily
associated with becoming German, a process which Koraszewski deplored and had himself
12 Ibid., 20 October 1891, from German translation in APO, RO, Syg. 163.
13 Gazeta Opolsa, 2 October 1891, from German translation in APO, RO, Syg. 163.
94

esisted. Given his continued frustrations and admonishments to his Polish-speaking
readers, it is clear that not all shared his negative judgment of becoming educated in
German.
Much of the success or failure for Koraszewski’s project would hinge on the role of
priests. Catholic clergy were among the few native Upper Silesians who attained education
and social prestige while remaining within the Polish-speaking rural milieu. Koraszewski
relied on good relations with key members of the clergy to expand his Polish movement
beyond the printed page. Fathers Lubecki, Kulka and Frysztacki, from the nearby villages of
Kottorz/Kotorz, Chrzumczütz/Chrząszczyce, and Chroszcina/Chróścina respectively, were
among those that offered Koraszewski the greatest support. 14 With their help and that of
other priests, Koraszewski spearheaded a new set of Polish-Catholic Associations in the
county. On 9 February 1891, the first branch opened in Oppeln/Opole with 90 members
under the direction of Johann Reymann, a chaplain from nearby Slawitz/Sławice. 15 While
the group represented a significant assertion of Polish linguistic interests, it remained
contained within the bounds of local religious society. The group avoided any official
aspirations for political organization, instead focusing on the “cultivation of the Polish
language” and social-religious self-defense against “social democratic efforts.” 16 Polish-
Catholic Associations were replicated in villages across the county; by 1893 there were four
additional groups along with the original Oppeln/Opole branch, with a combined
membership of almost 400 Polish speakers. 17 In addition to the Catholic associations,
14 Tobiasz, Bronisław Koraszewski, 22.
15 Targ, Bronisław Koraszewski, 23-24.
16 Polizeiverwalter Rämer to Regierungspräsident, 13 December 1893, APO, RO, Syg. 159.
17 Data from June 1893 report in APO, RO, Syg. 159.
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Koraszewski spearheaded cultural groups to promote the Polish language. In 1891 he
founded an amateur Polish-language theater group, and in 1893 a Polish singing choir
Lutnia [Lute]. 18 Through these various groups Koraszewski began to assemble Polish speakers
who could form the raw material for a social network of national activists.
Koraszewski and his nationalist movement – with the newspaper as its centerpiece –
still faced difficult odds. One obstacle was the antagonistic reaction of regional Prussian
officials. In February 1892 the Oppeln/Opole district president, Karl Julius Rudolf von
Bitter, warned all county officials about the potential for political activity latent within
these Polish-Catholic organizations. He suspected political goals behind the official
linguistic-religious statutes, and demanded that all county officials report back regularly on
the size and activities of such groups. 19 A year-and-a-half later, he had no doubt about the
political content of these groups. He recommended caution, however, in persecuting the
groups too publicly or stridently, fearing a backlash even among local police forces. 20 Von
Bitter understood that the popularity of these groups had reached a critical mass in certain
areas – above all in the industrial belt in the east of the province – such that their complete
repression would be politically unwise. Nonetheless, local officials used force on many
occasions to break up or prevent meetings. One village official threatened tavern keepers
with revocation of their liquor license for hosting Polish-Catholic meetings. 21 After the
Polish theater troupe was denied use of theater space in Oppeln/Opole’s city hall in 1892,
Koraszewski responded with calls for a boycott of German and Jewish newspapers and
18 Targ, Bronisław Koraszewski, 23,26.
19 Von Bitter to county officials, 26 February 1892, APO, RO, Syg. 159.
20 Von Bitter to county officials, 4 August 1893, APO, RO, Syg. 1893.
21 Tobiasz, Na froncie walki narodowej, 45.
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stores. “If we only supported our own,” the Gazeta Opolska noted, “then the Germans
would really feel the significance of the Polish people.” 22
Repression from Prussian officials was but one thorn in the side of the Gazeta Opolska
and its developing national community. Koraszewski’s sharp nationalist language did not
necessarily fit the larger profile of the Polish-Catholic associations or the aspirations of all his
readers. Koraszewski’s nationalist agenda also put him at odds with Napieralski’s more
strictly Catholic politics in his massively popular Katolik paper. By 1892 Napieralski had
largely cut off funding to Koraszewski, while warning him that his agenda was too radical:
You are deluding yourself if you think that our people have matured to their
own fundamental national sensibility. You judge everything based on those
few people that surround us. Yet you know the people’s spirit, from
correspondence sent to the Katolik. Have mercy! Be accountable, after all, to
God and to the cause. 23
Koraszewski had planted his paper ideologically firmly on the side of nationalism, which
necessitated an uncharted re-fashioning of Catholic interests. The Nowiny Raciborskie, a
more radical nationalist newspaper operating in the early 1890s in Upper Silesia, would
soon lose the struggle which Koraszewski was attempting. Its Posen/Poznań born editor,
Karol Maćkowski, endured government repression as well as the hostility of many regional
priests before selling the newspaper in 1895 and returning to his home province. 24
Koraszewski tempted a similar fate. In 1892 he wrote to his mother complaining of his
penury and mounting debts. “I have absolutely no money, and the apartment is not yet
paid for.” While Koraszewski claimed many readers, there were few paying subscriptions: he
knew from experience that single copies of the paper would be passed around to ten or more
22 Gazeta Opolska, 23 February 1892, published in 29 February Gesamtüberblick. APO, RO, Syg. 163.
23 Quoted in Maria Wanatowicz, Społeczeństwo polskie wobec Górnego Śląska, 1795-1914 (Katowice: Uniwersytet
Śląski, 1992), 77.
24 Tobiasz, Na froncie walki narodowej, 34. For priestly complaints, see p. 52.
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eaders. His troubles brought a twinge of defeat for his nationalist beliefs. “My heart
demands ideals,” he wrote to his mother, “and they are too far away from me,
unreachable.” 25
Koraszewski’s attempts to crystallize a local community around nationalist principles
faced not just a long-standing lack of knowledge or interest in the Polish cause, but also
competing movements. The milieu of Catholic workers in particular offered a competing
organizational network. By early 1895 the largest Catholic association in Oppeln/Opole was
the Catholic Workers Association [Katholischer Arbeiterverein] with 350 members. This
organization, while comprised largely of Polish-speaking or bilingual workers from suburbs
and nearby villages, was not party of Koraszewski’s network. Rather, it was a socially-based
group which professed no interest in nationalism, and part of a broader network of Catholic
worker groups emerging across Germany in the 1890s. These workers were part of a
separate insurgency within the Catholic political movement that challenged the
conservative, clerical basis of the Center Party from the Kulturkampf era. In eastern,
industrial Upper Silesia such associations proved wildly popular, attracting thousands of
members. 26 Yet especially in Oppeln/Opole the Catholic Workers Association remained
outside the orbit of Koraszewski’s constituency. Koraszewski’s newspaper nationalism
mainly represented the farmer and artisan wing of the movement, but stopped short of
encompassing the social or political interests of many Polish-speaking workers in the
region.
25 Quoted in Ibid., 48.
26 Report of Oppeln Landrat, 7 January 1895, APO, ROBP, Syg. 48. Cf. contemporaneous reports in same file from
Königshütte (1048 members) and Beuthen (over 6000). See also James E. Bjork, Neither German nor Pole: Catholicism
and National Indifference in a Central European Borderland (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 56.
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Koraszewski’s Polish-Catholic movements and the Catholic Workers Associations did
share a common element: both were challenges from below to the unitary voice of the
Catholic Center Party. The dynamics of the Reichstag and Prussian Landtag elections of
1893 in Oppeln/Opole would reveal all the conflicting elements of this fracturing Catholic
milieu. The local Reichstag campaign was waged mainly as an intra-Catholic battle with no
nationalist content. Rather, the national election centered on a split within the Catholic
Center party over increases in military spending proposed by Chancellor Caprivi in the
Reichstag. With most of the Center Party against the bill, a small fraction of conservative
Catholics took the opposite, pro-government stance. Among the 12 Center Party renegades
(out of over 100 delegates) were seven from Silesia – including Oppeln/Opole’s
representative Ballestrem and the leader of the pro-Army position, Karl von Huene.
Bickering over the military appropriation led to the dissolution of the Reichstag in May
1893 and the calling of new elections. Ballestrem, stripped of his party leadership position
over the row, decided against running again. In his place ran von Huene, who entered
several races simultaneously. With the Center Party leadership turning against him, von
Huene ended up winning none of his races, gaining support instead mainly from pro-
military German liberal voters. 27 The Oppeln/Opole seat instead went to a local priest from
Zlönitz/Zelasno, Joseph Wolny. With the support of the regional Catholic party, Wolny
dominated in the countryside and won more than double the votes of von Heune, his main
opponent. The Socialist (SPD) candidate, meanwhile, could only muster three percent of
the votes in Oppeln/Opole. 28 The election of Wolny brought the Ballestrem era to an end
27 Karl Bachem, Vorgeschichte, Geschichte und Politik der deutschen Zentrumspartei (Köln: J. P. Bachem, 1927), Bd. 5,
289-291.
28 Election results in Wochenblatt für Stadt und Land, 18 June 1893.
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and marked the end of deference to noble politics within a unified Catholic front. Still,
Wolny won without any overt appeals to Poles as a national group.
The Prusian Landtag vote in November 1893, in contrast, brought Koraszewski’s
national program into the stormy waters of electoral politics. The county was previously
represented by two German-speaking Center Party members, Bernhard Nadbyl and Victor
Matuschka. With the latter retiring, the decision for a replacement fell to the local election
committee. A recent reorganization of the committee had yielded a Polish-speaking
majority sympathetic to the nationalist cause. Their suggested candidate, Major Juliusz
Szmula, proved exceedingly controversial. As a Center Party representative fluent in Polish,
Szmula was an ally of many leading nationalists, including Koraszewski, with whom he
maintained personal correspondence. 29 Szmula had just won a bruising Reichstag campaign
in eastern Upper Silesia, where he ran as a renegade Center Party candidate against the
party’s official choice, the pastor Leopold Nerlich. His victory depended largely on the
public support of Napieralski and Polish nationalists. 30 Szmula’s insubordination within the
Center Party in the name of defense of Polish-language rights made him a suspect
candidate in the eyes of German speakers in Oppeln/Opole. The 11 German members of
the electoral committee, outnumbered by the 29 pro-Szmula representatives, resigned in
protest. Szmula was thus selected to run for the first of the two seats. 31 Nadbyl, meanwhile,
decided to contest Szmula for the first seat (and run in the second seat concurrently).
During the campaign, the Gazeta Opolska lobbied heavily for Szmula, while German-
29 For an account of Szmula’s pro-Polish activities, see William Rose, The Drama of Upper Silesia (Brattleboro Vt.:
Stephen Daye Press, 1935), 138.
30 For more on the Reichstag election of Szmula in Beuthen-Tarnowitz, see Ibid., 138-139, Bjork, Neither German nor
Pole, 42-47.
31 Tobiasz, Na froncie walki narodowej, 59-60.
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leaning Catholics, including the Church and Catholic Party hierarchy, rallied behind
Nadbyl. While Nadbyl won the second seat easily, the first seat featured a contested three-
way campaign between Szmula, Nadbyl, and the Free Conservative candidate Ladislaus
Reymann. In a three-class system of indirect voting, the 438 members of the district’s
electoral college [Wahlmänner] split their votes without a clear majority winner. Szmula
earned 166 votes, Reymann 169, and Nadbyl 103. In the ensuing runoff between Szmula
and Reymann, slightly more Nadbyl voters switched their vote to Szmula than to Reymann
– giving Szmula a narrow 213 to 209 victory. 32 Koraszewki’s preferred candidate had pulled
off an upset over the established Center Party choice.
What do the election results reveal? As part of a three-class voting system that gave
significant weight to wealthier males, the Landtag election showed that Polish nationalists
had enough wealth (mainly in the countryside) to elect Wahlmänner in the upper two
voting classes, since poorer citizens in the third voting class alone could never elect a
representative. It is also clear that Koraszewski’s Gazeta Opolska and his network of
activists, as the main proponents of Szmula, were reaching a wide constituency of Polish
speakers that extended beyond their core readership. The ability to tap such a powerful
electoral constituency within three years must be seen as a major accomplishment for
Koraszewski. The runoff between Szmula and Reymann also forced Center-loyal Nadbyl
supporters to choose either the pro-Polish Center renegade or a member of the
Conservatives (who last represented Oppeln/Opole in 1876). That so many Nadbyl
Wahlmänner shifted their votes to Reymann reveals the deep rift which had opened within
32 Zdzisław Surman, “Wyniki wyborów do pruskiego konstytucyjnego zgromadzenia narodowego i izby posłów
sejmu pruskiego na Śląsku w latach 1848-1914” in Studia i materiały z dziejów Śląska. T. VII. Wyniki wyborów
parlamentarnych na Śląsku, (Zakład narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1966), 122.
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Center Party ranks. It is easy to interpret this as a national rift, and indeed many delegates
who chose Reymann were certainly upset at Szmula’s open alliance with Polish nationalists.
The tensions unleashed by the election also extended, however, to within the Polish
camp. Szmula was far less antagonistic to the Center Party leadership than the Gazeta
Opolska was, and he clearly sought to avoid intra-party tensions. After Szmula came out
with pro-Center statements, Koraszewski threatened to revoke support for the candidate
before the election. 33 Szmula in turn accused the Gazeta Opolska of agitation that painted
him as antagonistic to the Center Party and to Nadbyl. In a letter to Koraszewski in
October 1893, Szmula threatened, “If this rabble-rousing does not cease, then I must even
declare myself in the German papers as standing against the Polish newspapers.” 34 Szmula
still counted his national solidarity with Koraszewski as secondary to his Center Party
membership, a balance of loyalties which the nationalist Koraszewski derided. The latter’s
insistence on the primacy of national belonging may have come prematurely to a regional
political scene that was only beginning to adapt to the multifarious social and cultural
challenges to party unity in the wake of the Kulturkampf.
NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PRESSURES
Various local, national, and international forces were bearing down at different angles
on Oppeln/Opole in the early 1890s to produce the rapid rise of a nationally motivated
electorate. The broader forces of Catholic political reconfiguration, the reshaping of German
nationalism through new interest groups, the waning of assimilationist liberal ideologies,
the sharpened battle lines between the Prussian government and Polish political
33 Targ, Bronisław Koraszewski, 31-32.
34 Quoted in Tobiasz, Na froncie walki narodowej, 61.
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nationalism, the accelerating political involvement of the lower classes, socialist challenges
to the state’s foundations, and the rise of Polish ethnic nationalism all affected local society
and politics in Oppeln/Opole. Upper Silesia’s political transformation throughout the 1890s
and into the following decade cannot be understood without reference to common forces
shaping Germany and especially eastern areas of Prussia. Labor unrest and increasing
worker radicalism in Upper Silesia’s rapidly growing industrial east made it the continuous
vanguard of regional Polish nationalist politics. Oppeln/Opole’s willingness to follow in the
footsteps of coal miners, meanwhile, depended on local factors which lay mainly outside the
realm of nationalist politics. The explosive growth of cities and villages, new class
alignments and tensions among artisans and factory-working farmers, and the expansion
of municipal services and government bureaucracies all affected the Oppeln/Opole area in
specific ways which are key to understanding its unique political trajectory.
The grand German political re-alignment of 1890 thrust the Catholic Center Party
into the crucial swing position within the Reichstag – a position it held almost
uninterruptedly until World War I (the exception being the Bülow Bloc period of 1906-
1909). With this position came new responsibilities, and new pressures. Abandoning the old
oppositional Kulturkampf stance for an alliance with Conservative and National Liberal
parties meant the need for Catholic politicians to embrace increased military spending and
pro-capitalist industrialization – or at least trade their support on such policies for outside
votes on Center Party priorities. Defining these priorities became a challenge in itself given
the fracturing base of the party, with defections to the oppositional Socialist Party
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increasingly common among workers. 35 A general professionalization of the party brought
lawyers and (to a lesser extent) businessmen into Reichstag seats once held by local
notables. The Center’s core constituency was still found among economically
underdeveloped or (in contemporary discourse) “backwards” peasants and artisans. Catholic
concern over issues of social integration and economic improvement attested to shifts in
policy away from Kulturkampf resistance to address the broader ills of Catholic society. Yet
the party was subject to attacks from left and right. The party’s wavering course on
agricultural tariffs illuminates the difficulty of their new its new position. Center Party
members supported to the lowering of protective tariffs in the 1890s, which coincided with
a global collapse in commodity prices to produce widespread peasant poverty. A clamor
among agrarian party interests spurred a change of course around 1900, culminating in
new protections in 1902. Yet the subsequent rise in commodity prices, particularly on
bread, opened up the Center to attack from opponents on the left, who could cite Center
Party policy as the cause for worker hunger. 36 The Center Party was caught between its
diverging agrarian and working-class constituencies.
Broader Prussian anti-Polish cultural and economic policies also affected
Oppeln/Opole, even though Upper Silesia remained off the map for most German
nationalists who focused on Posen/Poznań and West Prussia. The Polish partition area of
Posen/Poznań had long been ground zero for German-Polish battle, often waged between
noble landowners of rival national persuasions. The policies from 1886 onwards, however,
35 Helmut Walser Smith, German <strong>Nationalism</strong> and Religious Conflict: Culture, Ideology, Politics, 1870-1914 (Princeton,
N.J: Princeton University Press, 1995), 93.
36 For a summary analysis of the role of the Center Party in German politics from 1890-1914, see David Blackbourn,
Class, Religion, and Local Politics in Wilhelmine Germany: The Centre Party in Württemberg before 1914 (Wiesbaden:
Steiner, 1980), 23-60. Agricultural issues are discussed in Ibid., 44-53.
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involved the Prussian state directly in the suppression of Polish landowners’ political-
economic power and in the broader Germanization of the regional Polish-speaking
populace. The Colonization Commission established that year set aside an initial 100
million marks to buy up Polish estates and settle Germans in their stead. With more money
poured into the program, the Colonization Commission had by 1907 spent 388 million
marks on resettlement. Yet the program proved a massive failure. Polish nationalists
organized banks and credit houses as alternative purchasing agents for landowners looking
to sell, then parceled and sold the plots to Polish speakers. Combined with demographic
trends of a higher Catholic birthrates and steady migration out of Posen/Poznań, the
percentage of Polish land ownership only increased during the era of nationalist battle. 37 In
1903, Prussia extended the Colonization Commission’s purview to Upper Silesia. In the
next two years, that authority was extended through two acts, one enlarging the number of
hereditary German landholdings known as Fideikommisse which could not be parceled, and
another giving the government approval over all new construction projects based on
national interests. In reality, these measures did practically nothing to affect the regional
balance of Polish and German speakers in Upper Silesia, and were used for national ends
sparingly. More repressive were 1908 language ordinances, as part of the Vereinsgesetz,
which banned Polish language usage at public meetings. Exceptions for political groups and
for heavily Polish-speaking counties, however, limited the effect of these measures in Upper
Silesia. 38 By far the greatest impact of these failed policies was to provide ample fuel to Polish
activists hoping to fan the flames of nationalism. The fumbling and ineffective Prussian
37 Hagen, Germans, Poles, and Jews, 184-185.
38 Tomasz Kamusella, Silesia and Central European <strong>Nationalism</strong>s: The Emergence of National and Ethnic Groups in
Silesia, 1848-1918 (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2007), 196.
105

policies lent the impression, not unwarranted, that a war of cultural extermination was
being waged against Poles. Polish activists capitalized upon the threat consistently in
newspapers and election campaigns.
The broader battle between Germans and Poles being waged primarily outside Upper
Silesia also brought about a new popular alliance between Prussian officials and German
activists. The most notable organization was the Ostmarkverein [Eastern Marches Society],
its members known colloquially as Hakatists after the initials H-K-T of the group’s three
founders Hansemann, Kenneman and Tiedemann. It was founded in 1894 in reaction to
conciliatory policies by the Caprivi government towards Polish nationalist leaders in
Posen/Poznań. Ostensibly acting in defense of German interests, the Ostmarkverein gained
the trust and membership of Prussian civil servants while advocating aggressive measures
against Polish-language learning, cultural autonomy, and economic advancement. 39 In
nationalist terms, the achievement of the Hakatists was to flip the story of ethno-cultural
threat on its head. Whereas Poles could rightly claim that Prussian policies were aimed at
decapitating Polish political nationalism and assimilating the Polish-speaking masses into
German society, the Hakatists now claimed that Polish efforts to stop these processes
constituted a threat to socially dominant German society. This near-paranoid fear over the
Polish erosion of German cultural dominance was driven by broader forces on the right
which were reshaping German conservative interests along activist lines in the era of Liberal
decline. 40 The Ostmarkverein was only one of several pressure groups pushing Prussian
39 For the most lucid English-language account of the Ostmarkverein, see the somewhat dated Richard Tims,
Germanizing Prussian Poland: The H-K-T Society and the Struggle for the Eastern Marches in the German Empire,
1894-1919 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941).
40 Geoff Eley’s seminal study on these right-nationalist pressure groups in the Wilhelmine era argues for the
importance of this activism in creating the “political context in which the possibility of a German fascism could
106

policy in hardline anti-Polish directions, albeit one with upwards of 50,000 members at its
height before World War I. 41 The group resonated loudly with Polish nationalists as the
quintessential opponent, and “Hakatists” became the preferred pejorative in the Prussian
press for any Prussian official or German opponent. The threat of Hakatists to Upper Silesia
was more than rhetorical: with less than 50 percent of Ostmarkverein members typically
hailing from Posen/Poznań and West Prussia, Silesians became main targets of
recruitment. 42 By 1913 Silesia counted almost 12,000 members in the Ostmarkverein, and
although many were certainly in purely German-speaking areas of Lower Silesia, a
significant cadre of Upper Silesian Hakatists existed. 43 Upper Silesian branches, however,
remained subordinate to the Ostmarkverein leaders in Posen/Poznań and their political
agenda. But these Silesian Hakatists nonetheless constituted an essential – and politically
powerful – bloc within regional national relations.
Among Polish activists, a powerful ideological and political network was forming across
the partition divides largely to counter the threat of Germanization made tangible by
Prussian policies and the Ostmarkverein. In Posen/Poznań conservative landowners, the
remnants of pre-partition Poland’s gentry class, or szlachta, had long dominated Polish
politics. The end of Germany and Russia’s diplomatic alliance in 1890 opened up the
possibility for Poles – caught between the two states – to exploit the new continental
develop.” Geoff Eley, Reshaping the German Right: Radical <strong>Nationalism</strong> and Political Change After Bismarck (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), vii.
41 The Bund der Landwirte, the second most influential group, existed along with a range of smaller regional
organizations as well as national conservative groups (such as the Pan-German League) sympathetic to the Hakatist
position. For an account of these “Missionaries in the East” see Hagen, Germans, Poles, and Jews, 266-287. Eley cites
Ostmarkverein membership at 53,000 in 1910. Eley, Reshaping the German Right, 101.
42 In 1897 only 8,000 of the approximately 17,000 members Hakatist members hailed from Posen or West Prussia.
Tims, Germanizing Prussian Poland, 73.
43 The Breslau headquarters of the Silesian Ostmarkverein branch counted 11,850 members in 1913. Kamusella, Silesia
and Central European <strong>Nationalism</strong>s, 158.
107

tensions. A new Polish political force drawn from the educated middle classes in the Russian
partition, combined with exiles in Switzerland, began in the 1890s to question the
conservative tactics of building civil society within the partitions. Instead, they advocated a
new fighting spirit grounded in mass political movements for the political resurrection of
Poland. In so doing, they also re-imagined Poland as an ethnic nation-state rather than as a
multinational Commonwealth of the pre-modern era. 44 Known at various times as the
National League, National Democrats, or Endecja, this growing coalition focused on
Germany as the main enemy of an ethnic Polish nation-state, since it was advanced
Germany that harbored the greatest threat (or enticement) to assimilate Polish speakers,
rather than Russia or Austria. 45 Anchoring themselves in universities and urban centers in
Posen/Poznań, and to a lesser extent in Upper Silesia, the National Democrats made their
political breakthrough in 1903 by stealing away a majority of Polish seats in Posen/Poznań
from the noble Polish conservatives. 46 In Upper Silesia the new crop of Polish nationalists,
led by the charismatic Wojciech Korfanty (recruited into the Endecja movement through
its student society in Berlin), faced a wider and more disparate set of opponents than in
Posen/Poznań. Nonetheless, the triumph in the 1907 Reichstag elections of ethnic Polish
nationalists in both Posen/Poznań and Upper Silesia seemed to herald, at least temporarily,
a new re-imagination of the ethno-national connections between Polish speakers in Prussia.
44 Brian Porter traces the political activism of these ethnic nationalists to an abandonment of Liberal or Socialist
notions of ineluctable progress (of ‘historical time’) and the seizing of history in the name of all-out ethnic battle.
Brian Porter, When <strong>Nationalism</strong> Began to Hate: Imagining Modern Politics in Nineteenth Century Poland (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
45 For a thorough examination of Polish National Democratic thought on the Prussian partition, see Roland
Gehrke, Der polnische Westgedanke bis zur Wiedererrichtung des polnischen Staates nach Ende des Ersten
Weltkrieges: Genese und Begründung polnischer Gebietsansprüche gegenüber Deutschland im Zeitalter des
europäischen <strong>Nationalism</strong>us (Marburg: Herder-Institut, 2001).
46 Hagen, Germans, Poles, and Jews, 234.
108

Industrialization and economic change, meanwhile, affected Upper Silesia disparately
in its eastern and western stretches. The number of coal miners in eastern Upper Silesia
grew from around 40,000 in 1885 to 100,000 in 1906, while other mining and smelting
industries also saw substantial rises in employment. 47 As cities multiplied in size, eastern
Upper Silesia became an industrial urban conglomeration with masses huddled in migrant
working-class shantytowns. The breakneck pace of industrialization of the eastern industrial
belt unleashed the forces of Social Democracy in the 1890s. In the Kattowitz/Katowice
district, Socialist votes in national Reichstag elections jumped from 2.5 percent in 1893 to
32.3 percent in 1898. 48 Yet away from the coal mines Upper Silesia remained heavily
agricultural, and the regional diversity of class interests made regional political unity elusive
in the absence of Kulturkampf repression. The Oppeln/Opole area served as a microcosm of
different Catholic interests, with a largely Germanized artisan class and a smattering of
professionals within the city, a significant population of workers in factories lining the city’s
edges, and a mass of rural farmers and peasants in the surrounding county. Given these
disparate interests, local Catholic politics could be pulled in several directions
simultaneously. While the threat of class rebellion remained marginal before World War I
(Oppeln/Opole’s Socialist votes peaked at around ten percent in 1912), continued
economic deprivation remained a key concern. 49 Consistently low wages and the decline of
small artisanal trades combined to create a disaffected worker population, while agriculture
suffered significant and long-term commodity price declines. Local citizens, especially of
47 Lawrence Schofer, The Formation of a Modern Labor Force, Upper Silesia, 1865-1914 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1975), 14.
48 Jerzy Pabisz, “Wyniki wyborów do Parlamentu Związku Północnoniemieckiego i Parlamentu Rzeszy Niemieckiej
na renie Śląska w latach 1867-1918” in Studia i materiały z dziejów Śląska. T. VII., 294-297.
49 Pabisz, “Wyniki wyborów” in Ibid., 302-303.
109

the suburban and rural lower classes, were consistently anti-government, and thus required
a political outlet to air their grievances. The tone of protest among Catholics around
Oppeln/Opole often was directed at the more pro-governmental forces within the Center
Party. The success of the Polish nationalists thus depended heavily on the stance of the
Center Party vis-à-vis the state. It should come as no surprise, then, that the main Polish
political surge in Upper Silesia came precisely during the period of greatest cooperation
between the Catholic Center Party and the “cartel” of National-Liberal and Conservative
parties under Chancellor Bülow, from 1902-1906.
The economic transformations that left many in Oppeln/Opole disaffected also
produced a growing social crisis in the city. In the 1890s the city began to burst at the seams
under rapid growth. Between 1885 and 1900 the population of Oppeln/Opole nearly
doubled – from 15,975 residents to 30,112. Much of Oppeln/Opole’s growth came from
physical expansion after 1890, with actual population growth at around 20 percent. 50 A bout
of municipal incorporations, culminating in the integration of the village of
Sakrau/Zakrzów in 1899, doubled the city’s footprint in just a decade. 51 A spurt of new
administrative building in the 1870s and 1880s increased the city’s stature as a district
capital. A new train station (still in existence today) followed in 1900, and a train car repair
workshop which opened on the eastern edge of town later in the decade became one of the
city’s largest employers. 52 Along with this growth came massive increases in municipal
50 Growth in the industrial eastern cities was even more explosive; Gleiwitz/Gliwice’s population tripled in the same
15-year period. Dziewulski and Hawranek, Opole: monografia miasta, 252-255.
51 For statistics on the population of incorporated areas see Paul Steinert, Die Stadt Oppeln: Eine stadt- und
verkehrsgeographische Studie (Breslau: Hirt, 1925), 66.
52 Bericht über die Gemindeangelegenheiten der Stadt Oppeln für die Jahre 1896, 1897, 1898, 1899, 1900, (Oppeln: E.
Raabe, 1904), 95. Verwaltungsbericht des Magistrats der Stadt Oppeln für die Zeit vom 1. April 1906 bis 31. März 1911,
(Oppeln1911), 1.
110

spending, from 3.4 million marks in 1901 to 7.5 million by 1909, much of it driven by
ambitious new public works projects. 53 Oppeln/Opole’s growth also came on the heels of
expansion among the city’s industries. By the eve of World War I the cement industry
employed over 2,300, and the smaller cigar and food production factories employed
roughly the same number (many of them female). Construction also proved a major
employer, and by 1907 roughly 48 percent of local citizens worked in industry, compared
to just 10 percent in professional trades or working as civil servants. 54
All of this growth did not necessarily benefit the lower classes, as a minor social crisis
gripped the expanding city. Wages in non-government jobs remained severely depressed,
particularly in the cement and cigar rolling industries, even as the number of jobs
expanded. The cement industry in particular was also highly sensitive to market crashes and
international competition, resulting in layoffs every time the economy dipped. Prices rose
amid a housing shortage and general commodity inflation, as working families squeezed
into undersized tenements. The city increased its spending on poor relief by 36 percent
between 1900 and 1905, with much of the extra spending due to inflation. 55 The number of
births out of wedlock, which was at a low of 16 percent in 1899, doubled to 32 percent in
1905, with future years seeing figures hover around 30 percent. 56 Schools remained
constantly overcrowded, leading to inadequate instruction, although the situation actually
53 Bericht über die Gemindeangelegenheiten der Stadt Oppeln für Zeit von 1 April 1901 bis 31 März 1906,
(Oppeln1907), 23. Verwaltungsbericht des Magistrats der Stadt Oppeln, 67.
54 Opole: monografia miasta, (Opole: Instytut Śląski, 1975), 260, 278.
55 Bericht über die Gemindeangelegenheiten, 1901-1906, 130-131.
56 Bericht über die Gemindeangelegenheiten, 1896-1900, 7, Bericht über die Gemindeangelegenheiten, 1901-1906, 4,
Verwaltungsbericht des Magistrats der Stadt Oppeln, 11.
111

improved in the 1890s as new schools were built. 57 Most of these statistics point in the same
direction: as Oppeln/Opole outgrew its small-town profile, the majority of citizens
(especially those not in the civil service) struggled with the economic forces disadvantaging
them, and the fabric of urban society was stretched thin.
Examining the range of political, economic and social pressures bearing down on
Oppeln/Opole as it entered the twentieth century, it becomes obvious that the city
continued to exist on the margins in several senses. Economically, the challenges of an
earlier era only multiplied as the city took on a more industrial profile. Wages remained
among the lowest in Germany and migration westward continued to be one of the only
sure paths to a better life. Education and social advancement also clearly still necessitated
the learning of German. Oppeln/Opole also remained on the economic margins of
industrialization within Upper Silesia, escaping the large-scale working-class slums and the
social crises which accompanied them. Oppeln/Opole’s discontent simmered instead of
boiling over. For this reason the city also remained on the margins of Upper Silesian Polish
nationalism in the prewar period, since it lacked the destabilizing radicalism which Polish
nationalist activists would effectively (although transiently) channel for their own ends. At
the same time, Upper Silesia itself remained largely removed from the main Polish-German
battle zone of Posen/Poznań. The latter became the center of anti-Polish colonization
efforts, the Ostmarkverein, and Polish counter-measures such as the massive 1907 school
strikes involving over 70,000 students. 58 While many of these new groups and new battles
57 The Catholic boys’ primary school downtown, for example averaged 87 pupils per teacher in 1891, compared to 67
ten years later. Calculated from 1901 school census in APO, AMO, Syg. 2370.
58 To compare, in Upper Silesia the Polish leadership decided against a strike, and only 431 schoolchildren in the
district, whose parents acted independently, decided to participate in the strike. Kamusella, Silesia and Central
European <strong>Nationalism</strong>s, 170.
112

were large and loud enough to make themselves heard in Upper Silesia, they echoed most
loudly in the industrial area. When addressing the role of national leaders and the attempted
national division of local society in Oppeln/Opole, it is thus necessary to consider the
unique economic, geographic, and social factors which placed the county on the margins in
the prewar period.
NATIONALISM IN ELECTIONS AND BEYOND
The period from the mid-1890s through 1907 was marked by the nationalization of the
electorate in Oppeln/Opole. In a continuous and accelerating feedback loop, Polish and
German nationalists captured increasingly large audiences at the polls, with an alliance of
German-minded Protestants and Catholics overcoming intra-ethnic political differences to
agree on common candidates to run against the Poles. This mutual engagement of both
national groups with their co-nationalists and with their opponents radicalized the rhetoric
of electoral campaigns and seemed to signify, or at least foretell, the national division of
local society. Yet the reverberations of electoral strife were not necessarily felt in all corners
of social life. The rise of a nationally unified Polish electorate was accompanied by the
simultaneous decline of Polish associational life in the Oppeln/Opole area. Local citizens
formerly engaged in Polish-Catholic Associations turned their attention instead to Catholic
Worker groups which, while largely Polish in membership, did not advocate a Polish
nationalist agenda. The radicalization of national life captivated locals at the polls, but in
reality only a committed core of activists maintained a steady interest in building Polish
and German national societies.
113

The 1898 Reichstag elections heralded a new era in national division. At the regional
level, the Catholic Center Party and the Napieralski-led group of moderate Polish
nationalists both eagerly worked out an electoral truce for Upper Silesia. As a result, in most
districts a list of Polish-approved Center Party candidates handily won, although increasing
Catholic defections to Social Democracy and the Conservative Party signaled the slow
fracturing of Center Party hegemony. 59 In the Oppeln/Opole district, however, things did
not run so smoothly. The incumbent candidate, Father Wolny, had fallen out of favor with
the Polish activists who, just five years earlier, had supported his candidacy. In a show of
solidarity from the region-wide alliance, the Center Party backed Major Szmula, the current
Landtag representative for Oppeln/Opole whom the party had bitterly opposed five years
earlier. 60 Wolny, however, continued to fight for his seat, finding support among German
nationalists within the Center Party and from Protestants who typically supported the
Conservative candidate. In 1898 this latter group decided against running their own
candidate, instead supporting Wolny. Thus local officials and German nationalists (many
of them Protestant) were put in the position of voting for a Catholic priest.
The contested election campaign featured testy accusations and denunciations in the
press. That spring the Catholic Oppelner Nachrichten called out Koraszewski for not
supporting Wolny, even going so far as to label Koraszewski “dictator of the provisional
government of the future Polish Empire.” Koraszewski dismissed the charges as false, and
even humorous, calling himself a “Prussian subject” with a political program that was one
59 Bjork, Neither German nor Pole, 50-51.
60 Schwidetzky, Die polnische Wahlbewegung, 43-44.
114

with the Center Party. 61 Yet he also readily admitted that his paper rarely spoke of Wolny,
and as the election approached the Gazeta Opolska began an assault on the incumbent
candidate. Wolny had been campaigning mainly within the city to pro-German crowds,
and had gained the endorsement of the Catholic Oppelner Nachrichten as well as the
conservative Prussian-loyal Wochenblatt für Stadt und Land. In backing Wolny, the
Oppelner Nachrichten was defying its party in favor of a renegade nationalist candidate.
Koraszewski criticized the coalition of voters supporting Wolny as much as he did the actual
record of the candidate. In particular, his newspaper lodged the claim that a “mishmash” of
pro-Germn forces were attempting to usurp Polish self-determination:
If this mishmash recommends Father Wolny, then it wants to throw sand in
the eyes of the people, lead them astray, and defeat the Polish people; it wants
to show the people that it lacks its own will, and instead must do whatever the
handful of Germans or Germanized Poles dictates. Brothers, let us gather
ourselves and defeat the mishmash! 62
The term “mishmash” became a powerful marker of the supposed inauthenticity of
Oppeln/Opole’s Germans – a mix of imported Protestant bureaucrats and Germanized
Poles who had abandoned their Catholic heritage, according to the Gazeta Opolska. The
German press readily admitted that an untested coalition of conservatives, liberals, and
German-nationalist Catholics was backing Wolny, yet also framed the battle as one of
national and patriotic duty. The Wochenblatt argued that defeating Szmula would require
“all nationally minded elements … to perform their duty completely.” 63 In the eyes of the
Wochenblatt, being “nationally minded” obviously meant being pro-German. On the eve
61 Wochenblatt für Stadt und Land, 15 May 1898. Koraszewski incidentally had found himself in legal trouble during
the campaign. In January 1898 he reprinted a Polish article from Lemberg/Lwów which allegedly slandered Prussian
ministers for violent anti-Polish Germanization measures. Found guilty, Koraszewski served two months in prison
that summer, while his executive editor was jailed for six months. See Wochenblatt, 30 Apr, 18 June 1898.
62 Reprinted in Ibid., 11 June 1898.
63 Ibid.
115

of the election, the Wochenblatt officially endorsed Wolny by labeling him, in giant
lettering, the “collective German candidate.” 64
The election was now fully framed as Pole versus German – except that Koraszewski
also saw a second enemy to battle: national indifference. His publicity campaign for Szmula
played up the supposed loss to Polish-Catholic culture of withholding one’s vote. The
Gazeta Opolska warned its readers:
If you do not give your vote to Szmula, then it means that you willingly accept
your children growing up without [Polish] instruction, without prayer, without
singing, that you do not care if you and your people, with their God-given
rights, die out. … He who does not turn out to vote [for Szmula] is a traitor to
the divine faith, to the church, to the rights and freedom of the Polish people. 65
Koraszewski’s nationalist program of voter outreach still relied heavily on translating the
appeal of Polishness into locally tangible themes of cultural loss in the Catholic milieu.
Treason to the nation amounted to treason against God, and a violation of the supposed
unity of local Polish-Catholic culture against the Germanizing mishmash. Religion served as
the palliative for national indifference – and the mechanism for translating national
belonging to voters beyond the circle of convinced activists.
The election results bore out the divisiveness – as well as the apathy – generated by the
nationalizing propaganda. On election day, only 54 percent of voters in the district turned
out, far below the 68 percent national average and lower than Upper Silesia’s 56 percent,
despite Oppeln/Opole featuring the only truly contested election in the district. The results
were exceptionally close: Szmula earned 6,440 votes and Wolny 6,220, with the SPD
candidate earning just enough votes (521, or 3.9 percent) to prevent a majority winner and
64 Ibid., 15 June 1898.
65 Reprinted in Ibid., 12 June 1898.
116

necessitate a runoff. 66 The results revealed stark micro-level variations. Seven of the eight
districts within the city limits went for Wolny – the bourgeois neighborhoods
overwhelmingly, with outlying working-class areas giving strong showings for Socialists (up
to 30 percent) and for Szmula. Results in surrounding villages varied substantially, but
predictably, with most Polish-speaking towns turning out large margins of victory for
Szmula. 67 Calrsruhe, in comparison, a Protestant-German settlement, produced the ironic
result of 148 local men casting their votes for a Catholic priest, Wolny, while not a single
man chose the former Prussian Major Szmula. 68
The prospect of a possible victory for the “German” candidate Wolny, meanwhile,
motivated a significant increase in turnout among German-minded men in Oppeln/Opole
for the runoff. In the bourgeois first district in the center of town, turnout jumped from 57
percent to 85 percent, with 134 of the 151 surplus voters casting their ballot for Wolny.
Not all voters were as enthusiastic: overall turnout was just 64 percent for the runoff, but
the preponderance of Polish speakers created a numerical voting bloc which overcame
German nationalist zeal for Wolny. Szmula’s margin of victory increased, with scattered
evidence suggesting that SPD supporters turned their votes overwhelmingly towards
Szmula in the runoff. 69
The election seemed to cement the successful national division of the electorate and the
fracturing of the Catholic unity of the Kulturkampf era. This was at least partly based on
66 Election figures in Pabisz, “Wyniki wyborów” in Studia i materiały z dziejów Śląska. T. VII., 296-297.
67 In some cases the victories were extreme: Vogtsdorf/Wójtowa Wieś, for example, turned out 144 votes for Szmula
and just three for Wolny. Yet Groß Döbern/Dobrzyń Wielki, a village that was more than 90 percent Polish
speaking, registered a 166 to 90 majority for Wolny. Wochenblatt, 18 June 1898.
68 Local voting results in Ibid., 18 June 1898.
69 In the working-class suburb of Königlich Neudorf/Nowa Wieś Królewska, the first election yielded 208 votes for
Szmula, 168 for Wolny, and 56 for the Socialist Wecker. Wolny actually lost votes in the week between the first and
second elections, earning 164 to Szmula’s 345. Local resutls for the runoff from Ibid., 26 June 1898.
117

oader regional and national trends. Yet the greatest debt was owed to the local Polish
nationalist movement, the seeds planted in fertile ground by a young Posen/Poznań-born
newspaper man. German nationalists who, just a decade earlier, had boycotted elections in
the face of Catholic hegemony, reacted by joining hands with German-minded
conservative Catholics to challenge the rise of Polish electoral nationalism. Yet the limits of
the Polish triumph were also clear. The Reichstag vote remained exceedingly close, especially
given the overwhelming demographic preponderance of Polish speakers. Had Koraszewski
truly managed to unite his ethno-linguistic flock behind his preferred candidate, Szmula
would have crushed Wolny. Some element of nationalist fatigue had also set in. By the time
the Prussian Landtag election campaign began later that year, nationalist divisions had
taken a back seat to Center Party unity. In accordance with the region-wide truce between
the Polish press and Catholic Center Party, the Oppeln/Opole Catholic electoral committee
established the incumbents Szmula and Nadbyl as its candidates. The election campaign
contained only passing references to national belonging or strife, with German-speaking
priests as likely as Polish activists to condemn Germanizing language policies. Szmula was
quick to downplay the nationalist division generated by the June Reichstag election; in a
platform speech to 500 local citizens that October, he played up his Prussian patriotism and
promised to address issues like school overcrowding and economic suffering which affected
both German and Polish speakers. 70 These priests and candidates rallied mainly behind issues
of social justice, and Szmula and Nadbyl won re-election handily. 71
70 Wochenblatt, 25 October 1898. Gazeta Opolska, 25 October 1898. Translation in APO, ROBP, Syg. 219.
71
The results of the 3 November 1898 Wahlmänner election: Szmula 242, Conservative Kupfer 178, Wolny 21,
Catholic Vogt 10. In the 2nd spot: Nadbyl 278, Kupfer 151. Results in Surman, “Wyniki wyborów” in Studia i
materiały z dziejów Śląska. T. VII., 122.
118

Koraszewski’s failure to nationalize society was also borne out by the decline in
nationalist interest after election season. Following the election-year hubbub, a curious
torpor set in, as national tensions largely disappeared from the local public discourse. Efforts
during the heated campaign season to boycott pharmacies employing Polish speakers fell
flat and quickly dissipated. 72 Life returned, at least according to the city’s main paper, the
Wochenblatt, to its regular schedule of theatrical presentations, city council meetings,
gardening fairs, birthday celebrations and retirement parties, choral recitals, petty crimes,
adjusted train schedules, school financing, weather forecasts, military maneuvers, and
suicides. In the Gazeta Opolska, most nationalist news came once again, as it had before the
election, from afar – from Posen/Poznań, the other Polish partitions, or eastern Upper
Silesia. Koraszewski’s newspaper also suffered a steady drop in subscriptions beginning in
the late 1890s. The subscription base had reached 5,000 by 1898, yet by 1902 the paper only
counted around 1,500 subscribers. 73 The Gazeta Opolska showed a particularly volatile
subscription range throughout the pre-war period in tune with election cycles. The national
excitement and division engendered during the election campaign proved hard to sustain.
This was equally true for the Polish-Catholic Associations Koraszewski had helped to
found in the early 1890s. After peaking in the mid-1890s with around 400 to 500 members
in the county, the scattered groups slowly declined in membership. By the summer of 1898
police counted only four Polish-Catholic groups in the county with a total of 264
members. 74 The main branch of the association in Oppeln/Opole declined from 320
72 Gazeta Opolska, 25 October 1898. Translation in APO, ROBP, Syg. 219.
73 See Bernhard Gröschel, Die Presse Oberschlesiens von den Anfängen bis zum Jahre 1945: Dokumentation und
Strukturbeschreibung (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1993), 197-198, Opole: monografia miasta, 332.
74 Undated report of Oppeln district administration, summer 1898, APO, ROBP, Syg. 22.
119

members in early 1897 to 45 members (only 26 of whom had paid their dues) just five years
later. 75 By the late 1890s the singing group Lutnia had also disbanded. The Gazeta Opolska
reported that a meeting in September 1899 meant to revive the singing group only
attracted seven people. 76 One by one rural Polish-Catholic groups disbanded from lack of
interest. By August 1902 only two Polish-Catholic associations existed in the surrounding
county, with a combined membership of around 90 Polish speakers; one of the groups, with
50 members, would dissolve by 1904. 77
This waning of Polish-Catholic Associations in Oppeln/Opole proved a sustained
phenomenon. The 1903 Reichstag election failed to re-energize a Polish nationalist
movement in Oppeln/Opole. This is all the more surprising given the new surge of a full-
fledged Polish nationalist party (the National Democrats) in the 1903 Reichstag elections.
With a motto of “Down with the Center,” the movement’s leader Korfanty was able to win
the first ever seat (thanks to a last-minute alliance with Socialists) in coal-belt Upper Silesia
on an explicitly pro-Polish and anti-Center platform. 78 In Oppeln/Opole, the opposite trend
was visible. With Szmula up for re-election as the official Center candidate (backed by
Polish nationalists), the only viable opponent came from Franz Ballestrem, who attempted
a comeback in his old district while also running for another seat which he already occupied.
The campaign was waged largely on social and religious issues. The county electoral
committee emphasized Szmula’s vigilance in protecting “the Catholic faith, the church and
75 Oppeln Landkreis report of 4 January 1897, APO, ROBP, Syg. 48. Oppeln Stadtkreis report June 1902, Syg. 35
76 Gazeta Opolska 29 September 1899, official translation in APO, ROBP, Syg. 34.
77 Oppeln Landkreis report August 1902, APO, ROBP, Syg. 35.
78 In the Kattowitz-Zabrze district Korfanty won 26% in the general election compared to the Center Party
candidate’s 44% and the Socialist candidate’s 22%. In the runoff election the Socialists agreed to support Korfanty,
who won 51% to 49% over the Catholic Paul Letocha. Bjork, Neither German nor Pole, 106-108.
120

Catholic rights” rather than his national stance. Szmula won convincingly with 58 percent
of the vote. 79 This bargain – Polish control of the local Catholic machine in order to prevent
national strife – was unlikely to create a nationally motivated populace. The temporary
peace between Polish nationalists and the Catholic Center Party generated an air of Polish
national apathy, while German nationalists coalesced around an alternate Catholic
candidate in Ballestrem.
Neither could the Prussian Landtag elections that year spark a broad resurgence of
Polish activism, despite more electoral drama. A group of German Catholics supported an
internal Center Party opponent to Szmula, the Oppeln/Opole lawyer Paul Vogt. The
Gazeta Opolska attacked Vogt as an illegal “secessionist” within the party. But by turning
in favor of Szmula, the paper was violating among agreement among regional Polish press
outlets to remain neutral in the election. 80 This time the alliance of conservative Catholic
and German nationalist interests was enough to push their candidate over the top. Vogt’s
unseating of Szmula was attributable not just to a strong showing in the city (where Vogt
earned 1,141 votes across the three voting classes compared to just 80 for Szmula), but also
in the Polish-speaking countryside (2,389 to Szmula’s 880 across voting classes). 81 Unity in
the Polish camp had collapsed under the dual pressure of industrial-zone nationalist calls for
abstention, and a wing of the Catholic Center Party pushing for the German-minded Vogt
over Szmula. In this case the unity of German nationalist interests in Oppeln/Opole had
proved much stronger than Polish nationalist efforts.
79 German nationalists and conservative Catholics meanwhile split their votes between Ballestrem (29%) and the
county Landrat Lücke (4%), with Socialists gaining over 8%. Results in Schwidetzky, Die polnische Wahlbewegung,
Appendix ‘Die Reichstagswahlen 1903 – 1907 – 1912’.
80 Ibid., 70-71.
81 Surman, “Wyniki wyborów” in Studia i materiały z dziejów Śląska. T. VII., Appendix, ‘Okręgi wyborcze rejenci
opolskiej’.
121

Ultimately voting patterns can only reveal so much about ethnic and political identity
in local societies. One must ultimately look beyond elections to the shifting social fabric of
Oppeln/Opole and the opportunities for communal organization which existed outside
nationalist activism. If Polish-speaking citizens turned away from the Polish-Catholic
Associations, did they organize themselves in other ways? One potential answer lies in the
Catholic Workers Associations. At the same time that membership in Polish-Catholic
groups was plummeting, local Catholic Workers Associations showed a rapid rise in
popularity. The Oppeln/Opole branch of the Centralverband katholischer Arbeiter [Central
Association of Catholic Workers] fluctuated between 300 and 450 members in the period
from 1895 to 1905, then underwent a rapid growth spurt. By late 1907 there were over 700
members in the Oppeln/Opole branch. The recent founding of several new branches in
surrounding villages brought total membership for the county close to 2000 men. 82 Nor was
this an election-year spike; throughout Upper Silesia membership by 1909 included over
25,000 men, compared to just 10,000 in 1905. 83
The rise of Catholic Worker Associations in Oppeln/Opole must be seen in the first
place as a reaction to worsening conditions for workers. After rapid growth in the late
1890s, a weak economy in 1900-1902 resulted in the layoff of more than 1,000 cement
works and cigar rollers. 84 Even as these jobs returned, the pay was so low that many local
citizens refused employment. Salaries tended to be even lower than that of coal miners in
eastern Upper Silesia, who themselves earned, on average, almost 30 percent less than
miners in the Ruhr Valley in western Germany. A day’s work on starting salaries in the
82 Report of 1 November 1907, APO, ROBP, Syg. 64.
83 Bjork, Neither German nor Pole, 159.
84 Gazeta Opolska, 9 September 1902, nr. 72.
122

cement factories in Oppeln/Opole would not earn enough money to buy even a kilogram
of pork. 85 Despite a slack labor market, local factories were importing Polish and Ukrainian
laborer from Austrian Galicia willing to work for the low wages. 86 Oppeln/Opole natives
from the countryside, like their fellow Silesians, were abandoning the region to find work
elsewhere. By 1907 some 18 percent of all industrial workers in Berlin and 27 percent of
workers in Saxony were native-born Silesians. 87 The rapid growth in the city of
Oppeln/Opole had meanwhile created a housing shortage and general price inflation. 88
The Catholic Workers Associations, almost always under clerical control, were intended
as a moderate outlet for workers to steer them clear of socialism. Fighting for worker
interests was often secondary to the cultivation of religiosity and anti-socialist sentiment in
these associations. 89 As a result, the group’s tactics often leaned towards friendly
reconciliation with industrial and government interests, rather than socialist-style
confrontation. Linguistic parity was essential to the operation of the Catholic Workers
Associations. Almost all written materials were bilingual, and the group’s regional
newspaper in Upper Silesia had both Polish and German editions, with a combined print
85 As of 1913 underground coal miners in eastern Upper Silesia averaged 4.85 marks per day, compared to 6.47 marks
in the Ruhr. Above-ground workers generally earned around one-third less. Schofer, The Formation of a Modern
Labor Force, Upper Silesia, 1865-1914, 108. Local pork prices were 1.53 marks per kilogram as of 1906.
Verwaltungsbericht des Magistrats der Stadt Oppeln, 108.
86 Gazeta Opolska, 23 March 1907.
87 Wojciech Wrzesiński, ‘Abwanderung aus Schlesien’ in Klaus Bździach, ed., "Wach auf, mein Herz, und denke": zur
Geschichte der Beziehungen zwischen Schlesien und Berlin-Brandenburg von 1740 bis heute (Berlin: Gesellschaft fur
interregionalen Kulturaustausch, 1995), 182.
88 A Gazeta Opolska article from 7 May 1907 reported that housing prices in parts of the city had jumped 50 percent
in the previous few years.
89 According to an 1895 bilingual pamphlet for a Gleiwitz/Gliwice branch of the Catholic Workers Association, the
four main goals of the group were “1) Protection and advancement of religiosity and morality, in steadfast
alignment with the church. 2) Combating Social Democratic principles and agitation 3) Protection and
advancement of the material interests of workers. 4) Advancement of essential virtues: industriousness, loyalty,
sobriety, thrift, family spirit, raising status-consciousness [Standesbewußtsein].” APO, ROBP, Syg. 48.
123

un of about 6,000 in 1902 (60 percent of them in Polish, 40 percent in German). 90 Local
branches across Upper Silesia often were split into Polish and German wings, mainly for
practical purposes of better communication. When the Oppelner Nachrichten reported in
1905 that the local group would be split along linguistic lines, the city’s head priest, Karol
Abramski, felt the need to reiterate the group’s non-national goals. “Up to this point we
have succeeded in keeping the peace,” he wrote, “in the purely social and economic efforts
of the Association, which have nothing to do with politics or the language question; and in
letting the German- and Polish-speaking members go peacefully hand in hand, and with
God’s help it will continue this way.” 91 The organizations may have done more to
encourage confessional cohesion than class solidarity, but in so doing they heralded the
reassertion of Catholic political relevance under clerical leadership and across language
boundaries. 92
Membership in these organizations did not exclude belief in Polish nationalism. In
fact, Koraszewski increasingly patronized the groups, attempting to awaken Polish
patriotism among the workers and calling them “our members.” Sensing a chance to
overcome national ignorance and apathy, Koraszewski taught audiences at Catholic
workers’ meetings Polish songs, “because many of our members still are unfamiliar with the
beautiful songs in their mother tongue.” 93 By 1910 the Worker Associations in the rural
county were deemed “Polish” enough to be included in the Landrat report on Polish
90 Report of Mädler to Regierungspräsident, 7 April 1902, APO, ROBP, Syg. 64.
91 Oppelner Nachrichten, 2 February and 16 February 1905.
92 Bjork, Neither German nor Pole, 161.
93 Gazeta Opolska, 9 May 1911, official translation in APO, SPO, Syg, 1568.
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activity. 94 Polish nationalist involvement in the groups did not dictate, however, a Polish
nationalist agenda. As I argue in the following section, much of the seemingly nationalist
success for Poles in the 1907 election can be traced to their parroting of social causes at the
center of the Catholic Workers movement. The groups remained firmly under the control
of clergy and made concerted efforts to steer clear of nationalist politics.
Other signs pointed to the continued apathy of many Polish speakers in organizing
themselves along national lines. One local cultural issue continued to draw headlines in the
Gazeta Opolska and served as the paper’s bread-and-butter cause: linguistic Germanization
of children. With public schoolhouse instruction effectively limited since 1872 to German
except in rare cases, the battleground shifted to priestly catechism and communion
preparation classes. In April 1904 the newspaper counted 560 communions that spring in
the county, of which 380 took place in German and only 180 in Polish. 95 The paper’s fears
of passive (or willing) Germanization among local families was a constant concern – and
given continued admonishments in the Gazeta Opolska towards Polish speakers, it seemed
to exert little influence over local citizens’ habits. 96 Parents increasingly chose to place their
children in German-language religious instruction.
Efforts by the newspaper to indict specific priests for Germanization often revealed
that readers’ dedication to priests outweighed nationalist sentiment. When in 1902 a local
correspondent accused Father Maiss of Germanization in his parish in
Chrosczütz/Chrościce, the Gazeta Opolska came under fire. 97 Maiss responded by claiming
94 Oppeln Landrat report on Polish organizations, 30 December 1910, APO, SPO, Syg. 1568.
95 Gazeta Opolska, 19 April 1904, nr. 32.
96 For other examples, see Ibid., 3 and 10 January, 18 February 1902; 19 March, 8 and 27 August 1907.
97 Original article in Ibid., 24 January 1902.
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he had never heard complaints previously. He held an early-morning German service for
the roughly eight families (six teachers and two foresters) who preferred German, with the
main services always in Polish. And when Maiss asked the 150 children under his
instruction which language they were more fluent in, only two or three claimed the ability
to read and write in Polish. After accounting for parental wishes, ten children were placed in
Polish instruction and the rest in German. Maiss also noted the problems with some
children understanding German, and thus his need to translate from Polish. 98 Maiss was
working within the confines of an educational system that left Polish-speaking children
weak in both German and Polish. Yet his fluid bilingual practices were subject to continued
attacks by the paper, which labeled him a “Polish-speaking Germanizer.” The Gazeta
Opolska received at least three letters of support from villagers defending Maiss against
nationalization charges. 99 The newspaper’s insistence on nationalizing local church relations
ran against a wall of protection for the local priest. Rather than learn from such episodes,
however, the Gazeta Opolska continued to indict their Polish-speaking readership for a
“dearth of education.” By 1907 the paper could write, “Things still look sad and dark among
our Catholic people. They do not read our Polish, Catholic papers and thus it is little wonder
that they are in the dark and exhibit themselves as the laughing stock of their fellow
German citizens.” 100 For Koraszewski and his editors, neither linguistic Germanization nor
other nationalist issues had sufficiently motivated his readers, forcing them to denounce
their potential audience in stark terms.
98 Ibid., 31 January 1902.
99 Ibid., 14 March, 21 March, 11 April 1902.
100 Ibid., 17 September 1907.
126

Just as with Poles, the rise of a powerful German nationalist voting bloc did not
necessarily translate into sociological cohesion among German speakers. Admittedly, their
milieu was smaller but also more cohesive, confined mainly to Oppeln/Opole and the
various German-speaking, often Protestant towns in the county. German speakers (and
especially Protestants) were most at home in the halls of regional and municipal
administration in the district capital. The exclusive social world of educated civil servants
and industrialists in Oppeln/Opole was motivated by a self-defense of the city as a tower of
Germanness in Upper Silesia. This marriage of power and patriotism created a formidable
base for more radical German nationalists like the Ostmarkverein. Oppeln/Opole founded a
Ostmark branch in 1903, around the time that the movement was taking off throughout
Upper Silesia. By 1907 the local branch counted 160 members, led by a member of the
district council [Kreisrat]. Despite its status as the district capital, Oppeln/Opole’s
Ostmarkverein paled in comparison to the membership of branches in eastern industrial
Upper Silesia. 101 Locally the group served largely as a social club for patriotic civil servants.
The group at times seemed an extension of the government, as invitations to private
Ostmark events would be distributed through public channels to “all members of
government, all offices … and the chancery.” 102 Officials and even village teachers were
often expected to belong to the group or at least support its policies. Yet the group
remained largely passive, its agenda subordinate to Posen/Poznań. In 1903 the Breslau
regional headquarters noted the mainly “observational, waiting pattern” role of the Silesian
branches up to that point, though they promised a more active role. 103 The Ostmarkverein in
101 Ostmarkverein status report, 1907, in APO, ROBP, Syg. 69. Cf. Beuthen with 780 membes.
102 April 1913 invitation in APO, ROBP, Syg. 69.
103 Schlesische Zeitung, 16 March 1903. In APO, ROBP, Syg. 26.
127

Oppeln/Opole was removed from the main battles over land colonization and school strikes
– two central issues in Posen/Poznań in the 1907–1914 period. The integration of Upper
Silesia into a rhetorical “threatened borderland” would not mature until the 1920s. In the
meantime, however, the Hakatists proved a social center for the expanding circle of
German nationalists who embraced illiberal policies to do battle with the perceived threat of
Polish nationalism. The greatest impact of local Hakatists was to serve as the embodiment
of radical German nationalism for the Polish press, which used the term “Hakatist” to smear
practically any opponent regardless of actual membership.
A numerically stronger patriotic organization, but one without the same radical
nationalist credentials, was the veterans’ group known as the Kriegerverein. With branches
across Germany, this popular group served as the local home to former soldiers of various
ethno-linguistic backgrounds. The Kriegerverein in Oppeln/Opole was often at the center of
patriotic celebrations such as the Sedan Day commemoration of the Franco-Prussian War,
even as the holiday drew practically no interest from the wider community. 104 Given the
substantial Polish-speaking membership, however, the Prussian patriotism on display at
events like the 100th anniversary of Kaiser Wilhelm’s birthday in 1897 did not necessarily
translate into anti-Polish German nationalism. 105 The occasional “overdone patriotism” of
the group could also be distasteful even to its German-speaking members. 106 Kriegerverein
groups in mainly Polish-speaking villages also proudly waved their military and Prussian
flags. 107 The lines between a staatstreu Prussian loyalty and anti-Polish German nationalism
104 See, for example, Wochenblatt, 2 September 1898.
105 For details on the centennial and the role of the Kriegerverein see APO, AMO, Syg. 406.
106 Rose, The Drama of Upper Silesia, 159-160.
107 See, for example, letter of Alt-Schalkowitz official to Regierungspräsident, 8 February 1904, APO, ROBP, Syg. 37.
128

certainly remained well-defined for many local citizens, even among those in official
bureaucratic circles. The Kriegerverein, with its cross-linguistic and cross-confessional appeal,
proved it was possible to be a Prussian patriot and proud veteran while still being pro-Polish.
The group thus hardly served as a social club for anti-Polish nationalists. Ultimately the
German national voting bloc relied on support from socially disparate interest groups: it
was an alliance of artisans and other native Catholic Upper Silesians with an inner core of
mainly Protestant civil servants. This electoral alliance did not forge a redrawing of social
boundaries along national lines; markers of class, religion, and birthplace continued to
shape social life beyond elections in ways that contradict any depiction of a unified German
nationalist front against Poles.
POLISH SOCIAL AND POLITICAL LIMITS
A confluence of exceptional factors led to the 1907 Reichstag elections being the most
nationally divided in the history of Oppeln/Opole. At the same time, longer-term forces
were working to disrupt the attempted national division of local society. Korfanty’s victory
in the coal belt in 1903 as a Polish nationalist candidate had heralded a regional crisis
among more moderate Polish Catholics. Napieralski, as their undisputed representative,
slowly drifted in the 1903-1907 period towards a more explicit Polish nationalist stance,
finally joining Korfanty in a coalition in 1906 known as the Polish Circle [Koło Polskie].
This created a united Polish front, and allowed Koraszewski, whose politics had always stood
between that of Napieralski’s and Korfanty’s, free rein to pursue a Polish nationalist agenda.
At the same time, a rising tide of dissatisfaction with the Center Party – now in a strong
129

alliance with German nationalist parties – could be felt within society at large and within
clerical ranks.
A small but influential group of Upper Silesian priests began to openly question the
political direction of the Center Party. One key figure in this movement, who would later
represent Oppeln/Opole in the Prussian Landtag, was Jan Kapica. Born in 1866 to a Polish-
speaking family in Lower Silesia, Kapica was part of the post-Kulturkampf generation of
priests (he was ordained in 1892) whose loyalty to their parishioners and their social well-
being outweighed political genuflection to the Center Party. 108 While serving as a
prominent Polonophile priest in southeastern Upper Silesia, Kapica also mediated between
the Polish nationalists and Catholic interests during a period of rising tensions. At a
meeting of Upper Silesian clergy in April 1906, Kapica took a lead role in criticizing the
faltering Center Party. 109 Kapica later said that he could work “only in a Center Party that
exists in reality, but not in a Center party that exists only in our wishes.” 110 Ultimately he
would withdraw from the Center Party to recast himself as a moderate Pole in the
Napieralski mold. The regional erosion of Center Party support was due at least in part to its
lack of progress on socio-economic issues. The party, now in a pro-government coalition,
seemed tone-deaf to the rising worker impoverishment in Oppeln/Opole. The increasing
popularity of the local Workers Associations after 1905 had yet to find an echo among
Reichstag delegates. Some priests involved in the Catholic Workers movement became
despondent about the Center Party political prospects even as they organized workers on
108 Emil Szramek, Ks. Jan Kapica, życiorys a zarazem fragment historii Górnego Śląska (Roczniki Towarzystwa Przyjaciół
Nauk na Śląsku, 1931), 7-9.
109 Quoted in Bjork, Neither German nor Pole, 116-117.
110 Quoted in Szramek, Ks. Jan Kapica, 46-47.
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the ground. Abramski, then in charge of Polish-speaking Workers Association in
Oppeln/Opole, felt that priests should abstain from the “race war” consuming Upper
Silesian politics. While only a tiny minority of priests would officially come out to support
the Polish Circle in 1907 (only 13 out of nearly 500 in the region), the stirrings of
discontent and dismay among clergy ran deep and wide across Upper Silesia. 111
The new regional Polish Circle under Korfanty and Napieralski, meanwhile, sought to
blunt the sharp edge of its nationalist rhetoric by recruiting priests to run for Reichstag seats
in the 1907 election. As a result, three districts, including Oppeln/Opole, actually featured
two Catholic priests running against each other – one for the Poles and one for the Center
Party. With Szmula retiring, Polish nationalists nominated Father Paweł Brandys from
Dziergowitz/Dziergowice, a village in an adjacent county. His official Center Party
opponent was the same Father Wolny who had previously run. In 1898 German
nationalists had joined with Catholics to vote for Wolny, but a new electoral war in 1906
led by the German nationalist parties against the Center Party made a repeat alliance
impossible. A coalition of German parties under the new Patriotic Electoral Committee
instead nominated a separate candidate in Oppeln/Opole: the county school inspector and
Ostmarkeverein member Wedig. Without the support of Protestants, Wolny’s chances
against Szmula were slim from the beginning. But the flocking of many German-minded
Catholics to Wedig’s camp – most out of “dissatisfaction … over Center Party policies up to
now” according to one local paper – sealed Wolny’s fate. 112
111 Ibid., 48.
112 Oppelner Zeitung, 15 January 1907.
131

With Wedig and Brandys the two most viable candidates, the campaign was waged on
largely nationalist lines. Wedig’s rhetoric proved at times extreme. Taking on the school
language issue so close to his work as school inspector, he decried the “fanatics” who
disobeyed the “authorities decreed from God, the school and state agencies.” He insisted
that local children came to school knowing only an unenlightened regional dialect, and that
it was the state’s gift to impart German upon them. Wedig operated under the nineteenth-
century Liberal assumption that the assimilatory process was natural and would bring social
and economic happiness to Polish-speaking subjects. In so doing, he embraced an
undemocratic sense of German cultural superiority and hierarchy. Wedig warned that, if
Polish nationalists had their way, “our children in Upper Silesia will never learn German
correctly, and never feel themselves to be German, but instead Poles, and thus will remain
uncultured [in Unkultur bleiben].” 113
The Polish campaign of Brandys, while also explicitly nationalist, did not sharply differ
in tone from previous Polish-Catholic candidates in the district. His platform hit on a
carefully planned balance of religious, national, and social issues. His first promise, the one
he claimed “the most important of our duties,” was to protect the Catholic faith. “Not only
the Center Party fights for religious freedom, but also the Polish Circle equally as much.”
The Catholic priest promised continuity with the Center Party on most major issues.
Brandys, as a self-identified Pole, also was not afraid to turn make a link between ethnic
belonging and national duty. “Our sacred duty is to confess our Polish nationality. Deem it
an honor for us, that we are Poles, and preach everywhere our affiliation with the Polish
nationality.” His protests against Germanization policies were firm, but his denigration of
113 Oppelner Nachrichten, 11 December 1906.
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the Center as a “German party” that “does not protect our nationality or our language” was
more striking given his clerical background. Finally, Brandys positioned himself firmly as a
populist candidate with a strong platform of economic improvement. He recognized that a
mix of workers, farmers, and shopkeepers had disparate interests, but nonetheless appealed
to a sense of class unity driven by “brotherly love.” His economic stance was however more
anti-Socialist than explicitly pro-worker, offering a faith-based defense against the godless
Social Democrats. 114
Brandys managed to win the election convincingly, in the process solidifying voting
patterns established in the 1898 election. Brandys earned only 16 percent of votes in the
city, but 64 percent of all votes in the countryside. 115 When votes for Brandys are cross-
referenced with 1910 census results, it becomes clear that in some villages Polish nationalist
votes approached complete ethno-linguistic commitment among Polish and bilingual
speakers. 116 Wedig, meanwhile, was the top vote getter in the city with 45 percent of the
vote, and culled 25 percent of votes in the surrounding county. Votes for the SPD showed
their first ever decline in the county, from 8.5 percent in 1903 to just over five percent in
the 1907 election. If one presupposes the election as a purely nationalist referendum, then
the near-complete ethno-linguistic division of the electorate becomes a plausible reading of
the results. 117
114 Platform speech in Gazeta Opolska, 8 January 1907.
115 Local results published in Ibid., 29 January 1897.
116 1910 census results in APO, RO, Syg. 2096. In Chmielowitz, 85% of all votes went to Brandys, while the 1910 census
registered 87% combined Polish and bilingual speakers in the village. In Groß Döbern the figures were 90% and 93%,
respectively; for the rural Landkreis as a whole the figures were 64% and 78%. These must be taken as
approximations, given the political calculations of census takers and respondents, as well as demographic trends
which may have made the overall population look different than the over-25, male-only voting demographic.
117 Helmut Smith argues that by 1903 in Upper Silesia “political Catholicism had itself divided along national lines,”
and sees the 1907 election as a culmination of these trends. Smith, German <strong>Nationalism</strong> and Religious Conflict, 196.
133

Longer-term trends, particularly the attitude of Polish nationalists after the election,
suggest however that such a reading over-simplifies the significance of the election. While
attacks on the Center Party continued, after the election Koraszewski and the Gazeta
Opolska instead increasingly addressed social issues and worker discontent. They reported
on the poor health conditions and urged immediate wage increases, while also noting the
significant profits of the dominant Portland Cement company. 118 Regular indictments of
the radical methods of socialists and appeals to “legal” and “Christian” measures of worker
empowerment by Polish activists suggested that they feared losing members to the Left
even more than they feared the Center. 119 The Gazeta Opolska even showed signs of
attempting to usurp the growing Catholic Workers movement by implicitly criticizing its
soft methods. “Our workers only lack one thing, and that is strong organization,” the paper
announced in May 1907, even as Polish-speaking workers were flocking to Catholic
Workers Associations. 120 The Polish electoral triumph resulted in no major resurgence in
national associational life. Instead, Polish nationalists seemed to offer themselves as voting
outlet for various forms of social disscontent, which they could not effectively channel in
the long term. The drop in SPD support in 1907, while much larger in eastern industrial
districts than in Oppeln/Opole, can be taken as one sign of the ability of Polish nationalists
to summon working-class votes. 121 The Gazeta Opolska, having won victory in a
118 Gazeta Opolska, 2 March 1907.
119 For example, in March 1907 references to worker movements and Socialism can be found in the Gazeta Opolska
on 2, 7, 14, 23 March, despite any serious strike or other activity to motivate exceptional coverage.
120 Gazeta Opolska, 23 May 1907.
121 In the districts containing Kattowitz and Beuthen, Socialist votes roughly halved between the 1903 and 1907
elections, from 21-22 % to 11-12%. See Pabisz, “Wyniki wyborów” in Studia i materiały z dziejów Śląska. T. VII., 298-
301.
134

nationalized election, turned it attention largely away from nationalist issues to address the
social crisis among local workers.
After the election, the Polish nationalists and Center Party soon discovered more
common ground than points of disagreement. Their common interests were motivated
above all by the same external enemy: the Bülow Bloc of conservative and liberal parties
arrayed against Catholics, Poles, and Socialists. While the Bülow Bloc originally formed to
support colonial financing in German Southwest Africa, the bloc also utilized its power to
launch new aggressive anti-Polish laws. The two most notorious measures, both from 1908,
limited the use of Polish in public meetings, and provided the means for forced
expropriation of Polish landholdings as part of the German Colonization program. The laws
marked an aggressive new stance which prompted some Catholics to fear a new
Kulturkampf, even though the expropriation measure was used only once, on four Polish
farms. 122 Even before the 1907 Reichstag election the nationalist Oppelner Zeitung noted
regional Catholics’ outward desire to remain “closely befriended” with Polish nationalists, in
case they found reason for an alliance in the future. 123 The Bülow Bloc provided that reason.
Within fifteen months of the election, this alliance became a reality. In preparation for
the Landtag elections of 1908, the Center Party allied with the Poles, agreeing to run Polish
nationalist candidates in three districts. In reality, the local Oppeln/Opole electoral
committee sought out conciliatory candidates for both of their local seats. In the second
slot, Otto Wodarz was instead chosen to run as a Catholic candidate in place of the less
Polish-friendly incumbent Nadbyl. Candidacy in the first slot went to Jan Kapica, officially
122 Bjork, Neither German nor Pole, 132, Kamusella, Silesia and Central European <strong>Nationalism</strong>s, 196-197.
123 Oppelner Zeitung, 16 January 1907. It should be noted that the paper, in supporting the Hakatist Wedig in the
election, had an interest in painting the Catholics and Poles as related enemies.
135

unning as a Pole but on a platform driven by reconciliation with Catholics. In a major
platform speech, Kapica beamed over the “peace… between the two Catholic peoples,”
noting that the compromise was “one of my life’s ideals.” Besides being “a child of Polish
parents” and a priest, Kapica also emphasized that he was a “farmer’s son” who would
“pursue national justice and social equity.” 124 The Polish-Catholic strife of 1907 seemed to
disappear beneath a swarm of speeches from both political camps professing a common
platform committed to fighting for economic and cultural interests of local Catholics. Not
surprisingly, this formidable alliance overcame the weighted Prussian three-class voting
system to defeat the nationalist Bülow Bloc candidates. 125
The Polish nationalist political triumph of 1907 would continue to fade from view in
the coming years. At the regional level, the Catholic side of the Polish-Catholic political
compromise proved more enduring and appealing. Napieralski’s newspaper empire used the
newfound alliance to again push a moderate agenda, one which clashed with Korfanty’s
fiery nationalist style. When the Bülow Bloc disintegrated in 1909 over Conservative
resistance to changes in tax law, Napieralski and moderate Poles joined with Center Party
Catholics in supporting a new majority alliance with the Conservatives. Korfanty, who
relied on working-class voters for support, balked at the conservative turn and formed a
separate Polish faction with fellow Endecja members. The unity of the Napieralski-Korfanty
1907 Polish ticket had been dealt its final death blow. The Polish Circle’s decision to run
priests in the recent Reichstag and Landtag elections now came back to bite Korfanty; the
moderate set of pro-Catholic, Polish-speaking clerical politicians leaned more firmly towards
124 3 June 1908 police report of 24 May 1908 Wahlversammlung, APO, SPO, Syg. 221.
125 The Bloc candidates were the Oppeln Landrat Karl Lücke and Ladislaus Reymann. Results in Surman, “Wyniki
wyborów” in Studia i materiały z dziejów Śląska. T. VII., 122.
136

Napieralski and the compromise position than towards Korfanty. Kapica was among
Napieralski’s supporters; in 1909 he denigrated Korfanty as a radical nationalist agitator,
drawn to socialism and incendiary speeches but without the qualities needed to be an
effective lawmaker. 126 After Korfanty was forced to sell his financially troubled newspapers
to Napieralski in 1910, no one could dispute that Napieralski had emerged as the leading
voice of Polish Catholics in Upper Silesia, touting a moderate agenda in tune with Center
Party interests.
Yet Napieralski also faced issues unifying his electorate. As a regional movement which
had relied on Korfanty’s ability to attract socialist-leaning voters, Polish nationalists now
found themselves allied with German Conservatives – hardly a recipe for enticing working-
class votes. Fears spread of a mass exodus of Polish voters to the Socialists, who were gaining
ground organizationally throughout Upper Silesia, but especially in the industrial belt.
Napieralski attempted to re-establish Polish populist bonafides ahead of the 1912 Reichstag
election, resuming an anti-Center press assault. The SPD vote did increase significantly
across Upper Silesia in 1912 to 14 percent, compared to just 6.5 percent in 1907. 127 The
“red” vote was significant enough to force several runoffs between Catholic and Polish
candidates. In a repeat of previous trends, SPD voters to switch their votes to Poles in the
runoffs, while German nationalists rallied behind the Center candidate. The Poles ended up
losing one of their five seats, with reduced showings in nearly every district. In
Oppeln/Opole, the Center Party decided to ally with German nationalists, who promised to
vote for the Center candidate against the incumbent Brandys in the Reichstag election. In
126 Szramek, Ks. Jan Kapica, 52-54.
127 Pabisz, “Wyniki wyborów” in Studia i materiały z dziejów Śląska. T. VII., 300-303.
137

eturn, the nationalist coalition was promised support from Catholics for a Conservative in
the Prussian Landtag elections. Brandys was able to fend off the alliance and win re-
election, thanks to strong support once again from the countryside, but his vote totals
declined. 128
Despite the repeat victory for Brandys, Polish nationalists suffered a huge loss of
confidence in the supposedly inexorable power of national division. 129 The logic of
nationalist awakening assumed an ever-increasing loyalty among Polish speakers, and could
not readily account for a decline in support. Napieralski’s election campaign also alienated
many who had joined the 1908 compromise ticket – chief among them Kapica. A few
months after the 1912 Reichstag election, Kapica announced he was exiting the Polish
Circle in light of increasing Polish attacks against the church. 130 It became clear that Polish
nationalists had failed to spark an enduring popular movement of Poles, or effect the
national division of society. After Kapica’s resignation he attacked the Polish nationalists
for attempting to sow discord between Catholics by playing up the issue of Germanization
in priestly instruction of children. He insisted that almost all priests followed the wishes of
parents and were capable of offering instruction in both languages. In defending his fellow
priests, Kapica showed his first-order loyalty to the Church, rather than to any nation. In the
process he also revealed the nature of language relations and continued national apathy in
Upper Silesian families. “Those familiar with relations between peoples will observe that a
large portion of Upper Silesian families speak with their children in German and teach them
German prayer,” he wrote. Even among radical nationalists, Kapica claimed, commitment
128 Local results of 12 January 1912 Reichstag election in APO, SPO, Syg. 91.
129 Bjork, Neither German nor Pole, 145-152.
130 Szramek, Ks. Jan Kapica, 55.
138

to the Polish social milieu was less than complete. From experience he claimed that “many
fathers, who at election time belong to the most extreme radicals, still send their children to
German [religious] instruction.” 131 Kapica’s claims, when combined with evidence of
floundering Polish organizations, suggest strongly that Koraszewski and his protégés had
failed to stem the tide of national apathy and German social integration, even as they
earned electoral victories.
Polish associational life in Oppeln/Opole, meanwhile, underwent a retrenchment
among its elite members in the decade before World War I. A coterie of loyal nationalist
activists distanced themselves increasingly from the flock of Polish speakers they claimed to
represent. New organizations, such as the Manufacturers’ Society [Towarzystwo
Przemyslowców] founded in 1906, tended to draw their membership from the small
numbers of Polish-minded professionals and artisans around Oppeln/Opole. Of the 25
original members in this new group, 19 lived in the city of Oppeln/Opole. 132 Efforts to reach
out to the peasantry through new Polish associations were practically non-existent, and by
late 1910 only one Polish-Catholic organization, with 35 members, existed in the county. 133
The Gazeta Opolska still assumed a nationalist tone, especially when reporting on events
beyond the region, or on school and church linguistic policies. But Koraszewski’s newspaper
nationalism also clearly had been unable to corral the growing working-class constituency
organized in Catholic Workers Associations. These groups tended to eschew national issues
almost entirely in favor of pressing social questions. The Gazeta Opolska’s own report of a
1912 Catholic Workers meeting in Oppeln/Opole made no reference to nationalism.
131 Quoted in Ibid., 56-58.
132 Statue of organization from 1 March 1906 in APO, ROBP, Syg. 37.
133 Landrat report 30 December 1910, APO, SPO, Syg. 1568.
139

Workers instead railed against their perceived common enemy: the “liberal spirit” of
capitalist competition which steamrolled workers’ rights and failed to honor the Lord’s day
of rest. 134 The language and content of such meetings must have been ultimately
disheartening to Koraszewski and fellow nationalists. They had failed to convert social
grievances into an enduring and socially cohesive Polish national movement.
The internal strife among Polish nationalists at the regional level ultimately trickled
down to the Oppeln/Opole area through a new challenge to Koraszewski’s leadership.
Internal squabbles between leading local nationalists – particularly over employment at the
Polish-led People’s Bank [Bank Ludowy] – prompted a breakaway faction to establish its
own bank, printing press, and newspaper in Oppeln/Opole in 1911. The leaders of the new
faction were, unlike Koraszewski, typically native Upper Silesians of a younger generation
who were products of the new Polish nationalist milieu. Franciszek Lerch, one of the leaders
of the new faction, was born in a neighboring county in 1880 as the “son of a well-situated
and apparently quite German-minded farmer,” according to German officials. 135 His
education in Polish nationalism began in high school and matured while he studied in
Breslau. There he belonged to the new Polish-nationalist secret student society Zet
supported by the Polish Endecja, the same organization in which Korfanty received his
national-political education while studying in Berlin. 136 The Zet represented a break from
previous student groups in Breslau in that it moved beyond the Polish-Catholic milieu of
the theology faculty to attract the handful of Polish speakers training in lay subjects to a
134 Gazeta Opolska, 12 September 1912, nr. 73.
135 Report of Mädler to Regierungspräsident, 9 August 1911. APO, ROBP, Syg. 123. See also Jerzy Ratajewski, Opolskie
"Nowiny" w latach 1911-1939 (Opole: Instytut Śląski, 1967), 14.
136 Zet was the common colloquial abbreviation for the association, whose official name was Związek Młodzieży
Polskiej [Association of Polish Youth]. On Korfanty’s membership, see Sigmund Karski, Albert (Wojciech) Korfanty:
Eine Biographie (Dülmen: Laumann-Verlag, 1990), 40.
140

purely nationalist cause. 137 The Zet brought its members into close contact with Endecja
leaders Dmowski and Balicki, who were preaching an agressive new vision for an ethnic
Polish-nation state that included Upper Silesia. It was in Zet that Lerch also met his fellow
dissenter and native Upper Silesian Franciszek Kurpierz, who together with Lerch and other
colleagues established the rival Nowiny newspaper in Oppeln/Opole in 1911.
The founding of the Nowiny represented the public debut of the first generation of
local Upper Silesians who had formed their intellectual and political personas in a
thoroughly nationalist milieu. As such, they were torn between dedication to their local
homeland and loyalty to the Polish nationalist cause. On the one hand, the newspaper
presented itself as the true defender of the local Polish people against the distant and over-
educated outside activists personified by Koraszewski. In its inagural issue, the Nowiny
announced its populist motto of “By the people – for the people!” and claimed the same
peasant background as its intended audience. “We are children of one mother, children of
the same Polish people, to which you – dear brother and sister – also count yourselves.” 138
They defined their paper against the supposed elitism and flowery prose of the Gazeta
Opolska. “We will not write mile-long articles, which people hardly read, nor profound
treatises, which no one understands” they decalred. 139 Yet for all their populist credentials,
the editors of the Nowiny were in many ways more convinced nationalists than their
opponents, and made little attempt, as Koraszewski had, to mediate their Polish nationalism
through a Catholic lens. The Nowiny wasted no time condemning the national apathy of
137 As of 1900 only a handful of Polish-speaking students – estimated by one newspaper at just seven – studied at lay
faculties in Breslau. Bjork, Neither German nor Pole, 83.
138 Nowiny Codzienne, 21 June 1911, official German translation in APO, ROBP, Syg. 123.
139 Ibid., 8 August 1911, in Ratajewksi, 20.
141

local Polish speakers; in the very first issue an article complained “that our people read so
little, which is the cause of their lack of education and sense of honor.” 140 The paper
estimated that, in agrarian western Upper Silesia, only one out of 100 Polish speakers read
Polish newspapers, and thus “ninety-nine don’t feel a need for education at all.” 141 The
Nowiny’s strategy for enlightenment relied mainly on ethnicist assumptions that all Polish
speakers must naturally become nationalists, just as Kurpierz and Lerch had themselves
done. The newspaper was quickly brought into the fold of other National Democratic press
outlets in Upper Silesia and Posen/Poznań, arrayed against Napieralski’s more moderate
Polish-Catholic press empire. The Gazeta Opolska and Nowiny also initially engaged in
many petty back-and-forth accusations over who caused the local split among Polish
nationalists. 142 Nonetheless, the internal Polish drama proved good for business: by the
outbreak of World War I each paper was printing between 4,000 and 5,000 copies, though
many were for non-local subscribers or for institutions. 143
This local split, driven by personal rivalry but then taking on the contours of
ideological strife among Polish activists, revealed two larger cleavages in Polish life in
Oppeln/Opole. The rhetoric of national unity so vigorously pursued by the Gazeta Opolska
– which had insisted for two decades that it was the true representative of the Polish nation
– was now shattered amid the cacophony of clashing voices. While the Nowiny tried to
define itself as the home-grown challenge to the outside incursion of Koraszewski, in reality
both press organs employed a mix of locals and Posen/Poznań-born Poles. The differences
140 Ibid., 21 June 1911, official German translation in APO, ROBP, Syg. 123.
141 Nowiny Codzienne, 26 August 1911, official German translation in APO, ROBP, Syg. 123.
142 Many of the back-and-forth accusations can be found (in German translation) in APO, ROBP, Syg. 123.
143 Ratajewski, Opolskie "Nowiny" 22-23, Gröschel, Die Presse Oberschlesiens, 199-202.
142

etween the papers were thus more stylistic and tactical than truly philosophical. Both
advocated an ethnicist vision of Polish national society at the local level, varying mainly in
the level of radicalism deemed necessary to achieve their vision of nationally divided
society. In addition to the split between nationalist activists, another cleavage emerged even
more clearly between the activists and their target audience of nationally apathetic Polish
speakers. The Nowiny insisted that Polish nationalism had yet to permeate society because
other activists had not yet tried hard enough to convince Polish speakers of their natural
duties to the nation. The last two decades of Polish nationalism in Oppeln/Opole, however,
had suggested the social limits of the movement amid continued apathy and generational
shifts towards German-language usage. The Nowiny-Gazeta Opolska split would be the first
among several turns towards radicalization in subsequent decades for Polish activists, who
would continue to insist that failure to nationalize was ultimately the fault of local citizens
for remaining apathetic and denying their natural loyalties. World War I would prove both
a test of this gap between activists and everyday citizens, as well as a breeding ground for
accelerating national changes between Germans and Poles.
WAR AND DEFEAT
World War I in many ways temporarily deepened the rift between Polish nationalist
activists and the mass of Polish-speaking Upper Silesians. The basic elimination of electoral
politics by the German wartime regime deprived the Polish movement of its most effective
demonstration of national unity. While local Polish speakers were drafted en masse into the
Prussian army, Polish activists were put under pressure to toe the line on Prussian
patriotism. New political alignments and possibilities danced before the eyes of Polish
143

nationalists, yet they trod cautiously in advocating for Polish autonomy or independence –
not least because of censorship. While most Upper Silesians were too busy serving on the
front or surviving the home front to engage with the nationalist hopes of Polish activists,
they were nonetheless receiving a wartime political education. Polish speakers were learning
the same lessons as their fellow German citizens: lessons of German hubris and overreach in
goals of territorial conquest, lessons of social radicalism bred from worsening material
conditions, and lessons of the failure of the German state to maintain order and peace
among its citizenry. It was ultimately these lessons – culminating in German war defeat
and socio-political collapse – that would awaken the radicalism which first led many Polish
speakers to imagine trading their Prussian citizenship for membership in a new Polish state.
The German-Austrian war against a broad alliance of Slavic-speaking peoples,
including Poles under Russian rule, led to an almost immediate outbreak of German official
repression of Polish nationalists. Koraszewski had the unfortuante distinction of being the
first Polish German citizen arrested in Prussia, on the night of 31 July 1914. 144 He was one
of about 40 Polish activists from Upper Silesia arrested in the early days of the war. Without
any specific charges most activists were released within a few months of their arrest,
although their experiences could be traumatic and life-changing. 145 The imprisonment by
military officers signaled a dire threat to the basic civil rights of Polish activists. A few
isolated incidents of anti-Polish attacks surfaced in the early months of the war; more
common, however, was a general attitude of fear and wartime chauvinism in Germany
which spilled over into anti-Slavic sentiment. One Polish nationalist, Jan Gomoła, born in
144 Tobiasz, Na froncie walki narodowej, 119.
145 Edward Mendel, Polacy na Górnym Śląsku w latach I Wojny Sẃiatowej: Położenie i postawa (Katowice: Sląsk, 1971),
54.
144

1875 in a neighboring county, remembered the daily contours of suspicion he endured
while serving on the home front as a gendarme in the early months of the war. One day a
fellow gendarme accused him of being a “Polish agitator” for possessing a Polish newspaper.
Luckily for Gomoła, not everyone was equally anti-Polish: when his commanding officer
from western Germany heard the charge, he replied: “He can read whatever he darn pleases,
it doesn’t matter to me at all!” 146 Such instances of tolerance were generally outweighed,
however, by a sharper German nationalism which put Polish-speaking citizens on the
defensive.
Many Upper Silesians, particularly men of military age, did prove their patriotism by
serving in the war. Some Poles have claimed in hindsight that local Polish speakers lacked
enthusiasm for the war on national grounds, highlighting cases of disobedience or desertion
to prove their case; but these incidents stand out as exceptions. 147 Loyal service was expected
and in all but a few cases delivered. At least one historian has estimated that the proportion
of Upper Silesians in the Prussian Army– perhaps as a result of demographics – was
substantially higher by late 1914 than in other parts of Germany. In the industrial area in
particular, about 25 percent of coal miners had been drafted by 1915, compared to just five
to six percent in the Ruhr mines. 148 Memoirs point to vast numbers of young men, Polish-
and German-speaking, who were drawn from the villages and cities around
Oppeln/Opole. 149
146 “Jan Gomoła” in Wspomnienia Opolan, vol. 1 (Warszawa: Pax, 1960), 174.
147 See, for example, ———, Z zagadnień udziału Ślązaków na frontach I Wojny Światowej, 1914-1918 (Opole: Nakł.
własny, 1965), 22, Wojciech Poliwoda, Wspomnienia, 1913-1939 (Opole: Wydawn. Instytutu Śląskiego w Opolu,
1974), 24-27.
148 Mendel, Polacy na Górnym Śląsku w latach I Wojny Sẃiatowej, 55.
149 See various memoirs in Wspomnienia Opolan.
145

For nearly every soldier the war no doubt affected their political beliefs in some way;
for many Polish nationalists, the experience of World War I retrospectively stood out as the
climax of Prussian-German national chauvinism and authoritarianism. Bernard Augustyn,
for example, a Polish speaker born in 1877 in a neighboring county, later recalled (after
World War II, when he was interned for over five years at Buchenwald) that he became a
fully convinced nationalist at the front in World War I. “There, having finally gained solid
life experience and a wise outlook on the world and social issues, I recognized precisely the
German spirit of militarism and rapacity, this German mentality which is alien to the Polish
nation,” he wrote. 150 For others, their political education came through direct contact with
Poles in German-occupied zones to the east. 151 Franciszek Bul, another leading interwar
local Polish activist from a village outside Oppeln/Opole (also later interned at
Buchenwald), retrospectively associated his experience on the eastern front with his own
national maturation. Meeting a great number of Poles in the German-occupied Russian
partition, especially women, he claimed it was there that “I could finally conclude – and
with satisfaction – that Polish girls possess a firm spirit and honor, especially in matters of
morality. And thus more and more I took a fancy to everything Polish.” 152 These memoirs
came from the elite political class of Polish nationalists who remained in favor with the
Communist government after World War II, so they cannot be taken as representative of
all Polish speakers. But they show one key type of political transformation which could be
accelerated by wartime experience. At the same time, not all soldiers experienced a Polish
150 “Bernhard Augustyn” in Ibid., 26-27.
151 On the German-occupied “Ober-Ost” in Western Russia, see Vejas Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front:
Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
152 “Franciszek Bul” in Wspomnienia Opolan, 67.
146

nationalist awakening. French efforts to recruit a Polish legion among German POWs of
Polish background failed miserably: as of December 1915 Prussian commanders knew of
only 31 Polish-speaking POWs who had defected. 153 While many soldiers likely had non-
national motives for not defecting (such personal camaraderie or fear of reprisal), the scales
of Polish nationalism versus German patriotic loyalty still tipped heavily towards the latter
for many Polish-speaking soldiers.
Among elite regional Polish activists, particularly major newspaper editors, the war
caused a deepening rift over methods and aims of nationally uniting Upper Silesia’s Poles.
Napieralski, motivated by his long-held political moderation and his faith in German
victory, decided to collaborate with the German government. Just days after the first shots
were fired in 1914, Napieralski proposed an extension of his press outlets into any
conquered Polish territory. By promising the German occupation a ready-made Polish-
language press friendly to its interests, Napieralski stood to benefit through the rapid
expansion of his papers’ circulation, while also gaining political influence over future
decisions on Polish autonomy. 154 In reality, Napieralski found his grand plans attacked from
both sides: while occupied Polish territories largely boycotted his papers, seeing them as
German propaganda, German politicians indisposed to Napieralski’s Polish nationalism
never fully trusted his new pro-German overtures. 155
A different set of tensions emerged in the local press of Oppeln/Opole. Koraszewski’s
imprisonment in the summer of 1914 had clearly radicalized him and destroyed any
153 Mendel, Polacy na Górnym Śląsku w latach I Wojny Sẃiatowej, 103.
154 Marek Czapliński, Adam Napieralski 1861-1928: Biografia polityczna (Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich,
1974), 184-185.
155 Bjork, Neither German nor Pole, 179-180.
147

emaining faith he held in the Prussian rule of law. 156 His political positioning, once in
between Napieralski’s and the more radical National Democrats, now leaned clearly towards
the latter, and his paper aligned itself closely with its former rival, the Nowiny. The
newspapers had to tread carefully, however, much like their comrades throughout Germany
sympathetic to Endecja. Roman Dmowski, now the undisputed the leader of Endecja from
the Russian partition, could publicly transform his pre-existing anti-German beliefs into
pro-Entente policy. His Polish compatriots in Austria or Germany, however, would have
committed treason by following in Dmowski’s footsteps. Any public opposition needed to
be expressed in terms that adhered to a basic pro-German loyalty.
The Nowiny and Gazeta Opolska, while markedly lessening their critiques of the
government, still tested the boundaries of this loyalty in their pages, and thus also the
authority of Prussian censors who now reviewed every article before being published. 157 The
newspapers failed to celebrate the Kaiser’s birthday in early 1915, while at the same time
raising a combined 7,000 marks to aid Polish speakers in the Austrian and Russian
partitions. Both actions raised the suspicions of Prussian officials. The two papers also sought
out statements in support of Polish independence from neutral or friendly countries, even
before Germany committed to political autonomy for Poles in 1916. The Nowiny, in early
1915, republished an article from the Norwegian Dagbladet discussing Polish hopes for
independence in the Austrian and Russian partitions. In both zones, the article claimed of
Poles that “their ideal is naturally a free and independent Poland that encompasses all
156 See the account of his internment in Tobiasz, Na froncie walki narodowej, 119-124.
157 The Gazeta Opolska, shut down at the war’s start, resumed printing on 14 August 1914 under censorship. Mädler
to Regierungspräsident, 14 August 1914, APO, ROBP, Syg. 141.
148

ethnographically Polish lands.” 158 Another article from the same year also spoke of support
for a Polish state among Polish Americans. 159 At other times questionable articles were
reprinted from neutral or even enemy countries without efforts to question or condemn
opponents’ viewpoints. One article featured in the Gazeta Opolska in November 1914
reprinted a long Italian report on “dying Belgium.” While references to Germany as the
combatant country were edited out, the article’s extremely sympathetic exposé of the
downfall of Catholic Belgium must have been read by any informed citizen as an
indictment of Prussian-Protestant military aggression. 160 Another Gazeta Opolska article
which slipped through censorship in early 1915 flatly declared that Germany’s opponents
were hoping for Germany to run short on food and munitions. In the wake of this article
regional officials questioned the rigor of censorship, and Oppeln/Opole soon had a new,
stricter censor. 161
The outcome of this wartime transformation of the Gazeta Opolska is that two of the
three most radical Polish newspapers in Upper Silesia now resided in Oppeln/Opole. 162
While this may seem like a contradiction, given the lack of steady enthusiasm for Polish
nationalism among local citizens before World War I, the two processes of radicalization
and national apathy are arguably intertwined. Koraszewski and his fellow nationalists had
succeeded in the previous 25 years in creating a corps of activists steeped in a nationalist
milieu. It was these activists – the few who accepted (and indeed personified) their belief in
158 Mädler to Regierungspräsident, undated report (early 1915), APO, ROBP, Syg. 141.
159 Nowiny, 20 February 1915.
160 Gazeta Opolska, 8 November 1914.
161 Original article from Ibid., 12 January 1915. Subsequent government reports of January and February in APO,
ROBP, Syg. 86.
162 Mädler to Regierungspräsident, 10 April 1915, APO, ROBP, Syg. 141.
149

an ethnicist Polish nation, and who were most persecuted for their beliefs – that increased
the expectations for national belonging among the wider population. Failure of local
citizens to give the same loyalty to the nation as activists did not shake the belief of
activists, but rather only motivated them to try more vigorous, and radical, approaches.
Moreover, with censorship limiting critiques of Prussian Germanization policies, the
Nowiny and Gazeta Opolska instead directed blame more squarely at the local populace. A
November 1914 Gazeta Opolska article on language use avoided the traditional attacks on
priests and schoolteachers, instead opting to scold only parents for the abandonment of the
Polish language. “This weak-mindedness can be felt especially in the present dreadful crisis,
where many soldiers are not in a position to write a decipherable letter [home] in their
mother tongue,” the paper warned. 163
The Nowiny and Gazeta Opolska espoused – within the bounds allowed by a strict
censorship regime and high demands for patriotic loyalty – the greatest oppositional stance
conceivable in the early years of the war. By 1917 at the latest, however, their once radical
questioning of German authority and hopes for Polish political independence looked much
more mainstream. German promises of political autonomy to Poland in 1916, meant to
spur recruitment of Polish soldiers into the faltering German war effort, only created a
temporary sense of hope among nationalists. Three years of labor shortages, food rationing,
and material sacrifice had wreaked a similar war weariness on the Upper Silesian home front
as elsewhere in Germany. Women and children as young as 14 became increasingly drawn
into the dirty, dangerous coal mines, while grandparents and small children toiled in the
163 Gazeta Opolska, 12 November 1914, official German translation in APO, ROBP, Syg. 141.
150

fields to compensate for a lack of male labor. 164 Rates of disease grew steadily with each
season of malnourishment and each winter without adequate coal for heating. 165 In the
industrial area, worker strikes and hunger protests multiplied in both number and size,
sinking the region into near chaos by late 1917. Wojciech Korfanty – who had 15 years
earlier managed to harness growing worker radicalism to promote Polish nationalist
interests – returned from de facto political banishment, winning a special Reichstag election
in June 1918 to replace a deceased Upper Silesian lawmaker. 166 While the Oppeln/Opole area
again escaped the level of worker radicalism and chaos on display in the eastern industrial
zone, rumblings of discontent were evident. A new organization, the St. Jacek Educational
Society, was founded in the fall of 1917 by Polish activists in Oppeln/Opole. Although
officially a cultural group led by a priest, Father Skowroński, the St. Jacek Society drew its
membership from the elite corps of local nationalists. It was intended as a leadership
organization meant to restart the work of national enlightenment which had failed in the
previous generation. Its stance was often openly hostile to German interests, demonstrating
the extent to which the government could no longer maintain authoritarian control. One
of its first publications was entitled “In Defense of the Polishness of Upper Silesia.” 167 The
group also openly sympathized with Roman Dmowski’s lobbying among Entente powers
for a new ethnographic Poland encompassing Upper Silesia. 168 This new iteration of Polish
164 In Upper Silesia 12.3% of women were employed in heavy industry by 1918, almost three times as many as in the
Rhineland. Mendel, Polacy na Górnym Śląsku w latach I Wojny Sẃiatowej, 87.
165 Ibid., 95-98.
166 Bjork, Neither German nor Pole, 189-192.
167 Mendel, Polacy na Górnym Śląsku w latach I Wojny Sẃiatowej, 181-183.
168 Dmowski’s main treatise envisioning a new ethnographic Poland (albeit one with significant historical claims to
old eastern Commonwealth lands) was penned in 1917. Roman Dmowski, Problems of Central and Eastern Europe
(London 1917).
151

nationalism, the activist leaders in Oppeln/Opole hoped, would fall on more fertile ground
– the ground of widespread misery, hunger, disaffection, and war defeat.
The options for a more moderate, collaborationist stance were lessening with every
battlefield defeat. The Russian Revolutions of 1917 provided the last viable chance for a
reversal of wartime fortunes for the Central Powers, and it was in this climate of sober
optimism that Catholic and moderate Polish regional leaders made one last effort to unite
their constituencies under the banner of German rule. Jan Kapica, who had come to ally
himself closely with Napieralski during the war, became a main regional voice for
accommodation between the Center Party and Polish nationalists. In a 1917 treatise Kapica
still held out hope that the war could rehabilitate German-Polish relations. “The blood
spilled together by German and Poles must extinguish the memory of the past,” he
argued. 169 Kapica managed to condemn nationalism as a chauvinistic philosophy, while at
the same time defining nationality and national belonging as natural, positive traits.
Germany could still rule benevolently over an autonomous Poland, he thought, through a
post-nationalist embrace of “magnanimous cultural politics.” 170 His ideas ultimately rested
on a belief in the indifference of most citizens to the extremism of nationalist activists
controlling the debate. “Prussia must not confuse Polish nationalists with the Polish
people,” he warned, “even if one must admit that the Polish nationalists gladly confuse
themselves with the Polish people.” 171 His vision of reconciliation attempted to transform
German wartime authoritarianism into a peaceful, democratic vision of multicultural
169 Jan Kapica, Die deutsche Kulturmission, der Katholizismus und die nationale Versöhnung (Beuthen: Katolik, 1917),
76.
170 Ibid., 61.
171 Ibid., 76.
152

understanding that eschewed nationalist ideologies. It was a vision which depended on
increasingly unlikely German victory. Ultimately even Kapica could not hold on to this
utopian vision in the wake of war defeat and revolution. Within two years of publishing his
plea for reconciliation, he would openly advocate the secession of Upper Silesia to a newly
resurrected Poland.
CONCLUSION
Juliusz Szmula’s prediction in 1886 that the spread of “Germanness” would encounter
resistance thanks to new, aggressive anti-Polish Prussian policies proved correct, up to a
point. The trajectories of Koraszewski and Kapica – the nationalist ideologue and the
consensus-seeking Polonophile priest – reveal the opportunities and limits of nationalist
engagement in Oppeln/Opole in 1890-1918 period. Koraszewski’s optimism and ambition
left him convinced that he could awaken the nationally apathetic Polish-speaking
population. His initial successes in mustering a unified Polish electorate proved more
durable, however, than his attempts to transform the fabric of local society into nationally
committed and divided communities. Much of his success ultimately rested on political
conditions beyond his control, while his failures are more directly linked to the flaws in his
nationalist logic. While boosted by a more radical anti-Polish turn in German nationalist
circles, a lower-class and clerical revolt within the regional Center Party, and the general
democratization of politics, Koraszewski was ultimately hampered by an ethnicist belief that
Polish speakers should naturally join his cause regardless of clear economic or social benefits.
This logic had become so entrenched, however, that even his opponents who questioned his
outcomes after 1910 did not alter their fundamental belief in ethnicism nor their strategies
153

for reaching Polish speakers. Rather, the entrenchment of Polish activists in the new
nationalist milieu only deepened their belief in the inexorable force of ethnic nationalism.
Kapica, on the other hand, found most of his success through vigorous pursuit of a
Catholic big tent that could incorporate the hopes of more moderate Polish nationalists like
Napieralski. Kapica thus crossed paths with Koraszewski at the key moment for this
reconciliation, in 1908, when it looked as if a stridently national Polish vision had given
way to a more inclusive and moderate alliance with Catholic interests. But Kapica’s failures,
like Koraszewski’s successes, ultimately were attributable to forces beyond his control –
namely the retrenchment of nationalist activists and the increasing social radicalism of
Upper Silesians before and during World War I. In the end, even Kapica came to believe in
the inexorable, universal character of national belonging, although he hedged against
nationalism as a political movement. In this sense nationalism was winning the ideological
battle of making itself seem like a natural, inherent trait. Kapica and Koraszewski, for all
their differences, ended up in almost exactly the same camp by 1918, both promoters of the
secession of Upper Silesia and its bilingual population to the new Polish state. This
transformation can only be understood through the bitterness of war defeat and the
subsequent re-evaluation of Prusso-German power. The next 15 years, meanwhile, would
bring various forms of democracy to Oppeln/Opole – first in the form of a plebiscite, then
in the form of German parliamentary democracy. The transformations at the local level
unleashed by these new forms of participation would not, however, herald the triumph the
nationalization of local society in Oppeln/Opole.
154

Breakdown
Upper Silesians in the Plebiscite Era, 1918-1921
155
Chapter 3
Take the elements of a gigantic picnic, a Sunday school treat and a general
election thrown in; the male choruses of half a dozen comic operas of the
militant variety mixed well; have as a background a wicked wilderness of mine
shafts, factory chimneys, and slag heaps, and entitle your revue “The Upper
Silesian Plebiscite” and your audience will then gain an approximate idea of this
corner of Europe on the eve of the most fateful day in its history. 1
This news report for The New York Times, filed on the same day nearly 1.2 million
Upper Silesians cast their ballots for either Germany or Poland, reveals if nothing else the
suspended “picnic atmosphere” calm which overcame the region at the climax of three years
of violence, deprivation, and unrest. Following Germany’s defeat in World War I, the Allies
originally ceded Upper Silesia to Poland, but following German protests agreed to a
plebiscite – the largest among many similar votes across Central Europe – to help decide the
region’s political future. For over a year, Upper Silesia became its own quasi-state,
administered by the Allied powers in preparation for the vote. Despite a year-long barrage
of German and Polish propaganda making every possible argument to sway locals for one
state or the other, the voting outcome on that March day in 1921 remained anyone’s guess.
“I find both Germans and Poles in perfect agreement,” the same foreign correspondent
continued, “that whatever may be the absolute result, the voting by localities is going to
produce most bewildering paradoxes.” The “paradoxes” apparent to the journalist – mainly
that many areas were home to a “hopeless racial mixture” – in fact represented a
1 “Picnic Atmosphere in Upper Silesia,” The New York Times, 21 March 1921.

continuation and extension of prewar trends among the nationally indifferent population. 2
The plebiscite, intended to mark the preference of Upper Silesians for a future in Poland or
Germany, achieved exactly the opposite of its intent: instead of clarifying national loyalties,
it blew the lid off of long-simmering forces of national ambiguity.
This hour of decision for Upper Silesia has been the subject of a copious literature. In
Polish historiography, the plebiscite era is intricately tied to the three Silesian uprisings of
August 1919, August 1920, and May 1921. As insurrections meant to pre-empt Upper
Silesia’s fate through violence, the uprisings have entered Polish nationalist lore as a
continuation of the great tradition of nineteenth-century popular uprisings for the
resurrection of Poland. 3 While the uprisings drew the participation of tens of thousands of
angry, pro-Polish insurgents from Upper Silesia, they were not spontaneous mass uprisings,
but rather centrally planned putsches with Polish military support. The uprisings serve as the
foundation upon which Polish historiography has built an ethnicist narrative of popular
national will for the Polish outcome. On the German side, the partition of Upper Silesia
became primary evidence in the interwar period for a threatened German culture in the
East. A broad consensus among non-Communist parties emerged quickly that Germany
was unfairly robbed of Upper Silesia as another piece of the overarching Versailles Diktat.
The continuities of Germany’s revisionist stance on Upper Silesia through the Weimar and
Nazi eras are discussed in subsequent chapters. German defeat in World War II and the
Polish takeover of nearly all of Silesia in 1945 only served to add a polarizing filter to
2 Ibid.
3 For example, “The uprisings drew on the deep, mass patriotism of the people, who strove to join the Polish nation
emerging into independent existence.” In Kazimierz Popiołek, ed., Źródła do dziejów powstań śląskich (Wrocław:
Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1963), Tom I, 5. See also Wacław Ryżewski, Trzecie powstanie śląskie 1921: Geneza
i przebieg działań bojowych (Warszawa: Wydawn. Ministerstwa Obrony Narodowej, 1977), Andrzej Brożek, ed.,
Powstania śląskie i plebiscyt w procesie zrastania się Górnego Śląska z macierzą (Bytom: Muzeum Górnośląskie, 1993).
156

historical lenses on the plebiscite era. The ultimate victory of Polish territorial claims
cemented a triumphalist narrative of Upper Silesia as a bona fide ethnic Polish land.
German defeat, meanwhile, created a new, declensionist narrative driven by expellees which
focused on nostalgic defense of the old Heimat while maintaining a noticeable silence on
the Nazi German policies which prompted their expulsions. 4 Since the 1980s, these
narratives on the plebiscite have been softened and relativized, but in most cases not
fundamentally questioned. 5
What unites most literature is the supposedly stark and binary national choice at the
heart of the plebiscite: Upper Silesians were at last forced to choose whether they were Polish
or German. Yet a narrative ordered around the either-or constraints of the plebiscite vote
may hide more than it reveals. The history of the plebiscite era was in fact exceedingly
messy – marked not only by nationalist battle, but also by radical social-political conflict, a
powerful separatist movement, and the breakdown of security and trust in local
communities. The March 1921 plebiscite vote served as the obvious climax (or anti-climax)
for these postwar trends, but it was not the sole ordering principle for Upper Silesians in this
period. The experience of the plebiscite years was one of overwhelming trauma, material
deprivation, and loss of trust in government and fellow citizen, but these events did not
always follow pre-scripted national dividing lines. The sense of trauma and communal
breakdown suffered by Upper Silesians during the revolution, occupation, and uprisings of
4 For an example of a broader historical narrative which largely ignores the conflicts over Polish culture and national
belonging, see Joachim Bahlcke and Joachim Rogall, Schlesien und die Schlesier (München: Langen Müller, 1996).
5 For a recent, more moderate Polish interpretation see Wiesław Lesiuk, “Plebiscyt I Powstania Śląskie Z Perspektywy
Osiemdziesięciolecia” in Marek Masnyk, ed., Powstania śląskie i plebiscyt z perspektywy osiemdziesięciolecia (Opole:
Wydawn. Uniwersytetu Opolskiego, 2003), 11-22. On the German side, the recent study by Hitze maintains a subtle
but discernable national bias. See Guido Hitze, Carl Ulitzka (1873-1953), oder, Oberschlesien zwischen den
Weltkriegen (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2002).
157

the plebiscite era cannot be understood without reference to the crossovers and confusions
between national, social, and religious conflicts which exploded in the aftermath of war.
NATIONAL OR SOCIAL REVOLUTION?
In the months after the November 1918 Revolution Upper Silesia, like many areas of
Germany, slipped into chaos. The coal mines in the eastern stretches of the province served
as a major base of radical Spartacist and communist uprisings, which the new Socialist state
was compelled to put down with the force of martial law. In Upper Silesia, however, the
threat of social radicalism was compounded by the potential for a nationalist uprising that
would cede the region to the newly resurrected Polish state. Regional Polish activists now
spoke with a unitary voice in favor of secession of their homeland to Poland. What was the
relationship between these social and national revolutions brewing simultaneously in Upper
Silesia? While social radicalism in the industrial eastern areas was often converted into
support for joining the Polish state, in the relatively calm areas around Oppeln/Opole the
lack of widespread strikes made it more difficult to convince local Polish speakers to join in
a national uprising. Economic and material concerns proved more fundamental to local
citizens in 1918-1919 than national belonging. Yet persistent shortages of basic material
goods, poor health, and economic despair led many around Oppeln/Opole, like their fellow
citizens across Germany, to become disillusioned with the new government. In Upper
Silesia, this discontent was channeled into massive victories for Polish nationalists in
November 1919 communal elections, suggesting that Germany’s inability to meet material
needs was allowing Upper Silesia to slip away to Poland.
Polish nationalists in Oppeln/Opole, from the first days of the November Revolution,
158

hoped to convert social radicalism into national secession to Poland. On 14 November, just
three days after Germany’s surrender and the founding of the Polish Second Republic, a
group of self-declared “Silesian Poles” from around the region gathered in Oppeln/Opole to
discuss their place in the shifting geopolitical landscape. Newspaper editor Bronisław
Koraszewski basked in the glory of “the resurrected Polish fatherland,” noting the duty of all
his fellow compatriots to support their new national homeland. Franz Kurpierz, once
Koraszewski’s opponent but now a firm ally, explained that Silesia would undoubtedly be
ceded to the new Polish state, and thus it was their duty as Poles to follow Warsaw’s orders
to elect a regional Polish parliament. In his eyes it was precisely the new moment of social
revolution in Germany that allowed for the expression of national revolution in Upper
Silesia: “In Prussia the government has declared total freedom for every individual. This
moment is favorable for us, because for us as well – for the Polish people – the hour of
freedom has arrived.” Kurpierz was able to excite the crowd specifically when denouncing
officials at the local level, and it was the Landrat, Carl Lücke, who received much of his
scorn. Upon asking, “Are you satisfied with the economic policies [Wirtschaft] of the
Landrat?” the crowd answered “No! We don’t want him, be gone with him!” When no one
stood up to defend Lücke, Kurpierz declared it within his authority as representative of the
people to decommission him. 6 The Catholic Oppelner Nachrichten criticized their meeting,
“If one had not told us that the election of so-called Farmers’ Councils should have taken
place, we would not have known it ourselves. He who approaches the meeting in a
nonpartisan manner must harbor thoughts that this was about propaganda for the secession
6 Oppelner Nachrichten, 16 November 1918.
159

to Poland.” 7
Discontent with local economic policies and a sense of political high-handedness by
non-Silesian Prussian officials drove much of the anger that day. Upon the instructions of
Kurpierz, the collection of mainly rural farmers at the meeting were to return to their
villages and form independent People’s and Farmers’ Councils in order to replace local
Prussian authorities. 8 For the group of Polish activists gathered in Oppeln/Opole, the
November Revolution was not a chance for working-class redemption, but rather the
redemption of their movement through the annexation of their homeland to the new
Polish nation-state. Rural Polish nationalists tended to hail from the class of more
prosperous independent farmers. They were able to earn social prestige at the local level
without undergoing the Germanization of university education necessary for urban
advancement. In the wake of the November Revolution, they sought to leverage this
prestige to convince their rural, Catholic communities to support a national revolution. 9
These Farmers’ and People’s Councils positioned themselves simultaneously as a
conservative social response to the revolution and as a radical national voice for the ceding
of Upper Silesia to Poland. 10 One regional official observing conditions in November 1918
around Oppeln/Opole wrote, “it is to be expected that rural areas will very soon be overrun
with “greater Polish” [grosspolnisch] Farmers’ Councils.… If Upper Silesia’s rural population
is represented only by greater Poles, then Germany has lost Upper Silesia.” 11 Polish
7 Ibid.
8 Nowiny Codzienne, 16 November 1918. Quoted in Polnische Zeitungsrundschau, 23 November.
9 The names of local Polish nationalist leaders can be seen in report of Oppeln Landrat on the formation of local
People’s Councils, 12 December 1918, APO, SPO, Syg 117.
10 Hitze, Carl Ulitzka, 172-173.
11 Undated anonymous report from November 1918, APO, ROBP, Syg. 259.
160

nationalist activists were using the political vacuum created by the revolution, their
organizational skill, and their village political networks to profess open allegiance to the
new Polish state.
The activists who hoped to see Germany’s revolution transformed into a Polish
national revolution in Oppeln/Opole ultimately saw their efforts fall short. Part of this can
be tied to the high level of continuity in regional and local administration across the
revolutionary divide of November. The central People’s Council in Breslau organized itself
as an alliance of Social Democrats, already accustomed to sharing the reins of government,
with Liberals committed to the reassertion of social stability. 12 Events in Opplen/Opole that
November, meanwhile, bore little resemblance to an actual revolution. August Neugebauer,
the Catholic Center Party mayor since 1911, remained in power as head of the new 30-
person combined Soldier’s and Worker’s Council formed on 14 November. At least seven
city officials (and more rural civil servants) served with Negebauer on the Council, and
while membership fluctuated during its ten months of existence, the Council contained at
least 12 Center Party members, compared to only four Social Democrats (as well as three
additional Independent Social Democrats), and no Polish nationalists. 13 Moreover, officials
at the level of Landrat or below across Germany were ordered to remain in their posts.
Reports streaming in from the city and county through November and December almost
invariably reported political calm. 14 While other parts of Upper Silesia suffered from violent
uprisings against local authority, forced food seizures by citizens, and paralyzing industrial
12 Hitze, Carl Ulitzka, 166.
13 Wiesław Lesiuk, Rady robotnicze, żołnierskie, chłopskie, i ludowe w rejencji opolskiej w latach 1918-1919 (Opole:
Instytut Śląski, 1973), 86-87.
14 See report of Oppeln police to Regierungspräsident, 18 November 1918, and report of Landrat to same, 16
November 1918, APO, ROBP, Syg. 259.
161

strikes, Oppeln/Opole remained quiet. From this one can conclude that the political
ambitions of Polish nationalists did not start a national revolution nor spark widespread
disorder among the greater population in the county. The regional Polish nationalists who
had hoped to seize power proved unable to alter the balance of political power at the county
level. Despite repeated personal appeals for the Landrat Lücke to step down, they proved
unable to dislodge even the lowest directly appointed official on the Prussian political
ladder. 15
The extent to which the broader population in Oppeln/Opole identified with the Polish
nationalist cause in 1918 is difficult to pinpoint, however, given the swift and antagonistic
reaction of Breslau to the perceived threat of Polish nationalist councils spreading across
Upper Silesia. Within ten days of the revolution, the Breslau People’s Council addressed
methods to combat the Polish nationalist threat. Its program focused on new freedoms for
the population to choose the language of religious instruction for their children, as well as
propaganda efforts led by German-loyal priests, Catholic Center Party members, and
Christian labor unions. 16 Just as importantly, Breslau officials were simultaneously
centralizing control of the revolution by depoliticizing all councils at the sub-county level.
Village councils, where Polish activists had made their initial efforts to assert authority, were
relegated to the roles of food distribution and material aid, while elected county-wide
People’s and Farmers’ Councils operated in consultation with the Landrat Lücke. 17 Much of
the fear in Breslau was being generated from Posen/Poznań, where Polish nationalists
15 See various November 1918 reports by Oppeln Landrat Lücke in APW, 39/II, Syg. 139.
16 Report on 20 November 1918 meeting of Breslau Volksrat, APW, 39/II, Syg. 81.
17 Report of Oppeln Landrat to local officials, 20 November 1918, Report of Oppeln Regierungspräsident to Oppeln
Landrat, 20 November 1918, APO, SPO, Syg. 117.
162

quickly organized over 500 People’s Councils advocating the secession of the Prussian
partition to newly resurrected Poland. 18 Thanks to the work of Polish nationalists in Upper
Silesia, the region was now fully implicated in the battle between Poland and Germany over
control of disputed ethnic territory. Lücke feared the spread of this movement in his
county, and in November suggested pre-emptive arrests of local Polish activists as well as
widespread censorship of the Polish press, the latter measure becoming common policy in
1919. 19 The Breslau People’s Council sought to centralize control in their solidly German
hands as quickly as possible to head off a national revolution, exactly like the one that
would overturn German rule in Posen/Poznań.
The Silesian People’s Council thus became, even sooner and more convincingly than
in other parts of Germany, what one historian has called a “revolutionary apparatus for
order.” 20 Yet the centralizing control exerted by Breslau was intended not just to counteract
Polish nationalist fervor, but even more to stem the worker radicalism and strikes prevalent
in the eastern industrial stretches of the province. The uncontrollable strikes in the mines of
eastern Upper Silesia had already put the revolutionary government in direct conflict with
workers by late November. The overlap between the demands of Polish nationalists and
those of striking workers remains a matter of contention among historians. Without a
doubt, Wojciech Korfanty, who during the plebiscite era became the undisputed one-man
leader of the Polish campaign, harnessed worker radicalism for the Polish cause. 21 On the
18 Lesiuk, Rady robotnicze, żołnierskie, chłopskie, i ludowe w rejencji opolskiej w latach 1918-1919, 121.
19 Lücke to Regierungspräsident, 22 November 1918. Quoted in Popiołek, Źródła do dziejów powstań śląskich, 53-54.
20 T. Hunt Tooley, National Identity and Weimar Germany: Upper Silesia and the Eastern Border, 1918-1922 (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 55.
21 Before returning to Upper Silesia to lead the Polish plebiscite campaign, Korfanty was active politically in the
battle to secure Posen for Poland. See Sigmund Karski, Albert (Wojciech) Korfanty: Eine Biographie (Dülmen:
Laumann-Verlag, 1990), 187-195.
163

other hand, the Communist Party (KPD), which established itself in January 1919 on the
basis of Spartacist resistance, proved immune to the national question in Upper Silesia,
arguing that both states were bourgeois opponents of worldwide revolution. Direct
collaboration between Polish and Communist leaders may have taken place on the streets,
but relations among leaders of the two groups were icy. 22 Adam Napieralski’s Katolik, the
premiere Polish-language Catholic paper in the industrial area, defended a religiously based
populist Polish nationalism that was nonetheless anti-Spartacist. The paper claimed “The
work of German Spartacists is not Polish, and moreover is very harmful to us.” 23
Accusations flew more frequently in the opposite direction, as urban Germans feared the
apparent popular overlap between radical socialists and Polish nationalists.
Continued strikes into the spring of 1919 reveal the relative stability and salience of
working-class claims and the instability of competing national claims. In the area around
Oppeln/Opole, which lacked a critical mass of industrial workers, the early part of 1919
passed with relative political calm. 24 National self-identity and the desire for a free Poland
were not sufficient motivation in themselves for western Upper Silesians to rise up in early
1919. Worker radicalization in the east, however, clearly was. Among communist and
Polish nationalist leaderships there existed a great deal of mutual distrust and ideological
incompatibility, but both rested their authority and measured their success largely upon the
radicalization of workers in eastern Upper Silesia. The workers themselves, meanwhile, often
22 Franciszek Hawranek, Ruch komunistyczny na Górnym Śląsku w latach 1918-1921 (Wroclaw: Zaklad Narodowy im.
Ossolińskich, 1966), 63.
23 Katolik, 25 March 1919.
24 While reports of unrest flooded in nearly every week from the industrial area to the Regierungspräsident,
practically no reports appear from Oppeln/Opole, APO, ROBP, Syg. 268. For a discussion of the small USPD and
Spartacist movements in Oppeln, see Edward Mendel, Stosunki społeczne i polityczne w Opolu w latach 1918-1933
(Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1975), 60-61.
164

seem to have had fluid conceptions of their own demands. Arkadiusz Bożek, who would
later become a regional leader in the Polish nationalist movement, remembered a
hodgepodge of ethnicities, including Jews, who would attend Spartacist meetings. Bożek
even described himself in his memoirs as “a conglomerate of a socialist, a Spartacist, and a
conservative” during the Revolution. 25 Rudolf Vogel, a native Upper Silesian and a witness
to the revolution who went on to write a dissertation on German plebiscite propaganda,
described these malleable boundary lines between religious, class, and national discontent:
It was infinitely easy for Poles and Communists to agitate: Entrepreneurs and
landed magnates stood in opposition to the poor, Polish-speaking masses. The
hated German military supported the German-speaking bureaucrats and
industrialists, whose behavior in the World War made them the targets of score
settling. Religious concerns and thoughts, which resided in the soul of the
Upper Silesian worker in a curious, peaceful mixture with Communist affinities,
could have been easily pacified were the German bureaucrats and directors not
also almost all heretical Protestants. The mass of wives and single women left
unemployed after the men’s return home also stood ready to lay the blame for
their unemployment and their removal from work at the feet of the military
and industry. 26
This combined disaffection for the entire political and social system continued
relatively unabated through the summer of 1919. When, on 17 August 1919, a full-scale
insurrection was launched, it was unclear to some whether the uprising was driven by Poles
or Spartacists. The 18 August headline in the Catholic Oberschlesische Zeitung conflated the
two groups with its headline “Polish-Spartacist Putsch in Upper Silesia.” Unable to
determine the allegiance of the anti-German forces, the paper placed the blame mostly on
the widespread strikes preceding the insurrection. “Bolshevism, which desires world
revolution, does not think twice about draping itself in the garb of Polish patriots in order
25 Quoted in James E. Bjork, Neither German nor Pole: Catholicism and National Indifference in a Central European
Borderland (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 194-195.
26 Rudolf Vogel, "Deutsche Presse und Propaganda des Abstimmungskampfes in Oberschlesien" (Doctoral
Dissertation, Universität Leipzig, 1931), 61.
165

to involve the Upper Silesian working class in its goals. Spartacism in Upper Silesia wears a
Polish mask, and thus are the workers deceived.” 27 For many Catholics, the paper argued, the
main fault of the insurrectionists was not their Polishness but their abandonment of
religious values: a regional “self-destruction” by those who became “estranged from Catholic
principles by Socialism and its radical strains.” 28 The failed insurrection, put down by
German border protection troops and met with murderous reprisals, has entered history as
the first of three Polish uprisings in Upper Silesia. The uprisings were clearly organized by
the Polish Military Organization of Upper Silesia [Polska Organizacja Wojskowa Górnego
Śląska– POW], who exploited the social disorder of the strikes in launching its assault. Yet
at the time it was difficult for some observers to separate the national from the socialist
content. Over time, the nationalization of historiography has elided or muddled the synergy
between the chaos of Communist strikes and the Polish paramilitary uprising. 29
The Oppeln/Opole area lacked the overwhelming class tensions and the breakdown of
society which plagued the industrial area in 1919, but the population nonetheless grew
increasingly embittered with the new regional government. In order to combat the strikes
and Polish nationalist activity in Upper Silesia, in January 1919 the Silesian government
appointed Otto Hörsing as head of the new Central Council of Upper Silesia for
Kattowitz/Katowice. The creation of a separate Upper Silesian Commissary was intended to
pacify the social and cultural demands of the mixed-language population, but Hörsing
proved the wrong man for the job. Although a socialist, Hörsing came from a Protestant
27 “Polnisch-Spartakistischer Putsch in Oberschlesien,” Oberschlesische Grenzzeitung, 18 August 1919.
28 “Gegen die oberschlesische Selbstzerfleischung,” Oberschlesische Zeitung, 23 August 1919.
29 See, for example Popiołek, Źródła do dziejów powstań śląskich, Tom I, 5, Ryżewski, Trzecie powstanie śląskie. For a
recent, more moderate appraisal, see Wiesław Lesiuk, “Plebiscyt i powstania śląskie z perspektywy
osiemdziesięciolecia” in Masnyk, Powstania śląskie i plebiscyt, 11-22.
166

ackground in East Prussia and wore his German nationalism on his sleeve as a supporter of
Paul von Hindenburg. 30 Far from pacifying the workers of the industrial area, he fought
bitterly against the perceived double threat of communism and Polish nationalism. With
nearly unfettered power and a strong German police and paramilitary force, Hörsing
crushed the uprisings using martial law. For his tactics he became known throughout the
province increasingly as a dictator practicing “red Hakatism” – that is, German
colonization in the guise of socialism. 31
The police state atmosphere of censorship and arrests did much to alienate the
population from the party at the helm of the revolution, the Social Democrats (SPD). But
just as important were the broken promises of cultural tolerance and shortcomings in basic
material provisions. In December 1918 Prussia promised immediate policy changes for
Upper Silesia, including full freedoms for Polish speakers in communion and school
instruction, and the appointment of more indigenous bilingual civil servants. Yet by the
spring of 1919 progress proved halting, prompting the Oberschelsesiche Zeitung to decry a
“false game with Upper Silesia.” The paper claimed that the only major promise that had
been kept was the appointment of a new Catholic native Upper Silesian, Joseph Bitta, as
district president. “Everything else exists only on paper.” 32 Apparently seeking to prove the
authors correct in their assessment, Hörsing’s censors banned the paper for eight days for
anti-state propaganda in the article. This sort of heavy-handed governing was also
combined with the continued material impoverishment and ill health of the population.
Upper Silesians endured a wintertime influenza pandemic and then came into the spring
30 Hitze, Carl Ulitzka, 223.
31 Bjork, Neither German nor Pole, 232.
32 Oberschlesische Zeitung, 3 April 1919.
167

and summer with continued, even reduced, rationing of basic foodstuffs. One official in
April 1919 called “scarcity of provisions” the single greatest issue radicalizing workers in the
industrial area, a problem not helped by class envy towards the well-paid and better-fed
German border patrol forces. Informants in the industrial area estimated that only ten
percent of the Spartacist protestors were motivated by ideology; the vast majority were
instead acting out on their hunger. 33 At the end of August, Oppeln/Opole was plagued by
two days of riots over commodity prices. On the first day crowds stormed the fruit and
vegetable stands, particularly the larger sellers. The next day the plundering spread to
textile, grocery, clothing, and tobacco shops, while many rioters simply used the threat of
mob attack to force sellers into selling their goods at sub-market prices. Order was restored
only under the force of military occupation. 34
The inability of the government to meet the basic needs of its population, and its
repressive attitude towards many Polish-speaking workers and nationalists, created an
opening for Polish nationalists to reassert political power. First, however, they needed to
decide whether to participate in the political process at all. During the elections to the
national and Prussian assemblies in January 1919, the Poles made the strategic decision to
boycott, hoping that their flock would soon be able to vote in their new Polish homeland.
The boycott resulted in reduced turnout throughout Upper Silesia: in Oppeln/Opole
county, around 60 percent of eligible voters cast ballots for the national assembly elections,
the second worst showing of any county in Germany. 35 Participation varied wildly by
village, however: Chroschütz/Chroscice and Folwark had turnout rates of 27 and 41 percent,
33
“Bericht über die innerpolitische Lage in Oberschlesien,” April 1919, GStA PK, I. HA, Rep 77, Tit 856, Nr. 100.
34 Der Tag, 30 August 1919, nr. 407.
35 Hitze, Carl Ulitzka, 195.
168

espectively, but Chmielowitz/Chmielowice just up the road registered an 80 percent
turnout. Generally more remote Polish-speaking villages, further removed from socialist
class politics, showed lower participation rates, but turnout often depended on the presence
(or absence) of one or two nationalist activists in each village. 36 Nonetheless, the SPD
proved the largest winner in the county that January with 50 percent of the votes; together
with the Catholic Center party they combined to win over 90 percent of rural votes. In the
absence of Polish nationalist agitation, the other parties did not feel the need to make
explicit appeals to national belonging. The Catholic press blamed “the Polish-speaking
people from the countryside” for “having for the most part defected to the Social
Democrats.” 37 With the absence of a Polish option, many local citizens turned their votes to
the SPD. The campaign in January was waged by the Catholics largely as a religious battle
against the “Kulturkampf-minded Social Democrats.” The SPD in turn heralded the
Revolution and decried the social backwardness of Catholics. 38
While the SPD proved more popular in western Upper Silesia in January 1919 than in
the industrial east, its success would not last through the end of the year. When the long-
delayed elections for local communal councils were held in November, SPD votes dropped
precipitously, as they won just 135 local council seats to the Center Party’s 308 seats. Yet
neither party could match the Polish nationalists, who had decided to contest the elections
and came away with 487 seats in local councils throughout Oppeln/Opole county. 39 Many
villages showed a high level of polarization and clear switching by voters from SPD or
36 Results printed in APO, SPO, Syg. 29. Also see Bjork, Neither German nor Pole, 210.
37 Oppelner Nachrichten, 22 January 1919.
38 Vogel, "Deutsche Presse Und Propaganda", 58.
39 Results in APO, RO, Syg. 1A.
169

Center Party ballots to the Polish nationalists. In Kempa/Kępa, the January elections to the
Prussian Assembly yielded 187 votes for the Catholics and 51 votes for the Socialists; in the
November council elections, meanwhile, all 212 votes cast were for the Polish nationalists.
Smaller and more remote villages tended to have more polarized outcomes in favor of either
the Catholic Party or Poles, while larger villages and the working-class suburbs around
Oppeln/Opole often saw split representation between Socialists, Catholics, and Poles. 40
Polish nationalists clearly achieved great tactical victory at the local level, harnessing
popular discontent with an out-of-touch Socialist quasi-dictatorship to bolster their cause.
The results, while symbolically a huge blow for German efforts to hold on to the region, had
little actual effect on administration, because within a few short months an Allied
Commission would take over most of Upper Silesia in preparation for the plebiscite. Yet the
communal elections were a resounding defeat for the Socialists and their policy of repressive
governance against the forces seeking to unravel German rule, and forced Hörsing to resign
his position as Commissar of Upper Silesia. 41 They seemed to herald the imminent secession
of Upper Silesia to Poland.
The first year after World War I saw a continuation of warfare in Upper Silesia, this
time between classes and between the state and its unruly citizens. The battle lines were
almost never solely nationalist. Polish activists channeled war weariness and worker
radicalization in the coal mines of eastern Upper Silesia into calls for secession to Poland.
The resulting violence and insurrection, however, seems to have been driven as much by
heavy-handed repression of Spartacist demands as by any spontaneous outburst of national
40 Results in Ibid., and APO, SPO, Syg. 30.
41 Hitze, Carl Ulitzka, 250.
170

group identity. In the area around Oppeln/Opole, the lack of worker radicalism in the first
six months after the Revolution resulted in relative calm, despite the hard work of Polish
activists to seize power at the local level. Polish activists could not rely on national self-
identification of the populace alone to spur secession from Germany, but needed broader
forces of social and political discontent to bolster their cause. Working in favor of the Poles
was widespread discontent with the continuities in governing between old and new Prussia.
Along with the uninterrupted service of many local and county officials, regional leaders
immediately moved to restrain the radical impulses of the population through martial law.
When combined with failed promises to remake the bureaucracy in the image of Upper
Silesians, and the inability of the government to meet basic material needs, Germany
practically handed Polish nationalists victory in 1919.
Polish nationalism was thus boosted by the erosion of material and physical security in
the region following the Revolution. This widespread suffering and social radicalism among
Upper Silesians in 1919 paved the way for the near-total breakdown of social and
communal peace the following year, when French-led Allied forces occupied Upper Silesia
in preparation for the plebiscite. The tide of increasing sympathy for Polish nationalism
would be severely tested, however, by the violence and social chaos of 1920-1921. In the
meantime, Polish nationalism also faced another foe: the movements for regional
autonomy and an independent Upper Silesian state. This outpouring of support for a
regional solution to the supposedly national crisis in Upper Silesia proved an additional
factor complicating the dividing lines between Poles and Germans in the decisive hour for
the region’s political future.
171

UPPER SILESIA FOR THE UPPER SILESIANS
In the wake of the Revolution, a range of overlapping movements began organizing
for new political freedoms for Upper Silesia. Calls for autonomy within Prussia as an
independent province, for separation from Prussia and the creation of a separate state
within Germany, or for complete free-state independence, were all outlets for dissatisfaction
with German rule. Often these three options were explored by different groups at the same
time, or by the same group at different times, with significant overlap in ideology and
leadership. These movements for autonomy and separatism which swept across Upper
Silesia in the 1918-1922 period have also taken on various meanings over time. One strand
of historiography sees the calls for autonomy as the expression of an Upper Silesian regional
identity that served to replace existing national identities, even going so far as to profess a
“distinct unitary blood-race [eigenblütiges Einheitsvolk] of Slavo-Germanic hybrid blood.” 42
Polish writing on the plebiscite and uprisings, meanwhile, is dominated by the view that
autonomists and separatists were almost exclusively Germans engaged in an intra-ethnic
feud, who remained hostile to the Polish nationalist cause. 43
Closer examination of the motives and messages of autonomists and separatists reveals,
however, that strong national distinctions were not at the core of the movement. The
ragtag, shifting coalition of industrialists and educated Upper Silesians advocating various
levels of political independence had little desire to create an alternative national grouping of
“Upper Silesians.” The proclamation of regional uniqueness instead focused on issues of
42 Andrea Schmidt-Rösler, “Autonomie- und Separatismusbestrebungen in Oberschlesien, 1918-1922,” Zeitschrift für
Ostmitteleuropaforschung (1991) Vol. 1: 11. Quoted in Philipp Ther, "Die einheimische Bevölkerung des Oppelner
Schlesiens nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg," Geschichte und Gesellschaft 26 (2000): 414.
43 Maria Wanatowicz, Historia społeczno-polityczna Górnego Śląska i Śląska Cieszyńskiego w latach 1918-1945
(Katowice: Wydawn. Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 1994), 24-25.
172

conflict with Berlin, issues which made the region analogous to other areas of post-
revolutionary Germany where separatist movements also took root. 44 The autonomy
movements were intended above all to corral the forces of the German Revolution in a
conservative Catholic and capitalist direction, and utilize the threat of regional secession to
gain promises of cultural tolerance and political independence for Upper Silesia.
The national persuasion of most of the separatist leaders is not in doubt. German-
minded Catholic intellectuals, politicians, and industrialists formed the core leadership of
the movements; those advocating the secession of Upper Silesia to Poland were generally
not welcome. 45 Yet the audience for autonomy extended beyond convinced Germans into
the mass of nationally indifferent Upper Silesians. Many of the hundreds of thousands who
read the main autonomous and separatist newspapers could identify the arguments and
tone as very similar to Polish nationalist protests of the prewar era against Prussian anti-
Polish policies. Why was this new movement necessary, then, given the existence of a
Polish nationalist movement? Regional autonomy movements were able to open a new
space for political discontent which had been foreclosed with the postwar transformation of
Polish nationalism. Before World War I, Polish nationalism was stateless, and as such could
lodge its claims in the broadest and most malleable terms. The stakes of voting “Polish” in
1907 did not encompass the ceding of one’s homeland to another state – an outcome
nearly unimaginable before the Great War. But the resurrection of the Polish state in 1918,
and the vociferous demands of Polish nationalists to cede Upper Silesia to the new nation-
state, vastly increased the stakes of Polish loyalty. The autonomy movement offered a safe
44 Hitze, Carl Ulitzka, 176.
45 The brothers Thomas and Jan Reginek, founders of the original separatist Upper Silesian Committee in
November, defected to Polish nationalism a few months later. See Günther Doose, Die separatistische Bewegung in
Oberschlesien nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg (1918-1922) (Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz, 1987), 18-19.
173

space of fundamentally conservative protest against the direction of the new Germany that
promised the extension of Upper Silesia’s Catholic and cultural-linguistic freedoms, without
advocating secession to Poland.
The first major organized campaign of November 1918 began calling for either
separation from Prussia or complete removal from the German federal state. It took shape
as the Upper Silesian Committee, founded by the brothers Jan and Thomas Reginek – the
former a teacher, the latter a priest – as well as the lawyer Dr. Ewald Latacz. Even within this
troika there were disparate goals, as Latacz more explicitly worked to protect industrialist
interests and imagined a merely temporary separation from Germany until it returned to
more pro-capitalist policies. 46 Yet the three remained united in their desire for cultural
autonomy, and in December they targeted the Prussian ordinances on religion which
threatened state support for Catholicism. Under the direction of the anti-religious
Independent Socialist (USPD) member Adolf Hoffmann, the Prussian Ministry of Culture
announced on 13 November plans to separate church and state. 47 By the end of the month
priests were banned from the schoolhouses and religious instruction was fully eliminated as
a subject of instruction. 48 Upper Silesian separatists vilified these Socialist policies in their
propaganda. Just as importantly, the anti-Church policies motivated the Catholic Center
Party – rebranded the Catholic People’s Party (KVP) in December – to jump quickly on the
separatism bandwagon. At a regional meeting of Catholic leaders on 9 December the anti-
Church policies emerged as the focal point of protest, prompting vigorous support for
various autonomy options. The KVP even contemplated, though never officially advocated,
46 Ibid., 17.
47 Ibid., 20.
48 Hitze, Carl Ulitzka, 174.
174

annexation of Upper Silesia by Poland over the Church issue. 49 Over the next several weeks,
readers of the regional Catholic press were blanketed with calls for autonomy. The KVP’s
election campaign promised to fight against all “foreign cravings for annexation” which
would culturally, linguistically, or economically repress the region. The party instead
claimed to “advocate for the preservation of Upper Silesia, as it has historically been.” 50
While the KVP tempered its language, the Upper Silesian Committee, unmoored from the
constraints of vote-seeking, offered more radical rhetoric. In a December 1918 bilingual
broadsheet it exploited class resentment, material privation, and hostility to Kulturkampf-
like policies:
“Upper Silesians! Do we want to surrender our treasures to others, do we want
to continue to hoist up these treasures day and night through strenuous work,
to break hard limestone, breathe in cement dust, languish at broiling smelting
ovens; should the farmer give away the fruits which he has extracted from his
soil for a few cents, like before the War, merely to have other countries lift up
their culture, while we are patronizingly handed a few crumbs?
Should you Upper Silesians with your large families live cooped up in one- or
two-rooms in tall, fetid rental barracks?!
Should our children continue to be taught in schools where they don’t hear
their mother tongue, where they now still want to expel religion and the cross?
Should we Upper Silesians join ourselves to a state that persecutes our Catholic
church, one that is led by atheists? 51
Despite the radical rhetoric, these initial calls were remained unclear about the exact
extent of autonomy or separatism which should be pursued. Only over time did the various
political options for greater Upper Silesian independence develop into distinctive platforms.
In one early scenario, separatists called for a “Free State of Upper Silesia” that would exist as
49 Ibid., 181.
50 KVP Wahlaufruf, printed in Oppelner Nachrichten, 24 Decmber 1918, quoted in Doose, Die separatistische
Bewegung in Oberschlesien nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg (1918-1922), 63 fn. 1.
51 “Oberschlesier! Frieheit, Freiheit!” Broadsheet, December 1918, APO, RO, Syg. 265.
175

its own polity (analogies to Luxembourg were common) under the mutual guarantee of
Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. While seemingly the most radical political solution,
the idea of a free state actually earned some of its greatest support from conservative
magnates in the region, who hoped to preserve their wealth and landholdings by splitting
from socialist Germany. 52 Most who expressed this viewpoint, however, including the
Upper Silesian Committee, saw the creation of a free state as a temporary solution until
Germany stabilized, at which point the region could rejoin its old polity. Two other more
popular solutions called for the creation of Upper Silesia as a separate province or as a federal
state. The distinction between these two options hinged on the relationship to Prussia: the
former option would simply have elevated the region to a province within Prussia, while the
latter option called for creating a state along the lines of Bavaria or Baden, separate from
Prussia and with broader powers over its domestic cultural, educational, and economic
agenda. Prussia had long been associated with the undemocratic excesses of the Kulturkampf
and aggressive anti-Polish policies, and the new revolutionary Prussia, with its immediate
calls for church-state separation, showed continuities in Catholic eyes with the Prussia of
old. Thus calls for a “Republic of Silesia” in December 1918 were couched primarily as a
chance to break free from the yoke of Prussian repression while joining the new German
state as an autonomous partner – essentially a smaller version of Catholic Bavaria.
Separatist tendencies in Upper Silesia also co-existed with similar movements elsewhere
which combined to threaten the disintegration of Prussia in 1918-1919. In Hannover, in
Schleswig-Holstein, and above all in the Rhineland provinces of Prussia, broad movements
for autonomy and separatism emerged almost simultaneously to Upper Silesian demands.
52 Doose, Die separatistische Bewegung in Oberschlesien nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg (1918-1922), 22-23.
176

Not coincidentally, these provinces tended to be those forcibly taken over by Prussia during
its nineteenth-century expansion, and in the case of the Rhineland also heavily Catholic
and with longstanding grievances against Prussian anti-Church policy. 53 Combined with
these threats of secession, Prussia was dealing with the external erosion of its eastern borders
by the Polish state, particularly in Posen/Poznań, where an insurrection that began in late
December 1918 wrested away German control of its former Polish partition. Both threats –
that of internal dissolution and external dismantlement – were brewing simultaneously in
Upper Silesia.
It is thus little wonder that the Prussian government worked swiftly to counter calls for
autonomy or separatism. On 30 December, Berlin representatives and regional leaders,
including the heads of the separatist Upper Silesian Committee, gathered in Breslau to
address the Upper Silesian question. While the Silesian People’s Council and Berlin
representatives sharply rebuked the various separatist and autonomist solutions offered by
the Upper Silesian Committee, they nonetheless recognized the need to combat the crisis of
confidence in German administration emerging throughout the region. 54 The result was
publication of the Breslau Resolutions, a set of promises made by the Socialist People’s
Council in Breslau to the people of Upper Silesia. The five chief promises were: 1) the
replacement of leading civil servants with men sensitive to Upper Silesian needs, and in all
possible cases Polish-speaking Catholics; 2) a backing down from church-state separation
policies (a German-wide phenomenon by this point) and support for linguistic freedoms in
53 For a discussion of autonomy and separatist movements in the Rhineland, see Martin Schlemmer, "Los von Berlin":
Die Rheinstaatbestrebungen nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 2007). On the nearby Pflaz and the
Rhineland, see Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1990), 120-148.
54 Doose, Die separatistische Bewegung in Oberschlesien nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg (1918-1922), 95.
177

eligious practice; 3) a new Upper Silesian bishopric delegation for the industrial area; 4)
consultation of Silesian officials prior to pertinent decision-making in Berlin; and 5) the
creation of an Upper Silesian Commissar based in Kattowitz/Katowice. 55 The Breslau
Resolutions were intended as much for the public as for policymakers, and were widely
disseminated throughout the region. The hope was to placate the moderate KVP autonomy
demands, and bolster the standing of the SPD in Upper Silesia heading into the January
1919 elections. Having accomplished these tactical goals, fulfillment of the resolutions took
a back seat. As demonstrated earlier, the pace of replacement for civil servants proved too
slow for many, and the Upper Silesian Commissar Hörsing became widely reviled for his
harsh anti-communist and anti-Polish tactics. 56
Nonetheless, the Breslau Resolutions served their political purpose, quelling Catholic
Party demands for autonomy. From this point the divergent options of full separatism on
the one hand and autonomy on the other became more sharply defined. The Upper Silesian
Committee reformed itself in January 1919 as the Union of Upper Silesians [Bund der
Oberschlesier/Związek Górnoślązaków – BdO]. Increasingly this group came to represent
the popular face of nationalist discontent among the mass of Upper Silesians. The original
program of the BdO went beyond the Breslau Resolutions, calling for full bilingual services
in all public institutions, greater welfare programs, and the “indivisibility of Upper Silesia.”
On this last point the BdO demanded the creation of an independent, neutral free state
55 Text of Breslau Resolutions in Ibid., 103, fn. 1. Minutes of the original meeting can be found in Popiołek, Źródła do
dziejów powstań śląskich, Tom I, 77-89. For specifics on personnel replacements, see 30 December 1918 report in
APW, 39/II, Syg. 46.
56 For a critique of the failure of promises made in the Breslau Resolutions, see “Das falsche Spiel mit Oberschelsien,”
Oberschlesische Zeitung, 3 April 1919.
178

only if Upper Silesia were to be partitioned or separated from Germany. 57 While this
position made the group more pro-German than pro-Polish, the BdO found itself equally
reviled by both national camps. Thomas Reginek, who would leave the BdO for the Polish
camp in February, complained that the Germans saw the BdO only as “a clever disguise for
dangerous Polish agitation” while the Poles suspected the group of working “in the service
of German capitalism and the former reactionary, Hakatist government.” 58 German
government surveillance of the movement was widespread, and in some German eyes it
resembled Polish nationalism in its level of traitorousness. 59 It was precisely this mutual
suspicion between nationalist activists and the BdO that seemed to make the movement
exceedingly popular. The BdO cited its own membership as reaching 400,000 by 1921.
Even with free membership making it simple to join, this figure is likely inflated
significantly, a combination of wishful thinking and conflating membership with the
number of free pamphlets and newspapers distributed during the height of the plebiscite
campaign. 60
Although not without internal contradictions – the BdO came out in support of
Germany just days before the plebiscite vote – the group’s activism and appeal to the rural
population served as a check on German and Polish nationalism. While the BdO continued
to propagate separatist ideas and worked through industrial and governmental back
channels to achieve their goals, the political options for Upper Silesian independence
57 The program was circulated bilingually throughout Upper Silesian newspapers in mid-January 1919. See, for
example, Oppelner Nachrichten, 17 January 1919.
58 Thomas Reginek, Die Oberschlesische Frage, 1920, quoted in Doose, Die separatistische Bewegung in Oberschlesien
nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg (1918-1922), 115.
59 Ibid., 116. For an example of Polish critique, see 29 July 1919 Nowiny article translated in APO, ROBP, Syg, 323.
60 For a discussion of various figures, see Ibid., 113, fn. 2.
179

narrowed as the plebiscite approached. The BdO failed to get a third option on the plebiscite
ballot for a “free state,” yet it remained popular even after the vote and insisted until the
actual partition in late 1921 that Upper Silesia’s territorial unity be preserved. Through its
radical separatist proposals, the BdO also opened up a moderate political space for
compromise solutions which vote-seeking parties, particularly the KVP, could pursue. The
Catholic Party, reflecting internal disunity, publicly swung between support for the radical
free-state option and more moderate proposals for provincial or federal state autonomy.
This political jujitsu made the party popular among those captured by the BdO slogan
“Upper Silesia for the Upper Silesians” and earned the KVP bargaining power for more
moderate autonomy solutions. The deterioration of Germany’s hold over Upper Silesia in
1919, reaching its crisis in the first Polish uprising that August, sharpened the political battle
lines between Socialists and Catholics, as the latter accused the former of mismanaging the
province into Polish hands, and the Catholics in turn were accused of near-treason for their
separatist promises. 61 In the aftermath of the uprising this rancor was converted into an
earnest assessment of the political necessity of autonomy, resulting in high-level bargaining
between the KVP and SPD. With the KVP holding out the threat of full separatism and
federal state autonomy, they were able to write the terms of a less radical provincial
autonomy law, passed by the Prussian Assembly on 14 October 1919. 62
The creation of a separate Upper Silesian province within Prussia would have a greater
long-term impact on the region’s development than any law since the Kulturkampf era, but
its immediate effects lay more in the realm of perceptions. With the victorious Allied
61 See especially the 31 July 1919 speech by Carl Ulitzka and reaction, Hitze, Carl Ulitzka, 238-239.
62 Ibid., 243.
180

powers about to occupy the region in preparation for the plebiscite, the autonomy law rang
out as a future promise of Catholic-influenced political independence to assert the region’s
cultural and religious prerogatives – within a new democratic Germany. These promises
would prove a cornerstone of German propaganda efforts to sway plebiscite voters, and
even prompted a similar law from the Polish parliament [sejm] in July 1920. Throughout
this process, the demands of separatists and autonomists rarely made claims to any distinct
Upper Silesian nationality. Rather, they focused their anger on the apparent continuity of
religious, linguistic, and economic repression across the 1918 zero hour. The BdO and
Catholic Party thus appropriated a political protest space once occupied by the Polish
nationalists, who now demanded secession of the region to a new Poland. In so doing, the
autonomy movement was able to channel the forces of the revolution to the benefit of
Upper Silesians desiring linguistic parity, religious freedom, and economic opportunity. As
a home-grown populist movement, it stood in stark contrast to the largely non-native corps
of nationalist activists. It also contrasted with the very foreign element of an Allied
occupying force, which more than any group arguably led to the breakdown of local
societies and peace in the plebiscite era.
BREAKDOWN: TOWARDS THE PLEBISCITE
The Allies’ decision to hold a non-binding plebiscite to help determine the national
preferences of Upper Silesians brought with it not only vicious battle between Polish and
German nationalists, but also foreign occupation. Intended to create an environment of
safety ahead of the vote, the occupation by the French-led Inter-Allied Commission (IAC)
instead had the opposite effect. The social and political radicalism of the 1918-1919 period
181

exploded with the occupation into the violent breakdown of local societies around
Oppeln/Opole. Emerging as a result of the IAC’s inability to police the population (and, as
some evidence shows, blatantly pro-Polish policies by the French), violence increasingly
consumed the plebiscite zone in 1920 and 1921. This bloodshed was undeniably the direct
result of national strife over the plebiscite, which motivated roving bands of Polish and
German partisans to terrorize villages hoping to scare locals into one national camp or
another. Yet at the local level, this violence was experienced most directly as a breakdown of
community. While many neighbors became enemies, the lack of trust also pitted local
communities against outsiders. Village self-defense forces were briefly formed – albeit along
national lines – to defend against the threats of radical nationalists perceived as a
fundamentally external threat. Ultimately, the profound fear and near-chaos under French-
led occupation proved a strong motivating force for plebiscite voters around Oppeln/Opole
to favor the German state that had previously provided them a basic sense of physical and
material security.
The decision to put the region’s political fate to a vote came only after vocal protest
against the complete secession of Upper Silesia (and parts of adjacent Lower Silesia) to
Poland. Roman Dmowski, by this point the undisputed national leader for an
enthnocentric concept of Poland, appealed to the Paris Peace Conference in February 1919
for the inclusion of vast swaths of eastern Germany to Poland on the grounds of their
majority Polish ethnic makeup. The Wilsonian principle of national self-determination in
this case, as in other territories throughout Central Europe, meant deferring to determined
nationalist activists like Dmowski, who often had tenuous connections to the borderlands
they claimed to represent. Based on the claims of the Polish delegation, which itself relied
182

on Prussian census data on language use, the Allies initially decided in a 7 May 1919 draft
of the Versailles Treaty to cede Upper Silesia, and eastern counties of Lower Silesia with
Polish-speaking majorities, to Poland. 63 News of the decision sparked immediate mass
protests in Upper Silesia, with additional protests throughout Germany. The largest took
place on 10 May 1919 in Oppeln/Opole, where an estimated 20,000 people marched
through the streets carrying German flags. The Catholic newspaper announced that day in a
glaring headline “Germany’s Death Sentence – Wilson’s colossal moral defeat.” 64 While the
large marches were supported by the government and its de facto propaganda arm, the Free
Association for the Protection of Upper Silesia [Freie Vereinigung zum Schütze
Oberschlesiens], the outpouring of popular discontent over the decision is not in doubt. 65
The direct effect of the mass protests on the Allies in Paris remains unclear, but vigorous
German counter-lobbying, bolstered by sympathy from Lloyd George and the British
delegation, led to the June 1919 decision to commission a non-binding plebiscite. 66
Nearly eight months after the decision, Germany would cede control of the plebiscite
zone – encompassing all but the farthest Western reaches of Upper Silesia, plus small slices
of Lower Silesia – to the Inter-Allied Commission. The IAC was placed under the direction
of French Commissioner Henri LeRond, and backed by roughly 13,000 troops (11,000 of
them French). 67 A trusted political ally of Clemenceau, LeRond was fluent in German and
63 Ibid., 206-209.
64 Oppelner Nachrichten, 10 May 1919.
65 Vogel, "Deutsche Presse Und Propaganda", 59.
66 Hitze, Carl Ulitzka, 212. The British feared that the loss of Upper Silesia’s coal and mineral riches would
disastrously weaken Germany’s overall industrial capacity.
67 Waldemar Grosch, Deutsche und polnische Propaganda während der Volksabstimmung in Oberschlesien, 1919-1921
(Dortmund: Forschungsstelle Ostmitteleuropa, 2002), 28. Of these troops, only around 400 were stationed in the
Oppeln/Opole city and surrounding county, with much larger forces stationed in the industrial area. See Prussian
Interior Ministry report of March 1920, GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 77, Tit. 856, Nr. 380.
183

Polish, but more importantly he was fluent in the postwar French politics of revenge against
Germany and pro-Polish support. The implications of this shift from German hegemonic
control of the reins of government to an essentially Polonophile administrative apparatus
sent shock waves through the traditional power structures of Upper Silesian society. With
the IAC takeover, residents became members of a special temporary state, with passports
required for travel out of the plebiscite zone. The Commission could not, however,
reasonably remake the entire bureaucracy overnight, and as such the German legal system,
currency, and much of the police apparatus remained in place under direction of the IAC. 68
With Oppeln/Opole as its headquarters, the Commission was, at least in the eyes of the local
German Catholic paper, engaging in “the occupation of our city.” The administrative
apparatus required 70 offices, plus at least 200 private apartments. 69 As district president
Joseph Bitta made his farewell remarks before the French entered the city in early February
1920, he urged peace but also warned women and children to avoid cavorting with the
soldiers: “Women and girls of Oppeln, defend your honor and dignity!” 70 Much as in any
wartime occupation, women carried a special ideological burden in nationalist rhetoric of
resisting the occupier’s advances.
Widespread resistance to the French presence around Oppeln/Opole developed within
months of the IAC’s arrival. The first spark for mass protest came when, on the evening of
12 April, an inebriated off-duty French soldier provoked a fight at the Quosego bar in
Oppeln/Opole after being told that the billiards table was out of order. The soldier pulled out
a gun, fatally shooting the bartender and injuring one other. Incidentally, the days before
68 Hitze, Carl Ulitzka, 261.
69 Oppelner Nachrichten, 15 January 1920.
70 Ibid., 1 February 1920.
184

the shooting had seen widespread worker strikes, especially in the cement plants around the
city. When workers gathered for a meeting the day after the shooting to discuss demands
for wage increases, talk turned instead to the dead bartender, with demands raised for
100,000 gold francs in compensation for the death. A meeting intended to express class
grievances soon grew into a street protest (involving an estimated 6,000 people) against the
murder of a local by a foreign occupier. 71 French troops fired shots to control the protestors,
and on14 April were forced to institute a three-day evening curfew to curb the tide of
violent protest. 72 On 16 April workers in the Gas, Electric, and Water Works went on strike
to protest the murder, while several judges continued to strike for nearly two months to
protest loss of independence under the IAC. 73 The fluid transference of class antagonism
(which most certainly included many Polish-speaking cement workers from villages around
Oppeln/Opole) to violence against an untrusted occupying force pitted locals against
outsiders, but not yet Poles against Germans.
The strongest outbreak of popular national violence in the city’s history would come,
however, just a few weeks later. Ahead of the 3 May anniversary of the 1791 Polish
constitution, nationalists planned parades throughout the province. The gathering in
Oppeln/Opole, scheduled for Sunday, 2 May drew hundreds of enthusiastic Polish activists
from nearby villages and also by train from the industrial area. As news of the planned
Polish march spread through Oppeln/Opole, a group of mostly working-class citizens
decided to stop the celebration by blockading the main roads into town. The marchers
71 The French soldier was eventually sentenced to 10 years of forced labor and expelled from the military. See report
of Hatzfeld to Prussian Interior Ministry, 9 May 1920, in Popiołek, Źródła do dziejów powstań śląskich, Tom II, 169.
72 Oppelner Nachrichten, 15 and 16 April 1920.
73 Ibid., 18 April 1920. Władysław Dziewulski and Franciszek Hawranek, Opole : monografia miasta (Opole: Instytut
Śląski, 1975), 308. See also the report of Hatzfeld to Prussian Interior Ministry, 9 May 1920, in Popiołek, Źródła do
dziejów powstań śląskich, Tom II, 168.
185

streaming in from nearby villages encountered the anti-Polish crowd at the grain market
early that afternoon on the outskirts of Oppeln/Opole. Police at the scene described at least
a thousand pro-German supporters. As fighting broke out around 3 p.m. (police reports
abstain from assigning blame for the first blows), Polish participants fired into the crowd.
Some were then overtaken and beaten by German opponents. 74 Police worked to separate
the two crowds and take the most culpable, and the most vulnerable, into custody. While
order was restored at the grain market by 5 p.m., anti-Polish violence spread to other
symbolically important sites in the city, such as the Polish consulate and the headquarters of
Koraszewski’s Gazeta Opolska. At least eight people, all of them of working-class
background, were seriously injured. 75
In the following days the violence continued in the city and spread to villages in the
surrounding county. Around 11 a.m. on 3 May a pro-German trader August Skrobotz was
shot in the leg by Johann Schaka from nearby Goslawitz/Gosławice as revenge for the
attack on the Polish parade. That afternoon a crowd of 200 to 300 protestors gathered in
front of the Polish consulate, tore down the white eagle adorning the entrance, and hurled
rocks through the building’s windows. At the Polish Bank Rolników the Polish flag and
eagle were also torn down; both here and at the consulate, Poles within the buildings
74 One nearly mythical story from this encounter tells of linguistic confusion among two opposing leaders, Szymon
Koszyk and Jan Mrocheń, meeting at a bridge on 2 May. Koszyk, a pro-Polish leader born in Oppeln, supposedly
shouted his insults in German, the language he knew best, while Mrocheń, a pro-German Communist from a nearby
village, felt more comfortable shouting down his opponents in Polish. While this tale has been told and retold, no
historical documentation could be located to confirm the portrayal of events, which seems to have descended
through oral retellings. Nonetheless, the linguistic preferences of the two figures are highly plausible given their
backgrounds, and the prevalence of the story in Communist Poland suggests some desire to complicate
understandings of linguistic preference among the autochthonous Silesian population that remained after World
War II. See Jan Goczoł, “Nationale Zugehörigkeit und Sprache in Oberschlesien” in Klaus Bź dziach, ed., "Wach
auf, mein Herz, und denke" : zur Geschichte der Beziehungen zwischen Schlesien und Berlin-Brandenburg von 1740
bis heute (Berlin: Gesellschaft fur interregionalen Kulturaustausch, 1995), 96-104.
75 Police reports of 2 and 3 May, 1920, APO, ROBP, Syg. 299.
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threatened to retaliate with pistols. 76 In multiple villages around Oppeln/Opole, Polish
activists stormed school buildings demanding that students receive the day off in honor of
the Polish national holiday. 77 In Ellguth-Turawa/Ligota Turawska, 23 kilometers east of
Oppeln/Opole, a full-scale rebellion broke out against the teacher, local official, and
German nationalist leader in the village, the latter taken to a hospital after being assaulted. 78
The day after, a mob attacked the Gazeta Opolska in Oppeln/Opole, destroying its printing
press, while looters broke into a Polish-owned drugstore and the Bank Ludowy. That same
evening a parade of anti-Polish protestors was dispersed by police; of the four pro-German
demonstrators arrested, three were younger than 21 years old. These arrests did not stop
around 400 workers from the train car repair workshop from demonstrating the following
day against the Polish parade. 79 The events in Oppeln/Opole were accompanied by
simultaneous school strikes across the plebiscite area, as Polish nationalists demanded that
schools be closed in honor of the 3 May holiday.
The pattern of violence established during the incidents of April and early May would
carry on for more than a year. While national support in the early May incidents tended to
follow clear geographic lines – with pro-German supporters from Oppeln/Opole and the
working-class villages surrounding it, and Polish supporters from more remote villages or
from the industrial area – the events also had a strong insider/outsider dimension.
Oppeln/Opole pro-German citizens directed their anger against the supposedly distant
industrial-area Polish activists who had come from the “East,” although it is clear that many
76 Reports of officers Barfels and Rietschel, APO, ROBP, Syg. 299.
77 Reports of teachers Hiller in Chrosczütz and Günther in Ellguth-Turawa, APO, ROBP, Syg. 299.
78 Report of Zugwachmeister Breuer on 3 May 1920 events, APO, SPO, Syg. 93.
79 Oppeln police report, 6 May 1920, APO, ROBP, Syg. 299.
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pro-Polish demonstrators actually came from villages within the county. Likewise, the
demonstrations against symbols of power often focused on what were deemed external
threats – the consulate, the national flag, the Prussian schoolhouses. This construction of an
enemy as external or non-organic to a place is certainly one hallmark of nationalist dispute,
especially since many of the Polish activists and pro-German officials were in fact locally
born. While national strife certainly structured the division into two rival camps, so too did
understandings of an attack on local homelands by outsiders.
Just as importantly, the bonds within local communities would break down amid the
rising violence. Without a doubt, much of the violence which consumed the county (and
Oppeln/Opole was spared the deeper violence of the industrial area) was nationally
motivated. The second Polish uprising in August 1920, much more organized and advanced
than the first, swept westwards into the eastern villages of Oppeln/Opole county. While
police forces drove back the Polish insurgents, pro-Polish activists deeper within the county
hoped to foment rebellion through acts of violence against teachers and local authorities.
Flush with weapons, these Poles would throw hand grenades through the windows of their
targets, steal official symbols of power, or issue death threats. Thanks in large part to
effective French patrols, however, all paramilitary groups regardless of national leaning were
repressed, and the incidents remained scattered. While French forces were accused elsewhere
of openly allowing Polish violence or even supplying insurgents with weapons, the
Oppeln/Opole Landrat noted their local effectiveness in stopping the spread of the second
Polish uprising. 80 Nationalist violence was not limited to periods of major uprisings. On 10
August a group of young men roamed the streets of Vogtsdorf/Wójtowa Wieś late at night
80 Report of Oppeln Landrat, 10 September 1920, APO, SPO, Syg. 93. Rumors of French deliveries to Polish forces
can be found in the government reports throughout the same file, and also in APO, ROBP, Syg. 93.
188

singing German soldiers’ and folk songs when they were shot at by unknown attackers,
who injured one in the leg. The following day more shooting broke out between German
and Polish activists in the village. 81 In late October 1920 in Alt-Poppelau/Popielów, an
evening talk led by three priests in Polish was disturbed by German speakers protesting the
language choice; in response, a French soldier accompanied about 30 to 40 young Poles (all
around 18-20 years old) to the event, prompting a brutal row. 82 Such incidents came to
mark a new reality of violence in communities across the region.
Such attacks also ultimately worked to tear apart any fabric of trust left within
communities. The widespread availability of weapons after the war and the breakdown of
government control over violence cast a wider net of fear and distrust than could be
captured by national antipathy. The violent acts which defined life during 1920 and 1921
around Oppeln/Opole sometimes had only tenuous nationalist content or completely non-
national motives. Take the day of 1 July 1920: that afternoon in Oppeln/Opole three police
officers were dispatched to the working-class neighborhood Odervorstadt/Zaodrze after
complaints of an out-of-control coachman. There they encountered Paul Stralka, who after
threatening his passengers with an iron rod, used the same weapon to attack a police officer.
The officer fatally shot Stralka in the abdomen. The real tumult began, however, as a
gathering crowd threatened the officers for the shooting, attempting to throw them into the
Oder/Odra river. The officers were forced to retreat to the station with their guns drawn,
and seek reinforcements to calm the crowd. 83 This incident suggests a reflexive antipathy to
authority, even though at this point most officers were still German speaking and were
81 Police reports from 12 and 14 August 1920 in: APO, ROBP , Syg. 299.
82 Report on events in Alt-Poppelau on 27 October 1920, APO, SPO, Syg. 93
83 Oppelner Nachrichten, 3 July 1920; police report on incident of 3 July 1920, APO, ROBP, Syg. 302.
189

dispatched to a working-class neighborhood of mainly German speakers. Then, late that
night, in an unrelated incident, someone threw a bomb through the windows of the new
administrative building for the Silesia cement factory on the outskirts of town – an
incident most likely driven by class antipathy, given ongoing worker unrest. 84 Earlier, in
June, a local from Oppeln/Opole living in the industrial area shot a man in the head for his
shoes, which he sold the next day for 70 marks. 85 Such acts of violence carried little or no
sign of national antipathy.
While such crimes reached their climax in the summer around Oppeln/Opole, the
violence raged on several months later. German officials complained to French
Commissioners in November that “Hardly a day passes without reports of a serious crime, a
robbery or a murder.” 86 One historian has estimated an average of seven to eight deaths per
day during the 13-month occupation leading up to the plebiscite – and this figure excludes
deaths during the second Polish uprising. 87 Violence was worst in counties to the east, but
crimes such as house robberies became commonplace throughout the region. Much of the
blame around Oppeln/Opole was laid on the porous border with Poland, as bandits from the
east supposedly invaded the county to wreak havoc on its citizens. 88 While this cannot be
proven by crime statistics, it is clear that local communities were subject to greater
migratory flows and more outsiders in the tumult of the plebiscite era, and many witnesses
described criminals not known in local communities.
In many acts of violence the motive remained unclear, but the impulse of officials and
84 Ibid., 2 July 1920.
85 Police report on 8 June 1920 shooting, APO, ROBP, Syg. 301.
86 Letter from Hatzfeld to Inter-Allied Commission, November 1920, APO, ROBP Syg. 304.
87 Karski, Albert (Wojciech) Korfanty, 308.
88 Oppelner Nachrichten, 12 October 1920.
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popular rumor was to define these events as having national significance. On 20 July 1920,
in Ellguth-Turawa/Ligota Turawska, a wedding celebration was marred by a shooting. Initial
eyewitness reports suggested that it was a political act, since the shooters were not known in
the village and the victims were known as German loyalists. Yet witnesses closer to the
actual events disputed the classification of the crime as a “political act of vengeance.” The
investigation centered on five young men who had been staying in a local inn; an
innkeeper reported that they spoke both German and Polish, “though a better Polish, than
is spoken here in the local district.” The suspects began drinking around 5 p.m. that day,
and in the evening engaged in a fight with Peter Panitz, who was a known Polish
nationalist in the village. This intra-national violence served as a prelude to the main event,
where at the Mazur tavern the men refused to pay the required cover charge for dancing.
According to the event’s organizer Kmitta, the suspects scuffled with him around 11 p.m.,
then danced some more. When asked a second time to pay the fee, they became aggressive
and left. They later returned and a fight erupted between them and Kmitta. Amid the
fracas, shots were fired, but no one was killed. While the evidence of Kmitta and others
directly involved suggested that there was no nationalist divide – that it was indeed just a
bar fight – the police continued to approach the case as an act of political terror. Police even
suggested that the unknown outsiders picked the fight as an excuse to beat up German
speakers. 89 The plebiscite battle had created a climate of national antipathy such that
violence which seemed to have little or no nationalist motivation was still interpreted
according to pre-set ideological lines dividing Poles from Germans.
The violence experienced under an inadequate French-led protection force sympathetic
89 Police reports of 21 and 22 July 1920, APO, SPO, Syg. 93.
191

to Polish insurgents had a profound effect on the fabric of local communities in the
plebiscite area. The magnitude of local fear of outside forces – whether Polish bandits or
irresponsible French soldiers – could at times draw together communities in self-defense. In
August 1920, for example, the Polish-led town council in Groschowitz/Groszowice voted to
form a civil defense force [Bürgerwehr] to ensure peace in their town. The force was to
consist of 60 Poles and 40 Germans, working in separate groups and staying on constant
patrol. The rough national compromise shown in the name of local order was vetoed,
however, by the IAC. 90
Violence ruled the plebiscite region in 1920-1921 in a way it never had before in the
memory of any living Upper Silesian. For those affected, the profound violence affected
more than just their sense of security. The nationalist battle between Germany and Poland
over the region created the external conditions in which near-anarchy could thrive, but the
everyday effects of that anarchy were not necessarily experienced nor made sense of
through nationalist divisions. The breakdown of communities was aided by a flood of
weapons and bandits, by material privation, and by radicalized young workers and
decommissioned soldiers. The wounds of this violence would scar multiple generations and,
in the short term, damaged Polish activists’ chances of convincing Upper Silesians to vote
for Poand. The inability of pro-Polish French forces to control the tide of violence sweeping
across Upper Silesia gave Germany much ammunition to woo the population into voting
for a country that had very recently provided them a basic sense of security and order. This
issue of security, not just in a physical sense but also in terms of economic empowerment,
would become one of the dominant messages of the plebiscite campaign as nationalist
90 Landrat report on 26 August 1920 meeting, APO, SPO, Syg. 93.
192

activists attempted to attract undecided Upper Silesian voters.
MAKING THE CASE, AVOIDING THE NATION
In the years and months leading up to the plebiscite vote of March 1921, Upper
Silesians were flooded with newspapers, magazines, satirical publications, placards,
pamphlets, speeches, debates, and priestly sermons seeking their vote. The battle for the
loyalty of the Upper Silesian could have easily hinged on racialist or integralist arguments
for national belonging. Yet even the establishment of the plebiscite served as the first major
recognition that statistics on language use or claims of ethnic makeup did not clearly
demarcate national self-identification. Prewar Polish activists asserted that the ethnic traits
of their constituency pre-ordained locals for membership in the Polish nation, yet their
strategy relied more on the conversion of social and religious grievances into national
terms. Now, with the human and mineral resources of Upper Silesia at stake, Germany and
Poland took no chances relying on simple ethnicist claims. The barrage of information and
propaganda flooding Upper Silesians made every imaginable argument for which state to
vote for, but little in the way of direct appeals to national belonging, although negative
stereotyping of the enemy was pervasive. Among those least disposed to nationalism, priests
(or, more precisely, a vocal minority of priests) paradoxically served as some of the rare
proponents of unadulterated national identity based on ethno-linguistic traits. For the most
part, however, propaganda by German and Polish nationalists revealed the national
ambiguity of the population they were trying to recruit.
The organization of manpower to run election campaigning and propaganda efforts
emerged along sharp national battle lines. On the Polish side, Korfanty’s personal control
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over the well-funded Polish Plebiscite Commission (PKP) allowed for a jump start on
coordinated propaganda efforts. Not satisfied with the smaller distribution of nationally
loyal Polish-language papers in the region (including those of his rival Napieralski, whose
Catholic-Polish papers Korfanty could not directly control), Korfanty went on a newspaper-
buying offensive in 1920. 91 He used his nearly unlimited funds to purchase financially-
troubled German-language papers that had previously despised him and his policies,
including the Liberal (DDP) Oberschlesische Grenzzeitung from Beuthen/Bytom and the
National-Conservative (DNVP) Kreuzberger Zeitung. With these purchases, and the hiring
of experienced German journalists, Korfanty hoped to overcome the roughly six-to-one
subscription advantage of German-language papers over Polish ones, and thus reach the
many Upper Silesians with Polish loyalties but German-language reading habits. In addition
he founded humor magazines and a variety of weekly inserts to appeal to every possible
voter, including women. 92 Korfanty’s control of the press proved nearly absolute, and his
grip also extended to brutal reprisals for defectors. When Teofil Kupka, a senior press agent,
left the Polish campaign to start a German-backed paper mixing autonomist claims with
scathing criticism of Korfanty, his former boss dispatched PKP security forces to murder
Kupka. 93 While dozens of affiliated pro-Polish press outlets would open in 1920, Korfanty
was able to define the overarching message with an iron fist.
This combination of an early press offensive and a tightly controlled messaging
structure offered Korfanty’s Polish camp advantages over their German opponents. Given
91 Napieralski’s newspaper empire provided a moderately independent voice from Korfanty’s plebiscite papers, but
nonetheless all supported ceding Upper Silesia to Poland. Korfanty sent several press agents to work with
Napieralski’s publications and coordinate messaging. Grosch, Deutsche Und Polnische Propaganda, 113.
92 Hitze, Carl Ulitzka, 279. Karski, Albert (Wojciech) Korfanty, 219.
93 Karski, Albert (Wojciech) Korfanty, 292-298.
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the pluralistic nature of German politics in the region and the press which represented it,
finding a unified voice proved more difficult for the German plebiscite campaign. The
original German government-backed propaganda wing, the Free Association for the
Protection of Upper Silesia, moved to Breslau, along with many pro-German operatives, in
advance of the IAC takeover. There, from a distance, the organization reached for a sense of
homeland authenticity by changing its name to the United Associations of Upper Silesians
True to Heimat [Vereingte Verbände Heimattreuer Oberschlesier – VVHO]. The group
nonetheless had a major image problem among many Upper Silesians: backed by rich
industrialists and led by conservative nationalists, it was subject to the accusation, lodged
repeatedly by Polish advocates, of continuing Hakatist policies in new garb. Indeed, VVHO
membership in many villages tended to be limited to the teacher and town magistrate. 94
Nonetheless, the VVHO increasingly overcame its narrow political base to become the
authoritative German public voice in the plebiscite, thanks in large part to the support of
the Catholic Party and moderate Socialists. Carl Ulitzka, head of the Upper Silesian KVP,
and Hans Lukascheck, a plebiscite official and future President of Upper Silesia, were among
the most prominent Catholics with leadership positions in the VVHO. The propaganda
group launched its own newspapers, including Polish-langauge publications such as the
Dzwon. 95 Yet the German press offensive, involving mainly the founding of new and
unknown papers, proved belated and less effective than the Korfanty’s purchase of pre-
existing press outlets. Moreover, the German camp still faced greater political
fragmentation among its diverse press – from conservative nationalists to radical socialists –
94 Vogel, "Deutsche Presse Und Propaganda", 52.
95 Grosch, Deutsche Und Polnische Propaganda, 39-50.
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as well as the robust distribution of separatist and autonomist literature from the BdO.
While German propaganda efforts thus faced greater obstacles to unity, the risk of ceding
Upper Silesia to Poland motivated the broadest spectrum of political parties, (excluding
Communists and Independent Socialists) to unite. The Catholic Party in particular
transformed itself into a vigorous defender of the German side in the plebiscite, thus
running the risk of alienating more Polish-minded former Catholic voters.
While the propaganda leaders and journalists tended to be convinced nationalists, their
target audience consisted mostly of undecided voters. Both sides seemed to understand that,
in this context, ethnicist claims of national belonging would do little in themselves to sway
Upper Silesians. Of course, almost all areas of propaganda were subject to a range of formats
– from lengthy, academic treatises to simple posters – but it is the more popular and visual
formats that not only had the widest appeal, but are also among the easiest to analyze. One
historian, Waldemar Grosch, conducted a statistical analysis of 455 German and Polish
propaganda pieces, such as placards, cartoons, or posters, that had short, easily discernible
arguments. He then categorized the roughly 1,200 different messages contained within the
pieces. His results, while a rough statistical mapping of a fluid range of ideas and arguments,
show that a plurality of propaganda (just under one-third in both Polish and German
camps) focused on economic arguments. For the German camp, he estimated that only
around 12.5 percent of arguments made direct appeals to ethnic belonging, while the Polish
camp made such appeals in about 18.5 percent of its arguments. Other rhetorical categories
in propaganda included religion, fear of war, autonomy, socio-political changes after World
War I, responsibility for violence, and deprecating the opponent. 96 Indeed, scathing
96 Ibid., 360-367. Statistical summary on 365.
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criticism of the morals, tactics, and supposed hypocrisies of the enemy, especially through
sarcastic publications such as the pro-Polish Kocynder and pro-German Pieron, became
some of the most biting and widely disseminated propaganda. This sarcastic negative
campaigning was part of a continuum with less offensive material which argued as strongly
against membership in the opponent state as for membership in the desired one. Among all
of these various themes, groupist arguments for national belonging proved rare.
On the economic plane, German war defeat and the onerous reparations which
emerged from the Versailles treaty offered the Polish press a powerful line of attack. The
Kocynder promoted a visual comparison of German and Polish debts through the imagery
of weightlifting in one 1921 cartoon. While the German figure, decrepit and sweating
under the weight of a giant barbell, holds out a cup asking for donations from Upper
Silesians to cover his debt, a healthy Polish bodybuilder clutches a small weight with one
hand, pointing out that “These are my debts.” 97 Another pro-Polish cartoon from 1919
shows a fat, supine German tied up with a hand pump attached to his stomach. The Allies
simultaneously pump out gold from his belly (worth 725 billion marks), claiming that they
will pump him empty. Polish papers regularly quoted the calculation that German war
reparations translated into a debt of over 60,000 marks for every person in Germany. 98 The
relentless focus on German debts was combined with criticism of the tax burdens of the
welfare state. The Kocynder in a 1921 cartoon depicted a plethora of German taxes –
including property, municipal, luxury, church, and pet (dog and cat) taxes, along with war
debts – as giant placards with feet chasing after the poor German citizen with his money
97 Poster reprinted in Karski, Albert (Wojciech) Korfanty, 240.
98 Poster reprinted in Grosch, Deutsche Und Polnische Propaganda, 318.
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ag. 99 In more suggestive and visually powerful language, the German “body” was often
represented as a corpse: a dying economy and nation destined to a future of penury. In one
bilingual pro-Polish placard, a giant skeleton in Prussian uniform traipses over a destroyed
industrial-agricultural landscape, the text warning “Don’t be a slave to the German
corpse.” 100 The German/Prussian corpse would indeed serve as a malleable visual metaphor
for the perceived economic sickliness of defeated postwar Germany.
The pro-Polish camp built on decades of social antagonism, especially in land relations,
where in the eastern stretches of Upper Silesia a few noblemen controlled vast swaths of
land; 54 magnates, in fact, owned 57 percent of the entire area of Upper Silesia, with the
largest seven landholdings comprising 26 percent of the land. Promises of land reform and
class revenge spread through the Polish press, including new Polish laws which promised the
forced parceling of large government and private holdings. 101 The PKP in fact created a
separate department for agricultural affairs and propaganda, and those close to the
organization were each promised 30 Morgen (about 18.5 acres) of free land, while poorer
farmers were enticed by Korfanty with promises of a free cow. 102 (Failure to deliver on the
cattle would later make the “Korfanty cow” a regional synonym for broken campaign
promises.) The image of the well-nourished magnate sucking off the resources of the toiling
Upper Silesian farmer joined the propaganda panoply depicting a German upper class
riding on the backs of Upper Silesian labor and tax payments.
German propaganda attempted to counter the powerful Polish economic argument
99 Poster reprinted in Karski, Albert (Wojciech) Korfanty, 238.
100 Poster reprinted in Ibid.
101 Grosch, Deutsche Und Polnische Propaganda, 311-312.
102 Hitze, Carl Ulitzka, 285-286.
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with appeals to the benefits of a robust welfare state buttressed by new Socialist promises for
worker equality. Promises of economic security melded well with political propaganda
comparing Socialist Germany’s pro-worker policies favorably to Poland’s. This argument
was visualized in one cartoon of a German worker proceeding to a government office,
where the various welfare benefits (retirement pensions, disability welfare, workers’
compensation, and health insurance) are each represented by a different window. The well-
dressed worker, in a sling, asks for help after hurting his arm at work. The dapper German
bureaucrat replies “Then go to the ticket window!” The same worker, now rumpled and
disheveled, approaches the run-down Polish office in the accompanying picture, where a
cretinous bureaucrat rejects the request for aid with a dismissive “Then go to hell!” 103
German propaganda also intentionally confused the value of German and Polish
currencies, working from the reputation of a strong Reichsmark to stoke fears of poor
purchasing power and future inflation for the Polish marka. 104 This fed into more general
alarms about the economic disparities between Germany and Poland. German propaganda
warned that a flood of workers from within Poland would migrate to a Polish Upper Silesia,
bringing down wages, or that Upper Silesia would become the milk cow of Polish
taxation. 105 This sort of comparative economics meanwhile easily slid into long-held
negative stereotypes against polnische Wirtschaft [Polish, or incompetent, economics].
“You Upper Silesians are supposed to fill empty pockets!” warned one poster, showing a
member of the Polish gentry with empty, outstretched pockets towering over an industrial
103 Cartoon reprinted in Karski, Albert (Wojciech) Korfanty, 272.
104 Grosch, Deutsche Und Polnische Propaganda, 331.
105 Ibid., 346.
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landscape. 106 In another cartoon, weary and destitute Polish peasants – all unproductive
women, children, and old men – cross the border in winter, “in order to beg in Upper
Silesia” the caption warns. 107
As these depictions of the Prussian overlord or the Polish beggar reveal, both sides
traded heavily in scathing national stereotypes. Very rarely, however, did these arguments
suggest that Upper Silesians inherently belonged to one national group. Rather, they tried to
convince voters that they should fear living in the other state. These constructions of
national difference, moreover, were tied explicitly to economic rationalizations for future
materials benefits or detriments. The Polish and German nations appeared mainly as
metaphorical apparitions symbolizing personal, material stakes beyond a national frame of
reference. The image of the Prussian magnate was only valuable insofar as he reminded
Upper Silesian peasants of their economic blight, and the Polish beggars were only as
valuable as the fears they stoked of future impoverishment. More direct emotional appeals
using national symbols such as the Polish eagle or German shield were also common, but
nationalist symbolism was just as often employed in the context of economic arguments.
The necessity of direct democratic appeal, in short, required the inversion of agency typical
in nationalist claims. Instead of arguing from a baseline of ethnicist belonging that
privileged the nation over individuals and argued for personal duty to the nation, the
plebiscite forced nationalists to sell their wares to skeptical voters. Messages of duty or
obligation were most often inverted in plebiscite propaganda, as the states offered economic
uplift and other social or cultural advantages which citizens were enticed to embrace.
106 Poster reprinted in Ibid., 302.
107 Poster reprinted in Karski, Albert (Wojciech) Korfanty, 273.
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Economic arguments, while the most prominent, were far from the only form of
indirect national appeal made in Upper Silesian propaganda. Military service (required in
Poland but not in Germany) was used in German propaganda to address a war-weary
populace. Appeals were made especially to women as the protectors of family integrity, as in
the pamphlet illustration showing a mother tearfully sending her child off to war with the
caption: “Mothers consider: Poland has mandatory military service!” 108 While Poland’s
imagery of Prussian authority regularly decried the officer as the embodiment of aggressive
German warmongering, Germany could counter with appeals to a future of socialist-led
peace. This stood in stark contrast to Poland, which fought six wars in three years to secure
its borders and its existence. 109 The most dangerous to Poland, the war with the Soviet
Union from 1919-1921, held ramifications for the plebiscite zone. With Germany pledging
neutrality, false rumors spread of French military support being mobilized in Upper Silesia
to defend Poland. German propaganda could capitalize on the fears of French support and a
Bolshevik takeover, such as the warning (originally in Polish) that “if you are going to vote
for Poland, you are giving your country not to Poland, but rather to Russia and
Moscow.” 110 As Soviet forces threatened Warsaw in the summer of 1920, protests broke out
in Upper Silesia in support of German neutrality, as well as more radical Communist strikes
expressing support for the Soviet Red Army. 111 The issue of security and peace was also often
108 Reprinted in Grosch, Deutsche Und Polnische Propaganda, 213.
109 Norman Davies counts the Ukrainian war which established control over East Galicia, the Posen insurrection, the
Silesian uprisings, the Lithuanian war over Vilnius, the Czechoslovak war over Teschen/Cieszyn, and the Polish-
Soviet war. Norman Davies, God's Playground: A History of Poland, revised ed. (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2005), Vol. II, 292.
110 Grosch, Deutsche Und Polnische Propaganda, 216.
111 It was Communist pro-Soviet protests that seem to have been dominant in Kattowitz/Katowice on August 17,
1920, when rioting broke out and a Polish doctor was lynched. It was this event which gave Polish paramilitary forces
the pretext to begin a long-planned insurrection, which would enter history as the second Polish uprising. Karski,
201

tied to prosperity: without the former, German propaganda argued, the latter was not
possible.
Along with these fears stoked by war, more direct appeals were also made to Upper
Silesians as a distinct group drawn by historic or ethnic bonds in different national
directions. On the German side the calls could be as simple as a poster claiming “We are and
will remain German!” But they more often made historical appeals to the cultural
transformations offered by economic integration into German society. These appeals
amounted to a continued belief in the assimilatory power of German nationalism in its pre-
exclusivist iteration. Polish counter-attacks, however, tended to rely more on ethnicist
claims of a Polish homeland which had been invaded by Prussian-German overlords,
beginning with Frederick II in 1740. 112 Upper Silesians were promised the chance to finally
be “man of the house” in a free Poland. Both sides claimed the mantle of representing
Upper Silesians, and Germans in particular could claim that this regional grouping provided
locals a way to distance themselves from supposedly uncivilized Polish nationalism. The
Freie Vereinigung would claim exactly this in one pamphlet: “Upper Silesia is not Polish, but
rather Silesian land.” 113 Yet these ethnicist claims were less common than arguments
stressing prosperity, peace, or security.
Both sides also played up their respective autonomy laws, while trying to portray their
opponents’ law as less generous. For the German side in particular, the appeal to the concept
of Heimat worked as an established idiom through which to temper nationalist claims by
Albert (Wojciech) Korfanty, 255-256.
112 See, for example, the drawing depicting the ghost of Frederick II as encouraging the German falsification of voting
lists, in Ibid., 221.
113 Quoted in Grosch, Deutsche Und Polnische Propaganda, 182. Emphasis in original.
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appealing to the local. Upper Silesia was allowed to have its unique Polish-German cultural
characteristics yet still join the panoply of culturally and historically diverse regions which
made up greater Germany. Polish appeals to the ojczyzna (fatherland) lacked a similar
connotation of Upper Silesian autonomy and unity distinct from national identity. At the
same time, the VVHO, wielding Heimat in its very name, was driven by conservative
nationalists. The ability of this group to define national belonging primarily on their own
political terms limited appeals to regional linguistic or ethnic diversity. Heimat in the
plebiscite still ultimately needed to serve the needs of the German state over the centrifugal
forces of autonomy and separatist movements.
One area prone to both propaganda and an array of political and social actors with
competing viewpoints was religion. Here the Polish plebiscite campaign seemed to have a
marked advantage. Upper Silesia had suffered since the days of Bismarck under Protestant-
Prussian repression of Catholic practice. The Polish camp argued that post-1918 Germany,
for all its promises of cultural and religious freedom, was in essence an anti-religious,
Socialist state supported by Hakatist Germanizing priests. A Polish prayer book during the
plebiscite told Upper Silesians in simple terms: “The German faith is not your faith.” 114
Germany could counter with promises of religious autonomy and new linguistic freedoms
in Catholic practice, but more often than not simply integrated religiously powerful
imagery into more generalized appeals. A pro-German bilingual poster, for example,
featured a large picture of St. Hedwig/Jadwiga, de facto patron saint of the region, with the
call: “Holy Hedwig, preserve German Heimat [ojczyzna] for your Upper Silesians!” 115
114 Quoted in Ibid., 231.
115 Reprinted in Karski, Albert (Wojciech) Korfanty, 277.
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Historic appeals tying Catholic faith to regional pride or other issues were more
commonplace than isolated appeals to religion as an unmediated marker of identity.
Pro-German propagandists, however, could rely on the new Catholic People’s Party
(KVP) to argue for a new German responsiveness to religious issues. The regional name
change for the former Center Party, while largely based on electoral calculation, reflected
real shifts in the makeup and policy orientation of the party. 116 A new crop of younger
leaders, chief among them Ulitzka and Lukasheck, took over the mantle of political
Catholicism from an older generation which had ceded so much electoral ground to the
Polish nationalists before World War I. This new group of leaders were among the
generation of priests who came of age after the Kulturkampf. Working as priests in an era
defined by the rise of socialism, Ulitzka and other leaders saw the need to counter the anti-
religious socialist threat with strong religious appeals to the working class. Thus the KVP
fought for regional autonomy on economic as well as cultural grounds and did battle with
the Socialists to control the regional direction of the Revolution. While Germany could
claim an active political party fighting for Catholic interests, the Polish side relied mainly
on the rhetorical appeal of Poland as a universally Catholic nation. This belief in an ethnic
Polish nation-state of Catholics worked better in theory than in practice, however: interwar
Poland contained over 30 percent non-Poles, mainly Uniate or Orthodox Ukrainians, Jews,
and Germans. 117 Poland offered the rhetorical equivalence of the Polish nation with
Catholicism, but Germany offered a battle-tested political party fighting for religious
interests.
116 Hitze, Carl Ulitzka, 187.
117 Ezra Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe Between the World Wars (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1983), 14.
204

The new outlook of the KVP in Upper Silesia did not prevent great internal dissent and
debate within the Church over the plebiscite issue. Ecclesiastical authority was considered so
crucial to the region that the IAC essentially gave the Vatican advisory powers similar to
those of the German and Polish delegations. Polish nationalists, seeing Silesian Bishop
Adolf Bertram as strongly pro-German, negotiated to cede his authority over Upper Silesia
to an ecclesiastical commissioner. (The position was first occupied by Achille Ratti – papal
nuncio in Poland and later Pope Pius XI – and subsequently by Ogno Serra.) Bertram’s
attempts to undermine temporary Vatican authority in the region, most notably in his
November 1920 ban on political speeches or actions by Upper Silesian priests, merely
reflected the larger breakdown of clerical unity happening at all levels in the face of the
plebiscite question. 118 Internal German reports estimated that of the over 500 priests in
Upper Silesia (the vast majority bilingual), around 200 were German-oriented, another 200
neutral, and the rest pro-Polish. One of the leading pro-Polish priests at the time, Michał
Lewek, estimated around 120 to 140 priests actively promoting a plebiscite vote for Poland;
figures from recent historiography are slightly lower. 119 Behind these numbers existed a
continuum between nationally indifferent priests and those with strong nationalist
agendas, as well as a related continuum of the willingness of priests to mix pastoral care with
political agitation.
While it is clear that a significant number of priests avoided mixing personal national
sympathies with pastoral care, it is these priests who are hardest to find in the historical
118 Bjork, Neither German nor Pole, 220-224.
119 Mariusz Trąba, “Kościół katolicki na Górnym Śląsku w latach 1919-1921” in Zbigniew Kapała and Jerzy Myszor,
eds., Kościoły i związki wyznaniowe a konflikt polsko-niemiecki na Górnym Śląsku w latach 1919-1921 (Katowice:
Wydział Teologiczny Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 2005), 37. For a discussion of various figures, including a recent study
that identified 108 pro-Polish priests, see Jerzy Myszor, “Kościół na Górnym Śląsku w okresie zmagań o zjednoczenie
z Polską 1919-1922” in Masnyk, Powstania śląskie i plebiscyt, 53-54.
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ecord. Among many priests there seems to have been an active desire to tone down the
national antipathy and preach Catholic piety and forgiveness in light of the nationalist and
communist excesses on display. This was not a stance limited to nationally indifferent
priests; many nationally committed priests also feared the consequences of mixing religion
and national politics. One priest writing in August 1920, Paul Feja, attempted to curtail
nationalist antipathy during the Polish uprising by asserting the necessity of Christian duty
over national right. 120 “Self-determination is only possible where freedom is allowed by
natural or divine law” he argued, and nations did not qualify as natural or divine entities.
“Christian theories of governance [Staatslehre] completely preclude the self-determination
of nations.” 121 For Feja, Wilsonian ideals thus collided with the first-order principle of
religious unity. Fears also spread of clerical agitation interfering with pastoral care. In
October 1920 leading German and Polish priests met in Beuthen/Bytom to establish
common rules for the involvement of priests in politics. The German side in particular
raised concerns about assistant pastors in a parish contradicting elder priests with political
activity and thus undermining the latter group’s authority. The Poles could not agree to ban
political speeches by vicars or assistant priests, however, rightly noting that elder priests
tended to be more German and their subordinates more Polish – and thus such a rule would
tend to squash pro-Polish priestly politicking more than the German equivalent. 122
The ultimate inability of national camps to compromise on the limits of clerical politics
resulted in a range of activity among priests: with many indifferent or stating their case at
120 Feja was in fact derided by the Polish camp as strongly pro-German and a close ally of the Prussian government.
Bjork, Neither German nor Pole, 229.
121 Der Tag, 21 August 1920.
122 Hatzfeldt to Prussian Interior Minister, 7 October 1920, GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 77, Tit.856, Nr. 399.
206

the local level, leadership fell to a few of the most vociferous (and intellectually astute)
priests on both sides. Among Polish advocates, Jan Kapica was among the most prominent.
Kapica had made a turnaround since his rejection of Polish politics in 1912. His newfound
fervor for the Polish cause came from a mix of class and cultural arguments combined with
a persistent belief in the essential Polishness of most Upper Silesians. He argued that Poles
were finally ready to be “pillars of culture [Kulturträger]” and not just “the manure of
culture [Kulturdünger]” in Upper Silesia. 123 “The Upper Silesian people have until now been
only a servile race, now they want to finally experience the feeling of national freedom and
equality.” 124 Using biological language, he estimated the number of Germanized citizens
“descended from Polish blood” at around 600,000. He saw formerly convinced Germans
now doubtful of their national loyalties in the wake of World War I. 125 The war had clearly
been transformative for Kapica as well: early in the war believed in the “the solidarity of
German-Polish interests” before later deeming this collaboration a sham. His own
conversion certainly speaks to the contingencies which could halt or reverse self-
identification with German nationality in favor of Polish. In an article which conflated the
new proletariat with the old ruling class, Kapica indicted the seeming continuities in
Prussian anti-Polish policy:
The old Prussian system is dead, but its spirit lives on in the German proletariat.
It is the spirit of Luther, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Bismarck, Treitschke, Nietzsche;
the spirit of arrogance, of egoism, of the will for power and dominance, of class
dictatorship and imperialism; the spirit of human suppression and idolatry of
the state; the spirit which has been instilled into the German Volk through the
dynasty, landed lords, the Landrat, through the petty officer, through
123 Der Oberschlesier, 1919, nr. 6. Quoted in Emil Szramek, Ks. Jan Kapica, życiorys a zarazem fragment historii Górnego
Śląska (Roczniki Towarzystwa Przyjaciół Nauk na Śląsku, 1931), 67.
124 Schlesische Vokszeitung, 2 October 1919.
125 Szramek, Ks. Jan Kapica, 67-68.
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university professors, high school and primary school teachers. This spirit is
stronger than the revolution and democracy, stronger than the Catholic Center
Party and Father Ulitzka, stronger than the letters of the German constitution.
... A rapprochement or pax with this spirit is impossible. 126
Kapica had essentially converted to Polish nationalism. As a priest educated in the Prussian
system, fully bilingual, and with a history of privileging regional interests over national
ones, Kapica carried enormous credibility among nationally ambiguous Upper Silesians. His
closest equivalent in the opposite camp was probably Carl Ulitzka; but Ulitzka never argued
as forcefully in print for Germany as Kapica did for Poland, preferring instead the levers of
regional politics.
One of the most famous pro-German clerical tracts was penned by Paul Nieborowski,
who turned out to be a more convinced nationalist than Kapica. Nieborowski’s main goal
was to overturn the idea of a supposedly natural and intimate relationship between the
Polish nation and the Catholic Church. His historical polemic on the alleged Polish betrayals
of Catholic faith was combined with an insistence on recent Polish nationalism as an
import, mainly the work of “paid greater Polish [grosspolnisch] agents and editors.” 127
Nieborowski famously claimed that Upper Silesians, in resisting Germanization and
Polonization efforts, had constituted their own nation, a nation which he called essentially
Catholic in character. He wrote that “Catholic belief fully captures and replaces nationality.
If we should render the unitary ethnic character of the Upper Silesian in a single word, we
could say that his nationality is called ‘Catholic.’ ” 128 For all his effort to play up the Catholic
identity of Upper Silesians, Nieborowoski turned out to be a more conventional German
126 Oberschlesische Grenzzeitung, 22 May 1920, quoted in Ibid., 71-74.
127 Paul Nieborowski, Oberschlesien und Polen in Hinsicht auf Kultur und Religion, 4 ed. (Breslau: Wahlstatt-Verlag,
1922), 28.
128 Ibid., 36.
208

nationalist that most priests, even leaving the priesthood and the party in the early 1920s,
and later publicly denouncing Ulitzka on charges of corruption. 129 Nonetheless,
Nieborowski went farther than any other priest or notable Upper Silesian in defining the
region as a nation-unto-itself united by Catholic heritage.
The counterpoint to Nieborowski’s assertion of a Catholic Upper Silesia dressed in
German garb came most forcefully from Teodor Kubina, the author of an anonymous
pamphlet “The Position of Priests in the Upper Silesian Question.” 130 As a native Upper
Silesian priest, Kubina worked in a dominantly German-language parish in
Kattowitz/Katowice, but nonetheless converted fully to the Polish cause by 1918 and
distanced himself early on from the KVP. 131 Kubina took an even more forceful stand than
Kapica on the national belonging of Upper Silesians. Asserting that no Upper Silesian,
including priests, could stay neutral in the face of the plebiscite, he insisted on Polish
national belonging as the primary marker of Upper Silesians. He wrote: “The population of
the plebiscite zone is in its overwhelming majority Polish, its nationality is Polish – these are
true Poles, their national disposition is Polish.” 132 He garnered an array of Prussian
demographic statistics for his cause, and even derided many Upper Silesians, using a high
priestly tone, for denying their Polish “blood” and assimilating to German ways. “Thus all
of you who are descended from Polish parents shall honor the truth! Away with the false
shame! Away with the inner untruths! You are and remain, like your parents and
grandparents, Poles; your mother tongue, even if you don’t know it well anymore, is and
129 Hitze, Carl Ulitzka, 607-608.
130 Teodor Kubina, Stellung der Geistlichen in der oberschlesischen Frage (Nikolai: Karol Miarka, 1920).
131 Bjork, Neither German nor Pole, 225, 241.
132 Kubina, Stellung der Geistlichen, 11.
209

emains Polish!” 133 Kubina even used his religious authority to assert that individuals had no
right to choose nationality, but that it was instead “something natural, [and] thus willed by
God.” 134 Kubina’s pamphlet represents some of the most extreme rhetoric for national
belonging, but it existed on a continuum with other integralist arguments by priests who
claimed to know the true national identity of Upper Silesians.
The influence of these priests on the wider plebiscite outcome is difficult to gauge.
While the strength of their stances has caused them to enter the historical record, other less
vocal priests often served as the most direct contact for local parishioners. It may seem
paradoxical that bilingual priests, as native Upper Silesians aware of the complex cultural
relations in their parishes, would be among the loudest proponents of essentialist nationalist
rhetoric, claiming a biological basis for national belonging. In reality, it was precisely their
position that allowed them this leeway. Priests who took a national stand spoke from
positions of moral authority unmatched by outside nationalists. With claims to know their
land and people better than most, they could assert a biological or historic stance on
nationality with greater authority than a government propagandist. Priests also represented
just about the only group of educated native Upper Silesians who had advanced socially and
educationally within the Prussian system, and yet nonetheless declared loyalty to Poland.
One historian has suggested that some priests had a personal stake in this stance, hedging
their bets on secession to Poland and hoping to advance in clerical ranks in the new
Catholic nation-state. 135
Yet the statements of these politically partisan priests on national duty or belonging
133 Ibid., 29.
134 Ibid., 37.
135 Bjork, Neither German nor Pole, 226.
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amounted to non-democratic incursions in what had become a fundamentally democratic
exercise. The broader propaganda barrage of the plebiscite campaign recognized that the
crucial votes would be cast by nationally ambiguous Upper Silesians who could still be
convinced to support either state. The power of priests to sway the plebiscite results is
impossible to pinpoint, but the difference in rhetoric points to the fundamental tension at
play in propaganda: the more democratic the argument, the less national its content. The
need to sway a mass of nationally indifferent or undecided voters relied precisely on the
muddling of national rhetoric, or its filtering through alternative cultural and material
arguments. Priestly sermons on biological national belonging did not fit this democratic
mold. This trend towards voter appeal was evident even in the language selection of
propaganda: the Polish and German camps both thought it essential to reach their audience
in the opponent’s language, since linguistic belonging was rightly thought to be a poor
predictor of political preference. The weight of propaganda also conveys, with the exception
of some clerical rhetoric, that Upper Silesians were essentially being asked to vote on state
rather than national belonging. Given this propaganda and the pattern of voting results, it
is clear that many Upper Silesians cast their ballot not to declare themselves national Poles
or Germans, but to secure their future as free and prosperous citizens of one state or the
other.
FROM VOTING TO PARTITION
On Sunday, 20 March 1921, close to 1.2 million Upper Silesians went to the polls –
most in their Sunday best, on their way to or from church – to cast their vote. With only a
few reports of mild violence or intimidation (complaints were about equal from both sides),
211

the plebiscite vote took place in relative calm, a welcome and unexpected outcome for the
IAC. While intended as a non-binding aid in deciding the fate of Upper Silesia, the results
nonetheless proved particularly confounding for any politician trying to draw political
boundaries. The voting participation rate, at 97.5 percent, was extraordinarily high. With
707,488 votes (59.6 percent) for Germany, and 479,369 (40.3 percent) for Poland, the
results were clearly an overall blow to the Polish cause. 136 Polish activists immediately
blamed the results on intimidation, claims which have made their way into much Polish-
language historiography. 137 On the great magnate landholdings, social pressure from lords is
more plausible, but the secret nature of the ballot makes such accusations hard to sustain for
the entire region. 138 German counter-claims of Polish terror proved unfounded as well. 139
A more substantial Polish critique centered on the so-called outvoters. The League of
Nations stipulated that native-born Upper Silesians residing anywhere in the world could
return to their birthplace to vote. In reality, this meant that the mass of migratory Upper
Silesians who had moved to other parts of the Reich could sway the vote for Germany. Over
191,000 of the nearly 1.2 million votes came from these outvoters, who were transported
free on specially organized trains from across Germany in the days leading up to the vote.
Outvoters were even reported from as far away as Argentina and Chile, and their
136 Various figures exist for the final tally, but all are within a few hundred votes. These figures are based on the
official published results of the IAC. Quoted in Hitze, Carl Ulitzka, 363.
137 For example, the historian of Oppeln/Opole Edward Mendel claimed pressure and terror from priests, teachers,
and bureaucrats, and massive fraud at the polls. Mendel, Stosunki społeczne i polityczne, 87.
138 Voters were given two ballots, one for Germany and one for Poland, and only submitted the one of their choice,
discarding the other ballot. Thugs and various authorities thus could have intimidated voters by asking to see their
discarded ballot, but little evidence for this exists. See “Picnic Atmosphere in Upper Silesia,” The New York Times, 21
March 1921; Bjork, Neither German nor Pole, 245.
139 Hitze, Carl Ulitzka, 366.
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overwhelmingly German vote is undisputed. 140 Eliminating these outvoters, the plebiscite
results showed a slim majority for Germany of 53.8 percent. 141
The region-wide results showed some predictable geographic and social divisions at
work. Voters in the largely rural counties of Pleß/Pszczyna and Rybnik in the southeastern
corner of the region – also the areas with some of the largest magnate landholdings – tallied
the largest majorities for the Poles, of 74 and 65 percent, respectively. In Beuthen/Bytom,
at the heart of the industrial center, the vote was nearly even, with city centers registering
German majorities and poorer outlying suburbs or villages leaning Polish. The county of
Oppeln/Opole, including the city itself, voted 25 percent for Poland and 75 percent for
Germany (with a small number of invalid ballots). 142 With 95 percent of those in the city
voting for Germany, Oppeln/Opole asserted itself as overwhelmingly in favor of Germany.
Subtracting the city’s results shows that voters in the rural county gave Germany almost a
70 percent majority, and an estimate eliminating outvoters decreases that rural majority to
slightly over 60 percent. 143
The plebiscite results reveal new layers of complexity as one zooms in more closely. In
Chmiellowitz/Chmielowice, 87 percent of the village population declared itself Polish-
speaking or bilingual in the 1910 census, yet only 16 percent voted for Poland in the
plebiscite. Just down the road in Folwark, a town that was 97 percent Polish-speaking or
bilingual as of 1910, the vote for Poland was 67 percent. Language serves as a poor predictor
140 “Homecoming in Upper Silesia,” The New York Times, 12 March 1921.
141 Hitze, Carl Ulitzka, 363.
142 Results of the plebiscite at the county level can be found in APO, SPO, Syg. 134.
143 All figures calculated from results in Ibid. The estimate eliminating outvoters was calculated by subtracting all
registered outvoters from the total number of ballots. It was calculated on the imperfect presumptions that a) 100%
of registered outvoters actually voted and b) 100% of all outvoters cast their votes for Germany. It is thus intended
as a rough hypothetical estimate.
213

of the plebiscite vote, and the same can be said for prewar voting patterns. 144 In the 1907
Reichstag elections the rural county tallied 64 percent of all votes for the Polish nationalists,
more than double the plebiscite vote for Poland. Clearly the results of the plebiscite hinged
largely on village-level national or social relations, such as the presence of a strong pro-
communist working class, or of a highly active nationalist corps of priests or village leaders.
Even here, however, the trends are difficult to discern. Two of the most well-known pro-
Polish priests came from villages that voted over 80 percent for Germany. 145 Another pro-
Polish activist priest, Father Kulik, worked in Szczedrzik, 20 kilometers outside the city,
where 70 percent of voters preferred Poland. The highest tallies for Poland came, not
surprisingly, from villages that had maintained an active nationalist corps across the divide
of World War I. Many of these villages were actually those well-connected to
Oppeln/Opole – far enough away to avoid being working-class suburbs – but close enough
by proximity or by railway networks to allow for the movement of Polish nationalist ideas
and activists.
One must also take into account gender. The plebiscite vote was open to all men and
women over 20 years of age, and as such became one of the first major tests for
propagandists to appeal to female voters. Not surprisingly, the mostly male activists worked
from their own stereotypes of females, having women inhabit roles and mentalities that
men imagined them seeking. For Polish nationalists, the mother as the Polish-speaking
keeper of the home served as a convenient metaphor for the mother as protector of the
national integrity of the family. This dichotomy between home and outside was itself a
144 Results of 1910 census in APO, RO, Syg. 2096.
145 Father Knossalla ministered in Kupp/Kup, where 90% of residents voted for Germany, and Father Wawrzek in
Dembio/Dębie, where 81% of locals cast their vote for Germany. See results in APO, SPO, Syg. 134.
214

powerful marker of the self-defense of Upper Silesia from outside incursions (in the Polish
case, Germanizing Prussians). One Polish poster pictured a little girl with a Polish flag and
Jesus medallion, accompanied by the words “Mother, remember me, vote for Poland.” 146
This trope was not limited to just the plebiscite campaign, as Polish mothers would be urged
throughout the 1920s to protect the nation by sending their children to Polish minority
schools (see chapter four). Many Polish nationalists felt they had the advantage among
women in the plebiscite.
At the same time, the German KVP felt confident that piety could sway women to
support the German cause – if Catholicism were associated tightly enough with Germany.
To achieve this, German propaganda often turned heavily anti-Polish: imagery abounded of
the mother sending her child off to fight for the warmongering Polish state, of families
unable to feed themselves thanks to a weak economy and devalued currency, or of godless
Bolshevists overrunning the province. At its essence, domestic space in pro-German
messaging again worked as the metaphor for the dichotomy between Heimat and outside
intruders. This time, however, it was a German Catholic space rather than a Polish one. The
plebiscite battle was also one over future faith, and women were declared prime fighters, as
in this January 1920 newspaper article:
In this crusade women must also enter the ranks of the fighters, precisely
women, for they are most in debt to Christianity and the associated Catholic
worldview which they have gained, and they will be harmed by the victory of
unbelief and the removal of religion from public life; this in spite of all political
and legal equalization of women with men. 147
It is exceedingly difficult to pinpoint the relative effect of the Polish and German cases on
146 Poster reprinted in Grosch, Deutsche Und Polnische Propaganda, 219.
147 Father Ostendorff, “Der Kampf um die katholische Weltanschauung,“ Part II, Oppelner Nachrichten, 11 January
1920.
215

voting women. Despite their appeals, both the Catholic party and the Polish nationalists
were almost exclusively male-led organizations. As subsequent chapters will show, Polish
nationalists’ appeals to women proved particularly ineffective, especially on schooling
policies. Given this knowledge that nationalist appeals proved ineffective among women (as
among men), it is difficult to pinpoint how female votes may have swayed the election.
Uncertainty over the meaning of the plebiscite results continues today, but was even
more palpable to leaders and citizens in the immediate aftermath of the 20 March vote. The
final decision rested with the League of Nations, but partition of the region appeared nearly
inevitable; the main question was where to draw the line. Korfanty took the initiative on 22
March by suggesting a partition of the region that would have ceded around 60 percent of
the land and 70 percent of the population to Poland, right up to the eastern edge of
Oppeln/Opole county – a solution that became known as the “Korfanty Line.” The French,
under the suggestion of Le Rond, supported a slightly less pro-Polish boundary that
nonetheless included the entire industrial area. The Italian and British delegations to the
IAC countered with far more pro-German boundaries, giving to Poland only small rural
patches in the east and leaving nearly all industry in German hands. Within Germany,
national leaders still hoped for a complete territorial secession given the 60 to 40 win.
Meanwhile, leading German regional politicians suddenly re-engaged with autonomist calls
for the “indivisibility of Upper Silesia” and some advocated again for the free-state idea. 148
Upper Silesia’s fate had quickly become a matter of diplomatic wrangling. While the British
and Italians had proposed a pro-German partition boundary, they feared insulting the
French, who had taken the greatest stake in the plebiscite issue among the Allies.
148 Hitze, Carl Ulitzka, 372-373, Sarah Wambaugh, Plebiscites Since the World War: With a Collection of Official
Documents (Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1933), 251-253.
216

Fearing the possibility of a partition along the line suggested by the Italian and British,
Korfanty decided to use violence to attempt to pre-empt of the final diplomatic decision. As
the conflicting recommendations of the IAC were being sent to Paris, Korfanty and fellow
leaders organized an insurrection. First came Polish newspaper articles on 1 May decrying
the danger of losing Upper Silesia, then a general strike for the following day, and finally a
full-scale insurrection on 3 May, Poland’s national holiday. 149 The result, known as the
Third Silesian Uprising, was by far the largest and bloodiest of the plebiscite era. It pitted
around 50,000 pro-Polish fighters against a 35,000-man German counter-force, with rough
estimates of nearly 4,000 dead in the fighting. 150 By 6 May, the local insurgents and pro-
Polish police forces, (working with small numbers of Polish soldiers from outside the
region), had advanced to the “Korfanty Line” east of Oppeln/Opole. Along the way they
deposed German officials and intimidated or killed German partisans, all without any
notable resistance from French Allied troops (although the smaller contingent of Italian
troops did fight the uprising). Unwilling to wait for the diplomatic wrangling between the
Allies to yield a stronger counter-reaction to the uprising, Germany decided to take matters
into its own hands. By mid-May a force of voluntary fighters from within Upper Silesia
(mostly from unoccupied western counties) and above all Freikorps members from Lower
Silesia and beyond had been assembled with generous material support from Berlin. 151 The
German counter-offensive began 21 May at the holiest site in Upper Silesia, St. Anna
Mountain, about 30 kilometers southeast of Oppeln/Opole. German forces quickly put the
more numerous Poles on the defensive. For the next month German and Polish forces
149 Wambaugh, Plebiscites since the World War, 253-254.
150 Marek Czapliński et al., Historia Śląska (Wrocław: Wydawn. Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 2002), 363-364.
151 Hitze, Carl Ulitzka, 385-386, 402-403.
217

fought bitterly. At the same time, both sides took part in a diplomatic war, with some
British and Italian aid for the German side against the pro-Polish French. On 26 June a
ceasefire brought the battle to a close, but tensions remained enormously high.
The uprising in the Oppeln/Opole area equaled or surpassed the tumult of a year earlier
during the May 1920 riots. As one of the few areas not under Polish control, Oppeln/Opole
drew a significant number of men into the German forces. At least 29 men from the city
and county died in battle against Poles; the majority were in their early 20s and had joined
police self-defense forces within a week of the uprising’s start. 152 With the Polish-held line
nudging into the eastern edge of the county, pro-German citizens on the Allied-controlled
side lived in great fear of the consequences of further Polish expansion. Reprisals against
pro-Polish villagers were common, and several pro-Polish priests were forced to flee their
parishes. Four months later, in October 1921, Father Kulik was still hiding in the eastern
county of Rybnik, afraid to return to his home parish in Szczedrzik/Szczedrzyk. In writing
to the village gendarme, he noted that German civil servants had already successfully
returned to the pro-Polish stronghold where he was hiding. His parishioners also urged him
to return, but Polish nationalist papers still scared him with their reports of daily abuses. 153
German forces also behaved brutally in some cases, imprisoning those suspected of being
sympathetic to Polish forces. Polish nationalists were not the only target of arrests: Socialists
complained that right-wing paramilitary forces were arresting left-wing “members of the
Reich of German nationality.” At the interment camp near Cottbus in Lower Silesia, only
around 10 percent of the more than 1,000 prisoners from Upper Silesia were active Polish
152 “Nachwiesung über die bei der Gruppe-Oppeln Polizei-Oberchlesien gefallenen bzw. Verwundeten Beamten”
APO, NO, Syg. 310.
153 Kulik to Szczedrik Wachmeister, 30 Sepember 1921, response 17 October 1921, APO, SPO, Syg. 147.
218

fighters; most of the rest were civilians picked up by German forces based on local
denunciations or suspected Polish ties. 154 Local USPD leaders were being abducted “through
the efforts of reactionary circles who are using the current turmoil in Upper Silesia to get rid
of political opponents.” 155 The camp’s director admitted the presence of these pro-German
Independent Socialists from Upper Silesia. More pressingly, he also noted the impossibility
of determining the nationality of the largely bilingual prisoner population. Prisoners would
even change their national declaration from day to day when speaking to Red Cross
workers and other outside observers. He wrote, “that the majority of prisoners will switch
their identity, their requests and the style of presenting them, and even their German or
Polish disposition according to the citizenship or political leanings of the visitor.” 156 The
violence of May-June 1921 had clearly swept up many unintended victims and cast a wide
net of violence, fear, and redemption. For these prisoners, using their own ambiguity as a
source of empowerment to regain their freedom more quickly.
In the tense months after the end of the uprising, most of the drama over Upper
Silesia’s fate played out at the level of international diplomacy. The continued wrangling
over the borders created significant tensions between France and Britain, and according to
some even threatened to undermine the League of Nations. The German ex-Foreign
Minister, Walter Simons, delivered a calculated address to the League on 19 August warning
of damage not only to German confidence in the League, but to the League itself, if the
Upper Silesian partition is perceived as unfair. “Upper Silesia has become a world-problem
in the true sense of the word,” he told the League. Walters presented the Upper Silesian
154 Baerunsprung to Prussian Interior Ministry, May 1921, GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 77, Tit. 854, Nr. 694.
155 Complaint of USPD filed in Berlin, 15 June 1921, GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 77, Tit. 856, Nr. 694.
156 Report of camp director, 19 June 1921, GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 77, Tit. 856, Nr. 694.
219

decision as a choice of “the English idea of the European balance of power or the French
idea of a European hegemony.” The consequences of this decision, he said, could determine
the future success of the League and peace in Europe. He warned the League that “if it
makes a mockery of right in order to serve power, it will sow a seed in Europe from which
will assuredly grow the harvest of a new world war.” 157 While Simons’s promotion of British
fair-mindedness and justice no doubt served to justify his German self-interest, his remarks
speak to the volatility of the Upper Silesian question to the new, fragile League system.
Rather than solve the question among themselves, the Allied powers of the League
Council created a special committee in September, made up of more neutral countries
tasked with recommending a border. Upper Silesia’s partition rested in the hands of
representatives from Belgium, China, Spain, and Brazil. Their report, filed on 12 October
1921, recommended a partition line that gave the rural eastern counties of the region to
Poland, while splitting the industrial lands between states but giving Poland a distinct
majority of Upper Silesia’s mineral riches and factories, including 90 percent of its coal
deposits. After renewed but helpless protests from the German government (the Polish sejm
having approved the treaty on 26 October), the partition of Upper Silesia became a
reality. 158 The 12 October League report clearly stated that the “mixture of racial elements”
made it impossible to draw borders that did not leave substantial minorities on either side.
Germany received 71 percent of the land and 53 percent of the population, but significant
minorities remained on both sides: 44 percent of Upper Silesians in the new Polish
157 Walter Simons, The Upper Silesian Question as a Problem for the League of Nations: Address Delivered Before the
German League for the League of Nations on Friday, August 19th 1921, 7-8.
158 Wambaugh, Plebiscites since the World War, 257-260.
220

partition, and 23 percent in the German partition, had voted for the other state. 159 The
subsequent exodus of emigrants switching to their self-declared “homeland” is difficult to
estimate given the wild nature of so much cross-border movement, but historians have
estimated that around 150,000 Upper Silesians moved across the new border to Germany
and 60,000 to 70,000 moved to Poland. 160 The reality of a continued minority presence on
both sides of the border also compelled the committee of four countries to recommend a
minority protections regime for at least 15 years after the plebiscite. The bilateral Geneva
Accord signed by Germany and Poland in May 1922 agreed to the creation of a Mixed
Commission to oversee regional minority issues. It would become a key international
institution for most the interwar era in partitioned Upper Silesia.
CONCLUSION
The partition of Upper Silesia after World War I shattered the unity of a region whose
citizens had only begun to imagine themselves as a distinct group within the previous
century. In this sense, it can be argued that the steady march of nationalism across Central
and Eastern Europe in the early twentieth century also claimed Upper Silesian regionalism
as a victim. Upper Silesia certainly fits within the larger narrative of post-World War I
national self-determination as crafted by U.S. President Wilson in concert with Allied
powers and nationalist elites from former Habsburg, Russian, and German empires. The
hard work of Polish nationalists from Dmowski to Korfanty, combined with the
opportunity of Austro-German defeat, had convinced many that Upper Silesia belonged, at
159 Figures from Czapliński et al., Historia Śląska, 365, Wambaugh, Plebiscites since the World War, 267, fn. 2.
160 Various figures and estimates can be found in Danuta Berlińska, Mniejszość niemiecka na Śląsku Opolskim w
poszukiwaniu tożsamości (Opole: Stowarzyszenie Instytut Śląski, 1999), 94-96.
221

least in part, to the Polish nation. Yet the Upper Silesian plebiscite reflects the
contradictions and tensions in this moment of national self-determination. The forces
unleashed by war defeat, socialist revolutions, and the breakdown of communal peace
greatly complicate a narrative focused on binary national choice in Upper Silesia. National
“self-determination” was crafted largely by elite activists who claimed that their ethno-
linguistic nations should become the primary ordering principle of statehood and
citizenship. The closer one approached the actual practice of democratic self-determination,
as in the plebiscite, the less clear this principle seemed.
The Upper Silesian plebiscite, like smaller ones across Central Europe after World War
I, served as an unwitting philosophical exercise in the relationship between democracy and
nationalism. The either-or choice in the plebiscite vote forced states to grapple with national
competition through direct appeals to voters. Democratic voting on future statehood also
forced a reconfiguration of the language of nationalism. Ethnicist concepts of national
belonging had previously implied a mandatory group identity which was deployed by
activists to suggest natural duty to the nation. This rhetoric was no longer sufficient. Now,
instead of asking what you can do for the nation, the plebiscite forced the question: What
can the state do for you? Propaganda on both sides largely avoided direct appeals to
national belonging, instead focusing on socio-economic benefits, religious symbolism,
appeals to regionalism, and denigration of the enemy. While the vote could never take
place on a totally level playing field between national camps, the campaign served as an
experiment in democratic norms challenging nationalist ones. For a brief, crucial period in
Upper Silesia’s history, concerns over ethnic belonging became largely subordinate to more
pressing issues of state power, economic well-being, and social justice.
222

Between Apathy and Integration
Upper Silesians and Polish <strong>Nationalism</strong> in Weimar Germany
223
Chapter 4
In the summer of 1932, as Germany lay in economic ruin and the Weimar political
system teetered towards its final collapse, local Polish nationalists in Oppeln/Opole found
enemies almost everywhere, but also a potential ally: the German Nazi Party. In an all-too
prescient article, the local Polish paper, the Nowiny Codzienne [Daily News], approvingly
portended a shift from a past era of ethnic mixing and integration to a future of strict
ethnic separation. Nearly two hundred years of Prussian rule, the paper insisted, had yielded
“a mass of cultural half-breeds, who count themselves part of the German people but were
never really imbued with its high culture.” These “Germanized Slavs,” as they were
pejoratively called, were the most loathsome enemy of the Polish nation, those who turned
on their heritage to embrace a foreign culture. They were, in short, national traitors in the
eyes of the Nowiny. The nationalists’ solution, which they had been proclaiming through
much of the Weimar era, was a strict separation of the races “in the interest of the purity of
both cultures.” It was this trend towards separation that they sensed taking root in
Germany. “Luckily, one sees ever more clearly that the German people will no longer
tolerate the preponderance of these cultural hybrids. Protest in Germany against the
brutalization of Germanic culture through these ‘half-Slavic Germans’ is growing ever
clearer. The reaction against these ‘pioneers of the Prussian spirit’ is arising ever more
clearly.” 1
1 Nowiny Codzienne, 22 June 1932, nr. 141.

The Polish nationalists never expressed any outright friendship with the racially-
minded German parties, but a certain affinity grew out of common perceived enemies:
ethnic ambiguity and cultural integration. Hitler’s rise to power became seen, however
fleetingly, as a silver lining coming at the end of a very cloudy and troublesome political era
for Polish nationalism in Upper Silesia. For the previous decade, Polish nationalists felt they
had been fighting a battle in some ways similar to that of the Nazis, against racial mixing
and for the acknowledgment of the distinct, innate qualities of the Polish national body.
The main battle of Polish nationalists during this time, however, was not against Germans,
but rather against the national apathy and indifference which reigned in and around
Oppeln/Opole.
This remarkable shift from an era of prewar electoral victory to one of decreasing
political and social relevance in the 1920s was in fact directly related to the democratization
of Weimar society. The nationalization program carried out by Polish activists was to reach
its height in Oppeln/Opole during the Weimar era, yet never were the results more
disappointing. In schools, at church services and study groups, in local businesses and at the
polls, Upper Silesians increasingly chose to distance themselves from Polish nationalism.
National activists exaggerated isolated incidents of violence and ascribed national meaning
to minor personal squabbles, but remained unable to incite the national passions of their
flock. Nationally indifferent locals instead embraced educational and economic integration
into German society, bilingual Catholic communalism, and class-based or religiously
informed politics. The resurgence of the Center Party as the strong defender of Upper
Silesian cultural rights in language use and education enabled much of this shift away from
Polish nationalism. Polish activists, instead of adapting to the new political realities of a
224

Catholic-dominated Upper Silesia, continued to insist on ethnicist arguments for national
belonging, and only radicalized their position as they became more unpopular in the last
years of Weimar. At the moment Hitler came to power, the Polish movement was in
disarray, and internally divided over its failure to gain the perceived natural allegiances of its
Polish-speaking flock.
This failure proved all the more frustrating for the tight-knit core of Polish activists,
because while they were losing the local battle, across Central and Eastern Europe they saw
their philosophy winning the wider war. The Versailles Treaty had created several new states
on the principle of national self-determination. The policies enacted by the League of
Nations and by new nationalizing states encouraged group representation of interests along
ethno-linguistic lines. Protection clauses for ethnic minorities also served to establish ethnic
identity as the fundamental organizing principle of national and international politics.
Bilateral treaties, including the Geneva Accords of 1922, which formed the basis of Polish-
German relations in Upper Silesia until 1937, promised reciprocal rights to national
minorities on both sides of the newly partitioned province. Polish nationalists in
Oppeln/Opole saw these policies as European-wide steps in the direction of fulfilling their
utopian dream: an ethnically homogeneous Polish state that included Upper Silesia. Upper
Silesians would increasingly feel the pressure to declare their unequivocal national loyalty in
subsequent decades, as Germans in the Nazi era and as Poles after World War II. Yet
national apathy among Polish-speakers in Oppeln/Opole shows that Upper Silesians would
be drawn only against their will into the world of national disambiguation.
225

THE WIDENING GAP
The corps of Polish activists who led nationalist efforts around Oppeln/Opole in the
1920s were more removed ideologically from their constituency than in previous
generations. While Polish speakers remained a majority around Oppeln/Opole after World
War I , the program of Polish nationalism in Oppeln/Opole in the 1920s was in fact run by
a very small group who occupied most of the main leadership positions. The historian
Edward Mendel estimated this tight-knit group at 500, but for the full-time leadership the
same 20 or so figures rotated positions, often taking on multiple duties. 2 Czesław Klimas,
for example, was simultaneously head priest in Tarnau/Tarnów, leader of the Polish school
association in Oppeln/Opole, head of the League of Poles in Germany [Związek Polaków w
Niemczech – ZPwN] for Upper Silesia, and an elected member of the Prussian Landtag.
Another leader, Wacław Jankowski, was editor of the Polish nationalist paper Nowiny
Codzienne, founder of local singing groups, head instructor for Polish language classes, and
a leading member of the ZPwN. It was commonplace for almost all leaders to take on
multiple roles in the national movement. As in the prewar period, this was a close-knit
environment where everyone knew everyone else, where all nationalist efforts were closely
coordinated among the cadre of leaders as part of the same overarching program. Most
social life took place either in the Poles’ agricultural cooperative Rolnik on Nikolaistrasse
(today’s Ulica Książąt Opolskich) in or in the private houses and taverns of sympathetic
Polish-speakers in surrounding villages. Having overcome a prewar split, most Polish
nationalists acted with relentless unity in the 1920s, punishing those with divergent
2 Edward Mendel, Stosunki społeczne i polityczne w Opolu w latach 1918-1933 (Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo
Naukowe, 1975), 214.
226

opinions in order to ensure conformity; to speak of a single group of Polish nationalists
acting with its own agency is thus reasonable.
This small, tight-knit group of several hundred Polish activists was more
uncompromising in its views than the prewar generation. The leaders came from a range of
backgrounds, but all shared the common experience of radicalization from World War I
and the plebiscite era. Given the chaotic nature of the plebiscite period, it is impossible to
say precisely how many self-identified Poles left German Upper Silesia for Poland, although
consensus estimates range from 60,000 to 70,000. 3 More importantly than the total
number of emigrants was their social profile: virtually all the leading nationalist activists,
including the Gazeta Opolska founder Bronisław Koraszewski, fled or emigrated to Poland.
Those who remained were either too young or too poor to move, or felt compelled to carry
on the fight for Polish nationalism in German territory. For young peasants literate in
Polish and with a fervor for nationalism, the leaders in Oppeln/Opole could offer a way off
the farm, a modest living, and a city environment with like-minded co-nationalists. These
activists’ insular breeding in a nationalist milieu, combined with wartime trauma and the
violence of the plebiscite period, helped to radicalize their opinions. The key local leaders
were, without exception, men, and their patriarchal leadership often clashed, especially on
issues of religion and education, with their female constituents.
Part of their radicalization came from the erection of a Polish state and the increasing
links between Polish nationalists within Germany and in the homeland. Upper Silesian
Polish nationalists after World War I quickly became integrated into, and largely subsumed
by, the German-wide ZPwN. Founded in Berlin in August 1922, the organization sought to
3 See the various figures discussed in: Danuta Berlińska, Mniejszość niemiecka na Śląsku Opolskim w poszukiwaniu
tożsamości (Opole: Stowarzyszenie Instytut Śląski, 1999), 94-96.
227

unify the representation of Polish nationals of German citizenship. 4 With direct, if
sometimes secretive, financial links to Warsaw, the ZPwN brought its authority and
resources to bear upon a scattered landscape of regional Polish groups. The ZPwN remained
beholden to the Polish political landscape, which before 1926 was dominated by the right-
wing National Democrats, whose stronghold was in the western territories along the
German border. The National Democrats openly wished to annex the remaining territories
in Germany which they deemed ethnically Polish. The western shift of Poland in 1918-
1921, the National Democrats felt, was incomplete. 5 With Poznań/Posen now under Polish
control, their main target shifted to Upper Silesia. The city of Oppeln/Opole increasingly
became the organizational center of the Polish nationalist movement for all of Germany’s
eastern borderlands during the Weimar era. Using the logic of territorial nationalism, the
Polish activists hoped to encircle the province by first nationalizing Upper Silesia’s
westernmost slice, then working eastwards back towards the border. Whereas prewar
national activists in Oppeln/Opole sought national rights for Polish speakers within the
German state, their interwar counterparts advocated the eventual goal of ceding Upper
Silesia to its supposed Polish motherland. The expectations of loyalty thus increased
considerably for Polish nationalists, involving the ultimate goal of territorial secession.
Polish nationalists in Oppeln/Opole nonetheless had reason to be optimistic after the
partition of Upper Silesia was finalized in 1922. For the core group of activists hoping to
subvert the German assimilation process, increased national rancor from the plebiscite era
benefitted a project based on national division. Violence surrounding the 1921 plebiscite
4 On the ZPwN, see Wojciech Wrzesiński, Polski ruch narodowy w Niemczech w latach 1922-1939, 3rd ed. (Toruń:
Wydawnictwo Adam Marszałek, 2005).
5 Richard Blanke, Orphans of Versailles: The Germans in Western Poland, 1918-1939 (Lexington, Ky.: University Press
of Kentucky, 1993), 63-64.
228

did not immediately disappear; in some cases, especially along the newly-drawn border,
violence continued or increased in the years following the partition. Those who remained in
Germany despite their vote for Poland were sometimes treated as traitors by German
authorities. Much of the violence originated from loosely organized bands of German
nationalists and self-defense groups, many of whom saw it as their duty to terrorize the
Polish nationalists who had agitated against Germany during the plebiscite. Continued fears
of a Polish invasion aiming to seize all of Upper Silesia created a climate of paranoia in
government circles and among German nationalists. The over-reaction of these German
nationalists and Prussian officials – especially through arrests and persecution of known
participants in the Polish uprisings – served to polarize the population and drive some Polish
speakers into the oppositional Polish nationalist camp, even as they feared reprisals for
doing so. 6
The subsequent stabilization of Upper Silesia worked against the program of Polish
nationalism. Violence and murders continued along border zones until 1924, although the
Oppeln/Opole area, removed from the immediate border zone, was spared most of this
violence. The Upper Silesian government spoke out strongly against the German
paramilitary bands, recognizing their danger not only to the Weimar Republic, but also to
the very fragile relations between German- and Polish-speakers in the wake of the
plebiscite. 7 The newly autonomous provincial leadership, dominated by the Catholic Center
Party, made security and stability their priority from 1922-1924, and despite tacit support
from German nationalist circles for “self-defense” terror groups, these groups’ influence and
6 Edward Mendel suggests that fear of reprisals and government repression prevented many Upper Silesians from
expressing their political beliefs in the wake of the plebiscite. Mendel, Stosunki społeczne i polityczne, 98.
7 Guido Hitze, Carl Ulitzka (1873-1953), oder, Oberschlesien zwischen den Weltkriegen (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2002),
664-667.
229

each diminished significantly by 1924. Given the pervasive breakdown of local trust in
community and government, the province achieved an astonishingly quick transition to a
peaceful society in a few short years.
The ZPwN was still able to attract a significant number of Polish speakers to its cause in
its early years, although far less than the numbers who had voted for Polish candidates
before World War I. The Upper Silesian branch of the ZPwN, at the end of its first year in
1923, had already recruited 5,119 members in all of Upper Silesia. The city and county of
Oppeln/Opole accounted for 1,325 of these members, organized into 44 different chapters.
Of these, 1,199 were adult working men, 90 were women, and 36 were children or
unemployed men. 8 The initial enthusiasm for the Polish program faded, however, with the
stabilization of regional society after 1924. Moreover, demographic trends showed
increasing linguistic integration into German society among Upper Silesians. The official
number of Polish or bilingual residents in the city of Oppeln/Opole had dropped by 45
percent between 1910 and 1925, even as the city grew by nearly 22 percent during the
same period. 9 These shifts can be traced to three disparate causes: two demographic, and one
political. The population exchanges during and after the plebiscite across the partition
border fundamentally altered regional demographics. In addition to the more than 60,000
who fled Germany for Poland, around 150,000 moved in the opposite direction, many of
them settling in western Upper Silesia. 10 Oppeln/Opole also grew as a bureaucratic center,
resulting in many new German civil servants in the city. Secondly, these 1925 figures were
8 Marek Masnyk, Dzielnica I Związku Polaków w Niemczech: 1923-1939 (Opole: Dział Wydawnictw Wyższej Szkoły
Pedagogicznej w Opolu, 1994), 42.
9 Figures calculated from comparative census results in APO, RO, Syg. 2068.
10 These figures are exceedingly difficult to pinpoint, especially given the wild nature of much of the resettlement.
For discussion of various figures see Berlińska, Mniejszość niemiecka, 94-96.
230

doubtless the result of political manipulation from the Upper Silesian President Alfons
Proske, who instructed census takers (in violation of official policy) that all Polish-speaking
Upper Silesians with passable knowledge of German be listed as bilingual. Ironically, this
violation of census rules provides the most accurate snapshot of everyday language use and
the true extent of bilingualism, although it is impossible to say how many were fluent in
both languages. It is mainly for this reason that the official tally of Polish speakers in rural
Oppeln/Opole county dropped from 75.8 percent in 1910 to 21.7 percent in 1925, while
the count of bilingual speakers grew from 2.5 percent to 50.8 percent. The political
manipulation of the census makes it almost impossible to gauge the statistical significance
of the third cause: a tangible shift in language usage, based largely on generational shifts.
Quantitative evidence from school enrollments and qualitative evidence from nationalist
and administrative circles shows clearly that many children grew up hearing Polish at home
but speaking German with friends, at school, and in church. 11 These trends will be explored
throughout the chapter. It was this shift towards integration which the Polish nationalists
loudly condemned, and most greatly feared.
These demographic trends cannot account however for the seemingly rapid, short-term
decline in regional support for the Polish nationalist cause. After signing up over 5,000
members in 1924, the ZPwN saw its Upper Silesian membership drop to around 1,000 in
1926, 80 percent off its peak. Membership would eventually rebound after 1928, to around
6,000 in the final years of Weimar Germany. While the Polish nationalist movement was
invigorated by new outreach programs and by political radicalization after 1928, electoral
11 See for example, reports of Abteilung für Kirchen and Schulwesen in Oppeln on 15 November 1924, and 22 June
1925, in APO, NO, Syg. 145 and Syg. 148 respectively; and various statistics on school enrollment, Syg. 146.
231

support for Poles fell steadily in the Weimar period. 12 Membership in the ZPwN nonetheless
involved a much smaller number of participants than those who had voted for Polish
candidates before World War I, but the stakes of participation and levels of dedication were
much higher among this core group of Polish nationalists. In order to understand both the
wavering support among this core group of nationalist activists, and the reception of the
broader Polish speaking population to their program, it is necessary to trace in detail the
cultural and political program of Weimar-era Polish nationalism. As the remainder of this
chapter will show, in almost all key areas of Polish nationalist advocacy and activity –
theater and youth groups, school and church policies, legal minority protections, and
electoral politics – developments in the 1920s reveal the increasing gap between a core
group of committed activists and their ambivalent or indifferent flock.
Before delving into each of these areas, it is important to turn briefly to the use of
evidence, particularly the Polish-language newspapers. Within the arsenal of the Polish
nationalists, the press was seen as the mightiest weapon. In the Oppeln/Opole area, their
soapbox was the Nowiny Codzienne, a daily which had grown out of the prewar Nowiny
press outlet. 13 The vigilance of local nationalists in documenting every perceived slight
produced an astounding record of discrimination. A subscriber to this paper in the 1920s
could read of near-constant attacks on schools, singing groups, theater performances, and
everyday citizens. In line with the ZPwN agenda, the newspaper spoke regularly of “terror”
and even the threat of “extermination” of Poles – language which was vastly
disproportionate to the crimes committed, and was often used to vilify processes of
12 Masnyk, Dzielnica I Związku Polaków, 43.
13 After Koraszewski, the editor of the Gazeta Opolska, resettled in Poland his paper soon dissolved, leaving the
Nowiny as the only Polish nationalist paper in Oppeln/Opole.
232

integration or assimilation. 14 In an article written by an anonymous Polish veteran in 1931,
for example, the paper railed against German-minded priests for supposedly stealing away
children’s native tongue by teaching them catechism in German. “Insofar as they work on
the extermination of our youth, who depend on their God-given language, they likewise
tear away their belief along with their language and deliver them to Communism and
Hitlerism,” the article warned. 15 In this nationalist logic, the teaching of German in
catechism class brought locals down a sure path to their own extermination as Poles.
Examples such as this reveal a newspaper trying to present a well-defined, self-conscious
Polish minority, which was under constant threat of extermination as a people. In this pre-
Holocaust era, the language of extermination was deployed more casually, to suggest the
destruction of cultural tradition rather than actual people. Yet Polish nationalists felt they
could only benefit from conflating the two. This was at the very heart of their program:
asserting the primacy and unity of national group belonging, and condemning any
measures which worked against their utopian vision as leading to the destruction of all
Poles.
Many historians, especially those from Poland working within Cold-War era
nationalist paradigms, have accepted the claims of the Nowiny Codzienne at face value. They
have depicted the Weimar era in Oppeln/Opole, in line with the Nowiny’s agenda, as one of
continuous ethnic and national repression of Poles. 16 Many of the newspaper’s claims of
14 For one of many samples of the “terror” language, see Nowiny Codzienne, 10 November 1923, nr. 257. The article
complains about the lack of minority schools in Upper Silesia, writing “Oh you Germanizers! To think, that no one
knows your system and no one knows your terror in regard to the minority schools.”
15 Ibid., 24 February 1931, nr. 43. From official German translation in APO, NO, Syg. 68.
16 See, for example, Berlińska, Mniejszość niemiecka, esp. 88-94, Michał Lis, Górny Śląsk: Zarys dziejów do połowy XX
wieku (Opole: Uniwersytet Opolski, 2001), Opole: monografia miasta, (Opole: Instytut Śląski, 1975), Mendel, Stosunki
społeczne i polityczne.
233

epression proved to be exaggerations and distortions. We know this mainly from German
administrative investigations of complaints in the archives. While at times it is difficult to
trust the counter-claims of German officials, the historical record shows a pattern of fairness
and authoritativeness in German investigations. Officials were prompted by concern over
the fair treatment of the much larger German-speaking minority in Poland to treat
complaints from the Polish minority seriously. This preponderance of archival evidence
outweighs the nationalist complaints, many of which were promptly dropped after
investigation. Moreover, German investigations rarely revealed any counter-agenda of
German nationalism, but rather depicted a population indifferent to most forms of national
politics. Two other factors also work to establish an accurate portrait that rises above the
noise of competing discourse. First, a neutral Mixed Commission under League of Nations
authority arbitrated many of the more serious complaints, and its judgments show patterns
of exaggeration and distortion by Polish nationalists. Second, Polish press accounts reveal
occasional glimpses of a different rhetoric, one which attacked not Germans, but rather
Polish speakers for their apathy and indifference. It is these moments, when the front of
national unity broke down amid squabbles or self-critiques, which reveal the fragility of
entire Polish nationalist project. Polish newspapers may have spoken of an objectively
Polish population under threat of German terror and extermination, but the broader
historical record suggests a largely indifferent population unresponsive to the efforts of
Polish nationalization.
234

PERFORMING NATIONALISM: YOUTH RECREATION AND THEATER
Of all aspects of Polish nationalist life in and around Oppeln/Opole in the 1920s, youth
cultural outreach no doubt had the most success. The nationalists poured more effort into
the youth than any other generation, for they understood that the path to future success in
nationalist movements resided with the education and indoctrination of young,
impressionable minds. Yet their efforts to shape the Upper Silesian youth got off to a very
slow start. Early attempts by Jankowski in 1923 to start Polish-Catholic youth associations
often yielded small groups which quickly died out. Meanwhile, Polish language classes which
started in March 1924 in the Bank Rolników [Farmers’ Bank] lasted less than three months
before being dissolved. 17 Nationalists felt they were facing an indifferent and even hostile
audience. An article from the Nowiny Codzienne in 1925 addressed to the youth of Upper
Silesia criticized them for their seeming apathy to the Polish national movement. “It is high
time to reawake from the sleep and start the work of cultural enlightenment,” the article
proclaimed. “In order for us not to have torn from our hands this most precious jewel – the
Polish language for every boy and girl – we must form ourselves, form ourselves in
associations.” 18 Over a year later, in assessing their activities for 1926, the Nowiny was still
somber. It suggested that too many families were nationally apathetic, and lamented that
the majority of Polish-speaking parents sent their children to German schools and German
organizations. “It is false to claim,” reported the article, “that everything is in the best order,
when it is not true.” 19
17 Oppeln police report, 11 June 1924, APO, NO, Syg. 79.
18 Nowiny Codzienne, 13 December 1925, nr. 285. Official German translation in APO, NO, Syg. 214.
19 Ibid., 1 January 1927. Official German translation in APO, NO, Syg. 66.
235

With the increase in national tensions across Upper Silesia after 1926, Polish
nationalists found more success in the late 1920s in organizing youth. Although their
efforts spanned nearly all popular aspects of youth recreation in the day – including
scouting, gymnastics, and sports leagues – they showed particular strength in nurturing
singing and theater groups. While only some of these groups involved the direct
participation of youth, almost all were meant to appeal to a youth-oriented audience.
Starting in the winter of 1927-1928, the Polish nationalists organized regular singing
groups, theater performances, movie showings, dancing parties, and lectures in Polish for
locals, with a focus on youth outreach. The plays and slide shows were particularly well
attended, often drawing a sigificant portion of entire villages and surrounding
communities. 20 With the advent of these groups, Oppeln/Opole turned into the center of
the Polish nationalist movement in German Upper Silesia. As of May 1928, nine of the 24
Polish-language singing groups in Upper Silesia were located in or around Oppeln/Opole. 21
The Polish nationalists felt that in building on the popularity of such groups, they had
found a way to reach youth. At a February 1930 meeting of nationalist leaders in the
Oppeln/Opole Rolnik, the board declared, according to police observers, “that the founding
of these types of organizations are the best propaganda for Polish interests... just these
singing and social groups are the most appropriate method to win over the youth.” 22 These
meetings are recorded in history thanks not only to the nationalist newspapers, but also the
heavy surveillance efforts of local German officials. That a few dozen singing children
demanded secret government reports and, at times, police supervision speaks to the heavy-
20 See various police reports of 1927-1928 in APO, NO, Syg. 79.
21 Police report, 16 May 1928, APO, NO, Syg. 1859.
22 Police report on a meeting of leaders of ZPwN on 13 February 1930, in APO, NO, Syg. 79.
236

handed nature of government, as well as the everyday threats which could hamper Polish
nationalist activities. Yet it is crucial to note that the vast majority of Polish singing groups
and performances took place without any violence or threats. 23
When violence did occur it was more often than not interpreted as nationalist even
when national difference was not the main cause. Many incidents were indeed simply
personal brawls, where alcohol played the leading role. For example, on Easter Monday, 25
April 1927, a fight broke out at a dance party thrown by the local mandolin club in Alt
Schalkowitz/Siolkowice. Although this was not an attack on a Polish singing group, it
followed a similar pattern of revelry turned violent. As the Nowiny Codzienne reported,
there was a particular dance “where the German ‘Mandolin Club’ wanted to dance alone;
but as a Polish landowner’s son began to dance anyway, a fight erupted, which degenerated
into a stabbing.” 24 Yet a local investigation yielded a different picture: The club had reserved
certain dances for members only, but the “Polish” farmer’s son in question, Paul Pampuch,
decided to dance anyway. After a member of the club forbade him from dancing, a fight
erupted, in which Paul’s brother and father joined in. The three men were arrested for
injuring Paul and his brother were, just like Pampuch, from Polish-speaking backgrounds.
None of the men involved was known as being nationally active; in fact, the Pampuch sons
were known as local troublemakers who earlier in the year had fought with other Polish-
speaking men their age. National divisions simply played no role in the affair. As the rural
police explained, “At every dancing event that takes place here, German and Polish-minded
dance together, and if it comes to a brawl, then German and Polish-minded take part on
23 Numerous police reports detail peaceful performances in APO, NO, Syg. 79.
24 Nowiny Codzienne, 28 April 1927, nr. 95. Printed in Gesamtüberblick über die polnische Presse 7 May 1927. Emphasis
mine.
237

oth sides.” 25 Yet readers of the Nowiny Codzienne were led to believe this was an attack on
the Polish nation.
A more in-depth look at the daily fabric of Polish associational life and at the content
of the singing, dancing, and theater evenings also casts doubt on the nationalist agenda of
these groups and their impact. More often than not, the content of the plays was anything
but nationalist. At a January 1928 theater performance in Groschowitz/Grudzice, the first
play, Piękny Opłatek [Enchanted Wafer] told the story of a Galician wedding which was
disturbed by a Jewish interloper, who eventually was booted out of the house by a
triumphant pater familias. The second play, Diable poczustnek [Devil’s Treat], took humor
in the drunk main character. A month later, the residents of Fraundorf/Wójtowa Wieś were
treated to Pilnuj swego [Look After Your Own], in which a brother and sister mismanage
their inherited land and must later sell it off to a Polish Jew, before later reclaiming it thanks
to their own thrift and virtue. These plays were hardly powerful nationalist works; they were
folk pieces which dealt with locally familiar themes of drunkenness, marriage, and rural life.
Although these plays offered positive cultural stereotypes of Poles, and often scathing
depictions of Jews, this does not automatically mean that they encouraged Polish
nationalism. The most popular slide show in the winter of 1928-1929, which the Polish
nationalists showed in several local villages to hundreds of enraptured audience members,
dealt not with lofty themes of Polish history, but rather with the “Extraction and Use of
Manure.” Before these and other events, local nationalist leaders would hold brief speeches
touting their programs, and encouraging locals to make use of the Polish banks, schools,
and agricultural cooperatives. But the mostly young crowds, according to police reports,
25 Report of Siolkowice Landjäger to Oppeln Oberpräsident, 13 May 1927, GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 77, Tit. 856, Nr. 762.
238

were more interested in the dancing afterwards, in which the Polish and German language
often both flowed freely, as did the alcohol which proved the most common cause of
violence. As one officer noted after a February 1928 performance and dance, “German-
minded persons” also attended and even sang German folk songs during breaks in the
music. Such language mixing and social interaction was commonplace, making it difficult
to label the events part of a well-defined nationalist milieu.
Moreover, while the number of attendees at performances and dances was frequently
large, often encompassing almost all the young adults of a village, the core group of
performers and singers was typically very small. More often than not, the children of local
Polish activists (who usually amounted to around two or three families per village) made up
a large chunk of the membership. In Frauendorf/Wójtowa Wieś, for example, the local
singing group counted 25 members as of July 1930, but of these, at least 11 came from
three well-known local Polish nationalist families: Baron, Duda, and Poliwoda. 26 The wider
appeal of these organizations must be put into question. Indeed, the entire singing and
theater movement proved very fragile and short-lived; after the winter of 1930-31, activity
plummeted. The main factor was certainly the depression, and the economic strain this
placed on families. Nonetheless, these groups failed to convey a message of enduring
national loyalty to a significant number of local Polish speakers, as activists had hoped.
Polish nationalists thus fell far short of their goal of using youth singing and theater
groups to create a lasting, stable, and loyal generation of young “Poles” in Upper Silesia.
The resources poured into creating nationally-organized singing and theater groups proved
at most a temporary splash in the larger tide of national indifference and apathy. Genuine
26 Report on Halka singing group in Vogtsdorf, July 1930, APO, NO, Syg. 228.
239

attacks on the groups for their national allegiance proved much less common and less severe
than nationalists claimed, but it was this exaggerated version which has entered the
historical record thanks to the hard work of nationalist activists and the press.
THE DRAMA OF NATIONAL VIOLENCE
Even when real violence did occur, as in the most infamous case from 1920s
Oppeln/Opole – the theater attack of 1929 – its national content was often dramatized far
beyond its original scale or meaning in order to fit the needs of nationalist activists. On
Sunday, 28 April 1929, a visiting theater troupe from Katowice/Kattowitz, in Polish Upper
Silesia, performed the Polish opera Halka in Oppeln/Opole in front of a sold-out crowd.
During the performance a crowd gathered in front of the theater, having swelled to at least
several hundred onlookers by the play’s end. The audience left peacefully, but the
performers and orchestra feared for their safety along the several-block trip back to the train
station, where they were to be whisked home. The performers took a group of vehicles to the
station, but the mob of locals caught up with the performers just as they arrived. There, in
the underground walkway between the train station entrance and the main lobby, chaos
erupted, and several members of the troupe and orchestra were struck before transit police
separated the performers from their attackers.
The event proved a major black eye for Oppeln/Opole and regional authorities in
Upper Silesia. It carried the mark of extreme, unprovoked national violence against a
beleaguered minority, and gave the impression that the German authorities, unable to
protect even a small group of visiting thespians and musicians, could certainly not
guarantee the safety of their own local minority communities. In the weeks following the
240

attack, the Polish government threatened to unleash a wave of counter-discrimination
against the German minority there. The nationalist organization Związek Obrony Kresów
Zachodnich [Society for the Protection of Western Marches] organized protests across
Poland; on 2 May, some 10,000 people marched on the German legation in Warsaw. 27 For
weeks and months afterwards, the theater attack excited nationalist sentiment and served as
fodder for activists, and it has been recorded in history as a milestone on the path from
German integrationist and protectionist policies towards aggressive nationalism. 28
The closer one examines the actual attack, however, the less the incident reflects
unchecked national aggression, and the more it reveals special interest groups manipulating,
and exaggerating, events for their own nationalist ends. Even before the play was staged,
German bureaucratic missteps helped to dramatize the event as a matter of national
controversy. The town’s Social Democratic mayor Ernst Berger denied Polish nationalists’
first request to use the city’s theater space, explaining in mid-March that city space could
not be used to stage political events, and a Polish theater troupe’s guest performance
counted as “an event of political nature.” The regional Polish press pointed out the double
standard for Polish-language cultural events , contrasting it with the twice-weekly German-
language performances sanctioned in Polish Katowice/Kattowitz. In mid-April, the Polish
regional government retaliated by cancelling the Berlin Opera’s invitation to play in
Katowice/Kattowitz. By this time, a new Upper Silesian president, Hans Lukaschek, had
succeeded Proske. Known as a more vigorous defender of the rights of local Polish speakers,
Lukaschek overrode Berger’s decision in mid-April, paving the way for the performance on
27 Volkswacht, 4 May 1929, nr. 103.
28 Mark Mazower, Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe, 1st American ed. (New York: Penguin Press, 2008),
39.
241

April 28. In his scolding letter to Berger, Lukaschek noted not only the right to equal access
guaranteed by minority protections, but also the reciprocal benefits given to German
speakers across the partition border, which were endangered by Berger’s brash denial. 29
Berger swallowed his political defeat bitterly; meanwhile, the press ate up the
controversy. Reactions varied across the political spectrum. The right-nationalist
Oberschlesische Tageszeitung predictably decried the upcoming performance, labeling
Oppeln/Opole a “pure German city” and calling it a “slap in the face.” Unable to resist a
rhetorical flourish of exaggeration, one article suggested that “Maybe the self-defense forces
at St. Anna Mountain died back then [during the third Polish uprising] for nothing.” 30 The
Catholic Oppelner Kurier defended the right of any group, even communists, to hold
theater performances. But they, too, felt a performance was unnecessary so far from the
Polish-German border, “in Oppeln, right in the heart of German Upper Silesia!” 31 Center
Party members of the city council even registered an official protest at their next meeting. 32
Through this pre-curtain drama, played out in official circles and in the press, the stage had
been set for national conflict.
In the countryside around Oppeln/Opole, the play was also being promoted, as tickets
were given out for free, or at greatly reduced rates, to local Polish speakers. The publicity
paid off, as locals flooded the theater to capacity. Unfortunately for those in attendance, a
group of ten German-speaking troublemakers between 19 and 23 years old sneaked into
the 4:30 p.m. performance without tickets. Shortly before the end of the first act, members
29 See letter of Lukaschek to Berger on 16 April 1929 and reply on 17 April, APO, NO, Syg. 265.
30 Oberschlesische Tageszeitung, 19 April 1929, nr. 92, and 20 April 1929, nr. 93.
31 Oppelner Kurier, 19 April 1929 nr. 106.
32 Ibid., 20 April 1929, nr. 107.
242

of this group threw stink bombs into the crowd, igniting jeers and complaints. During
intermission the police apprehended the young men, took down their names, and expelled
them from the theater. Most of the men turned out to be members of the small local Nazi
movement. The Oppeln/Opole Nazi branch had printed up flyers before the event
addressed to their “German national comrades [Volksgenossen]” which decried the
performance as “political propaganda” and complained of “deficient national pride” among
local Germans. 33 For impressionable young men, such language could easily lead to juvenile
attempts to sabotage a theater performance.
Meanwhile, the disruption of expelling the young men drew more onlookers among
the crowd gathered outside. By the end of the play, police estimated the crowd at 500-600
strong, yet still entirely peaceful. As theatergoers started to leave just before 8 p.m., the
police chief ordered the 20 officers present to clear the pathways outside to make way for the
audience. No injuries were reported, but the police had clearly escalated tensions by pushing
back the onlookers. The Polish troupe and orchestra, meanwhile, left out a back entrance for
the train station, without police protection. Members of the crowd spotted their caravan,
and the newly formed mob hurried the few blocks to the train station. They caught up with
the performers across the street from the station as they exited their vehicles. In front of the
station and in the tunnel leading to the main hall, members of the mob used sticks and fists
to beat the theater performers. Five railway police entered the fray, and after about ten
minutes were able to push back the attackers while cordoning off the station with the
performers inside.
33 The flyer from April 1929 can be found in APO, NO, Syg. 266.
243

While the attack was no doubt based on nationalist rancor, the subsequent
investigation revealed that the mob was far from a unified group of radical nationalists.
Investigators collected dozens of reports from police and witnesses, all of whom described
the crowd as a mainly peaceful and impromptu collection of curious onlookers. Police had
played the primary role in agitating the crowd by pushing them back haphazardly to make
way for exiting theatergoers. As investigators sought out those responsible for the physical
violence, it became increasingly obvious that a few dozen people, at most, had taken part in
the beatings. The assaulters were difficult to pinpoint with the bounty of contradictory
eyewitness accounts. Moreover, the violence was not limited to just the Polish performers.
A local Polish speaker from the nearby village of Follwark/Folwark had the misfortune of
walking by the train station at 9 p.m. that night carrying his saxophone. He was beaten by
remaining members of the crowd, before someone recognized him as a local, at which point
he was released. 34
The nature of the injuries and damage reveals a great deal of irony. A doctor was called
in to tend to the performers at the train station, but their injuries, according to his report,
were mostly minor: scratches and bruises rather than severe breakages or dislocations. Only
one performer, with a bleeding wound to his right temple, was bandaged by the doctor.
Ironically, this orchestra performer was a fluent German speaker and a native of
Oppeln/Opole. Before World War I, he had served as a Prussian civil servant in
Kattowitz/Katowice, and decided to stay in his hometown rather than emigrate after the
partition. The anti-Polish mob had thus struck its most severe blow upon a former Prussian
bureaucrat whose national leanings, according to investigators, remained decidedly
34 From ZPwN deposition, May 1929, APO, NO, Syg. 268.
244

German. 35 Additionally, around ten of the musicians were actually German citizens from
the Beuthen/Bytom city theater temporarily assisting the orchestra. Mob violence, in this
case, did not discriminate nationally.
German authorities acted quickly to contain the fallout from the attack. The ten illicit
theatergoers who had thrown the stink bomb were arrested the next day. Investigations
were launched into both the attack and police conduct. Lukaschek, two days after the event,
wrote to Berlin announcing that both the police chief and the army commander in charge
of the reserve police should be dismissed. While he saw little to criticize in their actions or
previous record, he nonetheless recommended termination “out of foreign policy
considerations.” Lukaschek also met that same day with regional leaders of the ZPwN and
the Mixed Commission. Lukasheck promised justice for the victims, accountability for the
police, and even allowed local Polish activists to do much of the work of collecting
eyewitness accounts. 36
Among Polish nationalists, however, the outrage had already been set in motion. Two
days after the attack, the Nowiny Codzienne proclaimed the incident’s significance:
When anyone speaks in the future of the height of German culture, then one must
remember 28 April 1929. This day remains forever a dark point, which cannot be
blurred by anyone or anything. 37
The local Catholic press took a more restrained view, roundly condemning the
“irresponsible ‘political actions’ of half-grown lads.” International embarrassment seemed
their primary concern, which compelled them to note that the attack did not need to be
viewed through a national lens:
35 Incident report of Oppeln officer Mai, APO, NO, Syg. 266.
36 Lukaschek to Prussian Interior Ministry, 30 April 1929, APO, NO, Syg. 266.
37 Nowiny Codzienne, 1 May 1929, nr. 100. Official German translation in APO, NO, Syg. 266.
245

The visitors to the Polish show were, with few exceptions, bilingual rural folk
obviously provided with free tickets, who almost all came with their cars and coaches
into the city and quietly watched the performance. Neither the members of the theater
personnel nor the theatergoers were in any way engaging ‘in Polish agitation.’ 38
According to the Catholic press, a few bad apples, most likely from the nationalist
paramilitary groups or the Nazi camp, had ruined the entire event. Not everyone was
interested in using the attack to stoke nationalist division.
Nonetheless, the Polish nationalists – and increasingly the German Nazis and right-
wing nationalists – most directly benefitted from the continuing drama of the trials and
verdicts which unfolded over the summer and fall of 1929. In the first trial on 4 June, the
ten men accused of throwing the stink bomb, eight of whom were members of the local
Nazi Party, were convicted to at least two weeks each in prison. None, however, could be
linked to the later attacks. The right-nationalist Oberschlesische Tageszietung derided the
sentences as political and overly harsh, and the lead editor for the paper, Dr. Lothar Knaak,
along with local Nazis, organized a 10 June protest in Oppeln/Opole against the
convictions. Police estimated 2,000 in attendance (and Knaak’s own paper 5,000) for the
event, which was themed “Western Upper Silesia is in danger!” Knaak’s own speech
emphasized the weakness of Germany’s current foreign policy vis-à-vis the clearly
aggressive intent of Poland to capture the rest of Upper Silesia. Knaak barely mentioned the
convictions of the previous week. 39 The convictions of the stink bomb throwers, meanwhile,
failed to impress the Polish nationalists, who blamed Lukaschek in the Nowiny Codzienne
for failing to change “the system up until now of incitement against the Poles.” 40
38 Oppelner Kurier, 1 May 1929, nr. 118.
39 Oberschlesische Tageszeitung, 12 June 1929, nr. 135
40 Nowiny Codzienne, 18 June 1929, nr. 138. Official German translation in APO, NO, Syg. 267.
246

The ten men, meanwhile, appealed their conviction on the grounds that they did not
have time to secure adequate legal representation. The Nazis, seeing the opportunity to
stoke nationalist flames and win a public relations victory, brought in one of their top
lawyers from Munich, Hans Frank, who would later preside over the Nazi-occupied
Generalgouvernement during World War II. Frank used his legal skill in the 9 August retrial
to reduce their sentences to a trespassing charge, which carried a fine between 50 and 70
marks each. That same night, Frank joined the celebration party of the NSDAP, which
attracted a crowd of around 500. There, he proclaimed that the trial was part of a larger
political program: “We National Socialists are pursuing a revolution.” 41 German right-wing
nationalists like Frank and Knaak had successfully used the trials to rewrite the script, and
present German culture as under attack.
The trials of the 20 men eventually accused of assault at the train station that October
revealed the extent to which nationalists on both sides had twisted the event to suit their
needs. Few, if any of the defendants, all of whom were men under 30 years old, could be
identified by police as actually taking part in the beatings. Investigators based the
indictments mainly on the defendants’ nationalist affiliations and eyewitness accounts that
placed them at the scene. The courtroom devolved into a comedic stage over the course of
the weeklong trial, aided by the presence of 58 witnesses (including many victims) who
were escorted under heavy police protection from Poland to Oppeln/Opole. Yet it was the
victims from Poland, and not German eyewitnesses, who undid the prosecution’s case. One
musician, who became the star witness for the defense, claimed that he was forced to lie
about his injuries. He testified that he and others were ordered to destroy their instruments
41 Police report on NSDAP gathering of 9 August 1929, APO, NO, Syg. 267.
247

upon returning to Katowice/Kattowitz, then claim the damage took place in Oppeln/Opole.
Another musician claimed to be injured for ten days, but an eyewitness said he was back at
work within five. Numerous contradictions such as these were used by the defense to poke
holes in the case. Only seven of the twenty defendants were convicted, with the three most
clearly implicated in the assault receiving sentences of seven to eight months.
The trial had turned the tragic misfortune of the attacks into a stage for national
propaganda. The defense lawyer, in making his final case, turned the victims into symbols
by appealing to the memory of suffering during the plebiscite battles and building up all
Germans as victims of Polish aggression. He claimed, “We Germans want peace. But the
Poles must first give us peace.” He proclaimed that the Poles had “partly confused the
courthouse with the stage,” seemingly unaware of his own dramatic bravura. 42 Like the
defense attorney, most journalists at this point had little concern for the facts of the case;
the trial had transformed into whatever they wanted it to be. The Polish press called the trial
a sham of justice, yet mostly failed to print the victims’ testimony supporting the defense.
In a gambit to draw attention to themselves, the Polish press contingent even staged a
walkout from the courtroom on the fourth day. The German nationalist press, although
angry with the verdict, spent most of its time channeling its discontent into claims of a
Polish threat and German governmental weakness. Indeed, the real performance in the
1929 theater attack came from the nationalist activists who dramatized the violence and its
meanings for their own ends. If the theater incident of 1929 has been passed down as a
catalyst for increasing radical nationalization of Upper Silesia, then it is mainly thanks to
the work of those who sought to dramatize and exploit the event for nationalist ends.
42 Oppelner Kurier, 13 October 1929 nr. 237.
248

THE LIMITS OF NATIONALIZATION: SCHOOLS AND CHURCHES
The 1929 theater incident proved remarkable for how radically nationalists could alter
the terms of the debate for their own political ends. Yet, in the case of school and church
policy, no amount of manipulation could hide the failure of Polish activists to pursue
nationalization policies. Under the Geneva Accords, minority groups on both sides were
allowed to establish primary and middle schools with instruction in their own language.
Polish nationalists thus fanned out starting in 1922 to collect the required signatures from
Polish-speaking parents. By July 1923, 492 children in the county of Oppeln/Opole had
been signed up for a minority school – a fairly large number, but still only a fraction of the
9,077 primary school students in mixed-language schools in the county. The German
government worked to establish new schools and train teachers, although its efforts before
1925 were often slow and lackluster, according to both Polish nationalists and the Swiss
politician, Felix Calonder, in charge of the Mixed Commission which enforced the Geneva
Accords.
Nonetheless, when the schools opened, enrollment figures almost always fell short of
the number of signatures collected. The first minority school in the county opened in
Boguschütz/Boguszyce on 1 May 1923 with 179 students, but by 11 July had only 27 who
regularly attended. 43 On 1 May 1925, five new minority schools opened in the county, but
of the 507 students who signed up in 1923, only 127 showed up for the first day of classes.
In almost every case, school enrollments dropped shortly after the school opened, and
continued to decline in the following years. The minority school in Königlich
43 Minority Office report, 3 July 1923 APO, USMO, Syg. 18.
249

Neudorf/Nowa Wieś Królewska, which was built after 96 signatures were gathered, opened
to only 16 students in 1925, and was closed in 1929 with only six enrollees. 44
The Polish nationalists blamed the lackluster enrollments at first on government and
local intimidation and terror. Their claims had only a limited truth. In 1923 and 1924, the
German government was indeed moving very slowly to build the new schools and
classrooms necessary to house the Polish minority students. The training of teachers in high
Polish, however, proved the greatest challenge. A report from two Berlin officials who
traveled to Upper Silesia in 1925 admitted the scale of the problem: most of the teachers
placed in minority schools were “totally unsuitable for instruction,” because they were
unable to speak high Polish. Calonder even privately told a German official that the lack of
Polish fluency among teachers was the “crassest breach of the Geneva Accords that he had
thus far lived to see.” 45 While many teachers were fluent speakers of the local Polish dialect,
few had a mastery of high Polish, prompting Calonder to push for faster and better training
of teachers. Without a doubt, the initially poor quality of instruction in Polish discouraged
some parents from sending their children to the Polish minority schools. Yet, as Calonder
publicly noted, the parents were unlikely to speak any better high Polish than the teachers.
Meanwhile, the Polish nationalists filed dozens of complaints of alleged pressure from local
authorities, teachers, and priests to send their children to the German school. Most of these
complaints were discounted by Calonder’s office as exaggerated or false. 46 The Nowiny
Codzienne, nonetheless, found it easiest to blame the German authorities. They wrote in
44 Mendel, Stosunki społeczne i polityczne, 197.
45 Travel report of Interior Ministry, Jan 1925, GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 77, Tit. 856, Syg. 449; Nowiny Codzienne 5 April
1925, nr. 78.
46 See various reports in APO, NO, Syg. 66, 67, 148.
250

1925, “The parents have been subject to so many new lies, obsessions and threats, and the
Polish enlightenment action has been subject to so many hindrances, that some weak souls
have succumbed to this poison of dumbing down.” 47
In reality, few parents found it necessary or desirable to send their children to the
Polish minority schools. Often, it was the students themselves who, never having learned
high Polish except through religious prayer, took the lead in rejecting the schools. In
Malino/Malina in 1924, many parents withdrew their support for the minority school after
their children complained about the difficulty of learning high Polish. 48 At a German school
in Zelasno/Żelazna that same year, the teacher stopped offering Polish-language instruction
because the students would not come to class. According to the teacher, no parents even
asked for Polish instruction for their children past second grade. 49 This apathy of some
parents was combined with a sense among many others that Polish language and religious
instruction within German schools was sufficient. Most public schools offered Polish-
language instruction as an elective, and as of July 1923 a good portion of students from
local schools took part: in Frauendorf/Wójtowa Wieś 43 students took Polish language
instruction and 110 Polish religious instruction in a school of 262 students. In
Groschowitz/Groszowice, of 562 students in the school, 67 took language and 64 religious
instruction in Polish. Throughout the 1920s, around four times the number of students
signed up for Polish religious instruction as for a Polish minority school in German Upper
Silesia. Parents clearly preferred giving their children a German-language or bilingual
education rather than a predominantly Polish-language one.
47 Nowiny Codzienne, 2 May 1925, nr. 99.
48 Report of Regierungsabteilung für Kirchen and Schulwesen in Oppeln, 15 November 1924, APO, NO, Syg. 145.
49 Statement of Hauptlehrer Wiench, July 1924, APO, NO, Syg. 79.
251

Figure 1: Minority School Enrollment in German Upper Silesia 50
Number of Minority Students in Minority Students in Polish
School Year Schools
Schools
Religious Instruction
1923-24 16 1227 10833
1924-25 25 1030 9709
1925-26 53 1288 5677
1926-27 35 865 3706
1927-28 30 659 2988
1928-29 29 497 1954
1929-30 28 410 1553
1930-31 27 347 1462
Thus, even though Polish nationalists went door-to-door to convince families, offered
free textbooks and summer trips to Poland for children in minority schools, and held
lectures admonishing parents to do their national duty, enrollments in the minority schools
continued to sink after their high point in 1923-1925. By 1926, the German authorities had
worked out most of their issues with teacher training, and they were even keeping open
completely empty minority schools in order not to anger Polish nationalists. Around this
time, the complaints by Polish activists about government interference in minority
schooling decreased, and criticism shifted increasingly to the nationally indifferent
parents. 51 The Polish School Association scolded them in 1927: “Parents! You are Poles,
your mother tongue is the Polish language, therefore your children also belong, according
to legal decisions and from the standpoint of nature, in the Polish schools. Today there is
still time, you can still make good on what has been neglected.” 52 The Association
continued to insist that Upper Silesia was a land of 500,000 or more pure Poles, who were
50 Georges Kaeckenbeeck, The International Experiment of Upper Silesia: A Study in the Working of the Upper Silesian
Settlement, 1922-1937 (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1942), 337-338.
51 The ZPwN still submitted a complaint in 1929 directly to the League of Nations (bypassing the regional Mixed
Commission), where they lamented that fewer than 500 out of 50,000 Polish-speaking children were in minority
schools. The German response claimed that most parents saw no “intellectual or economic” need to send their
children to Polish minority schools. Given the lack of evidence from Poles of any outright discrimination, the
League saw no reason to take action. League of Nations Official Journal, 1929, 1027-1028.
52 Nowiny Codzienne 19 March 1927, nr. 64 . Official German translation in APO, NO, Syg. 135.
252

simply unawakened. At other times, the School Association, which had been founded at the
national level in Berlin in 1923, was less sanguine about the prospects of Polish
enlightenment. At its regional meeting in Beuthen/Bytom in May 1927, the Association
cited a range of “external and … internal difficulties,” the latter of which it summed up as
“our anxiety, our indifference and our cluelessness about our own interests, both public as
well as personal.” While Polish nationalists felt that many ethnic Poles were afraid to
express their cultural identity for fear of reprisal, they identified many more who “behave
indifferently toward it [their Polish identity] and indifferently toward the work of cultural
preservation.” 53 For these unenlightened did not understand that the national task would
supposedly bring about social improvement – at least in the logic of the nationalists. In
reality, the logic of social uplift through national enlightenment proved elusive to all but
the most committed of nationalist leaders – who were often precisely the small coterie who
had risen in social status through jobs with nationalist newspapers and organizations.
As the 1920s wore on, these educated Polish nationalists turned their ever-increasing
frustration more and more on their peasant and working-class constituency. At a June 1929
Mother’s Day celebration at the Rolnik, national leaders chastised the women they claimed
to be celebrating for not sending their children to Polish schools. “The parents should
finally rear their children to be true Poles and not half Poles and half Germans,” the local
ZPwN leader Stefan Szczepaniak warned the roughly 90 women in attendance. National
ambiguity “creates only unhappy persons,” he continued, especially children who would
resent their mothers for being so ambiguous. 54 A female guest from across the partition
53 Ibid., 7 May 1927 nr. 103. From official German translation in APO, NO, Syg, 232.
54 Oppeln police report, 25 June 1929, APO, NO, Syg. 1680.
253

order couched the same message in nicer terms, saying it was the holiest duty of mothers
to ensure their children grew up to love and defend the Polish nation. 55 Polish nationalists
by the late 1920s were clearly more perturbed by the indifference of Polish speakers to
schools than by repression from the government. Rather than respecting parental wishes for
bilingual education and religious instruction, activists instead scolded parents for failing to
adhere to utopian nationalist ideals.
Polish activists were ultimately thwarted by national apathy which was boosted by the
range of choices offered to locals. Educational policy in Upper Silesia gave remarkable
autonomy to the parent and child to determine their linguistic and national educational
preferences, at a time when the trend in some other parts of Central Europe moved towards
stripping parents of such autonomy. In the case of Bohemian schoolchildren in
Czechoslovakia, for example, the personal and familial right to choose one’s nationality
could be overridden by bureaucratic fiat based on “objective” ethnic criteria. 56 In Upper
Silesia, the Geneva Accords gave unfettered rights to individuals to determine their own
national affiliation, and it was a decision which no authority could legally question. This
ultimately subjective criterion for ethnic and national belonging irked the Polish
nationalists greatly, as they looked admiringly upon systems that forced locals to
acknowledge their supposedly “true” national identity. It was the official position of the
Polish government that ‘objective’ criteria be used to determine nationality. 57 But subjective
55 Lukaschek to Prussian Interior Minister, 18 July 1929. Quoted in Deutsche und Polen zwischen den Kriegen:
Minderheitenstatus und "Volkstumskampf" im Grenzgebiet: Amtliche Berichterstattung aus beiden Ländern, 1920-
1939, (München: Saur, 1997), 834-836.
56 Tara Zahra, Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900-1948
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), Ch. 4.
57 Julius Stone, Regional Guarantees of Minority Rights: A Study of Minorities Procedure in Upper Silesia (New York:
The Macmillan Co., 1933), 38.
254

nationality provided a legal basis upon which the local population was allowed to express
either its passion or its indifference to the Polish national project; and the great majority
showed indifference.
Similar relations prevailed in the churches in and around Oppeln/Opole, especially in
regards to communion and confession instruction for children. Most parents proved
indifferent to the language issue, as their children increasingly took catechism in German,
the language they were more fluent in. Priests, meanwhile, became a main point of attack
from Polish and German nationalists: sometimes, because they strayed from parents’ wishes
and tried to impose their own national agenda, but also because they honored parents’
wishes. In Lugnian/Lubniany, Father Schmidt was attacked shortly after arriving in 1925 for
supposedly wanting to Germanize the local parish and especially its youth. One reader
complained in the pages of the Nowiny Codzienne that children were switching over more
and more to German-language communion classes, and as a result were losing their morals.
While the reader partially blamed the parents “who don’t care how their child is taught
religion,” he reserved most blame for Father Schmidt, who “doesn’t respect the mother
tongue of his parishioners and imposes the German language on them.” 58 But Father
Schmidt responded to these attacks with a much different portrayal of his parish. He
instituted an early-morning German-language service twice monthly only after his
parishioners asked for one. He estimated that of the 3,100 people in his flock, 90 percent
were bilingual, with around 200 German-only speakers and 50-100 people, all over the age
of 65, who spoke only Polish. He noted that both the German- and Polish-language services
were well-attended, and that even at the Polish-language service most happily sang in
58 Nowiny Codzienne 10 November 1928, nr. 261. From official German translation in APO, NO, Syg. 79.
255

German. For two years he had been running a church youth group, which performed plays
in German without any complaints. Finally, in confession and communion instruction,
Schmidt noted that “all children openly demanded only German instruction without any
influence on my part.” 59 His claims were backed up by the parish council, which had
requested the German-language services. Moreover, the minority school in the village had
proved a failure, lasting only a few weeks before parents returned their children to the
German school. Father Schmidt offered a program that consistently respected the wishes of
his parishioners and was sensitive to linguistic diversity. But this was not acceptable to the
local Polish nationalists: a year later the Nowiny lamented that not a single child was taking
first communion in Polish in Lugnian/Lubniany, and it blamed the priest for not forcing
parents to educate children in Polish against their wishes. 60
Other priests were less attentive to the wishes of their parishioners, but often their
neglect was interpreted by nationalists as an insult against all Poles. Father Klosa in Alt
Poppelau/Popielów was regularly attacked in the Polish press. In February 1924 a reader
wrote that “the priest’s behavior against us Polish-feeling and Polish-thinking people reveals
that he breathes hatred against us and is not afraid to let out his wrath from the pulpit.” 61
Earlier that month the priest had been punched in the face by a parishioner who was upset
that Klosa had stopped reading part of the service in Polish. Four years later, the Nowiny
accused him of forcing children to attend the German-language service, and making them
sit on the floor if they came to Polish-language one instead. 62 But Klosa responded that he
59 Report of Father Schmidt, 19 March 1929, APO, NO, Syg. 79
60 Nowiny Codzienne 25 May 1929, nr. 119. Official German translation in APO, NO, Syg. 79.
61 Ibid., 26 January 1924. Translation in Gesamtüberblick über die polnsische Presse, 7 February 1924.
62 Ibid., 28 January 1928.
256

only asked the children to come to German service because they understood German
better, and the Polish one was usually overfilled. 63 While it is difficult to verify Klosa’s
claims in this case, it is clear that any grey areas of priestly neglect or bias were exploited by
a committed core of local activists who sought to transform his actions into a national
affront. This propaganda also worked in the reverse direction. Father Pillawa from
Bierdzan/Bierdzany was attacked by the local teacher and German nationalist press for
forcing children into Polish communion instruction against their parents’ wishes. Both
parents, of Polish-speaking background, complained to the government in 1931, saying
they wanted their children in German instruction for very pragmatic reasons: they would
eventually have to seek work in Germany, and thus should be fluent in German. 64 Despite
this misstep, Pillawa maintained that he was apolitical, and continued to provide bilingual
services to parishioners on Sundays according to demand, often mixing languages within a
single service. The regional government mostly defended Pillawa against the attacks from
German nationalists, and an investigation revealed that a local school teacher was leading
the press campaign against Pillawa because he had been denied a position as regional head
organist. Personal struggle and revenge thus manifested itself to the wider world as national
battle, with the nationalist press happily playing along. 65 As these sorts of events played out
repeatedly across the county, activists’ depiction of national strife in churches only grew
increasingly detached from the fabric of local parish relations.
63 Oppeln Landrat report, 5 April 1928, APO, NO, Syg. 79.
64 Parental complaints filed by Franz Reichel, 22 January 1931 and Anna Swora, 28 January. APO, NO, Syg 85.
65 See report of Father Pillawa, 23 April 1931, APO, NO, Syg. 85. It should be noted that the local Catholic press,
particularly the Oppelner Kurier, often defended priests against nationalist attacks.
257

MINORITY COMPLAINTS
The failure of Polish activists to transform local societies into nationally divided ones
came even as they were afforded a distinct, powerful institution for defense of national
interests. Unique among the former plebiscite areas and contested borderlands in the wake
of World War I, Upper Silesia became home to a special minority council established in
1922 through the German-Polish Geneva Accords. A Mixed Commission – made up
representatives from both countries and a leader from a neutral country – was established to
handle regional disputes and complaints from the minorities on both sides of the border.
Two regional minority offices meanwhile served as the first line of contact for complaints.
In reality, both countries were concerned primarily with the German speakers who chose to
remain in Polish Silesia. This economically powerful, urban and upper-class minority had a
greater ability to upset the partition compromise than did Polish speakers in Germany.
Until Hitler’s rise to power, and particularly after 1926, when the hard-line nationalist
Michał Grażyński took over leadership of Polish Upper Silesia, the concerns and complaints
of German speakers in Polish Upper Silesia dwarfed those of the Polish minority in German
Upper Silesia. From 1922 through 1932, German speakers filed 9,942 petitions with the
Minority Office in Polish Upper Silesia, while the Polish minority only filed 278 claims in
German Upper Silesia during the same era. 66
While the focus here will be on the specific failures of Polish activists in Germany to
use the Mixed Commission to their advantage, it is important to understand the reciprocal
nature of this agreement in promoting a precarious stability in the interwar period. As
German authorities decided how to respond to issues of bilingual rights and accusations of
66 Stanisław Rogowski, Komisja Mieszana dla Górnego Śląska, 1922-1937 (Opole: Instytut Śląski, 1977), 70.
258

mistreatment of the Polish-speaking minority, concern for the treatment of the German
minority in Polish Upper Silesia often proved the driving factor. For example, in July 1922
the local county commissioner of Oppeln/Opole, Michael Graf von Matuschka, denied that
there was a need to print all government documents in Polish and provide interpreters for
Polish-speaking citizens when dealing with officials, even though the Geneva Accord had
recently mandated these measures. Matuschka insisted that, to his knowledge, no one had
ever requested documents in Polish, and at least one local bureaucrat in most small towns
was fluent enough in Polish to interpret if the need arose. Provincial officials overrode his
decision, however, fearing it would lead to the repeal of the recent decision in Polish Upper
Silesia to publish documents in German. In the end, Matuschka’s depiction proved mostly
right: by 1926 the German government had cut back significantly on Polish-language
versions of most official publications and documents from lack of demand. Yet the concern
for reciprocal treatment of the German minority in Polish Upper Silesia proved paramount.
Similar considerations impacted the leeway given to the Polish nationalist press and political
party, especially as elections approached. These orders came directly from Carl Severing, the
Prussian Interior Minister in Berlin, who dictated to Upper Silesian President Proske in
1924 that the Polish party be allowed practically unlimited leeway in its campaigning. This
proved a bitter pill to swallow for Proske, who had privately described the paper’s content as
“virtually treasonous.” 67 But Severing’s main concern was defending the political rights of
the much stronger German minority parties in Polish Upper Silesia.
German authorities felt pushed to go out of their way to defend a Polish minority
which they thought existed more in the minds of Polish activists than in reality. While
67 Minutes of Proske meeting with Calonder, 14 Apr il 1924, APO, NO, Syg. 321.
259

officials sometimes brashly dismissed the national allegiance of Polish activists, they had
reason to believe these nationalists were manipulating the minority protections. Most
often, local Polish nationalists acting under the ZPwN made claims on behalf of citizens,
providing them the legal aid necessary to handle the paperwork. In many cases, however,
these claims were filed with what appears to have been only tenuous support from the
complainants themselves. While the Polish nationalists in Upper Silesia had a powerful
weapon in the form of legal appeal, the results failed to fulfill their hopes.
Somewhat paradoxically to the Polish nationalists, their newfound legal outlet did not
increase their strength, but rather sapped it. The general increase in safety after 1923, and
the guaranteed protections for Polish speakers under the Geneva Accords, left many Polish
speakers more satisfied with their cultural and linguistic autonomy than at anytime since
1871. Moreover, some local Polish speakers began to see the minority protection agency
not as a crucial institution enhancing their ethno-national rights, but rather as a tool to
solve local, personal disputes in their favor by imbuing them with national content.
Looking into the details of a few specific cases reveals a volatile mix of brash Polish
nationalism, intense (sometimes violent) local reaction, and officious government
skepticism at Polish claims.
The case of a death threat against the regional nationalist leader and priest Czesław
Klimas reveals most of these elements. His parish of Tarnau/Tarnów, situated in the far-
eastern corner of the county, was the only major locale in the county to experience armed
fighting from the Polish uprisings, and had a particularly difficult time overcoming its
recent history of violence. In 1923, Klimas received a death threat from a local anonymous
parishioner, prompting near-constant police protection. The Polish nationalist paper played
260

up the threat for maximum effect, blaming it on aggressive nationalists: “This new escapade
of the Tarnów assault troops shows that, with the dissolution of the assault troops in the
German Reich ... the moment has arrived when they can give free rein to their activity of
devouring Poles.” 68
The actual threat letter, however, did not refer to German nationalism or border
revisionism, but rather focused solely on local religious practice, accusing Klimas of
neglecting his German-speaking parishioners. The letter writer directed his anger squarely at
the pro-Polish propaganda he felt Kilmas was using to politicize the church. He pointed in
particular to a Polish-nationalist choir scheduled to sing in church in late October 1923, and
complained that no German-language services had been given in months despite demand
from locals. The anonymous letter writer felt strongly that Klimas was using the “church
service as a propaganda tool,” and suggested he practice his propaganda across the new
partition border, or face an unnatural death. 69 Klimas, however, remained steadfast in his
views, refusing to give any German-language services for several months after the death
threat.
The German authorities, while protecting Klimas until the threat seemed to dissipate,
tended to agree more with the accuser than the threatened party. A regional official crassly
downplayed the potential threat while finding sympathy for the German minority: “It is
understandable that this neglect has unleashed a valid animus among the German-minded
population, and also explains the sharp conflict between the local inhabitants and the
priest.” The local official insisted that all threats against Klimas would cease, “as soon as he
68 Nowiny Codzienne, 1 and 2 November 1923, nr. 249, 250. Official German translation, APO, NO, Syg. 88.
69 Original threat letter of 23 October 1923 in APO, NO, Syg. 88.
261

met his duties with respect to the German-minded population.” 70 Klimas was blamed in the
end by Proske for inviting the threat letter through his actions. 71 The disregard for Klimas’s
opinion should not be surprising, for German officials held little sympathy for his
nationalist views. Yet while nationalists on both sides had defined their antagonistic
positions, the original letter expressed anger couched not in terms of one nation doing
battle with another, but rather in terms of one nation doing battle with local church
tradition. Klimas was rhetorically positioned in the letter as the dangerous outsider,
spreading propaganda which tried to Polonize a deeply religious church flock interested in
bilingual pastoral care. In the end, as with every known death threat made in Oppeln/Opole
county during the Weimar era, the threat was not carried out. 72
Other cases did involve violence and bodily harm. The 1929 theater incident in
Oppeln/Opole, for example, also made its way through the minority complaint system.
Calonder, who ruled on the case in March 1930, condemned the attack but also found the
Polish government at fault for their retaliatory measures. 73 The winter of 1927-1928, at a
time when Polish nationalists were reviving youth and cultural activities, also saw a spike in
attacks by private citizens. In December 1927, for example, a railway official Theodor
Kasperek, along with his friend Johan Kneffel, stormed into a practice session for a Polish-
nationalist singing group. Kasperek shouted “This must be forbidden, we are Prussians and
want to be Prussian … When the minority there [speaking of Germans in Polish Upper
70 Report of Regierungsrat Brisch to Proske, 4 January 1924, APO, NO, Syg. 88.
71 Proske to Prussian Interior Ministry, 23 January 1924, in Deutsche und Polen, 824-25.
72 Although this cannot be definitively proven, it seems implausible that a threat carried out would have escaped the
historical record given the vigilance of Polish nationalists and German officials in tracking anti-Polish violence.
73 Kaeckenbeeck, The International Experiment of Upper Silesia: A Study in the Working of the Upper Silesian
Settlement, 1922-1937, 283ff.
262

Silesia] is not allowed to sing its songs, then we must strictly forbid you from it.” He and his
friend proceeded to break up the singing practice by force, although the press reported no
injuries. After the local judge dropped the case for lack of evidence, the ZPwN filed an
appeal with the minority office. Kasperek was a repeat offender, having disrupted a Polish
carnival festival in February 1927 in Vogtsdorf/Wójtowa Wieś, where he led others in anti-
Polish songs. 74 As a palliative, the railway office ensured that Kasperek was “seriously
rebuked” for his behavior. 75 In another case from March 1928, an unknown attacker lobbed
a grenade into the courtyard of a building in Malino/Malina where Polish singing practice
was taking place, shattering several windows but injuring no one. As the police
investigation stalled – the two main suspects both had alibis – the lead officer reported
rumors from “German-minded folks” in the village that Polish nationalists planted the
grenade themselves to deflect attention from similar attacks on German speakers in Polish
Upper Silesia. Polish nationalists, meanwhile, refused at first to share with police the grenade
shrapnel they had collected. 76 An atmosphere of mutual distrust prevailed at the local level,
promoted by Prussian officials who often let their German national colors show beneath
their gloss of neutrality.
The Nowiny reported that, from January 1927 through March 1928, some 25 “acts of
terror” had been committed in German Upper Silesia against Poles, no doubt including in
their count the cases mentioned above. Yet for all the valid or serious complaints of
discrimination, there were many others that were questionable. The mandolin club brawl
74 Report of Kasperek on 17 March 1927, APO, NO, Syg. 79.
75 All evidence from case file on Kasperek incident in APO, USMO, Syg. 190.
76 Nowiny Codzienne, 24 March 1928. Translation in APO, RO, Syg. 1859. Police report, 28 March 1928 in APO, SPO,
Syg. 94.
263

from April 1927, which involved no national tension, was categorized by nationalists as an
act of terror against Poles. In another example, the ZPwN filed a complaint in March 1928
that rental space for their events in small towns was often denied by local innkeepers after
they had received threats. They cited two specific cases, one in Malino/Malina in November
1927 and one in Zlönitz/Zlinice in January 1928. An investigation by the county
administrator Graf von Matuschka, however, revealed the exaggerated nature of the threats.
In the Zlönitz/Zlinice case, Matuschka admitted threats from “immature fellows,” but the
Polish group’s request was approved the meeting took place without incident. In
Malino/Malina, the husband and wife innkeepers had mistakenly double-booked the
meeting space; the Polish theater performance was rescheduled and came off without
incident. Matuschka even claimed good relations between the local Polish nationalists and
the innkeepers in Malino/Malina. The ZPwN subsequently dropped the complaint. 77 Even
allowing for some fudging by the loyal German administrator to protect his co-workers and
the Prussian system, such cases clearly often involved the exaggeration of threats, or the
nationalizing of events which had little or no national content. Yet these cases were also
considered acts of terror by Polish nationalists.
It is impossible to say precisely to what extent intimidation and violence against the
nationally active Polish minority discouraged Polish speakers from joining the movement.
The German administrative stance was that the vast majority of Polish speakers simply had
no desire to become national Poles. While the Polish activists often claimed terror and
repression hindered their work, they also regularly complained about the apathy of their
own Polish-speaking subjects. It is undeniable that many of the most active members of the
77 ZPwN complaint, 17 March 1928 , and Matuschka response, APO, SPO, Syg. 94.
264

Polish national minority endured discrimination and fear for their beliefs. Yet it is entirely
unclear whether, even in perfect conditions of absolute security, the broader Polish-speaking
population would have significantly embraced the national cause. In relatively low-stakes
cases of alleged minority repression, where violence and threats played little discernible role,
we can see the profound difficulties Polish nationalists had in convincing outsiders to join
their movement.
Nowhere is this clearer than with complaints over minority schools, when the ZPwN
sometimes worked against the wishes of Polish-speaking parents. In October 1924 ZPwN
filed a complaint that German officials refused to build a minority school in Tarnau/Tarnów
Opolski, despite having received the petition with sufficient signatures in June 1923. In
their complaint, the ZPwN suggested intimidation on behalf of the local town official, who
was supposedly spreading false information that the Polish school would only teach in
Polish, and never in German. The official countered that the Polish nationalist who had
collected signatures had lied about the schools, telling parents their children would only
receive religious instruction in Polish. The German government plowed ahead with plans to
open the school, but relented after parents balked at the idea of a separate institution for
their students. The ZPwN, defeated by the local lack of interest, withdrew its complaint in
January 1925. 78 They had thus filed a complaint on behalf of a minority which had no
serious interest in defending Polish national rights or in opening a separate minority school.
Three years later, another complaint filed by the ZPwN over school instruction met
with similar parental apathy. In September 1928 the ZPwN complained that the Polish
school in Königlich Neudorf/Nowa Wieś Królewska had been “abandoned” by the
78 ZPwN complaint, 9 October 1924, and German reply, 30 December 1924, APO, USMO, Syg. 60.
265

instructor. The teacher had in reality caught scarlet fever, and official miscommunication
had delayed the arrival of a substitute. For months, the ZPwN and government authorities
argued the fine points of the case; by the end of the following March, however, only three
families in the town with at least 2,300 Polish speakers still sent their children – six in all –
to the local Polish school. 79 With parental approval, the government closed the school. The
teacher, long recovered from scarlet fever, accompanied the six students to the local
German school to provide Polish language and religion instruction. The ZPwN thus saw the
case resolved only after the school they were trying to protect closed down from lack of
interest. Local Polish nationalists, in cases like these, found their biggest obstacle to be not
the German government, but rather apathy among local Polish speakers.
Evidence also suggests that locals used the ZPwN as a sort of last resort to defend their
own personal interests, without much concern for nationality. In 1930 the city council in
the regional center of Ratibor/Racibórz, facing a housing crisis, sought to expropriate the
gardening plot of a local Polish speaker to build a new apartment complex. The citizen
turned to the ZPwN hoping to defend his property, although his case for national
discrimination seemed tenuous at best. This sort of opportunistic use of the minority
protections must have been more than a singular occurrence based on the response of
national activists. In April 1930, regional activist Arkadiusz Bożek, his ire directed at the
Ratibor/Racibórz gardener, complained about the prevalence of such behavior. “The Polish
population reports to the Związek [ZPwN] only when there is, more often than not,
nothing left to save.” Frustrated and with a hint of self-aggrandizement, he complained to
79 The 1925 census registered 287 Polish-only speakers and 2,026 bilingual speakers out of a population of 6,439.
Census takers in 1925 were ordered by Proske to list all Polish speakers as bilingual if they exhibited any command of
German, thus artificially elevating the number of truly bilingual speakers. For results, see APO, RO, Syg. 2096.
266

the crowd, “Then you scream: “We are going down! Bożek, Bożek help us!” Feeling used by
the local population, Bożek of course saw the only solution in a true expression of national
solidarity. “Much misfortune could be avoided if the entire Polish population in Germany
would join themselves to one organization, the Związek [ZPwN].” 80 Given Brożek’s
scathing admonishments and the rather desperate position of the ZPwN by this point, such
warnings most likely fell on deaf ears.
The Polish nationalists had imagined building a vibrant national community of Poles,
but instead found themselves defending a Polish-speaking gardener having his land
expropriated for a much-needed public housing project. Such a far-fetched conversion of
social and personal conflicts into national ones was a common tactic for Polish nationalists,
but it represented a failure for them in building and representing a true national
community. The minority protections allowed for activists to claim the mantle of national
protections as group rights. But in reality these activists visions of their national group and
its rights clashed with that of Polish speakers. The latter group showed interest in securing
rights to language and religious practice, and living free of fear of repression, but rarely
imagined themselves as a threatened national group in the way activists imagined.
NATIONALIST AND OTHER POLITICS
The Polish nationalist program was, of course, not just a collection of newspaper
articles, youth outreach programs, and exaggerated complaints to international authorities.
The ZPwN and its local leaders were also intensely interested in political change, hoping to
extend their success from the prewar era when they rallied an overwhelming majority of the
80 Oppeln police report, 19 April 1930, APO, RO, Syg. 1860.
267

electorate behind Polish nationalist candidates for the Reichstag. Their political program,
however, must be seen as a near-total failure. Votes for the Polish nationalist party trended
consistently downward over the course of the 1920s in the Oppeln/Opole area. 81 In the
1924 Reichstag elections (there were three elections that year), the Polish party drew
between 23 and 25 percent of votes in the county, excluding the city of Oppeln/Opole.
These were their highest vote totals of any county in Upper Silesia, demonstrating that the
Oppeln/Opole area was a new center of nationalist activity. Even within the rural county,
however, their political power was uneven: some Polish-speaking towns had almost no
interest in the nationalist party, while other towns showed remarkable loyalty to the Polish
nationalist cause. Königlich Neudorf/Nowa Wieś Królewska registered just 18 percent of its
votes for the Polish party in the May 1924 elections, while Grudschütz/Grudzice, just a few
kilometers down the road, tallied 65 percent for the Poles in the same election. 82 The ability
of the Polish party to draw votes depended heavily on the presence of influential nationalist
leaders in specific towns who were able to attract votes.
Yet even these Polish nationalist leaders could not prevent an overall downward trend
in voting. In both the May 1928 and September 1930 elections, the Polish nationalist party
attracted just 14.4 percent of voters in the County; in the July 1932 elections (in which the
Nazis achieved their highest-ever vote totals nationwide), the Polish party pulled in just 5.7
percent of the vote in the county, and in the November 1932 elections this figure dropped
to 4.6 percent. The voting percentages within the city of Oppeln/Opole never surpassed 1.5
percent throughout the Weimar period. Even in the bilingual and Polish-speaking
81 The party oscillated names between the Polska Partia Ludowa [Polish People’s Party] and Polska-Katolicka Partia
Ludowa [Polish-Catholic People’s Party].
82 Masnyk, Dzielnica I Związku Polaków, 79, 83, 85.
268

neighborhoods on the edge of the city, votes for the Polish party never reached above four
percent. 83 Polish nationalists were never able to command the same dominance in the
countryside that they had in the pre-World War I period. In order to understand why, one
must look both at the program of the Polish party and at its competition.
While the Polish nationalists complained about election intimidation or repression,
most elections ran smoothly, with election violence really only coming into play after 1930
with the rise of the Nazis, by which point the Polish party was increasingly irrelevant in
Upper Silesian politics. Most leading nationalists in Oppeln/Opole were severely
disappointed by the election results. More often than not, they took to blaming the
nationally indifferent populace for their electoral failures. After the September 1924
elections, which saw a drop in votes compared the elections in May, activists expressed their
frustration with the Polish minority they claimed to represent. In the Nowiny they wrote, “it
is seemingly hard to understand, why this repressed and persecuted, shamed, disadvantaged
and neglected people does not create resistance, why they are not already thinking of their
rescue from this unhappy situation.” 84 Polish nationalists expected, or at least claimed
publicly, that all Polish speakers would vote based on their ethnic heritage alone, and
became angry when their theory proved wrong.
In reality, the Polish party faced distinct ideological challenges in connecting with its
potential voting base. The party had established itself as firmly anti-socialist, although many
Polish speakers, especially in the industrial area, actively participated in communist and
radical socialist uprisings during the plebiscite era. The patriarchal attitude of many Polish
83 For election results, see APO, SPO, Syg. 23, 24, 26, 27; AMO, Syg. 1115, 1116; Oppelner Zeitung 1 August and 7
November 1932.
84 Nowiny Codzienne 23 September 1924, nr. 221. Official German translation in APO, NO, Syg. 65.
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activists over their mainly lower-class flock likely increased this gap. The Polish nationalists
were also staunch promoters of Catholic rights, but only insofar as it promoted the Polish
nationalist cause. Their anti-clerical election propaganda against clergy who did not
promote Polish nationalism had the potential to alienate devout churchgoers. Moreover, in
their stances on class, religion, and language policy they faced formidable regional
opponents: the German Communist Party (KPD) and the Catholic Center Party.
Throughout the Weimar era the Center Party remained the largest vote getter in
Oppeln/Opole, and throughout Upper Silesia. In a deeply religious society, the Center Party
arguably remained the default choice at the polls. But whereas the Center Party defined
itself as the defender of bilingual religious practice and cultural leeway, the Polish party
instead saw a dangerous foe committed to the assimilation, and thus the extermination, of
local Polish culture. The Polish party could hardly contain its hatred for the Center Party
during election time, although its attacks were often contradictory. During an election
campaign in May 1930, the Nowiny reported on the Center Party, “One meets in their
ranks the most stubborn Hakatists,” referring to right-wing nationalists from the prewar
Eastern Marches Society [Ostmarkverein]. The article suggested that Bismarck would roll
over in his grave to see his former enemy, the Center Party, now carrying out his anti-
Polish agenda. Yet the very same article suggested that it was precisely the lack of national
commitment that most enraged the Polish party. In particular, priests were accused of
manipulating their flocks into voting on purely religious grounds. The worst of these
priests, the Polish nationalists argued, were those that had “de-nationalized themselves,” in
other words, given up national commitment in favor of religious or regional loyalties. 85
85 Nowiny Codzienne 10 May 1930, nr. 108. From official German translation in APO, NO, Syg. 67.
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Thus Polish activists simultaneously condemned the Center Party as German nationalist
and yet anational. After regular defeats, it became commonplace to blame the influence of
local priests. 86 Although there was some internal disagreement in 1930 about whether
attacking the Center Party was the best tactic for the Polish party, it continued to define the
Catholics as the main enemy, even during the rise of the Nazi Party. As the party of
integration, the Center Party seemed a greater enemy than the xenophobic, chauvinistic
Nazis.
On the class front, the Polish party had to compete with the KPD. This working-class
party was able to feed off of widespread economic discontent in an area where the other
party of the workers – the Social Democrats (SPD) – was notoriously weak. By the end of
the Weimar era, the Communists had achieved far greater success than the Poles: in the July
1932 elections, the KPD earned nearly four times more votes in Oppeln/Opole city and
county than the Poles. The reaction of the Polish nationalists in Oppeln/Opole to the KPD
was predictably hostile. In the logic of their nationalist propaganda, allegiance to the KPD
was part of the breakdown of Catholic-Polish society. The loss of the Polish mother tongue
inevitably led to the loss of Catholic morals: “He who forgets the mother tongue, also
forgets to pray to God,” the Nowiny claimed in 1928. “Insofar as he forgets his nationality,”
it continued, “he also forgets his religion.” The loss of religion then opened the path to
Communism, which was particularly strong among the youth. In this logic Germanization
thus bred a loss of morals led ultimately to Communist loyalties: “Our children,
Germanized in the schools and often in the churches, are a lost cause not just for nationality
86 See, for example, Ibid., 23 September 1924, nr. 221; 28 September 1927, nr. 222; 23 October 1930, nr. 247.
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ut also for the Catholic faith … That is why their numbers are so high among the
Communists. These are the effects of Germanization!” 87
This interpretation, blaming national and religious indifference for the strength of
Communism, explains more about the fears of the Polish party than the morals of the
population. In reality, the Polish party lacked a comprehensive social program for an
economically depressed population that often showed more interest in basic material needs
than in national belonging. Even the Center Party, with its extensive network of Catholic
labor unions and welfare programs, showed much more concern for locals’ material needs
than the Polish party. This deficiency was obvious even to some regional Polish activists. In
1928 a leading nationalist from the industrial area, Stanisław Witczak, submitted a report to
the Polish government, suggesting that the steady decline in support for the Polish party
stemmed directly from its lack of a social program. “The broad masses allow themselves to
be guided entirely from worries about their material existence and vote ... partly out of
conviction, partly out of economic calculation, for the German parties.” Himself a
convinced Pole, Witczak believed that overcoming the population’s “political indifference”
required organizing Polish speakers into trade unions and professional organizations that
were nationally divided – a task the Polish party never seriously took up. 88 Instead, the
Polish party continued to insist that it should automatically earn locals’ votes based on the
primacy of national affiliation.
The ZPwN’s lack of concern for social issues and its insistence on inciting hatred
between Germans and Poles led to a local revolt within Polish nationalist ranks. Led by the
87 Nowiny Codzienne, 27 June 1928, nr. 146. Official German translation in APO, NO, Syg. 67.
88 German translation of Witczak pamphlet, n.d, APO, RO, Syg. 1859.
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Nowiny editor Antoni Pawletta, a group of native-born Upper Silesians broke away from
the ZPwN-dominated movement between 1928 and 1933, moving to establish their own
organizations and alternative newspaper, the Katolik Trzyrazowy [Catholic Thrice-Weekly].
Their main complaints centered on the heavily anti-German attitude of the national party,
the lack of a social program, and the lack of attention to local needs. Before the Nazi
elections of March 1933 (which the Polish party still aggressively contested), the Katolik
Trzyrazowy wrote critically of the Polish party, depicting it as controlled by outsiders. “In
our view one must reckon more with the voice of the voters than with the views of a few
Berlin men, who only know the needs of the Silesian population from stories.” 89 The Polish
nationalist movement ended the Weimar era in disarray, with a local revolt against a
nationally controlled party, which relied on the imagined primordial national community
of all Poles for electoral support. This internal disunity mirrored the era immediately before
World War I, when Koraszewski and his Gazeta Opolska were challenged by the new
Nowiny press, who claimed to represent the true regional interests of Upper Silesians against
the outsider Koraszewski. Ironically, the tables were now turned on the Nowiny. Its
involvement with the ZPwN in the 1920s left it open to the same attacks that it had
originally lodged two decades earlier, namely that it was out of touch with the local
population.
Some Polish historians have criticized the ZPwN for being out of touch with workers,
and instead promoting an antiquated agenda based on irrelevant agricultural policy and a
Kulturkampf-style attitude to religious policy in an era of relative religious freedom.
89 Katolik Trzyrazowy, 18 February 1933. German translation in APO, NO, Syg. 211.
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Undoubtedly, this agenda hindered the party from reaching its full potential. 90 But with
competing parties attracting Polish-speaking voters with agendas that de-emphasized
nationality, it seems likely that a large portion of the population felt little solidarity or
natural group belonging as Poles, and instead voted as Catholics, or as workers, or as Upper
Silesians. The critique of the Polish party’s tactics therefore does not go far enough: it was
the party’s basic assumptions and philosophy that all Polish speakers were willing members
of the Polish nation that proved to be false during the Weimar era.
Unable to reconcile reality with their own nationalist assumptions, the core group of
Polish nationalist leaders instead took to blaming and attacking the national indifference of
the population they were trying to recruit. Before the 31 July 1932 elections, which recorded
the highest ever democratic vote totals for the Nazi Party in Germany, the Nowiny
Codzienne defined the enemy as broadly as possible, blurring the lines between German
racial nationalism and less radical forms. Reacting to two Hitler speeches in Upper Silesia in
late July, the article equated “the word of the ‘apostle’ of Hitlerist chauvinism” with all other
parties. “The Hitlerists as well as the other nationalists, and even the Zentrum, the Social
Democrats and the Communists show the same appetite when it comes to exterminating
Poles.” 91 In the Darwinian struggle for national loyalty, all German parties were seen as
equal aggressors. As suggested earlier in the chapter, however, Polish nationalists also shared
an affinity with the Nazis for racial thinking about national division, and would come to
embrace Nazi logic in the early months after Hitler took power.
90 See Masnyk, Dzielnica I Związku Polaków, 184, Mendel, Stosunki społeczne i polityczne, 214-215.
91 Nowiny Codzienne, 26 July 1932, nr. 169.
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The broad electoral attack strategy did little to stem the exodus away from the Polish
nationalist party. After the July 1932 Reichstag elections, local ZPwN leaders recognized
that most Polish speakers had voted for the Communists, the Zentrum, or even the Nazis
instead of their own party. Rather than using the defeat to prompt self-reflection, the party
lashed out against the area’s Polish speakers. Unable to see any fault in their own actions,
nationalists instead blamed Polish speakers’ votes on “weakness of character.” One article
even went so far as to claim treason among the local population for their voting habits,
lambasting them as “you coward, you betrayer of nationality, you brother murderer.” 92 The
party of Poles thus ended the Weimar era spewing hate against the nationally indifferent
whom they had failed to recruit.
CONCLUSION
Less than a year after the July 1932 elections, in May 1933 (at a time when the Polish
press was still relatively free), 93 the nationalist paper sounded a cautiously optimistic note on
the future of ethnic relations within Hitler’s new regime. They had consistently touted the
supposed benefits of ethnic separation for their national cause in the Weimar era. Thus, they
took particular comfort in a Reichstag speech from 17 May in which Hitler proclaimed,
“The notion of Germanization, this spiritual mentality of the past century, that one can
make Germans out of French and Poles, is for us equally foreign, such that we are turning
ourselves passionately against the reverse efforts [to de-Germanize Germans].” The Nowiny,
92 Ibid., 6 August 1932, nr. 179. Official German translation in APO, NO, Syg. 68.
93 Nazi repression of the political press was still limited mainly to the left-wing Socialist and Communist movements
in the spring of 1933. The Polish press in Upper Silesia was afforded protection League of Nations protections, and
continued to be critical of the Nazi government into 1937, long after other forms of political dissent or diversity had
been supressed.
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spotting a welcome analogy, commented “The Polish population in Germany is no less
inclined to voice its satisfaction about that.” 94 Without fully grasping the shift to racial
nationalism which Hitler was advocating, and certainly without foreseeing the
consequences that Hitler’s ideology would have for Poland less than a decade later, Polish
nationalists found solace in Hitler’s rejection of assimilation. It was a sentiment echoed by
activists throughout the German-Polish borderland. 95 The hubris in Prussian-German
cultural superiority seemed to have given way to an era of true national separation.
Although skeptical of Hitler’s tactics, Polish nationalists felt – for the moment – that they
had an ally in the Nazi Führer.
Polish activists in Oppeln/Opole had few accomplishments to look back on during the
Weimar era, despite the expansion of their nationalization efforts into nearly every possible
social and cultural realm. Youth, theater, and singing groups attracted a temporary surge of
interest in the late 1920s but failed to coalesce into a socially coherent movement of Poles.
Attempts to “protect” the minority more often than not involved exploiting non-national
cases for national ends, and locals – learning how potent the language of national rights had
become in interwar Europe – engaged in the same process for personal gain. Commitment
to the Polish project of nation-building through education, associational life, and politics
remained limited to a core group of committed activists who tried to exploit national
rhetoric for their own political aims. They insisted on the objective nature of national
belonging, asserting that local Polish speakers in were simply waiting to be awakened, even
as they consistently failed in their program. Through near-blind faith in the logic of ethnic
94 Nowiny Codzienne, 21 May 1933, nr. 106.
95 Rudolf Jaworski, “Die polnische Grenzminderheit in Deutschland 1920-1939” in Deutsche und Polen, 67.
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nationalism, these activists insisted upon the unity of Poles in Germany. This was the
picture they were able to present to the outside world with some success, and this is the view
which passed down to the postwar Polish nation-state.
In reality, Weimar-era Upper Silesians were not unawakened; they simply had other
priorities: securing suitable housing, finding coal to heat their homes, or providing a way
out of poverty for their children. If they chose economic and linguistic integration into
Weimar society, this did not necessarily entail a wholesale embrace of German nationalism,
but rather a practical hedging of bets on the best future for them and their children. The
increasing political stakes of identifying as Polish after World War I had driven away many
Upper Silesians from the movement. Frustrated by this apathy, Polish activists remained
firm in their belief in ethnic nationalism to awaken local Polish speakers. The insular group
of activists only further radicalized, resulting in a growing gap between their beliefs and the
national indifferent of Upper Silesians. The feedback cycle that drove these two groups
farther apart would eventually bring nationalists to embrace illiberal measures to enact the
national division of local societies against the perceived enemies of integration and ethnic
ambiguity.
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Broken Heimat
The Limits of German <strong>Nationalism</strong> in Weimar Upper Silesia
278
Chapter 5
The sweeping changes brought to Oppeln/Opole by its partition marked a sort of zero
hour for Upper Silesians – not just Polish-speaking, but for the entire population. From the
time of Upper Silesia’s political consolidation as a Catholic, bilingual region in the
nineteenth century, its residents had defined themselves largely in contrast to their greatest
perceived threat: kleindeutsch, Protestant German nationalism. This enemy within
Germany had unified Upper Silesian German- and Polish-minded Catholics. With the
partition of Upper Silesia, however, many Germans increasingly defined the enemy as
external to the German state. Poland, perceived as illegitimately occupying formerly
Prussian territory, and the Entente powers, seen as having carved up Prussia’s east in order
to exact punishment on Germany, filled this new role as Upper Silesia’s greatest threats. In
the process, distinctly regional issues which had long affected Upper Silesia, particularly its
poor economic condition, became increasingly wrapped up in a larger national and
international discourse on a “threatened East.” Nationally apathetic bilingual speakers who
had remained buffered from German nationalism through prewar Catholic politics now
faced narrowing options to express their distinct regional identification. Upper Silesia’s
partition was swallowed up in a larger framework of German national self-defense that
would take a radical turn by the 1930s.
One lens for understanding this transformation can be found in competing
conceptions of Heimat. Historians of Heimat have largely stressed the integrative function

of local patriotism in the forging of national identities, as a mechanism “by which the state
could reproduce itself at the local level of civic experience characteristic of most people’s
lives.” 1 Heimat could serve as an effective bridge, however, only if it fully spanned the gap
between local experience and national identification. In Weimar Upper Silesia, Heimat
advocates struggled to convince an underdeveloped, nationally apathetic bilingual
population of its supposed place in the German nation. By erasing the imprint of Polish
culture and language from Heimat literature, Germans excluded most Upper Silesians from
their vision of the region’s place in Germany. Instead of a portrait of regional diversity,
Heimat writers painted Upper Silesia as part of a broad eastern zone where Prussian
expansion had single-handedly brought cultural enlightenment.
Among the promoters of Heimat were many prominent Catholic politicians. The
Catholic Center Party emerged as the key leader of the newly autonomous Upper Silesian
province, and its politics would serve as the fulcrum between regional and national policies.
The Center Party’s local popularity rested largely on its promotion of bilingual religious and
educational practice. Yet these policies became increasingly hard to justify in a national
political climate dominated by revanchist desires against Poland. The Upper Silesian Center
Party, while promoting bilingualism and ethnic diversity at home, also committed to a
broad Weimar political consensus on the need for border revision, which placed Upper
Silesia firmly in this “threatened East.” Thus, at the same time that the Catholic-inspired
vision of a politically autonomous Upper Silesian Heimat reached its full fruition, it was
being eroded by politicians and activists, including many Catholics, who presented the
region as a German cultural landscape under siege by Poles.
1 Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990),
8.
279

The success of the Center Party ultimately rested on its ability to provide upward
mobility and security for bilingual Upper Silesians, a task made difficult by the province’s
persistent economic deficiencies, and all but impossible with the global depression of the
early 1930s. The Center Party’s fragile grip on its bilingual electorate began to slip away to
the typical end-of-Weimar outlets: Communists and Nazis. The groundwork for the
regional rise of the Nazi Party – which relied on the support of many German and Polish
speakers – had been set by German nationalists who had already framed Upper Silesia as a
land under national siege. Rather than attacking Upper Silesian Polish speakers, Nazi leaders
described the national threat in local terms as an attack on the Heimat. The Nazis
recognized that few Upper Silesians around Oppeln/Opole felt strong loyalties to the Polish
state. Thus, they used the language of a “threatened East” without overtly attacking the
ethnic basis of local Polish culture. While their ability to attract voters never outpaced that
of the Center Party in this heavily Catholic land, the Nazi Party nonetheless demonstrated
its willingness to bring Polish speakers into its fold. Thus even as some German nationalists
had used Heimat to exclude Polish-speaing Upper Silesians from their vision of regional
culture, the Nazis capitalized on economic discontent to attract Polish speakers to radical
nationalism.
THE SHIFTING CENTER
Upper Silesia emerged from the plebiscite era politically strengthened as a regional unit,
but economically weakened. This section focuses on the national tensions within the
region’s premier political party, the Center Party, while the following section examines the
economic weaknesses of Upper Silesia and the Center Party’s response. This portrait of the
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egion’s political and economic landscape is a prerequisite to understanding how
nationalists and Heimat activists refashioned Upper Silesia’s place on mental maps of
Central Europe. The Weimar-era resurgence of the Catholic Center Party in the region
began in the plebiscite era. Its leading role in securing autonomous rights for the province
bolstered its image as the defender of Catholic rights and bilingualism. With Polish
nationalists largely discredited through their calls for secession, the Center Party emerged as
the undisputed leader of the new Provinz Oberschlesien, separated from its larger, Lower
Silesian sibling. The basis of party power was found above in regional administration: all
Oberpräsidenten [provincial presidents] of Upper Silesia in the Weimar era hailed from the
Center Party, along with most top regional officials. While the party’s share of the popular
vote never reached an absolute majority given the panoply of Weimar-era interest parties,
the Center still remained the most popular party continuously from 1924 until Hitler’s rise
to power. Its competitors varied by place and time: in 1924 the Polish party, prior to its
electoral freefall, nearly matched (and in one election bested) Center Party vote totals in
the countryside around Oppeln/Opole. In the city, meanwhile, the German National
People’s Party (DNVP) earned the second-highest vote totals consistently (around 20-25
percent) until the rise of the Nazi Party. Even in the July 1932 elections, when the Nazis
emerged as the strongest party nationwide, the Center Party held on to a narrow plurality
of voters around Oppeln/Opole. 2 The Center Party weathered the various crises of the
Weimar era while also maintaining a firm grip on the reins of regional administrative
power.
2 See, for example, Reichstag election results of 4 May 1924 in APO, SPO, Syg. 23, AMO, Syg. 1115; results of 20 May
1928 in APO, SPO, Syg. 25, AMO, Syg. 1116; results of 31 July 1932 in Oppelner Zeitung, 1 August 1932.
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The Center Party’s endurance as the most popular party in Weimar Upper Silesia must
be traced above all to its cultural lenience vis-à-vis the bilingual local population. The new,
democratic Prussian political structure allowed Catholic politicians to break free of their
associations with unpopular prewar policies restricting Polish language use. The Center
Party benefited above all for Prussia’s new tolerance for Polish-language education in late
1918 and greater control over religious practice. The regional party was thus able to stave
off many of the cultural fears of Polish speakers. Its church, schooling, and language
policies, as seen in Chapter 4, tended to resonate with a Polish-speaking population that still
preferred religious services and instruction in Polish, but increasingly sought out education
for their children in German. These policies were framed by the Center Party in terms of
benevolent Germanization. As the regional party head Carl Ulitzka noted, “The winning
over of the Polish-speaking population for Germanness occurs not through combating the
Polish mother tongue. Through positive transfer of German culture, through well-built and
well-run schools, through easing entrance to higher schools of learning, through people’s
libraries, etc. the current of German culture will be transmitted into the Upper Silesian
population.” 3 In maintaining a staunchly pro-German stance in the plebiscite, the Center
Party also regained Polish-speaking or bilingual voters who had voted for Polish nationalists
in the prewar years, but were not yet ready to abandon Germany for Poland in the
plebiscite. In the wake of the plebiscite, a large proportion of locals fled the extremist turn
of national politics in favor of a defense of local rights and hopes for economic prosperity.
On the other hand, the Center Party had shifted significantly towards a more pro-
German national stance – a process which began in the 1890s but accelerated after World
3 Originally in Coseler Zeitung, 20 January 1928, nr. 16. Quoted in Guido Hitze, Carl Ulitzka (1873-1953), oder,
Oberschlesien zwischen den Weltkriegen (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2002), 673, fn. 385.
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War I. The plebiscite again served as the key moment here for the regional Center Party. Its
unwavering support for the German cause in the plebiscite subsequently developed into
support for Weimar-era revanchist foreign policy and domestic state integration. The
party’s support for border revision had the potential to bring it into conflict with its
constituents, many of whom had traumatic memories of the chaos which accompanied the
recent partition. Negotiating between the demands of Berlin and of regional constituents
proved a delicate balancing act for the Center Party. The case of Upper Silesian autonomy
proves one example of this. While the area had already been granted provincial status within
Prussia in 1919, political leaders – most crucially Ulitzka – had held out promises that Upper
Silesia would seek autonomy as a free state outside of Prussia. After the partition, however,
cross-party support for a free state diminished, and by 1922 the Center endured increasingly
harsh criticism for its advocacy of autonomy, a stance now shared only with Polish
nationalists. Prussian officials, led by Prime Minister Otto Braun, warned of the financial
insolvency of a tiny Upper Silesian state severed from Prussia, and privately feared the
precedent it would create for other provinces to secede from Prussia and eventually dissolve
the state. These same officials feared the power of the Center Party, with its deep clerical-
social roots, to achieve the 60 percent vote needed for autonomy. The issue of free-state
autonomy created a rift within the Center Party, as more nationalistic Catholics accused
their pro-autonomy brethren of attempting to weaken the Prussian and German states. 4
The regional party did much to boost its status with Berlin by ultimately abandoning,
albeit at the last minute, its campaign for free-state autonomy. Their decision rested most
crucially on a symbolic confirmation of Upper Silesian autonomy in the Prussian Landtag a
4 See, in particular, the reports of early 1922 in GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 77, Tit. 856, Nr. 714, 715.
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few months before the scheduled vote on free-state status. 5 The party lost some political
credibility among local voters for its reversal, but in the process gained political respect
within Prussian ministries. It paved the way for more productive coalition governing
between Catholic, Social Democratic, and German Democratic parties, and most
importantly reaffirmed the German-Prussian loyalty of the dominant Center Party. 6 On
the other hand, it opened the party to scathing attacks from Polish nationalists. Moreover,
the Catholic Party’s goodwill with more nationalist parties in Berlin only lasted as long as
they maintained a fruitful coalition. During the 1928 elections, when the Center Party was
expelled from its role in the governing coalition, it was accused by German nationalist
parties of having “vaterlandlose [without Fatherland] sensibilities.” 7 The Center Party was
ultimately pulled in two different directions by its pro-Polish cultural policies and by its pro-
Weimar policies, opening it to attack from nearly all sides.
Just as the Center Party faced difficulties reconciling its support for cultural autonomy
with loyalty to Berlin, so it faced increased challenges in rallying its disparate electorate to
support common social policies. With a new wing of young, energetic leaders under the
guidance of Ulitzka, the Upper Silesian Center embraced the national Center Party’s new
leftist wing, embodied by Germany’s Chancellor from 1921-1922, Joseph Wirth. In so
doing, regional Catholic leaders sought to appeal to the economic despair of the local
population, and particularly to recapture support in the industrial area, where they had lost
ground to Spartacist and communist radicalism after 1918. In embracing “social
Catholicism,” the Upper Silesian Catholic party also underwent a rechristening as the
5 Hitze, Carl Ulitzka, 547.
6 Ibid., 558-559.
7 Quoted in Ibid., 626.
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Katholische Volkspareti [Catholic People’s Party – KVP], a name which had been crafted
amid the revolutionary fervor of late 1918. 8 Its new brand of economic populism needed to
appeal to groups who had been radicalized during the revolution by communist, anti-
religious ideology.
At the same time, the Center Party still relied for its base of support on morally
conservative Catholics in farming or hand-working trades. In towns and villages, the priest
functioned simultaneously as the dominant moral authority, anti-socialist crusader, and
Center Party election advocate. These priests, in advocating openly for the KVP, tended to
treat classes not as destined for conflict but rather as an organic system in need of slight
balancing. One election broadsheet signed by several priests in 1924 called “for a
compromise [Ausgleich] among the individual classes, which are interconnected like the
limbs of a body.” 9 The KVP’s vision of mild class compromise rather than outright conflict
may have been influential in socially close-knit, clerically-led rural communities, but in
urban parishes the KVP competed with parties willing to advocate for working-class
interests more forcefully. Finding a balance between the cultural interests of conservative
Catholics and the working-class populism of its more urban constituents would prove
difficult.
The regional KVP, like the prewar Catholic party, still depended on nationally
indifferent Upper Silesians as its electoral base. Yet by more firmly supporting a Weimar-
era nationalist vision of border revision, the interwar KVP became a less viable political
outlet for Upper Silesians hoping to avoid nationalist loyalties altogether. The KVP still
8 Ibid., 184.
9 Election material from 23 April 1924 in AAW, 1 A 25 h48
285

emained the default party for many regional Catholics thanks to its promotion of religious
and linguistic freedoms, but this tolerance was tested by the party’s need to fit the mold of
German nationalist parties, especially on foreign policy. Its success at home, meanwhile,
would be hampered by persistent economic hardship. The failure of the KVP to overcome
regional economic deficiencies, even when its policies were rarely at fault, still reflected
most harshly on the party in power.
FROM REGIONAL MISERY TO THREATENED BORDERLAND
The economic landscape of the Oppeln/Opole area in the 1920s exhibited key
continuities with the prewar period. In particular, long-standing patterns of economic
disadvantage in wages, prices, and housing were exacerbated, but not fundamentally
altered, by the partition. The city itself, already burdened by the population explosion of the
pre-war decades, continued grow in size after 1918. The 17 percent rise in the city’s
population between 1919 and 1925 does not capture the total population transfer in and
out of the city in the years surrounding the plebiscite, as Poles left for Poland while
Germans moved westwards, often settling in Oppeln/Opole or using it was a way station to
other destinations. 10 The social ills caused by this migratory population – typically poor,
sick, and lacking resources – were significant, and placed enormous strains above all on the
city’s housing infrastructure.
The establishment of a new provincial government, combined with the transfer of
administrative offices (most notably the Railway Administration) which had previously
been in now-Polish territories, also caused a spike in the number of civil servants. The
10 For statistics on Oppeln’s population see Edward Mendel, Stosunki społeczne i polityczne w Opolu w latach 1918-
1933 (Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1975), 7.
286

landscape of the city changed, as new grand government buildings as well as more prosaic
structures like maintenance warehouses sprang up. Between 1910 and 1922 the number of
civil servants in the city nearly trebled, from around 2,000 to 5,422, reaching 8,412 by
1933. 11 In 1925 Oppeln/Opole’s mayor, August Neugebauer, estimated that counting wives
and dependents, nearly 60 percent of the city lived directly from a government paycheck. 12
While these jobs tended to provide steadier employment than industry or agriculture, not
all of them were high-status or high-paying. The two largest government employers were
the postal service and the railway administration, often jobs of the middling classes. 13
For those not employed by the government, economic opportunities became
increasingly bleak, and the nationwide upturn of 1924-1928 barely registered on the radar
of Upper Silesians. The largest industrial employer in and around Oppeln/Opole, the
cement and limestone industry, suffered the greatest downturn. The eight factories around
the city produced 168,000 tons of cement in 1913, but by 1915 that number had fallen
drastically to 65,000 tons, and it never reached anywhere near its pre-World War I levels in
the 1920s. The largest local company, Portland Cement, owned 92 percent of the industry’s
capital, and while the company generated 4.5 million marks of profit in 1927, its workers
suffered from depressed wages. 14 In 1924 cement workers earned 33 Groschen per hour.
Thanks largely to the advocacy of the Christian Social movement, hourly wages had
doubled by 1929. Yet to compare, construction workers in Berlin and Hamburg around this
time typically earned about one mark per hour, nearly double the common wage in
11 Ibid., 21-22.
12 August Neugebauer, “Die Regierungs- und Provinzial-Hauptstadt Oppeln” in: Erich Köhrer, ed., Oberschlesien:
Seine Entwicklung und seine Zukunft (Berlin: Dt. Verl.-Aktienges., 1925), 66.
13 Mendel, Stosunki społeczne i polityczne, 22.
14 Ibid., 17.
287

Oppeln/Opole. Workers were also subject to factory closings: the same year that one
Portland Cement shut down, city unemployment rolls rose from around 1,000 to 2,539. 15
The huge buildup in the construction industry, from 185 workers in 1923 to 2,577 in
1933, no doubt provided some relief for those hurt by declining industry. But the spate of
new construction could do little to put a dent in Oppeln/Opole’s most pressing crisis: a
shortage of housing. Population growth and renters looking to upgrade from squalid single-
room apartments meant that demand continued to outpace supply. From 1918-1924 some
1,247 apartments were built in the city, with the pace of construction only increasing in the
later 1920s. 16 Yet by 1930 some 2,475 citizens in Oppeln/Opole lacked adequate shelter.
Housing prices, meanwhile, rose about one-third between 1925 and 1929. 17 At the end of
the decade, it was estimated that Upper Silesia, with its population of around 1.2 million,
lacked 44,000 apartments needed to house its population. 18 A host of municipal programs
and incentives could only create a moderate dent in this housing crisis.
The working classes came primarily from the edge of town, or from villages and
countryside surrounding the city, where their lives were no less afflicted by hardship. Many
maintained one foot on their small landholdings and the other in the dusty cement
factories or coal mines. Weekly commutes to the industrial area in eastern Upper Silesia,
with weekend trips home to tend their plots, were a common ritual. 19 Despite the relatively
heavy industrialization of eastern Upper Silesia, the province as a whole had 43 percent of
all employed persons working in agriculture, higher than the Prussian average of 30
15 Ibid., 32, 34, 112, 315.
16 August Neugebauer, “Die Regierungs- und Provinzial-Hauptstadt Oppeln” in Köhrer, Oberschlesien, 66.
17 Mendel, Stosunki społeczne i polityczne, 38.
18 APO, SPO, Syg. 136.
19 Hans Herschel, “Oberschlesische Landwirtschaft” in Köhrer, Oberschlesien, 56.
288

percent. 20 Few dispute that the small villages and agricultural settlements were the epicenter
of economic suffering in Weimar Upper Silesia.
The essential dilemma of this class of small peasant farmers, most of whom in the
Oppeln/Opole area owned plots of less than ten hectares, was a gap between costs and crop
prices. Agriculture in the 1920s faced fierce competition from overseas crops and generally
low worldwide commodity prices. Grain prices, after significant price drops from 1924-
1927, stood at half their 1914 prices. 21 The result was crippling agricultural debt. As of 1928,
two of every five farms the province were indebted more than 30 percent of the total value
of the property. 22 Along with this debt came the social and health costs of widespread
poverty: Upper Silesia had the dubious distinction of holding Germany’s highest infant
mortality rates (one-third higher than the national average), as well as the highest
proportion of deaths from tuberculosis. 23 Working with the lowest per capita government
distributions of any province in Prussia, 30 percent lower than average, Upper Silesian
administrators tended to focus their scarce resources on infrastructure needs such as
transportation, housing, and school construction, leaving little funding for much-needed
health and social welfare programs. 24
As in the prewar era, the artisan class of the city worked vigorously to defend its
livelihood against the encroachment of modern industry. While their economic power was
undoubtedly declining, artisans enjoyed special political privilege as the supposed
foundation of Germanness in the province. The 1920s actually saw a significant increase in
20 Die Not der preussischen Ostprovinzen, (Königsberg1930), 15-16.
21 Hitze, Carl Ulitzka, 702.
22 Ibid., 702, fn. 489.
23 Die Not der preussischen Ostprovinzen, 23.
24 ———, Carl Ulitzka, 695-697.
289

the number and variety of mandatory guilds for local craftsmen. Watchmakers, drillers,
women’s fashion tailors, and even gingerbread bakers all established their own guilds 25 This
form of corporatist protection for the artisan class was achieved with the blessing of
municipal politicians, contributing to an economic stasis and lack of competition in
essential local trades.
The case of the guilds begins to reveal how national political priorities could distort
economic policy. The political value of the artisan class to various German-minded parties
(including the KVP) was considered important enough to offer protectionist measures even
they hurt the working classes. The guilds were inevitably placed, as one celebration put it,
among the list of “patriotic groups and associations loyal to Heimat and the Fatherland.” 26
Bakers and tailors marched arm-in-arm in nationalist parades, earning the praise of
government officials and local citizens for their combination of nationality and local
authenticity. “The mindset and political activities of the handworkers are … core German
[kerndeutsch],” one citizen wrote. Although these Upper Silesian artisans had Polish-
speaking ancestry, they now represented “the core of the native German population of
Upper Silesia.” 27 In lauding handworkers for their loyalty, German nationalists were
unwittingly praising the process of assimilation which had turned Polish-speaking peasants
into German tradesmen. Yet protectionist policies were simultaneously disadvantaging
those locals who had not, or could not, make this transformation in pro-German artisans.
Many of the economic problems plaguing Upper Silesia were an extension, or an
acceleration, of decades-old regional trends. Wages were among the lowest in the country,
25 “Innungswesen” report, APO, AMO, Syg. 2377.
26 “Volk in Not!” invitation to ten-year Versailles protest, APO, AMO, Syg. 419.
27 Dr. Gerber, “Das schlesische Handwerk und Gewerbe” in Köhrer, Oberschlesien, 59.
290

unemployment rates were stubbornly high, prices remained above average, housing
shortages and substandard living conditions were common, and according to key indicators
the population was the least healthy in Germany. All of these trends mark a continuation of
the economic marginalization of Upper Silesia within Prussia and the region’s development
into a backwater dating back to the nineteenth century. At the same time, many of these
same issues were exacerbated by the partition of the province. The pressures placed on
Oppeln/Opole’s infrastructure by the increase in population through emigration from
Polish Upper Silesia were significant. The loss of vast coal deposits and a majority of mineral
production factories proved the most sustained hit to the regional economy. Patterns of
labor migration within the province were also largely destroyed by the new international
border with Poland. A tariff war between Germany and Poland in the mid-to-late 1920s
also further hampered cross-border trade, and Upper Silesians suffered particularly since
transport costs of commodities and goods from other parts of Germany remained high. In
judging the range of problems weighing down Upper Silesia’s economy, however, it
becomes clear that the partition of Upper Silesia exacerbated, but did not fundamentally
cause, widespread regional misery in the 1920s. This also proved much the same case in
other areas of the German-Polish borderlands, such as East Prussia. 28
As Upper Silesia was increasingly drawn into debates about economic impoverishment
in eastern areas of Prussia, however, the region’s long-term disadvantages were elided in
favor of a more politically expedient vision of a “threatened East.” This discourse served to
bind Upper Silesia to a larger narrative of economic victimhood, with the crimes committed
not by long-term Prussian or German policies, but rather by the resurrected Polish state and
28 Richard Bessel, Political Violence and the Rise of Nazism: The Storm Troopers in Eastern Germany, 1925-1934 (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 7-9.
291

the Allied victors. The more immediate losses of territory, transport networks, and industrial
capacity were pinpointed as the primary catalysts of misery. In 1930, a number of
government officials from the six east-Elbian provinces collaborated on an extended
“memorandum” of victimhood, entitled “Crisis of the Prussian Eastern Provinces” [Not der
preußischen Ostprovinzen]. Using language originating from prewar radical German groups
such as the Hakatists, the authors painted a unified picture of a “German East” [Ostmark]
threatened by “the invisible occupation of the gravest economic crisis which the residents of
these regions suffer in the struggle for their collective well-being.” 29
By using the term “occupation,” this group of authors – representing high levels of the
Prussian government – sought to frame their provinces as victims of hostile international
forces beyond their control. They also drew comparisons with the external occupation
suffered by regions of western Germany, particularly the Rhineland, suggesting that Poland
was occupying German territory. It is not surprising that the economic threat easily
mutated into an ethno-national threat, in which the “occupation” could spell the
destruction of “the last cornerstone of Germanness in the East,” namely “the Ostmark
population’s rootedness in the soil.” 30 Emphasis on the agrarian nature of much of east-
Elbian Prussia also allowed activists to claim that not just German workers or farmers, but
also German “soil” – that is, the territorial basis of German livelihood – was at stake.
German activists and regional officials conflated economic misery with national threat in
order to serve the specific ends of revanchist policy against Poland.
29 Die Not der preussischen Ostprovinzen, 2.
30 Ibid., 24.
292

The consolidation of Upper Silesia’s place in the “threatened East” also reveals the
extent to which provincial leaders themselves had learned to transform regional issues into
national ones. Much of this arose from the interplay between the center and peripheral
regional governments. The greatly increased political attention and funding which Upper
Silesia received from Berlin in the plebiscite era had funded paramilitary groups,
propaganda, and social welfare programs to sway Upper Silesians toward Germany. 31 After
the partition, regional politicians had a keen interest in keeping the spigot of money from
Berlin flowing. Provincial leaders recognized that they needed to speak the language of
German nationalism and border revisionism in order to hold the attention of Berlin. While
driven by conviction of the justness of border revision, moderate, Catholic politicians like
Carl Ulitzka also saw a benefit in playing up the concept of a threatened East in order to
secure resources for their economically struggling province. Whereas before World War I
the regional issues were viewed both locally and in Berlin as largely distinct from those in
Posen/Poznań, now Upper Silesia was being promoted as part of an eastern danger zone:
geographically cut off from the rest of the Reich (or in danger of being cut off),
economically imperiled, and populated by potentially disloyal national minorities.
For all of the national framing of these economic issues, the solutions offered tended
not to have overt national effects, even if their aims were nationalist. The Osthilfe [Eastern
Aid] offered first to East Prussia in 1927, then to all the eastern provinces in 1930, proves
the most crucial example. The program sought to ameliorate landholder debts and restrict
foreclosures, as well as promote settlement programs of Germans in the east. In Upper
31 It is estimated that Germany spent over one billion marks in 1920-21 to support the plebiscite. In 1920, spending
on Upper Silesia amounted to 3.5% of total Reich expenditures. T. Hunt Tooley, National Identity and Weimar
Germany: Upper Silesia and the Eastern Border, 1918-1922 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 219-224.
293

Silesia, only the first goal of debt relief made any significant impact, with around 4,000
landholders receiving aid between 1930 and 1933, totaling 12.9 million marks. In
comparison, only 225 German settlers received any financial support in the same time
period. 32 While some evidence exists that a few Polish national activists were denied aid
based on their political leanings, it is clear that a substantial portion of the money went to
local Polish-speaking or bilingual farmers. 33 The financial help, however, proved but a
temporary bandage on the perennial problem of rural impoverishment, and came just as
commodity prices collapsed with the onset of the Great Depression. The Osthilfe and similar
aid programs for eastern provinces were most notable not for their success on the national
front, but rather for their lack of success on the economic front.
While Upper Silesia underwent a sort of renaissance in the 1920s thanks to autonomy,
Catholic political resurgence, and the policies of cultural tolerance which accompanied
Center Party dominance, any sense of success was dampened by persistent economic crisis.
The crisis itself, and the patchwork solutions offered, did not necessarily promote national
strife among Polish and German speakers in Upper Silesia. But the framing of the issue by
German nationalist politicians fundamentally altered Upper Silesia’s place on the mental
map of Germans. Long a backwater, Upper Silesia now represented its economic blight to
the outside world a product of the Versailles dictates and Polish national rapaciousness. Such
a redefinition of regional issues into a vocabulary of national threat fundamentally altered
32 Hans Gladosch, "Untersuchungen über die Notwendigkeit, Massnahmen und Ergebnisse der Osthilfe in
Oberschlesien" (Doctoral Dissertation, Universität Heidelberg, 1933), 62.
33 See the Osthilfe applications and financial records in APO, SPO, Syg. 899. In the file there is practically no mention
of denials based on national belief or ethnic belonging. It is clear that many Polish speakers applied for Osthilfe,
based on subsequent complaints (filed through the Minority Office) over forced land auctions for those unable to
repay Osthilfe loans. See Syg. 901.
294

the symbolic relationship between region and nation. This transformation was perhaps
most evident in Weimar-era depictions of Heimat.
THE TENSIONS OF HEIMAT
The work of linking loyal patriotisms and allegiances to a conception of national group
identity and belonging was, in the German context, largely accomplished through
articulations of Heimat. In the Upper Silesian context, Heimat could serve as a powerful
mechanism for integrating Polish speakers into a German nation that seemed to grow
organically out of the local Catholic landscape and bilingual cultural heritage. The Center
Party and other German nationalists hoping for integration of the local populace knew the
size of the task they faced. In addition to the 25,000 citizens around Oppeln/Opole who had
voted to join Poland, many more had registered protest votes against Germany in the
prewar period, and had only weak loyalty to their state. German administration estimates
from 1922 based on plebiscite results put the number of “convinced” national Poles in
German Upper Silesia at 160,000. 34 German politicians self-consciously faced the enormous
task of making these Upper Silesians into Weimar citizens. While the pull of socioeconomic
mobility could make Germans out of those locals lucky enough to escape poverty, German
nationalists provided no explicit program of national recruitment (unlike the Poles) to
convince locals to become loyal Germans.
Heimat practices served as one potential mechanism to accomplish Germanization.
Most studies of Heimat have tended to stress its integrative function. According to Alon
Confino, “By using the metaphor of the whole and its parts, the idea of Heimat harmonized
34 Hitze, Carl Ulitzka, 673.
295

the heritage of local identities and the single national identity.” 35 The vocabulary of Heimat
is said to have endowed Germans in various locales with a common sense of national
belonging – a unity achieved through the diversity of local landscapes, dialects, and
peoples. 36 In Upper Silesia, this case is harder to make. Economic marginalization, discussed
above, proved one key area in which a discourse of national threat erease regional
characteristics. In the case of regional Heimat culture, the result was much the same.
Throughout the Weimar period, Heimat increasingly became a tool of German nationalists
in Upper Silesia to elide Polish culture and history from the regional landscape, while
promoting the region as fundamentally a product of Prusso-German Kultur. Even
politicians and others avoiding a German nationalist interpretation of Upper Silesian
Heimat also failed to account for the mark of Polish culture. Alternative definitions of
Upper Silesians’ Heimat – as a Catholic landscape, as a European crossroads, and as a loyal
Prussian province – were likewise efforts to avoid discussing the fundamental influence of
Polish language and culture on the province. The result was that Heimat became
transformed into a tool of the politics of border revision. In this process, Hemat writers
failed to do justice to the heritage and lived experiences of Upper Silesia’s Polish-speaking
inhabitants, thus making Heimat unlikely to work as a tool of national integration.
The plebiscite era already served as a breaking point in the nationalization of Heimat
culture in a unilaterally German direction. The main propaganda arm of the German
plebiscite commission took on the title Vereingte Verbände Heimattreuer Oberschlesier
35 Alon Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871-1918
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 158.
36 One voice of moderate dissent can be found in Abigail Green, who sees Heimat discourse in post-1871 non-
Prussian areas of the Reich as emphasizing the particularism over integration. Abigail Green, Fatherlands: State-
Building and Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), Ch. 8.
296

[Union of Upper Silesians Loyal to Heimat – VVHO]. Fashioning Heimat as self-defense of
the German nation was not a uniquely Upper Silesian phenomenon. In parts of occupied
Rhineland after World War I, a similar rallying of Heimat as a wall against outside French
forces took place. 37 In the Upper Silesian case, however, the VVHO defined Heimat not just
against an outside occupier, but also against the cultural sentiments of many indigenous
Polish speakers. The VVHO and its plebiscite propaganda began to appropriate the concept
of Heimat as a tool to be deployed against Polish culture, in the process alienating the local
Polish-speaking population, rather than incorporating it into a more expansive model of a
multi-ethnic Upper Silesian homeland.
In the Weimar era, the use of Heimat to define the contours of German nationalism in
Upper Silesia continued, to the detriment of Polish culture. One of the main outlets for this
in Oppeln/Opole was the Oppelner Heimatblatt. A biweekly supplement to the German-
Catholic Oppelner Nachrichten and later to the German right-national Oppelner Zeitung,
the Heimatblatt was produced by a federation of local historical working groups. In the
pages of the Heimatblatt, one gained little sense that Polish culture or language had shaped
the historical development of Upper Silesia. Articles on local history overwhelmingly
emphasized the German heritage of Upper Silesia. This extended back to the most distant
settlers, which the Heimatblatt claimed were Germans and Celts around the birth of Christ,
some six centuries before the first Slavic settlers. The subsequent migration of Germans
around 1200 then occupied a land which was only filled with “sparsely settled Slavs.” 38 Early
37 Applegate, Nation of Provincials, Ch. 5.
38 Oppelner Heimatblatt, 11 March 1926 article on Flurnamenforschung.
297

Germans in Upper Silesia, in short, were refashioned as pioneers settling a terra nullius,
even when they occupied lands already inhabited by Slavs.
This analogy was extended to the early modern era by depriving Slavs of their own
cultural history. In one issue from 1925 the Heimatblatt suggested two major “times in
which ... culture [was] advanced in powerful strides.” The first was the fourteenth century,
when German settlers brought their industriousness and “free German law” to Upper
Silesia. The second was the early eighteenth century, when “Prussia’s greatest king” brought
industry and economic success to the region. Because these two moments constituted the
“high points of our historical past” in the estimation of the Heimatblatt, the entire issue was
dedicated to Prussian settlements under the reign of Fredrick II. 39 The settlements of
Frederick II and his accomplishments in modernizing Upper Silesia received outsized
treatment in the vision of Heimat history. The multiple centuries of Habsburg rule, in
contrast, were largely dismissed as an era of decay and chaos.
Other themes in the Heimatblatt tended to fit into this overarching historical rubric.
The Polish era of medieval Piast rule, which was widely celebrated by Polish nationalists as
both the high point and the origin of regional culture, was mostly ignored in the pages of
the Heimatblatt. Polish speakers were denied any autonomous culture in the language of
Heimat. In fact, Kultur was imagined as a civilizational marker which came with the arrival
of Prussians, and hence a quality Poles were not capable of possessing. Much like the
broader academic pursuit of Ostforschung, regional Heimat research suggested the
formulation of a German cultural and racial space mapped onto eastern territories. These
lands remained, in rhetorical terms, empty space – that is, they were defined primarily
39 Ibid., 3 May 1925, nr. 3.
298

through the absence of culture and development. 40 These tropes of an empty Ostraum,
awaiting Prusso-German enlightenment, were common formulations in 1920s Weimar
Germany, and had their basis in a long-standing discourse of the German “Drang nach
Osten.” 41 What makes this a special case was the application of these tropes to Heimat
history, that is, to the history of a local landscape that had long existed within Prussia’s
borders. In this sense, Upper Silesia was being pushed eastwards on the mental map of
Germans living within the province.
Even when reporting on religious symbols or sites, the historical legacy of Polish-
speaking Catholic culture could often be erased in Heimat literature. One of the greatest
sources of local pride was the 700-year old cloister in nearby Czanowanz/Czarnowąsy.
Instead of marking the cloister as a great symbol of bilingual Catholic religiosity, however,
the Heimatblatt considered it “a significant German cultural site, from which German
culture emanated particularly in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.” 42 References to
bilingual religious celebrations, which appeared from time to time, proved the exception
rather than the rule. 43 Insofar as Catholicism contributed to local Heimat culture, it was
predominantly a vision of German Catholic culture which ignored important figures and
traditions of local Polish speakers.
This erasure of Polish history and culture was also evident in the Oppeln/Opole city
museum. The historical department of the museum was divided into three sections: natural
40 For a discussion of Ostforschung in the Weimar era, see Michael Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards: A Study of
Ostforschung in the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 22-42.
41 Wolfgang Wippermann, Der "deutsche Drang nach Osten": Ideologie und Wirklichkeit eines politischen
Schlagwortes (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1981), esp. 104-116.
42 Oppelner Heimatblatt, 1 December 1928, nr. 8.
43 See, for example, the article on the bilingual celebration of St. Barbara in Ibid., 29 November 1925.
299

history, pre-history, and cultural history. The chronological division between pre-history
and cultural history occurred, unsurprisingly, in the early eighteenth century. The latter
section included old city maps and drawings (the oldest from 1734), a rebuilt baroque altar
from a nearby church, and a large display on Oppeln/Opole’s most famous hometown hero,
the nineteenth-century African explorer Emin Pascha. The pre-history section, meanwhile,
focused on everyday life of pre-modern societies, including the various tools and weapons
dug up around the province by amateur archeologists. The entire medieval and early
modern eras were largely overlooked. While one room contained a large painting of the
Piast castle, references to Polish culture were very much muted where they existed at all. 44
The logic behind the division between “pre-history” and “cultural history” is most telling. It
reveals a persistent belief that Kultur in Upper Silesia was the exclusive domain of Germans.
That the eras of Piast and even Habsburg rule would be considered “pre-history” suggests as
well the power of Frederick II’s Prussian takeover to serve as an historical caesura separating
it from other forms of German rule – indeed, marking 1740 as the beginning of the history
of civilization. This highly selective historical narrative essentially erased any traces of Polish
culture in the province, and in so doing, created a cleavage between Heimat and the reality
of bilingual Catholic life for Upper Silesians.
The Oppelner Heimatblatt and the city museum represented efforts to depict German
national culture as the only culture of Upper Silesia. Other academics and cultural critics
avoided depicting Upper Silesia as homogeneously German, yet they their alternative
formulations likewise avoided recognizing the contributions of Polish language and culture.
For example, instead of being imagined as an eastern fortress of German culture, Upper
44 Oppelner Heimatblatt, 23 March 1930, nr. 12.
300

Silesia was at times depicted as existing at the crossroads of Europe. One article by Alfred
Hein, “The Soul of the Upper Silesian,” served as the fullest exploration of this idea. Hein
noted with admiration (and a dose of mathematical fudging) that Upper Silesia was nearly
equidistant from London, Paris, Moscow, Stockholm, Rome, Istanbul, St. Petersburg und
Athens. He asserted that Upper Silesia’s location at the supposed “geographic epicenter of
Europe” made it a crossroads for the continent, both historically and metaphorically. 45 Lying
on the ancient Roman amber road to the Baltic coast, Upper Silesia had long been an
outpost for long-distance traders, he wrote. In modern times, it was the land of East meets
West.
Hein’s rhetorical placement of Upper Silesia on a European rather than a German map
contained an implicit critique of German nationalism. Although Germans had laid claim to
the land as their own, Upper Silesia had never attained Western status. Instead, Hein wrote,
“It remains an eastern land.” His admission that Upper Silesia had not been well-integrated
into the West carried the tacit assumption that it had not been well-integrated into the
German nation-state. Yet his romanticized portrait of Upper Silesia as “ ‘lands of European
love,’ namely a region where eastern and western cultures fruitfully kiss” ultimately rested
on a civilizational hierarchy which placed Western (i.e. German) culture above Eastern (i.e.
Slavic) culture. 46 His construction relied on centuries of hard work, starting with
Enlightenment era thinkers, to paint Eastern Europe as the “complementary other half” of
Europe, a proto-civilization still wed to the backwardness the West had overcome. 47 This
45 Alred Hein, “Die Seele des Oberschlesiers” in Köhrer, Oberschlesien, 39. Actual distances range from around 950km
(Stockholm) to nearly 1500km (Athens).
46 Ibid.
47 Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 1994), 4.
301

cultural construction of Eastern Europe was in fact the prerequisite for imagining Upper
Silesia as a crossroads between Western and Eastern civilizations on the continent. The
concept of Oppeln/Opole at the heart of Europe also echoed the sentiments of Freidrich
Naumann, whose idea of Mitteleuropa prescribed the leading role of German culture over
the center of the continent. Upper Silesia may have been a crossroads, as Hein suggested,
but in his model ideas and culture only moved in one direction: from West to East. When
Hein suggested that Oppeln/Opole needed to develop a high culture, it should come as no
surprise that he held up a German culture figure, the Upper Silesian-born poet Joseph von
Eichendorff, as a model for future development of culture in the region. 48 Thus Hein’s
alternative vision placing Upper Silesia on a European map still relied on constructions of
German cultural superiority.
The narrative of Prussian benevolence in the region as constructed by Heimat
proponents hewed closely to a fable of German cultural enlightenment. Could Prussia,
however, also ignite non-national patriotism and state loyalty among the bilingual
population if clearly distinguished from German nationalism? This was attempted by
Alfons Proske, the first president of provincial Upper Silesia, in a speech honoring the fifth
anniversary of the plebiscite. Proske represented a Center Party politician at the
conservative end of the spectrum, one whose loyalty to the Prussian state often outweighed
his political affiliation. He engaged in as much nationalism as necessary to live out this life
of service to Prussia. Yet Proske’s mandate also rested on the support of a large Polish-
speaking population. In his speech in front of thousands of onlookers in March 1926, he
made a deliberate attempt to appeal to this group. He noted that protecting Polish rights
48 Hein in Köhrer, Oberschlesien, 41.
302

was a legal duty of the current government, yet he went further: not only was it a Prussian
duty to respect bilingual rights, but it was an obligation of “divine and human natural law.”
Aware that many audience members likely felt distant from German nationalism, Proske
emphasized the “sense of loyalty” to Prussia rather than the Reich, suggesting that this
Prussian state loyalty was the more enduring sentiment. He ended his speech with an call to
praise not Germany, but Prussia: “Long live our Prussian motherland!” 49 By gendering
Prussia as a “motherland” rather than the more typical national “fatherland,” Proske sought
to emphasize what he saw as the benevolent qualities of Prussian protection and nurturing
over the aggressive and conformist streak of national identity. This notion of a nurturing
mother also carried Catholic echoes, positioning the KVP as nurturers of this Prussian
benevolence. In so many words, Proske was saying that Upper Silesians, regardless of
nationality, should feel safe in the bosom of Prussia.
Proske’s formulation of Prussian patriotism on the one hand challenges historical
understandings of the state’s role in German history. For a generation of post-war historians
grappling with Nazism, the worst excesses of German nationalism were enabled by Prussia’s
reactionary Junker politics and antidemocratic militarism. As at least one historian has
noted, the Sonderweg theory would not exist without longstanding assumptions about
supposedly centuries-old Prussian despotism and a lack of democratic institutions. 50 For
Proske, however, the moral judgment was inverted. Proske’s model of history placed
Prussian state-driven cultural enlightenment as the steward of modern democracy and
multi-cultural tolerance, rather than its foe. Proske resurrects for the modern observer an
49 Proske’s speech of 28 March 1926 in APO, NO, Syg. 34.
50 William W. Hagen, Ordinary Prussians: Brandenburg Junkers and Villagers, 1500-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), 17.
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altogether positive view of Prussia’s role in German history, one in which Prussia patriotism
had little overlap with German right-wing nationalism.
Proske’s declaration of Prussia as the guarantor of prosperity and rights had some basis
in fact. The Revolution of 1918 had arguably altered the political structure of Prussia more
than it did German national governance, particularly as the Prussian Landtag switched from
three-class voting to universal suffrage. Thanks to the demographic strength of the working
classes, Prussia actually became the “rock of democracy” in the Weimar political structure,
with a stable Socialist-led coalition throughout the 1920s. 51 For Proske, this modern state
was in essence a democratic reprisal of pre-national frameworks of paternalistic state
building, and it demanded supra-national political loyalty from its subjects in turn. Upper
Silesian officials like Proske latched onto Prussia as the foundation of the region’s state-
building tradition, with Germany acting, depending on political climate and personal
perspective, as either friend or foil to the Prussian protagonist. His was a vision of Prussia
which allowed room for multi-ethnic tolerance and non-national state patriotism.
Proske’s uderstanding of Prussian patriotism, however, co-existed uneasily with his own
German nationalism. Other parts of his speech reprised nationalist attempts to merge the
Prussian and German historical legacies in Upper Silesia. He described the province as
“depopulated and totally in ruins” and in a “culture-less, totally impoverished state” after
the Thirty Years’ War. Only when the region was “transferred” [überging] to Prussia could
Frederick II develop this depressed, cultural tabula rasa into a model of German
enlightened, efficient administration. Nearly two hundred years later, the province was a
modern industrial and German cultural powerhouse, he argued. “But only the German
51 Christopher M. Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press,
2006), 630.
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spirit, German culture, Prussian thoroughness, order, and sense of duty have made out of
Upper Silesia, everything which one feels from the ringing of the name ‘Upper Silesia.’ ” 52
Such statements elided the subtle differences Proske had enumerated between Prussia and
German nationalism. This was, after all, a protest event against the partition of Upper
Silesia. Proske’s speech thus needed to make many of the same arguments as border
revisionists about Polish and Allied efforts to destroy Upper Silesia. In the face of Heimat
literature and practices which increasingly positioned Upper Silesia within the political
geography of a threatened East, Proske could not carve out a plausible rhetorical space for
Prussia to integrate Polish speakers into a gentler, more inclusive state patriotism.
Proske’s legacy in Upper Silesian history is defined, however, not by his fifth
anniversary plebiscite speech, but above all by his decision to tear down Oppeln/Opole’s
premier landmark, the Piast castle. This decision, and the subsequent political fallout, reveal
the extent to which Germans had appropriated an architectural symbol of Polish historical
culture and transformed it into their own Germanized vision of Heimat, thus eroding its
Polish roots. The castle had been erected in the early thirteenth century during the reign of
Duke Kazimierz I on the city’s central island. After Oppeln/Opole was made district capital
in 1816, the castle was converted into the headquarters of the regional government, and
underwent several renovations in the next century. 53 Surrounded by a broad park, the castle
was the most important piece of architecture in the city and a central symbol in the regional
landscape. Nonetheless, Proske, citing the cost of maintenance, its poor structural state, and
the need for more space, decided to tear down the castle and erect a modern government
52 Proske’s speech of 28 March 1926 in APO, NO, Syg. 34.
53 Alfred Steinert, Oppelns Werdegang (Oppeln: Stadtbücherei, 1924), 25.
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headquarters in its place. On 18 July 1928, the dismantling of the Piast castle began, with
only the tower kept as a memento of the medieval structure. Today, the Piast tower still
stands, tucked into a parking lot behind the ten-story Nazi-era monolith which replaced it.
Polish activists naturally decried the destruction of the castle as a shot directly into the
heart of Polish culture and tradition. “In reality the castle was destroyed for political
reasons,” the Nowiny claimed two years after the razing, blaming Proske for “destroying the
roots of Polishness” in Oppeln/Opole.” 54 It is, indeed, hard to imagine the castle being
destroyed had it been seen as a symbol of German culture or history; its status as a medieval
Polish relic meant that fewer influential groups protested its razing. Yet the Piast castle
demonstrated how an architectural landmark could be appropriated in different ways over
time. While for many an architectural symbol of medieval Polish rule, the castle had also
been transformed, through a century of administrative use, into a symbol of Prussian
authority. Prussian rule and the increased presence of the German language in
Oppeln/Opole had allowed many locals to forget the castle’s Polish origins and instead
associate it with Prusso-German culture and Heimat.
The fallout over the decision to destroy the Piast castle revealed the ability of German
nationalists to appropriate an ostensibly Polish symbol of the local landscape into a German
Heimat narrative. The castle’s razing proved wildly unpopular not just with the Polish
nationalists, but with German nationalists as well. The decision prompted protests from the
Oppeln/Opole city council and, according to a government chronicle published just four
years later, from “the entire citizenry.” 55 One German wrote to the right-nationalist
54 Nowiny Codzienne, 8 November 1930, nr. 260.
55 “Chronik der Stadt,” 1932, APO, AMO, Syg. 456.
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Oppelner Zeitung to express his disbelief at the razing of the castle. This local resident saw no
contradiction between the castle’s Piast origins and its place in the hearts of modern-day
German Upper Silesians. It was, for him, a matter of Heimat. “How much love of Heimat
will be awakened among young and old in remembering this castle building, lying on such
beautiful garden grounds,” he asked rhetorically. 56 That a self-described German nationalist
decried the razing of a local Polish landmark suggests that he did not readily associate it with
Polish nationalism, but rather with the local landscape. The decision raised such discontent
that the general population took to pejoratively naming the rump tower, standing alone
amid the ruins, the Proskespargel, or Proske asparagus. 57 Even local Nazis found it beneficial
to decry the tearing down of a local Piast-era landmark. Joseph Adamczyk, who would later
become regional president under the Nazis in 1936, complained at a Nazi rally in 1929 that
“the Piast castle, this truly beautiful, old structure, was allowed to be torn down by the
Center Party man Proske in his spirit of destruction. The Proske asparagus still stands there
and contemplates how something like this could be possible.” 58 Nazis were thus able to use
local Heimat appeals to appropriate an architectural symbol from medieval Polish rule for
German nationalist ends. In the process, Germans were able to overlook the imprint of
Polish culture and history on the local landscape, just as Heimat historians had done for
other local landmarks. The overriding impression among these German proponents of
Heimat was that the local landscape had been shaped solely German culture and
enlightenment, a stance which amounted to an affront on the linguistic and cultural
heritage of the region’s Polish-speaking majority. This Polish-free version of Heimat
56 Oppelner Zeitung, 5 July 1928, nr 153.
57 Oppelner Heimatblatt, Vol 10, Nr. 1, January 1959.
58 Police report on 16 November 1929 meeting in APO, RO, Syg. 1800.
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amounted to a form of rhetorical violence against the cultural heritage of Polish speakers. As
such, Upper Silesian Heimat history and practice served not so much to integrate most
locals into German national culture, rather to exclude them.
PRIVATIZING MEMORY: PLEBISCITE ANNIVERSARIES
The plebiscite served as the founding narrative that shaped German politics and
memory in Weimar-era Upper Silesia. The plebiscite was able to simultaneously evoke sad
reminders of recent community breakdown and partition, desires for political revenge, and
optimism over the autonomy given to the region. The plebiscite heightened the political
stakes for both Polish nationalists and the German state in Upper Silesia. The Weimar
government sought to regain part of a province it could not have imagined losing until
1918, while also defending the territory it insisted remained its own. Energized national
activists acting in the name of the resurrected Polish nation-state sought the fulfillment of
what they saw as the Western mission of Polish reconquest. For the majority of locals,
meanwhile, the plebiscite often seemed a period best forgotten. The violence of partition,
the community breakdown, the internal social divisions – all of these were traumatic scars
on local communities, scars best healed, in many cases, through selective forgetting.
It is unsurprising that in this climate, memory of the plebiscite would be heavily
contested. The processes of commemoration, particularly of the fifth and tenth
anniversaries of the plebiscite, and of memorialization, reveal a regional government
hesitant to assign a single national meaning to the event. Instead, private German
nationalist interest groups eagerly co-opted the anniversary celebrations and memorial
planning. This allowed the Center Party-led government to disown official responsibility
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for the content of plebiscite memorialization, even as the party privately agreed with private
German activists. But, in using German nationalism to frame local understanding and
memory of their province’s partition, nationalist activists and willing government
accomplices also distorted and undermined the province’s defense of its Catholic heritage
and bilingual rights.
The first few anniversaries of the 20 March 1921 plebiscite passed by with minor,
somber ceremonies in Oppeln/Opole, directed mainly by the regional administration. Yet
they too were contested. Upper Silesian President Proske took a direct interest in these
ceremonies. In anticipation the third anniversary, Proske sent out a directive to major
county and city officials setting a somber tone. He insisted that “the overall conception will
be, in a modest yet forceful manner, to bring out expression of a sense of loyalty to the
German Reich and a protest against the arbitrary carving up of Upper Silesia.” 59 Then, on
the anniversary, 200 German-language and 120 Polish-language posters went up across the
province, with a benediction written by Proske himself. Proske emphasized German
fatherland patriotism and drew on popular will, noting how Germany won the plebiscite
vote, as well as historical ties. Locals could read, in the language of their choice, how foreign
powers “have torn apart a land, a Volk, that for more than six centuries formed an
undivided whole, which finally became truly indivisible through the economic and cultural
developments of the land and Volk in the last century.” 60
Proske’s personal interest in depicting his region suffering from rapacious foreign
powers generated controversy in Prussian administrative circles. Proske’s internal memo
59 Proske to Landräte and other regional officials, 10 March 1924, APO, NO, Syg. 34.
60 Text of posters from 20 March 1924 in APO, NO, Syg. 34.
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caused a backlash among civil servants, who argued, according to Proske’s own rebuttal,
that there was “a general lack of desire to celebrate” among the local population. Local
officials felt that farmers and workers were in no mood to see the government dedicating
time and money to commemorate recent painful events in history while they suffered from
an extended economic slump (the 1923 inflation crisis still fresh in their minds), and from
“strong tax pressure.” In his rebuttal, Proske stressed the supra-political nature of patriotism,
suggesting that current government policies should play no role in the direction of such
high-minded celebrations of Prussian history. 61 These first commemorations unveiled the
difficulties that the Prussian government, which had just recently led a vicious and
sometimes violent plebiscite campaign, had in convincing Upper Silesians to revisit the
wounds of the recent past.
The 1924 commemoration served as a prelude to the fifth anniversary, both in the scale
of celebrations and the scale conflict unleashed between government plans and the popular
mood. Proske again took personal control of what he labeled the “protest” against five years
of supposed injustice. Planning began at least three months in advance, when Proske met
with top regional officials, and a decision was reached to hold the main ceremony in
Oppeln/Opole. Already, officials warned Proske of a potential “splintering” in planning,
and emphasized the importance of a unified voice in the protest. Their concerns were soon
borne out in the press and the reactions of minor officials. The Oberschlesische Morgenpost,
an industrial-belt paper, criticized the decision to hold the main protest in Oppeln/Opole,
far away from the greatest suffering five years earlier near the partition border. The paper
lobbied for a border city instead, arguing “that a city in the border region exerts a whole
61 Proske to Landräte and regional officials, 17 March 1924, APO, NO, Syg. 34.
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different power of attraction for Germans in eastern [Polish] Upper Silesia and allows them
to more easily gather to participate in the demonstration.” Oppeln/Opole, in contrast, could
not promote cross-border solidarity and had less direct experience of the trauma of the
plebiscite era, the paper argued. 62 Proske, however, well aware of the Weimar government’s
interest in border revision, seemed less concerned with internal dissent and more concerned
with projecting an image of suffering beyond Upper Silesia’s borders. He worked closely
with Vereingte Verbände Heimattreuer Oberschlesier [Union of Upper Silesians Loyal to
Heimat –VVHO], the same group which had organized German propaganda in the
plebiscite, to promote the event. As a regional collection of German nationalists with deep
pockets and media connections, the VVHO became the main agency for promoting the
“protest” anniversary beyond Upper Silesia’s borders. It coordinated demonstrations and
film showings across Germany to play up the region’s plight and need for border revision. 63
Berlin also clearly valued the propaganda value of the fifth anniversary protest when the
government decided to postpone the event for eight days because protests against the
Rhineland occupation were already scheduled for 21 March. Spacing out reminders of
German turmoil suffered at the hands of Allied victors seemed like smart policy to Berlin,
and for all of Upper Silesia’s importance, it was forced to take a back seat to the Rhineland
saga.
This concern for public image and official presentation created more regional friction
as the anniversary neared. Upset by the staging of the commemoration in Oppeln/Opole,
local officials in the industrial border city of Beuthen/Bytom decided to stage their own
62 Oberschlesische Morgenpost, 16 January 1926, nr. 16.
63 See plans and documentation from early 1926 in APO, NO, Syg. 34.
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protest event on 20-21 March. Their neighbors in Hindenburg/Zabrze also staged a local
commemoration on 21 March. By the time the official ceremony rolled around a week
later, the eastern stretches of the province had already long finished their own
commemorations. The 28 March ceremony in Oppeln/Opole, meanwhile, carried the mark
of Prussian officialdom more than popular commemoration. Large crowds gathered at the
Ringplatz in front of the regional government headquarters to hear a somber speech from
Proske. The provincial president proceeded to glorify the Prussian state whose stable
architectural symbols lined the square, while degrading the supposedly undemocratic seizure
of Upper Silesia’s eastern stretches by the Allies after World War I. 64
The conflicts which emerged over the fifth anniversary were mostly intra-
administrative. They pitted eastern Upper Silesian administrators with a more populist
vision for the plebiscite protest against Proske and his official ceremony in Oppeln/Opole.
As the third anniversary reveals, however, Proske’s difficulties in creating enthusiasm for the
protests extended to the wider population. Local officials warned of a lack of interest among
citizens in revisiting the trauma of the near past. Throughout the 1920s, it became
increasingly obvious to the regional Center Party that Upper Silesians carried their own set
of unofficial plebiscite memories, focused on the breakdown of community and the
violence unleashed by German and Polish activists. Rather than confront the rival
memories and opinions, officials increasingly delegated the planning and content of
commemorations to private organizations. In so doing, the regional government could
maintain a stance of neutrality (especially important to please Poland), but it also gave up
64 For more details on Proske’s 28 March 1926 speech, see the previous section of this chapter.
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significant control to German nationalist groups who played up the messages of Upper
Silesian suffering and anger for their own ends.
The tenth anniversary of the plebiscite, held amid economic depression in 1931, reveals
the government’s new role as background player and financier. The VVHO had grown to
become the most significant nationalist organization in Upper Silesia, an umbrella
organization with connections in government circles as well as respectable right-wing
nationalist ones. Lukaschek and the regional government decided to allow the VVHO the
lead in organizing the main festivities for the tenth plebiscite anniversary, not knowing the
controversy the group would generate. The government pledged 20,000 marks to finance
massive celebrations in the border cities of industrial Upper Silesia, including an outdoor
stadium event in Gleiwitz/Gliwice. This time, the main commemorations were to take place
directly along the border, with Oppeln/Opole taking a back seat. The VVHO was also given
nearly 20,000 marks to reprint and distribute around 300,000 commemorative pamphlets
from the Berlin Center Party paper Germania to every school child in the province. Town
commemorations, meanwhile, were entrusted to local chapters of German-minded
associations such as Christian trade unions, veterans’ organizations, and singing groups. The
government seemed content to remain in the background and control events through its
purse, which was lightened around 90,000 marks for all of the events. 65
Unfortunately for the government, the planning spiraled out of control. The VVHO,
despite its semi-official ties to the government, took an expressly political stance on key
elements of planning. For the Beuthen/Bytom rally scheduled for 22 March, the VVHO
decided to ban the socialist red flag, even though the Nazi swastika was allowed. Only with
65 Planning document of Lukaschek, 17 February 1931 in APO, NO, Syg. 35.
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the intervention of the government was the VVHO forced to allow all parties to wave their
flags at the event. Inevitably, a few local groups expressed their discontent that they were
not picked to lead commemorations in their towns. In letters to the government, these
groups played up their own nationalist credentials in hopes of greater recognition and funds
for their nationalist causes. Far more than the wrath of local nationalists, however,
Lukascheck feared the potential backlash from Poland for a 21 May celebration on St. Anna
Mountain to mark the place where German troops drove back the third Polish uprising ten
years earlier. The ceremony was led by the Landeschützen, a coalition of self-defense groups
with paramilitary aspirations which described itself in contradictory terms as “a nonpartisan
organization and a continuation of the former self-defense groups.” As Lukaschek
complained, he had no way to prevent private commemorations by more radical groups
whom he did not fund. 66 The main desire of the government, in navigating all of these
events, was to forge a unitary national message while remaining in the background. But by
ceding the planning to different German nationalist groups, they only hampered any
chance of the events being truly inclusive, or of creating a unified message.
In the case of war memorials constructed in Weimar Oppeln/Opole, the government
never seriously attempted to direct their placement or design. All four of the main
monuments in the city were funded by private initiative, with two financed by individual
army regiments. The 23rd regiment held a design contest, and selected a figure of a tired
yet determined soldier, cast in bronze, to stand atop a limestone pedestal, placed just north
of the city center in Schiffmannsplatz. Unveiled in 1928, the statue conveyed, according to
those who selected it, a soldier “who through his stance and his will still has the strength to
66 Ibid.
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defend the fatherland. He embodies in his entire expression our tragic fate in the World
War, an immovable hero and strong with the will for victory even in the hour of fatigue.”
The 63rd regiment, based in Oppeln/Opole, went for a similar theme, unveiling its
memorial in 1924 near their military barracks on the eastern edge of town. A third
memorial, placed in the park surrounding the local Piast castle, was dedicated in 1925 by the
local county gendarmes (Landjäger), but went for a more abstract theme of a granite cube,
topped by a cross, with the names of local police killed during World War I and the
plebiscite battles. Such a monument served to conflate the German war effort with the
subsequent regional plebiscite battle, framing both in terms of German patriotic duty. A
final monument, the most dramatic of all, adorned the northeast corner of the new post
office headquarters next to the train station. Paid for entirely from donations by postal
workers, this monument, erected in 1930, portrayed a man mounted on a horse, atop a
four-meter pedestal, swinging a torch in his right hand. The pedestal itself contained the
names of the 288 men from regional postal ranks who were killed during the war. As the
postal headquarters explained in 1931, defending the highly symbolic iconography: “The
German Volk, the German national strength, which should have been destroyed by its
enemies, rises powerfully; its genius brings Germans fire, light, hope. From the blood of
those who had to leave their lives in the giant battles grows a new strength, which carries
forward the German genius.” 67
As contemporary justifications for these memorials suggest, these groups dealt in
romantic nationalist portrayals of German suffering. The iconography suggested that the
body of Germany might have been injured by the war, but it soldiered on, carrying the
67 Oberpostdirektion to city officials, 1931, APO, AMO, Syg. 2542.
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torch of “German genius.” These monuments demonstrate the considerable popularity and
financial resources of war veteran and civil servant groups. The combined cost of these four
monuments, at over 63,000 marks, was borne almost entirely by veterans and private
citizens. The government restrained itself from such outpourings of national sentiment,
instead leaving the construction of wartime and plebiscite memory to patriotic elements of
German civil society. These private groups, albeit with close ties to government, imbued the
landscape of Oppeln/Opole, already thickly settled with imposing government offices, with
a semi-official memory of German suffering in wartime. Whether these monuments made
the same impression on local passersby as their donors intended, is impossible to say with
any precision. Nonetheless, their intent, like that of the nationalists who led revisionist
anniversary protests against the partition, was to paint Upper Silesia as the victim of
rapacious international actors. As the Weimar system collapsed in the early 1930s, these
nationalists’ strategies would lay the groundwork for the regional penetration of the Nazi
Party.
NAZISM AND THE ‘THREATENED EAST’
As elsewhere in Germany, the Great Depression ushered in the collapse of Weimar
stability and the rise of radical leftist and rightist movements which clashed on the streets
and at the polls. In the Oppeln/Opole area, what is most striking about the patterns of
communist and Nazi sympathy are how both crossed ethno-national boundaries in their
appeals. Amid economic collapse and radicalization, Upper Silesians did not divide into two
national camps, but rather migrated towards political parties, including the Nazis, which
downplayed local divisions between German and Polish speakers. At the same time, the
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Nazi Party in particular was able to build off the hard work of German nationalists who had
turned Upper Silesia into part of a “threatened East.”
The rise of the Nazi party in Upper Silesia followed the common pattern throughout
Germany: infinitely adaptable, the NSDAP was able to feed off economic discontent,
antipathy to communism, and local cultural fears. In the case of Oppeln/Opole, rather than
confront the nationality problem head-on, Nazi agitators chose to mythologize it, in the
process building on the efforts of earlier nationalists who portrayed national differences in
the starkest terms possible. Upper Silesia was envisioned as a land under attack, threatened
by the continued advance of Polish nationalism. Yet the attacks were typically vague
enough not to incite hatred against local Polish speakers. Most likely, this is because – as the
available evidence indicates – Polish speakers were a key constituency.
The Nazi party received its jump start from the April 1929 theater incident, which
exacerbated negative public opinion against the regional government seen to be coddling
Polish national interests. By late 1929, Oppeln/Opole became the center of regular Nazi
gatherings, where young activists expounded wildly on the threat of Jewish Marxism, but
steered clear of attacks on local Polish culture. A November 1929 meeting in Oppeln/Opole
was typical: the speaker, Joseph Adamczyk, began by attacking the ruling government,
especially the Socialists and Center Party, for their supposed fecklessness and unfulfilled
economic promises, before moving to anti-Semitism. His main message, using typical
National Socialist rhetoric, conflated Jews and Socialists: “We are fighting Marxism. We
understand Marxism to be Jewish economics,” he said. The party’s goal, he concluded, was
that “We National Socialists want nothing more than a national economy. We want to be
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free.” 68 The themes of these meetings, according to local police reports, hewed closely to
anti-Semitism and anti-Marxism, but rarely dealt in anti-Polish sentiment, although the
Polish state did come under critique. Still, Nazi leaders depicted their racial battle in the
grandest terms possible. When Nazi Reichstag deputy Gregor Strasser gave a guest speech to
700 locals in the city in November 1929, he chose to depict the Nazi racial fight as a global
battle to protect Germans: “Asians, Chinese, and Negroes as well as Galician Jews must be
excluded from having German rights or public offices. We need racially pure blood, in order
to keep our clean and healthy economy.” 69 Nowhere in his speech did he mention Poles.
Beginning in early 1930, Nazis began taking their message to the countryside around
Oppeln/Opole. The local geography of their appeal follows clear lines: they emerged earliest
and strongest in medium-sized towns of largely monolingual German settlement,
especially those which had been populated in the eighteenth century under Frederick II’s
settlement program, such as Carlsruhe/Pokój. Yet the party also showed significant strength
in the historically Polish-speaking towns around Oppeln/Opole. The town of
Malino/Malina, for example, was over 95 percent Polish or bilingual speaking according to
the 1925 census, and 62 percent had voted for Poland in the plebiscite. Yet 47 percent of
villagers voted for the Nazis in the July 1932 elections, nearly double the turnout as for the
Center Party. 70 Nearby Grudschütz/Grudzice, with 91 percent Polish or bilingual speakers,
registered a 24 percent vote for the Nazis in the same election. Clearly Polish speakers were
turning out in substantial proportions for the Nazi party. The vote totals for the Nazis in
68 Oppeln police report, 18 November 1929, APO, RO, Syg. 1800.
69 Oppeln police report, 26 November 1929, APO, RO, Syg. 1800.
70 1925 census results in APO, RO, Syg. 2096, plebiscite results in APO, SPO, Syg 134. Election results in Oppelner
Zeitung, 1 August 1932.
318

the rural county still fell below those of the Center Party, but the NSDAP showed roughly
the same numerical strength as the Polish nationalist party during its electoral height in
1924. 71
The most consistent bonds among Nazi supporters seem to have been not language or
ethnic heritage, but rather age and economic despair. The Nazi Party benefitted from the
radicalization of a generation which had come of age during the bloody plebiscite years and
a decade of continued economic hardship. This radicalization could cross linguistic lines,
drawing in Polish speakers. According to the Polish Nowiny Codzienne, the Nazi Party
would offer rallies in Polish to attract locals. 72 The paper also noted by 1930 that Polish-
speaking voters in the countryside were increasingly supporting the whole range of German
nationalist parties promising economic betterment, including the Nazis. 73 Those who joined
the movement, regardless of language or ethnicity, were typically very young. The eight
troublemakers arrested for disrupting the theater event in April 1929 were all between the
ages of 19 and 23. A local ringleader and major speaker at Oppeln/Opole events, Max
Wieschalla, was only 22 years old in 1929. 74 Youth seemed almost a requirement for the
foot soldiers of the SA, as well as their Communist rivals in the Red Front Fighting League.
Their indiscretions led to low levels of street fighting; by 1931, hardly a Nazi meeting took
place without Communist interlopers or protestors, and disruption of competing street
71 31 July 1932 election results in Ibid. For results of 4 May 1924 elections, see APO, SPO, Syg. 23.
72 Nowiny Codzienne, 23 October 1930, nr. 247.
73 Ibid., 1 January 1930, nr. 1.
74 See trial records of Oppeln theater incident in APO, NO, Syg. 266.
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parades was common. 75 Oppeln/Opole’s social order, like in the rest of Germany, was being
chipped away by young thugs.
It is important to note that, just as Polish-speaking Catholics in the countryside turned
in part to Nazism, the National Socialists within the city were far from being just a party of
disgruntled Protestant civil servants. The party capitalized on its own mythologized version
of Heimat to gain the support of much of the local Catholic population. Of the nine
original members of the Oppeln/Opole SS, seven were Catholic, the majority of them
artisans. 76 The Nazi appeal to local Heimat sentiment can be seen in one of the party’s
largest local exhibitions, a weekend festival in August 1931 celebrating the opening of the
local SA “brown house.” In his housewarming speech, the regional Gauleiter Helmuth
Brückner spoke of the Nazi tradition stemming directly from Freikorps groups which had
protected the Heimat in the plebiscite era. He traced the Nazis’ direct lineage to this group.
“From its small beginnings the movement has grown strong, and it will develop further,
because large parts of the Volk have already grasped that national thinking and social action
are the imperative of the hour. A national spirit of camaraderie and discipline shall prevail in
the space being honored today. To the health of the party and the land, Heil Upper
Silesia!” 77 By claiming direct descent from the Freikorps, Brückner could not only boost the
party’s national credentials, but tie it to the defense of local space. He felt no need to define
the Polish threat. Instead he chose to allow the defense of local community to serve as a
metaphor for the defense of national community. The success of the Nazi Party depended
on adapting itself to the local language of national and economic threat, while remaining
75 See, for example, Oppelner Kurier, 13 February 1931, various police reports in APO, SPO, Syg. 79.
76 Report on SS membership in APO, RO, Syg, 1802.
77 Oberschlesische Tageszeitung, 24 August 1931, nr. 187.
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sensitive to the culture of its Polish-speaking constituents. This was more a matter of tactics
than ideology: after gaining power, the Nazi party begin launching more consistent attacks
in 1933 against Polish nationalists in Oppeln/Opole, although an attack on nationalist
activists did not necessarily indicate an attack on all Polish-speaking Upper Silesians.
The fact of Polish-speaking Upper Silesians voting in substantial numbers for the Nazi
Party is not entirely exceptional. In Masuria, a corner of the East Prussian exclave with a
large Polish-speaking population, several counties exceeded 60 percent vote totals for Hitler
in the July 1932 elections. 78 The Oppeln/Opole city and country vote never exceeded 27.1
percent, a full ten percent lower than the national average in July 1932. But the crucial
difference lay not in linguistic preference, but in religious loyalty. Throughout the period of
Communist and Nazi radicalization and the breakdown of social order, the Catholic
People’s Party was able to maintain a plurality of votes. Despite its more German
nationalist profile, the KVP remained the default party for Upper Silesian Catholics, one
voters returned to when dissatisfied with other parties. This became clear in the November
1932 elections, when the Center Party became the main beneficiary of a decrease in support
for the Nazi Party. Nazi votes in the rural county decreased by seven percent relative to
their showing in July, while Center Party support jumped by just over seven percent. 79 The
Center Party seemed to be weathering another challenge to its dominance in Upper Silesia,
just as it had in the pre-World War I years with the rise of Polish nationalism. This time
national events would outpace regional trends, and Hitler would to power in early 1933,
soon bringing an end to multiparty democracy.
78 Richard Blanke, Polish-speaking Germans? Language and National Identity among the Masurians since 1871 (Köln:
Böhlau, 2001), 255.
79 Results in Oppelner Zeitung, 1 August and 7 November 1932.
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CONCLUSION
As the ten-year anniversary of the plebiscite vote prompted commemorations in every
corner of the province, in the small town of Bierdzan/Bierdzany, 20 kilometers northeast of
Oppeln/Opole, a local workers’ singing club took charge of the village festivities. When the
leader of the local club met with the Landrat to justify the group’s role, he “emphasized that
our association is apolitical, but German.” 80 In a time of extreme politics, the value of being
nationalist without being political was a premium. Years of defining Heimat as a German
nationalist vision of Upper Silesian culture and history had carved out a political space so
broad that it seemed possible to be “apolitical” and yet fight for border revision.
Nationalist activists and regional politicians converted distinctly regional issues of
economic impoverishment and bilingual rights into part of a broader discourse on the
“threatened East,” thus linking the province’s fate more intimately with the rest of eastern
Prussia. In so doing, they turned economic and social problems into national ones. Through
writing the history of Upper Silesia as the march of German culture into an empty land,
these activists and officials eliminated the possibility of a multicultural Heimat which would
allow Polish speakers a place in German national society. They established the language
which the Nazi Party subsequently used to appeal to a defense of Heimat against racial
others. By not denigrating local Polish speakers, Nazis were even able to attract some of the
people whose language and culture they often derided as sub-human elsewhere in Germany.
The policies of the Nazi state towards Polish speakers, however, would look radically
different than Nazi appeals to them as voters. Nazi efforts to Germanize Upper Silesians
through repression would mark a radical break with past practices of nationalization.
80 Bierdzan Arbieter-Gesang-Verein to Landrat, March 1931, APO, SPO, Syg. 167.
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The ‘Racial State’ on the Margins
The Failed Nazi Germanization Campaign, 1933-1944
323
Chapter 6
“The present-day government cannot behave any worse than the previous government
with respect to the Polish movement.” 1 Such was the prediction of Arkadiusz Bożek,
secretary of the regional Polish nationalist group in Oppeln/Opole, the ZPwN, made in
March 1933 in a conversation with county commissioner [Landrat] Michael Graf von
Matuschka. The previous government in Bożek’s formulation was, of course, the recently
deceased Weimar Republic, which had been succeeded by the new Nazi state. Bożek’s
guarded optimism about the new Nazi regime revealed a deep ideological affinity with the
tenets of a racialist state. From Bożek’s perspective, the Nazi government, with Hitler’s
promise of racial separation, should have been a marked improvement over a democratic
government focused on assimilation and integration. The focus of Polish activists on
national division formed such a cornerstone of their philosophy that they could continue to
tout its benefits even as Nazi repression intensified in the later 1930s. In February 1937 the
Katolik Trzyrazowy told its readers they should feel lucky to live in racially-minded
Germany rather than multicultural Poland. “It must be easier for the Poles to proclaim their
Polishness in a country in which nationality is highly regarded. In such a state, as the
German one is, it would be impossible to find anyone who will risk casting a stone at a
1 Report of Matuschka to Prussian Interior Ministry, 17 March 1933, APO, NO, Syg. 75.

person professing another nationality.” Yet the paper still complained of apathy among
their audience, attributing it to national “illiterates” who had – after several generations –
refused to profess their Polishness. 2
Despite the best hopes of Polish nationalists, Nazi Germany worked to eliminate all
traces of Polish culture and language in the Oppeln/Opole area, ramping up repression in
the late 1930s as the regime radicalized and international German-Polish tensions increased.
Yet the methods and justifications for anti-Polish campaigns were varied, and the results
often contradictory. The twisted road to eliminating Polishness wound between classic
forms of totalitarian repression, and what were essentially Weimar-era solutions of cultural
leeway, economic uplift, and linguistic integration. These policies overlapped in key ways
with the special protections offered to Upper Silesia’s Jews under League of Nations
protections from 1933 to 1937. While the Jews of Oppeln/Opole ultimately suffered the
same fate of their co-religionists across Germany, Upper Silesian Polish speakers – who
remain the focus of this chapter – were treated uniquely from every other Polish population
inside or outside the Nazi Reich. The one consistent government strategy across the Nazi
era was to decapitate the leadership of the Polish nationalist movement, by turns
intimidating, repressing, threatening, expelling, or imprisoning leading Polish activists.
This project began in earnest in 1937 with the expiration of the Geneva Accord and its
minority protections, and ended with the mass arrests at the outbreak of World War II. But
what was to happen to the larger population of less-committed or nationally indifferent
Upper Silesians?
2 Katolik Trzyrazowy, 2 February 1937, nr. 13.
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For all the Nazi hopes of forging a German racial state, the fate of Polish-speaking
Upper Silesians was never definitively resolved before 1945. At first the Nazi strategy
sought to redefine the population, through the census, not as Polish but rather as a regional
group of loyal-German Upper Silesians. Yet the Nazis simultaneously abhorred the political
basis of Upper Silesian regionalism and worked to subordinate regional prerogatives to the
aims of National Socialism, as they did across Germany. Even the modest (by the standards
of Nazi repression) redefinition of Upper Silesians’ language usage in the census ran into
the resistance of organized Polish activists, who still utilized, until 1937, the power of
regional minority protections. 3 Nazi officials and sympathizers nonetheless used repression
to create an atmosphere of fear in villages around Oppeln/Opole. The repressive duties of
Nazi Gleichschaltung in Upper Silesia, meanwhile, actually caused the unintentional
resurgence of the Polish nationalist milieu. In the favorable climate of the Geneva Accord
minority protections and the 1934 Polish-German non-aggression pact, Polish activists
were able to restart their moribund movement and attract thousands of new members into
their cultural-national orbit. Yet local citizens were generally less interested in an
awakening of national sentiment, and more interested in the shield of protection which the
Polish movement could offer against Nazi anti-Catholic, anti-peasant, and anti-
Communist policies. As much as Nazi leaders deplored and feared this renewed Polish
nationalist activity in the region, its roots lay not in any deep commitment to the Polish
3 Despite the Germans’ withdrawal from the League of Nations in 1933, they continued to honor the bilateral
accord, mostly to represent the interests of German speakers in Polish Upper Silesia.
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national project, but rather in a regional particularism and above all a religious piety which
the Polish nationalists exploited for national ends.
Only after 1937, however, did the Nazi government launch a full-scale assault on the
Polish-speaking population. Even then, the government preferred to take sideways blows at
the general population, forgoing brutal crackdowns and instead erasing the symbols,
history, and statistical evidence of Polishness from public view. While violently repressing
Polish nationalist leaders, and interning many of them in Buchenwald during World War
II, the Nazi government settled for the appearance of German national loyalty among the
larger population around Oppeln/Opole. During World War II, this policy only resulted in
the resurgence of Polish language usage, thanks largely to the importation of Polish-
speaking laborers. Nazis prioritized wartime obedience from farmers and soldiers over a
crackdown on local Polish use. As a result, Upper Silesians openly spoke Polish in Hitler’s
German wartime Empire, even as Poles elsewhere were being expelled or exterminated. The
German era of rule ended with Nazis unable to stamp out Upper Silesia’s ethnic ambiguity.
THE MUDDY WATERS OF WASSERPOLNISCH
One of their first and most contested regional campaigns after the Nazi seizure of
power involved language, particularly the definition for census purposes of Upper Silesians’
native tongue. The legal battle over the meaning of the regional way of speaking,
commonly referred to as Wasserpolnisch in German or more neutrally as the Ślązak dialect,
had deeper roots in the long desire to categorize and systematize the fluid linguistic
landscape of Upper Silesia for various political ends. The Nazi campaign represented the
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culmination of the use of the term Wasserpolnisch to serve the political needs of an
increasingly strident vision of Germanness. The failure of this campaign in the face of
strong Polish nationalist resistance, however, forced the Nazi government to quiet its
explicit anti-Polish activities in the early years of the regime. In order to understand the
Nazi campaign, however, it is essential to put its efforts into a deeper historical context.
The term Wasserpolnisch had long carried a negative connotation in German,
suggesting a backwards dialect that incorporated lowly elements of both Polish and
German. Yet the first recorded use of the term, in 1688 by a regional pastor Adam Gdacius,
criticized locals not for their inability to speak high German, but rather for their inability to
speak high Polish. Throughout the pre-modern era before language standardization, the
Ślązak dialect would be but one among hundreds of regional vernaculars in Central Europe,
albeit one incorporating elements of languages with disparate roots. Until the late
nineteenth century the origins of the regional dialect were imagined less as the product of
two clashing civilizations, and more as a mix of regional sub-groups of Slavic and Germanic
languages from nearby provinces (Bohemia, Moravia, Russian Poland, and Galicia). 4 In this
sense the regional roots of Ślązak were not an aberration, but rather the norm among the
diverse populations in Central Europe.
Definitions and value judgments of Wasserpolnisch changed in the nineteenth century
in the face of industrialization, urbanization, and the resultant changes in language use
which accompanied them. The language was founded on a Polish syntax and grammar,
with a smattering of German vocabulary mixed in. Yet everyday usage was highly fluid,
4 Kevin Hannan, Borders of Language and Identity in Teschen Silesia (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), 174.
327

and the admixture of Polish and German roots varied from speaker to speaker, although the
language remained firmly Polish in its root structure and vocabulary. 5 As industrialization
took hold of the region, however, resulting in greater regional migration and the
introduction of new technologies (and hence new vocabularies), Ślązak took on new
German vocabulary. Farmers’ children would receive basic education, especially after 1872,
mostly in German, then move to the cities or minefields, coming into greater contact with
German speakers. Code-switching became common, with many newer words having only
German expressions. The language continued to vary wildly in practice, but mixing of
German vocabulary into Polish grammatical forms increased, such as with the verb
“umsteigować” – a mix of the German “umsteigen” (to transfer, change) with the Polish
verbal suffix “-ować.” 6 Nonetheless, the basis of regional communication among the less
educated and rural remained more firmly Polish than German in origin in the late
nineteenth century.
World War I and the subsequent partition would dramatically change the balance of
public language use in German Upper Silesia, as younger generations became more fluent
in German than in Polish. These shifts were deplored by Polish nationalists as the work of
oppressive Germanization measures, but parental preferences for German religious
education showed that most parents and children placed no negative value judgment on the
learning of German. Linguistic integration typically followed a generational pattern for the
lower classes. By the 1920s, it was common for grandparents to speak little or no German,
5 For examples of early nineteenth-century language usage and vocabulary, see Jerzy Bandtkie, Wiadomości o języku
polskim w Śląsku i o polskich Ślązakach, 1821 (Wrocław: Nakł. Wrocławskiego Tow. Naukowego, 1952), 36-46.
6 Hannan, Borders of Language, 175.
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parents to have a strong oral command of local German and Polish dialects along with a
shaky written command of both, and children to have a stronger written command of
German but still understand the local spoken Ślązak dialect.
It was during this time of transition that German nationalists sought to co-opt the
term Wasserpolnisch, and thus its population, by elevating the dialect to the status of a
language. This explicitly political move, first announced in 1917 by the Prussian Minister
of Culture Friedrich Schmidt-Ott, was designed to detach the dialect from its Polish roots
and re-categorize it as a hybrid language or even, in the view of some Prussian officials, a
Germanic tongue. Local conditions suggest a continued fluidity in language use that belied
a strict categorization of Wasserpolnisch as its own language. 7 Yet the German nationalist
argument that Upper Silesians spoke not a Polish dialect with German elements, but rather
their own language, was meant to sap strength from the ethnicist arguments of Polish
nationalists who defined the region as essentially Polish. 8 It was a phenomenon not limited
to Upper Silesia: in East Prussia, for example, Weimar-era officials shifted their description
of the language spoken by Protestant Polish speakers in the region from “Polish” to
“Masurian” – thus elevating and distinguishing the mostly spoken dialect from its Polish
roots in order to distinguish Masurians from Poles. 9
7 The town magistrate in Tarnau, for example, wrote in November 1918 that he had no personal knowledge of
Polish, but that approximately 80 percent of residents knew enough German to communicate with him, and
practically no one in the town had a literary command of high Polish. If a citizen needed to communicate in Polish
with him, he had his subordinate translate. See report of Tarnau official, 26 November 1918, APO, SPO, Syg. 139.
8 Günther Doose, Die separatistische Bewegung in Oberschlesien nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg (1918-1922) (Wiesbaden:
O. Harrassowitz, 1987), 177-178.
9 Andreas Kossert, Preussen, Deutsche oder Polen? Die Masuren im Spannungsfeld des ethnischen <strong>Nationalism</strong>us
1870-1956 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2001), 179-181.
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By the late 1920s, Wasserpolnisch found a place in German Ostforschung, which was a
broad academic movement dedicated to tracing the imprint of German culture on a broad
swatch of Central and Eastern Europe. 10 In August 1929, Professor Wilhelm Volz, head of
the government-supported Foundation for Research of German Racial and Cultural Soil
[Stiftung für deutsche Volks- und Kulturbodenforschung], sought funding from Hans
Lukaschek, the President of Upper Silesia, for a research project on Wasserpolnisch. 11 His
justification was to study “this ancient idiom” before it died out, eroded by the partition of
Upper Silesia and the increasing instruction in high Polish among the minority. Volz, like
many Ostforscher, rhetorically inverted the historic dynamic between Germanic and Slavic
cultures in most of Central Europe, depicting old Germanic superiority as the natural state,
and its loss as a threat to German culture. In the Upper Silesian case, Volz said, the
continued teaching of high Polish would “bring about the disappearance of an immensely
valuable sign of German cultural influence.” He portrayed the replacement of “old words
borrowed from German” with high Polish as a threat to German despite the essential Polish
roots of Wasserpolnisch. His project aimed to prove the supposed weak influence of Slavic
culture on Wasserpolnisch and the deep imprint of German – and thus chose to focus
selectively on Germanic word borrowings, rather than syntax or other more Polish
elements. Regional elites more closely familiar with Wasserpolnisch through everyday
practice looked suspiciously upon this one-sided examination. The head librarian in
Gleiwitz/Gliwice warned against political efforts to co-opt Wasserpolnisch as a “wall”
10 On the pre-Nazi rise of Ostforschung, see Michael Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards: A Study of Ostforschung in
the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), Ch. 1.
11 For more information on Volz and his organization, see Ibid., 25-29.
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against Polish nationalist ambitions, noting that Upper Silesians maintained a fundamental
link to high Polish through religious scripture, prayer books, and hymnals. Nonetheless,
Lukaschek approved Volz’s proposal, offering money and the volunteer labor of local
experts to pick out the German properties of Wasserpolnisch. 12
By the time the Nazis came to power, then, Wasserpolnisch had already been politicized
in official and academic circles as a supposed bulwark against Polish nationalism. National
activists and leaders on both sides were unhappy with subjective definitions of nationality
for Upper Silesians. The Geneva Accord had given leeway for citizens to choose their
nationality, and Germany benefitted as Upper Silesians in Weimar territory increasingly
chose integration over Polish nationalism. Without the will of the people they attempted to
nationalize, Polish nationalists were forced to adhere to objective, ethnicist standards for
national belonging. Yet even for German nationalists, the will of Upper Silesians to
become German (or at least integrate into German society) was insufficient. The
popularization of racial science and biological understandings of ethnicity demanded an
objective basis for classifying Upper Silesians, and in this case, the regional dialect proved
sufficiently malleable to serve as a convenient marker of Germanness.
The road was thus already paved for the Nazis as they undertook efforts to categorize
Upper Silesians as a distinct race through modification of the 1933 census. Previously locals
could choose German, Polish, or bilingual German-Polish as options for their mother
tongue on the census (although in reality officials and census-takers exerted substantial
pressure, especially in the fuzzy divide between Polish and German-Polish). The Nazi
12 Letter from Volz to Upper Silesian President Lukascheck and reply, August 1929, APO, NO, Syg, 319.
331

government, however, decided to add “Upper Silesian Polish” as an additional category. The
intention to push as many people as possible into this new category was made clear by
regional officials. The Landrat of Cosel/Koźle sent a written directive two weeks before the
June 1933 census, ordering census takers to allow “high Polish” to be listed only in cases
where the citizen had full command of the language spoken in “Congress Poland” (a
demeaning anachronism referring to the pre-1918 Russian partition). He warned that any
“careless false entries” by census takers would be strictly punished. The regional ZPwN
chapter in Oppeln/Opole filed a complaint to the Mixed Commission over the matter,
claiming that it was disingenuous for a census to differentiate between a dialect and an
official language. Upper Silesian Polish, they insisted, was no more distinct from high Polish
than the regional dialect of German was from high German. Their complaint spoke broadly
of “harm to the Polish minority.” They worried in particular that the census could work to
redefine Upper Silesians from a national minority to a regional one, which could pave the
way for restrictions in the minority rights afforded by the Geneva Accords to the Polish
national minority. 13
The German government, already on the defensive with the League of Nations, fought
hard to maintain its right to redefine the language boundaries in Upper Silesia. Silesian
President Helmuth Brückner promised in September 1933 that no harm would come to
Upper Silesian speakers, as both they and high-Polish speakers were protected under the
Geneva Accords. He focused most strongly, however, on justifications for distinguishing
13 Complaint of ZPwN to Mixed Commission, 16 June 1933; second brief submitted 15 November 1933, APO,
USMO, Syg. 363.
332

etween the languages. The difference between Upper Silesian and high Polish was
enumerated in the Geneva Accord itself, he claimed, insofar as minority school teachers in
German Upper Silesia were required to know high Polish, and not just the dialect. As
proceedings dragged on into 1934, League of Nations Mixed Commission director Felix
Calonder temporarily quashed the publication of the census results. More than a year after
the contested census, in July 1934, Nazi officials and Polish nationalists squared off in oral
arguments before Calonder’s Mixed Commission. Both sides attempted to play up the
historical and linguistic connections of Upper Silesia to their respective homelands, but
Calonder steered the debate to strictly legal questions. While he noted that speakers of
Wasserpolnisch seemed perfectly capable of reading prayer books and newspapers in high
Polish, he chose to adjudicate the issue based on the right of Upper Silesians to declare their
own nationality, free of interference from officials. The directive of the Cosel/Koźle
Landrat proved the key evidence for German guilt: Nazi officials had conspired to co-opt
individual decision making on the census and force Polish speakers into the category of
Wasserpolnisch speakers. The decision made no judgment on the relative merits of Polish
and German nationalists’ political claims on the local dialect, but rather on the subversion
of democratic national self-determination by Nazi officials. 14 Calonder’s judgment steered
clear of racial or integralist debates over the national identity of Upper Silesians, but thus
also by necessity resisted adjudicating the contested meaning of Wasserpolnisch.
The ZPwN demanded either a census recount, or the agglomeration of the two
categories of Wasserpolnisch and high Polish into a single category of “Polish.” Yet
14 Calonder’s decision subsequent to 28 July 1934 hearings summarized in APO, USMO, Syg. 363.
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Calonder had no legal authority to compel such a decision, so negotiations continued for
several more months between German authorities and Polish nationalists. Nazi officials
resisted Polish recommendations, arguing somewhat cynically that combining the census
numbers would impinge upon the rights of those citizens who actively chose to define their
language as Wasserpolnisch. Their deeper concern centered on the number 371,000 – the
total number of Polish and bilingual Polish-German speakers from the 1933 census who
would be counted as “Poles” by Polish nationalists, were the two categories combined. An
admission of such a high number of Polish speakers, the Nazis worried, would bolster Polish
nationalist claims on the territory. 15 Eventually, however, in February 1935, the Nazi
government acceded to Calonder and Polish suggestions, finally printing the official census
results without the designation “Upper Silesian Polish” – and thus conceding, at least in the
census, the non-existence of a local dialect.
The defeat for the Nazi Upper Silesian government proved a testament to the
endurance of international protections across the supposed divide of Hitler’s rise to power.
Although this was a struggle over statistics, the Nazi government clearly saw the census as a
way to begin denying the historical and cultural place of Polish culture in German Upper
Silesia. Losing that battle forced a retrenchment for Nazi officials until the expiration of
minority protections in 1937. Only then would the struggle to eliminate Polish culture
escalate, as the government abandoned its commitment to Poles and any semblance of
being a Rechtsstaat. In the meantime, however, a whole range of other unpopular policies
15 German delegation of Mixed Commission to Minority Office in Oppeln, 10 December 1934, APO, USMO, Syg.
363.
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not directly aimed at Polish speakers nonetheless created a backlash of increased Polish
nationalist activity.
OPTING OUT OF NAZI SOCIETY
In March 1935, the President’s office in Oppeln/Opole summed up the activity of the
regional Polish nationalist movement over the last year: “A year ago the state police
reported that the Polish movement no longer presented any danger; everywhere there was a
noted regression, the movement lacked financial support as well as any more support from
the populace. Today that is no longer true.” The last year had seen an explosion of new and
revived Polish-nationalist organizations: “Lecture evenings in the countryside, Heimat
evenings, discussion and reading circle language courses, youth groups, mothers’
associations, singing groups, gymnastics and sport organizations, veterans’ associations,
academic coalitions, adult education classes, theater performances, religious functions and
trips to Poland, celebrations, exhibitions, large mass meetings, massive distribution of
Polish texts and those with local historical [heimatkundlich] content.” 16 Just a year earlier,
the local Polish movement had compared itself to a “sick man … whose limbs are already
seized by the cold of death and whose head only still functions.” 17 Now the Nazi
government noted a significant increase in the organizational activity of a nationality
which they claimed barely existed except in the minds of Polish activists. Was this merely a
sign of Nazi administrative paranoia, or a genuine upsurge in Polish national solidarity?
16 Oppeln Regierungspräsident to Interior Ministry, 18 March 1935. Quoted in Deutsche und Polen zwischen den
Kriegen: Minderheitenstatus und "Volkstumskampf" im Grenzgebiet: Amtliche Berichterstattung aus beiden Ländern,
1920-1939, (München: Saur, 1997), 857-858.
17 Katolik Trzyrazowy, 6 January 1934, nr. 2.
335

The answer, in short, was neither: the renewed interest among Upper Silesians in the
activities of Polish nationalism was very real, not just a figment of Nazi nationalist
paranoia. Yet the new flowering of Polish nationalist activity in the mid 1930s – reaching
its peak in 1935-1936 before suffering at the hands of increased Nazi repression in the years
before World War II – did not signal any new national solidarity among Polish-speaking
Upper Silesians. Rather, local citizens utilized the safe space and rights guaranteed the Polish
minority as an umbrella under which to reconstitute social religious networks which had
been eroded by Nazi Gleichschaltung. Additionally, minority protections served as a shield
protecting locals from their more onerous duties to the Nazi racial state. By declaring Polish
nationality, locals could avoid the Hitler Youth, national service, and a whole range of Nazi
ideological programs. Working to obtain these exclusions, Polish nationalists claimed that
Upper Silesians were finally awakening to their cause, when in reality these activists pitched
their efforts as explicitly pro-Catholic and as a way to opt out of Nazi society.
Immediately following Hitler’s seizure of power, many Polish activists took comfort in
the doctrine of racial separation highlighted by the Führer, but felt a strong disconnect
between the ideals of mutual national respect and the realities of anti-Polish local German
activists taking the reins of government. The social changes ushered in by the Nazis
fundamentally altered the balance of power at the local level, giving new authority to
radical racists and street thugs. It was these groups, either organized into SA bands or acting
freely but with the tacit approval of officials, who increasingly threatened and bullied active
members of the Polish nationalist minority. On 9 March 1933, for example, the known
Polish activist Czesław Kempa was allegedly harassed by three SA men while walking in the
336

village of Alt Schalkowitz/Stare Siolkowice. Stopped and asked for identification, he was
subsequently threatened with violence if he organized any more Polish organizations. While
the SA men disputed that they had flashed a weapon, as Kempa and his companion
testified, the village security force for the Nazis did admit to insulting Kempa. 18
Such intimidation by officials or semi-officials became more common, but complaints
alleging actual violence remained exceedingly rare. Still, the number of petitions by Poles
in Germany to the Mixed Commission alleging discrimination skyrocketed from 16 to 74
between 1932 and 1933. In subsequent years the numbers remained nearly as high. Much
of this was a deliberate strategy by both German and Polish authorities to wield minority
complaints as a weapon against the opponent state, mainly as an excuse to weaken
protections on their own side of the border. The German minority in Poland also greatly
increased the number of their complaints to the Mixed Commission, from 75 to 189
between 1932 and 1933. 19 The trend continued until 1937, and the parallel rise in German
and Polish complaints reflected not just an increase in antagonism at the local level, but
also a political tit-for-tat.
The Polish nationalists were clearly dealing with increased intimidation and a
government which awarded positions of local power to radical German nationalists. At the
same time, the regional government remained under orders to uphold basic laws and rights
for the Polish minority. In November 1933, the Prussian Interior Ministry warned Silesian
President Brückner that it was “in the interest of the effect of German peace politics on
18 Depositions of main suspects, July – August 1933, APO, USMO, Syg. 343.
19 Stanisław Rogowski, Komisja Mieszana dla Górnego Śląska, 1922-1937 (Opole: Instytut Śląski, 1977), 70.
337

Poland” and also in the interest of the German minority in Poland that any reports of local
attacks against Poles be vigilantly investigated. The ministry in Berlin understood the
necessity of good will. “Just a single such report [of violence] can do more to hurt the tone
than an array of the best peace and educational speeches from leading officials can achieve
in weeks.” 20 The Nazi government maintained a continued interest in German-Polish
goodwill as it negotiated a treaty with Poland, resulting in a practical limit to German
nationalist fervor directed against Poles.
The result of this German-Polish “peace politics” taking place at the international level
was the Non-Aggression Pact of January 1934. The opening for renewed Polish nationalist
activity came with the breakdown of the League of Nations as a credible international body
in European affairs. Much of this breakdown was driven by the Nazi regime, which in a
series of high-profile cases chafed against the authority of the League in matters such as
disarmament and anti-Semitism. Poland, too, became increasingly disillusioned with the
League, openly condemning in 1933 a double standard by which the new Versailles states of
Eastern Europe were subject to minority protections which more established states could
openly flaunt. The German and Polish authorities sought a compromise which would
remove their own disputes from the League theater, allowing them to settle conflicts more
quietly between themselves. This served as a key turning point for both Germany’s and
Poland’s slow withdrawal from the international order embodied by the League; Germany
20 Letter from Interior Ministry to Upper Silesian Regierungspräsident, 16 November 1933, APO, NO, Syg. 68.
338

had withdrawn in October 1933, and by late 1934 Poland too had de facto removed itself
from the League system. 21
The minority protections in Upper Silesia served as a primary example for this type of
bilateral relations embodied in the non-aggression pact. Although the Geneva Accords of
1922 for Upper Silesia were subject to League mediation, the Realpolitik of the agreement
rested firmly on each country’s mutual self-interest to protect its proclaimed minority
across the border. In Upper Silesia throughout the 1920s the German regional government
learned to predict and head off discriminatory actions against German speakers in Poland
by defending the rights of Polish speakers in Germany. For both sides, avoiding the
ignominy of international rebuke was a primary concern – but mainly because any moral
wrong exposed on the international stage could provide fodder for rival states to enact more
aggressive foreign policy. The 1934 German-Polish Non-Aggression Pact was a
continuation of this policy of mutual deterrence practiced in Upper Silesia throughout the
1920s.
It was this international shift in Polish-German relations, combined with the
radicalization of Nazi society, which ultimately created a space for Polish activists to agitate
freely and the conditions for their message to thrive. The Polish-German Pact significantly
heightened the atmosphere of tolerance for minority movements and empowered
nationalist activists to renew their efforts relatively free of the fear of persecution. As a
result, the activities of Polish nationalists exploded over the course of 1934. Whereas there
21 Helmut Pieper, Die Minderheitenfrage und das Deutsche Reich 1919-1933/34 (Hamburg: Institut für
internationalen Angelegenheiten der Universität Hamburg, 1974), 324-325.
339

had been only 12 Polish-language singing groups in the late 1920s in all of Upper Silesia, by
the end of 1934 that number had skyrocketed to 74 groups. In the winter of 1933-1934
there were 25 language courses with 493 enrollees throughout the province, while the
following year 1,098 signed up in 42 different courses. 22 The Polish nationalists could also
count 53 lending libraries, 105 youth and sport groups, and 44 economic organizations,
such as banks and cooperatives, in the province at the end of 1934. 23 In 1935 a new Polish-
language men’s choir with 48 members was established in Oppeln/Opole, while that same
year an amateur Polish theater group was set up with about 25 members across the county. 24
Oppeln/Opole county housed 16 Polish lending libraries at the end of 1934, and 23 by
1937; circulation of the Nowiny Codzienne jumped meanwhile from just 300 copies in
December 1933 to 700 the following year and over 1,000 by the end of 1935. 25 Many of
the voluntary associations and courses were heavily subsidized by the Polish nationalists,
making the activities affordable for poor Polish-speaking peasants.
What was causing Upper Silesians to embrace the Polish nationalist movement? The
explanation typically promulgated by nationalist activists at gatherings – that Poles were
finally choosing to join the nation to which they organically belonged – is difficult to
sustain given the substantial turn of Polish speakers away from the nationalist movement in
the Weimar era. As late as January 1934, the Oppeln/Opole Polish paper Katolik
Trzyrazowy claimed: “Polish villages, that until recently counted as Polish, have become, in
22 Marek Masnyk, Dzielnica I Związku Polaków w Niemczech: 1923-1939 (Opole: Dział Wydawnictw Wyższej Szkoły
Pedagogicznej w Opolu, 1994), 211.
23 Oppeln Regierungspräsident to Interior Ministry, 18 March 1935. Quoted in Deutsche und Polen, 858.
24 Edward Mendel, Polacy w Opolu, 1933-1939 (Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1980), 57, 60.
25 Ibid., 41, 65.
340

view of the attitude of the populace, utterly indifferent to the national question.” 26 Much
more evidence exists that oppressive Nazi policies pushed locals into a selective embrace of
the Polish nationalist cause. Nazi anti-socialist crackdowns, restrictions on farmers, new
social obligations to the state, and above all disruption of local Catholic practice and
associations combined to motivate Upper Silesians to seek alternative forms of community
and outlets for social discontent. Unlike in many areas of Germany, in Upper Silesia Polish
speakers had a ready-made movement to channel their discontent with Nazi policies, thanks
to Polish minority protections. Yet by moving to embrace the social space and shield from
Nazi burdens offered by Polish nationalists, Upper Silesians did not necessarily embrace the
ideology and message of Polish nationalism.
The most pressing concern for many in the villages and towns around Oppeln/Opole
in 1933-1934 was church-state relations. Since taking power the Nazis had been waging a
campaign against the power of priests at the local and national level. Often it was local SA
storm troopers and petty officials who used their new powers to persecute priests. In
February 1933 the right-nationalist Ostdeutsche Morgenpost published an attack on Father
Piechotta, the head priest in the village of Groß-Schimnitz/Zimnice Wielkie, 15 kilometers
south of Oppeln/Opole. The paper labeled Piechotta a “Pole and German-hater” for not
giving any German-language services in the majority Polish-speaking village. 27 The
personal attack was largely a repetition of a speech given by a Nazi representative in the
Prussian Landtag, which was in turn based on a book by the German nationalist Ernst
26 Katolik Trzyrazowy, 6 January 1934, nr. 2.
27 Ostdeutsche Morgenpost, 20 February 1933, nr. 51.
341

Thiele, entitled “Poland Attacks.” Piechoota became the victim of a Nazi echo chamber of
denunciations. The priest was a noted defender of Germany during the 1921 plebiscite, but
had since been unable to maintain the delicate balance between the demands of his
German- and Polish-speaking parishioners, “through his own fault” according to Landrat
Matuschka. 28 Yet Piechotta was no friend of the Polish nationalists, who in March 1933
denounced him as “not a Pole, but rather a fanatical Center Party man.” 29 While Weimar
administrators were trained to seek conciliatory solutions in such cases and protect priests,
the new Nazi government took a more hard-line stance. In April 1933 the Prussian
Ministry of Science, Art, and Culture in Berlin ordered Piechotta to immediately introduce
German-language masses. 30 The decision validated local German nationalists who sought
remedies for the perceived weakness of the German nation in Upper Silesia, while at the
same time estranging the majority of Polish speakers in the parish.
This tacit government approval of local German radical nationalists led to further
attacks. In June 1933 the planned Polish-language service to celebrate the opening of a new
church in Piechotta’s village was disturbed when roughly 150 SA members showed up from
nearby Proskau/Proszków. The SA troops demanded to hear the service in German so that
they could take part. Piechotta declined at first, but was forced by threats into giving a
German-language service. 31 Father Mainka in nearby Czarnowanz/Czarnowąsy also came
under attack, repeatedly, for his anti-Nazi stance. In March 1933 a Nazi leader in the village
28 Matuschka to Ministry for Science, Art, and Culture, 28 February 1933, APO, NO, Syg. 85.
29 Nowiny Codzienne, 2 March 1933, nr. 50.
30 Ministry for Science, Art, and Culture to Upper Silesian Regierungspräsident, 18 April 1933, APO, NO, Syg. 85.
31 Parish office in Gross-Schimnitz to Oppeln Landrat, 23 June 1933, APO, SPO, Syg. 605.
342

accused Mainka of insulting Hitler, and of suggesting that the new government was run by
“aliens [Fremdlinge].” Mainka had only recently arrived to his post, replacing a more pro-
German priest who was chased away after roughly 80 percent of villagers in the heavily
Polish-speaking parish boycotted his services. Mainka had managed to calm the majority of
Polish speakers, but alienated the Catholic National Socialists with his continued pro-Center
Party political stance. The Nazi government held little sympathy for his position; he was
threatened by a prosecutor for anti-state propaganda, but allowed to continue in his post.
Local Nazis continued to largely boycott his masses, however, and in August around 150
people demonstrated in front of the village’s administrative building for his removal, with
the tacit condonation of local officials. Later that year, another dispute pitted Mainka
against the local Hitler Youth chapter, who wanted their flags to fly prominently in the
church. 32
As small conflicts like these played out in villages across Upper Silesia, the majority
Polish-speaking and bilingual population became increasingly estranged from the political
agenda of the Nazi party. At the national level, Nazi consolidation had shifted by the
summer of 1933 to crushing the last non-nationalist party remaining in Germany, the
Catholic Center Party. The dissolution of the party in early July, combined with the
Concordat with the Vatican later that month, served as a one-two punch to German
Catholics. Although the Concordat promised the Church autonomy in non-political realms,
the effective politicization of all of German society by the Nazis rendered this provision
largely moot. By 1934, Gleichschaltung was aggressively targeting Catholic lay
32 Letter of Mainke to Oppeln Landrat, 8 October 1933, APO, SPO, Syg. 605.
343

organizations, as Nazis disbanded youth groups, curtailed Polish-language masses, and spied
on church board meetings. These were repressive measures at the Reich-wide level, but they
carried a specific national content in the Upper Silesian context.
Just as importantly, the Nazi government immediately began dismantling the
autonomy granted Upper Silesia during the plebiscite era. German nationalist activists
derided the agreement to create a separate province in 1921 as a giveaway to Catholic
political interests; and indeed, throughout the Weimar era, the Catholic Center Party was
the dominant voice in regional politics. After the Catholic Upper Silesian president
Lukascheck was forced out of office in May 1933, he was replaced by Helmuth Brückner,
the longstanding Nazi party member and Gauleiter of Silesia since 1925. Most crucially,
Brückner was already president of Lower Silesia, putting the two provinces under the same
leader and effectively co-opting Catholic Upper Silesia into a politics defined by Greater
Silesian Nazi interests under Brückner’s direction. 33 Among the Brückner’s first public goals
in office, he announced the need for “elimination of mismanagement” and of the “Center
Party dictatorship of the last decade.” 34 While Upper Silesia would technically remain a
separate province until its merger with Lower Silesia in 1938, the era of Center Party rule
and cultural leeway for its bilingual Catholic population came to a crashing end in 1933.
The elimination of Catholic Upper Silesia’s political autonomy, the empowerment of
radical German nationalists at the local level, and the erosion of Catholic social networks
through Gleichschaltung created an opening for Polish nationalists to co-opt embittered
33 Guido Hitze, Carl Ulitzka (1873-1953), oder, Oberschlesien zwischen den Weltkriegen (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2002),
1113.
34 Quoted in Ibid., 1114.
344

local Catholics. Polish newspapers reported regularly on the elimination of Polish-language
masses. 35 Their propaganda increasingly painted Polish nationalism as the defender of
Catholicism, now that Germany had proven itself anti-Catholic. Under the slogan “mother
tongue and religion” the Polish nationalists created new school associations and youth
groups and staged new theater pieces with explicit Catholic messages. As the Upper Silesian
president reported in early 1935, the Poles were self-consciously filling a gap opened up by
the dissolution of Catholic networks:
It is undeniable that in 90 percent Catholic Upper Silesia the Center Party was a
reservoir into which many nationally fluctuating elements from the Polish
population merged, thus withdrawing from the organized Polish movement.
The upheaval from the Center Party’s dissolution came to benefit the Polish
Catholic movement. It is protected by the Geneva Accord from all influence
and can therefore pull all the fluctuating or indifferent among the population
who were formerly members of earlier German Catholic competitor
organizations into their group. The advances of Polish work in 1934 may thus
be closely associated with that part of the population that feels itself to be
primarily Catholic, especially the naive rural population, who frequently sees in
Polish organizations the continuation of their fight for the Catholic faith. It is
in this direction that the Polish slogans are directed. 36
The propaganda of the Polish nationalists at events throughout the mid-1930s
supported the Nazi administrator’s assessment. In April 1935, around Easter, Polish activists
held a Polish theater evening in Klein Döbern/Dobrzeń Mały which attracted 80 to 90 local
guests. In a pause between plays, the regional Polish leader Wawrzynek invoked the
resurrection of Jesus as a marker of the Catholic holiday they all celebrated. He then
explicitly linked Jesus’ resurrection to that of the Polish nationalists, who were profiting
from the “crown of thorns of the Poles in Upper Silesia, persecuted, beaten and
35 See Katolik Trzyrazowy, 4 January 1934, nr. 1; 9 February 1937, nr. 6; Nowiny Codzienne, 2 July 1935, nr. 148.
36 Oppeln Regierungspräsident to Interior Ministry, 18 March 1935. Quoted in Deutsche und Polen, 859.
345

disparaged.” 37 Many of the theater pieces shown throughout the province carried overtly
religious themes, such as Saint Francis, Beggar of Assisi shown in March 1936 to 400 guests
in Oppeln/Opole. At the show, Wawrzynek gave another religious speech, saying that “we
have maintained the right and the guarantee [from the Geneva Accord] to be able to live
according to the ways and customs of our Father. We may and we can again nurture the
language of our Father and live in the tradition of our acquired religion.” 38 That same
month, local Polish activists held a meeting for roughly 230 mostly rural peasants with the
theme “The Faith of Our Father.” During the presentations, local activists spoke in front of
a picture of the Black Madonna of Częstochowa, the single most powerful iconographic
symbol of Polish Catholicism. 39 Polish activists blanketed the county with a consistent
message of a Nazi threat to the universally Catholic Polish nation. As one Nazi official
noted in an exasperated report in August 1935, “These are the same practices which brought
about very successful national work for Poles in Posen before the war.” 40 The equivalency of
Catholicism with Polish nationalism had become nearly complete by early 1937, at least in
the minds of Polish nationalists, who spoke of “two gospels” – the “indivisible” faith in the
Church and faith in Polish nationalism. 41
Upper Silesian priests, still the most important arbiters of moral authority in many
Catholic villages, were also increasingly finding Polish nationalism the most viable shield
37 Groß Döbern gendarme report to Oppeln Landrat, 23 April 1935. Quoted in Ibid., 912.
38 Police report on 22 March 1936 theater performance in Oppeln, APO, RO, Syg. 1933.
39 Report of Oppeln Oberbürgermesiter to Upper Silesian Regierungspräsident, 5 May 1936, APO, RO, Syg. 1933.
40 Breslau Oberpräsident to Interior Ministry, 7 August 1935. Quoted in Deutsche und Polen, 870.
41 Katolik Trzyrazowy, 30 January 1937, nr. 12.
346

from Nazi persecution. According to Nazi officials the priests were offering “substantial
support” to the Poles by attending their meetings and giving their blessings to the groups.
As one official suggested, “With the strictly religious Upper Silesian populace, especially in
the countryside, it is already sufficient advertising for Polishness when a Catholic priest
visits a Polish function.” 42 Parents would join up with priests to protest anti-Church
repression, for example, by threatening to remove their children from the Hitler Youth
since the group’s scheduled activities often conflicted with Sunday services. In such cases,
previously anational or Center Party priests were being pushed towards Polish nationalism
for the protection it provided. Not only was this resurgence of Polish-Catholic rhetoric
causing alarm because it created an anti-Nazi resistance milieu with priestly support, but it
also directly affected Nazi penetration of local social networks. Officials and Polish
nationalists both reported that locals regularly refused to give the Nazi salute, instead opting
for “Praised be Jesus Christ.” 43 Many villages reported sharp drops in membership among
the Hitler Youth and other Nazi organizations after 1934. As the provincial president
reported in 1935, “in many villages in which <strong>Nationalism</strong> Socialism had gained a foothold
in 1933, today there are absolutely no more organizations.” 44
All of the new fervor for the Polish nationalist project may still suggest that Polish
speakers began to finally embrace the ideological tenets of Polish nationalism, which had
long been melded to a vision of a universally Catholic society. Yet other, equally
42 Breslau Oberpräsident to Interior Ministry, 7 August 1935. Quoted in Deutsche und Polen, 870.
43 Groß Döbern gendarme report to Oppeln Landrat, 23 April 1935. Quoted in Ibid., 912. Oppeln police report, 25
January 1934, APO, RO, Syg. 1932.
44 Oppeln Regierungspräsident to Interior Ministry, 18 March 1935. Quoted in Ibid., 860.
347

compelling and less ideological reasons existed for Upper Silesians to identify as Polish
nationalists. Polish activists promised locals a shield from the most onerous duties and laws
of the Nazi state, with varying success. One law of major importance to Upper Silesian
peasants was the September 1933 Entailment Law [Reichserbhofgesetz], which limited the
transfer of land to a single male inheritor while protecting farmers from foreclosure. The
law limited both enrollment and inheritance to those of German or “tribally equivalent”
[stammesgleich] racial background, a provision meant to exclude Jews but with implications
for Polish speakers in Upper Silesia. 45 By the summer of 1934 the mood among Upper
Silesians was restless, thanks to the property restrictions as well as production and price
controls on key agricultural goods such as milk, butter, and eggs. 46 Rumors spread, just as in
other parts of Germany, that the Entailment Law was made for the benefit of large
landholders, who still maintained economic freedoms not allowed smaller family farms. In
the case of the Entailment Law, court rulings included Poles under the rubric of “tribally
equivalent,” but this did not stop Polish nationalists from exploiting peasant discontent.
According to the Oppeln/Opole police director in January 1936, “a number of farmers have
called the leading members of the Polish minority to proclaim national allegiance or enlist
their protection in order to escape the provisions of the Erbhofgesetz.” 47
Polish nationalist activists did find significant success in some domains exempting
local citizens from the obligations of Nazi society. In 1934, when the Nazi government
45 J. Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (New York: Penguin
Books, 2008), 182-186.
46 Police report, 5 June 1934, APO, RO, Syg. 1930.
47 Oppeln police director situation report, 13 Jan 1936, APO, RO, Syg. 1932.
348

implemented in parts of Prussia a mandatory “land year” – a nine-month camp for
postsecondary youth featuring Nazi indoctrination – Poles were originally included. But
local Polish activists fought the measure, arguing that “the work-service is a German
national provision and ... serves to educate the members of the German Volk in the spirit of
National Socialism.” 48 Their appeals worked, as the government agreed to exclude Poles
from the service requirement. The local Polish nationalist paper rejoiced at the news, and
warned readers that any illegal attempts to force Polish children into the service should
immediately be reported to the ZPwN. 49 Polish activists also fought bitterly, but with less
success, to control instruction in minority schools. On orders from Berlin, minority pupils
were not to be excluded from German nationalist extracurricular activities, and were to
receive the same Nazi-based pedagogical instruction as in German schools. Yet frequent
reminders of this rule sent from Berlin to Oppeln/Opole suggest less than perfect
compliance with the orders. 50 Aryan students were expected to have two hours of weekly
instruction on the tenets of National Socialism, and for this law Poles were counted as
Aryans. Passive or symbolic resistance, moreover, suggests that some Polish minority school
teachers did not strictly adhere to Nazi pedagogical tenets. In many Polish minority schools,
the symbol of the ZPwN was pasted on the wall instead of the swastika, and teachers would
wear pins with the same stylized logo, the Rodło. 51 Even though Polish nationalists could
not always prevail in their disputes with the state, they were waging an effective battle of
48 Nowiny Codzienne, 1 October 1935, nr. 226.
49 Ibid., 19 November 1935, nr. 267.
50 Prussian Minister of Science, Art, and Education to Silesian Oberpräsident, 23 July 1935, APO, NO, Syg. 68.
51 Report from Schneidemühl to Oppeln Regierungspräsident, 16 March 1936, APO, NO, Syg. 69.
349

symbols and words, thanks to a populace disgruntled with the anti-Catholic repression and
new obligations to the state. As Brückner’s office summarized in August 1935, “A main
argument for Polish recruitment, especially among the youth, consists of them telling the
young people that if they joined a Polish association they would not need to belong to any
Nazi formation (SA, SS, German Labor Front) and would enjoy the far-reaching protection
of the minority policies in every respect.” 52
Nazi leaders in Upper Silesia confronted on a daily basis the power of the Polish
nationalist movement to serve as an umbrella for social discontent and indifference to Nazi
ideology. One of the most persistent concerns among administrators was the agility of
socialists, communists, and other non-Polish speakers to conduct their activities behind the
shield of the Polish nationalists. Soon after the Nazis banned the Communist Party ahead of
the March 1933 elections, local Polish activists scrambled to appeal for the vote of young
leftist radicals. It was these “younger age groups in the countryside, who were
overwhelmingly followers of the Communist Party” whom the Poles hoped to convert. 53
While the Polish nationalists had little success at the polls, winning only two seats on the
Oppeln/Opole county assembly, and no higher seats, they established a precedent of
appealing to the radicalized working class. By May 1935, Nazi police surveillance was
reporting that “angry Germans, and for sure predominantly followers of the Center Party,
as well as former Communists or other followers of Marxist orientations, are increasingly
52 Report of Silesian Oberpräsident to Interior Ministry, 7 August 1935. Quoted in Deutsche und Polen, 870-871.
53 Oppeln police report, 2 June 1933, APO, NO, Syg. 211.
350

declaring themselves part of the Polish minority.” 54 A year later, at a conference of regional
administrators, concern spread over the negative fallout from the “subjective theory” of
nationalism dictated by the Geneva Accords. The Nazi official warned that Communists
and Socialists, “whose open activities were made impossible in the old sense, now suddenly
profess belonging to the Polish minority, join the Polish professional association or the
central council and carry on their work in disguise.” 55 Their protection under the minority
treaty made it nearly impossible to prosecute them. The Landrat of Oppeln/Opole even
suggested a new, politically dangerous phenomenon in 1937: a portion of the 5,000 to
6,000 female seasonal workers migrating from Upper Silesia westwards within Germany
each summer would return home married, bringing husbands of German, working-class
background. Some of these men, despite their German backgrounds, joined the Polish
minority movement as a replacement for disbanded socialist networks. This led the
commissioner to declare, “For this reason there is sometimes little difference between
Communists and those who proclaim Polishness.” 56
At the heart of Polish nationalist appeals was a belief among activists that their flock
did not belong to the German Volk and thus should be excluded from its racial state, and
instead involved in separate activities, such as the Polish Harcerstwo (Scouts) instead of
Hitler Youth. Much to the chagrin of Nazi administrators, Polish nationalist activists made
use of Hitler’s logic – even parroting parts of his speeches – to advocate racial separation.
Just as Hitler emphasized the innate qualities of Germans in the near abroad, playing up
54 Police report, 29 May 1935, APO, RO, Syg. 1930.
55 Report on 30 April 1936 government conference on Polish minority, APO, RO, Syg. 1929.
56 Oppeln Landrat to Oppeln police, 3 April 1937. Quoted in Deutsche und Polen, 916.
351

their supposed racial distinctiveness to pave the way for territorial revision, so Poles
emphasized the racial qualities of the Pole in Upper Silesia for the same ends. Polish activists
derided efforts at national conversion, suggesting that Germans would never respect
anyone but a purely racial German. “Don’t believe it when they say to you that a Pole can
become a German, for this is not true.… The convert to Germanness will not have it better
in any way; the native German will in his heart scorn him as a man who can be bought off
for a plate of lentils.” 57 At a January 1936 Polish theater performance in
Goslawitz/Gosławice, the audience of around 250 to 300 guests were instructed in their own
sense of Polish nationalism. According to the police report, the Polish speakers in
attendance were told, “In all of Germany, wherever a person speaks and thinks in Polish, it
is Poland, exactly as the German Führer says it: wherever a German stands, speaks and
thinks German, it is Germany.” 58 If the Czechoslovakian Sudetenland belonged to
Germany, according to Hitler, then by the same logic Oppeln/Opole should belong to
Poland, Polish activists argued. German and Polish nationalists mutually reinforced the
logic of racial separation as they faced off against one another.
Yet while Polish activists sought to exclude Upper Silesians from the burdens of Nazi
society, they simultaneously fought for inclusion when material benefits were at stake. Here
the roles were reversed, as regional Nazi officials fought to exclude Polish speakers from new
provisions in the German racial welfare state. Poles, for example, were regularly excluded
from the new Nazi labor union, the German Labor Front (DAF), which controlled
57 Report of Upper Silesian District President to Berlin Interior Ministry, 18 March 1935. Quoted in Ibid., 861.
58 Report of Oppeln Landrat to Upper Silesian Regierungspräsident, 20 January 1936. Quoted in Ibid., 914.
352

unemployment benefits, protected wages, and provided leisure programs and other social
welfare benefits. More importantly, membership in the DAF became practically mandatory
for many jobs, not just in government agencies but in a wide array of industrial and
commercial enterprises. In another case, a 1936 German law provided additional welfare
payouts to Aryan families with four or more children. The additional 10 marks per month,
per child, could have been a windfall for many Upper Silesian families. Polish nationalists
argued that their minority was entitled to the payments, noting that “membership in the
Polish minority in Germany cannot be a reason for not considering an application.” They
urged their readers to apply, but to refrain from mentioning any association with Polish
nationalism, such as the children’s attendance at a Polish minority school. 59
At stake for both German and Polish nationalists were the terms of racial inclusion in
the Nazi state, as each side sought to bend the rules and logic of biological nationalism to
meet other, more pressing material and ideological ends. In Upper Silesian minority
politics, the stock placed in innate racial belonging was only as valuable as the purposes that
it served. Polish nationalists would never deny the supposedly biological ethnic national
self-identification which they claimed for every Polish speaker. Yet belonging in the Polish
national community – that is, the transformation of individual self-identification to a
notion of group belonging – was fungible based on the needs of this supposed community.
When material benefits such as child welfare payments and exclusion from work duty were
at stake, these concerns overrode any so-called “objective” markers of national belonging.
The League of Nations had declared the right to subjective national self-determination for
59 Nowiny Codzienne, 30 December 1936, nr. 299.
353

every Upper Silesian, in the process allowing for varying and often contradictory notions of
group belonging expressed by Polish activists.
For some Nazi officials and thinkers, the inclusion of the maximum number of citizens
into the Nazi racial community often outweighed concerns of racial separation. In 1935
Wilhelm Frick, the Nazi jurist responsible for much of Germany’s pre-war anti-Semitic
policy, took a lenient stance on the inclusion of Poles in the Volksgemeinschaft. Shortly
after the announcement of the Nuremberg Laws depriving Jews of German citizenship and
banning Jewish-Aryan marriages, Frick wrote “Only Reich citizens will have full political
rights in Germany. And what about the Polish population? Of course, but only those Poles,
who demonstrate through their actions that they are the best Germans and wish to be true
servants of the German Volk.” 60 Frick and others tacitly understood that the conversion of
Upper Silesian Polish speakers into loyal Germans proceeded best under the Weimar model
of cultural tolerance and regional Catholic autonomy. While Nazi Germany could still offer
the promise of economic advancement as an incentive for Upper Silesians, it was the
repression of the Catholic Church, the crushing of the workers’ movement, and the general
neglect of small farming interests that proved the ultimate stumbling blocks for the Nazi
project of national assimilation in Upper Silesia. Through these ostensibly non-national
policies to consolidate the Nazi totalitarian state, Berlin created a revived, seemingly
national enemy in Upper Silesia.
Yet this national enemy remained, in everyday practice, largely indifferent to the racial
dividing lines being erected by Nazis and Polish nationalists. The retreat into a Catholic
60 Polska Zachodnia, 11 December 1935, nr. 340.
354

milieu buffered from Nazi persecution by Polish nationalism is perhaps the strongest
evidence of this. Other glimpses into the social and organizational life of Upper Silesians
reveal that Polish speakers would often join Nazi organizations. In July 1935, the Berlin
Gestapo sent angry instructions to their Upper Silesian branch offices, claiming evidence
that “members of the Polish minority occupy in part the leading positions in SA and SS
formations as well as in work camps.” 61 The Gestapo demanded that such types be
immediately dismissed. A year later, the regional government was still struggling with
national mixing and the seeming indifference, or even duplicity, of some leading Nazi
Party members. In October 1936 the Landrat of Oppeln/Opole complained in particular
about Anton Fiech, a Polish activist from Bierdzan/Bierdzany who campaigned for Poland
in the 1921 plebiscite and was even suspected of formerly being active in Polish
paramilitary groups. Despite his continued Polish leanings in the 1930s, Fiech was able to go
to his county Nazi Party leader, Johann Witolla, and sign up for party membership. Witolla
even backdated Fiech’s application, most likely to earn Fiech some material benefit from the
state. 62 Among the larger population, avowed Germans attended Polish-language theater
performances, while Hitler Youth groups convened in Polish. 63 All of this crossing of
linguistic and ideological borders suggests a population that remained largely indifferent to
Nazi anti-Polish rhetoric and campaigns.
61 Berlin Gestapo to Upper Silesian branch offices, 15 July 1935, APO, NO, Syg. 68.
62 See various reports in APO, RO, Syg. 1933.
63 Silesian Oberpräsident to Interior Ministry, 7 August and 9 December 1935. Quoted in Deutsche und Polen, 872,
879.
355

Personal friendships and intimate relationships also crossed ethnio-linguistic and
ideological dividing lines. On Tuesday, 29 January 1935, in the village of
Grudschütz/Grudzice on the outskirts of Oppeln/Opole, the local Polish nationalist leader
Franciszek Bul gave away his stepdaughter in marriage. The groom, however, was not
another Polish activist: he was none other than Witolla, the acting head of the Nazi Party
for the county of Oppeln/Opole. The marriage incensed regional Nazi officials; the Landrat
called the betrothal an “impossibility,” since Bul was known as “one of the most senior and
most radical Poles” who regularly made it into secret police files. Witolla was known to have
even been present in Bul’s home during Polish nationalist meetings. 64 If the Nazi Party
leader for Oppeln/Opole county felt comfortable marrying into a Polish nationalist family,
then clearly the racial dividing lines were blurred enough to allow for intimate relations
between less ideological German and Polish speakers. More generally, the rhythms of
everyday life in mixed-language villages most certainly brought about interactions among
Polish and German speakers in shops and on the streets. The demographics around
Oppeln/Opole made it impossible for national self-identity to translate into social
exclusivity among national groups.
All of this everyday activity led regional officials to speak increasingly of a so-called
Zwischenschicht [in-between stratum] of non-committed Upper Silesians. While this term
had been used before, it took on a special significance in the later 1930s as Nazis further
racialized the contours of identity. In reality, Zwischenschicht referred as much to
ideological affinity as racial belonging. In August 1938 the Oppeln/Opole Landrat
64 Oppeln Landrat to Regierungspräsident, 29 January 1935. Quoted in Ibid., 911.
356

estimated that it included as some 60 percent of the local population. 65 According to the
Landrat, many of them were primarily German speaking and “belong[ed] to German
cultural circles” yet remained susceptible “in times of crisis to the propaganda of a foreign
nationality.” 66 His main concern was that Upper Silesians were showing a stubborn
indifference to the ideological tenets of their state, and promoting racial mixing and the
sullying of Nazi ideological purity. Ideological laxity was leading to racial impurity, and it
was the former which proved more important. Even if their policies did not always reflect
their beliefs, Nazis generally viewed race as a pre-determined biological entity which could
not be affected by ideology. 67 Yet here the Landrat was arguing that ideology was upsetting
and altering the national make-up of Upper Silesians. This vision of a society which
identified and adhered to its supposedly innate ethnic differences – a vision shared by Nazi
and Polish nationalists – ultimately failed to materialize in mid-1930s Upper Silesia. It
would take increased repression after the expiration of the Geneva Accord in 1937 for Nazi
administrators to pursue the elimination of Polish from public life – and even then, as the
next section shows, they found more success in eliminating the symbols and appearance of
Polish linguistic culture than in actually eliminating its presence.
65 Oppeln Landrat to Regierungspräsident, 12 August 1938. Quoted in Ibid., 920.
66 Silesian Oberpräsident to Interior Ministry, 9 December 1935. Quoted in Ibid., 878.
67 On Nazi Volksgemeinschaft thinking among local officials, see John Connelly, "The Uses of Volksgemeinschaft:
Letters to the NSDAP Kreisleitung Eisenach, 1939-1940," Journal of Modern History 68, no. 4 (1996).
357

THE APPEARANCE OF VICTORY: NAZI REPRESSION BEFORE WORLD WAR II
Beginning in 1936, with the shift throughout Germany towards more radical social and
economic policies, and then gaining steam after the expiration of the 1937 Geneva
Accords, Nazi officials in Upper Silesia made a final push to eliminate public traces of
Polishness in their district. Their dual goal was to decapitate the Polish nationalist
movement by intimidating and repressing local activists, while converting the rest of the
Zwischenschicht into loyal Germans. Yet the incentives for bilingual citizens to become
Germans, through newly funded “German national work,” were far outweighed by the
repression of their cultural practices and continued neglect of their economic needs. While
expulsions and arrests of Polish activists certainly scared many locals into expressions of
pro-Nazi loyalty, the battle against the larger population was waged mostly in the realm of
statistics, symbols, and discourse. The greatest social battle was waged by Nazis against the
Church, where by the summer of 1939 they had succeeded in eliminating all traces of Polish
from the pulpit. The decision had direct social effects on religious life, but for the most part
was also a symbolic victory, as locals continued speaking Polish – even with priests – in
situations where their government was not listening. In short, Upper Silesians, driven by
fear of a radicalized Nazi administration, reached a deal with authorities where both
pretended that Polish no longer existed around Oppeln/Opole.
One of the first major anti-Polish campaigns in this radical shift was the renaming of
towns. As early as 1931 the Oppelner Heimatblatt suggested changing village names, which
the paper claimed had become such an orthographic mishmash of German and Polish as to
358

make no sense in either language. 68 While select towns voluntarily changed their names in a
slow stream during the early 1930s, it was in 1936 that the Nazi government organized,
from the top down, a massive renaming of almost every Polish-sounding village in the
region. Some of the names were altered slightly to sound or look more German (Lendzin
became Lenzen, Folwark became Vorwerk, and Alt Schalkowitz became Alt Schalkendorf),
and sufficiently German names were left alone. Many others, however, were completely
changed. Czarnowanz became Klosterbrück, named after the famous cloister there, and
Slawitz became Preisdorf. Often, as in the case of Boguschütz’s conversion to Gottesdorf,
the renaming involved an act of rough translation from Polish. In other cases, German
nationalists merely invented a name based on some local feature of the landscape or vague
historical connection.
According to Nazi propaganda these measures merely constituted the “restoration of
old German place names” which had supposedly been sullied (typically in the medieval
period) by Slavicization. 69 It is difficult to say how much the name changes penetrated
everyday language; in the 1950s, some German expellees referred to their former homes by
their Nazi names. 70 Since the measure did not directly infringe on the national rights of the
minority, it was mostly outside the purview of the Geneva Accords. In March 1937 the
ZPwN did file a complaint that their Polish-language publications were being forced to refer
to local villages by their new “Germanized” names, but the complaint made little headway
68 Oppelner Heimatblatt, 18 July 1931.
69 Breslau Landesgruppen memo to Upper Silesian mayors on talking points for cohort of foreign journalists, 19 June
1937, APO, SPO, Syg. 77.
70 See accounts in BArch, OstDok, 1/243. For reasons of simplicity, I have chosen to list only the pre-1936 German
names of towns along with their Polish equivalents.
359

efore the Geneva Accords expired that July. 71 The Polish papers, even as they continued to
assert the essential Polishness of most of Upper Silesia, were thus forced to refer to villages
and towns by their artificial Nazi names in print.
The renaming of towns represented the renewal of efforts to deny the historical place
of Polish culture in Upper Silesia, efforts begun with the census changes of 1933 but
radicalized here. The two major censuses of 1933 and 1939 promised on paper the rapid
decline and imminent demise of the Polish language in Upper Silesia. The disputed census
figures of 1933, once published, already registered a significant decrease in the combined
numbers of Polish and bilingual speakers in the county, from 72.5 percent in 1925 to 49.5
percent in 1933. 72 While this can be attributed to a range of factors, it is likely that
generational shifts in language use played some part in the decline, but that census politics
and fear among locals of the consequences of their declaration played a greater role. The
latter cause, fear, was abundantly evident in the subsequent 1939 census, which registered
the near-complete disappearance of Polish speakers from the entire province. For
Oppeln/Opole county, only 601 listed Polish as their mother tongue, and 420 declared
themselves members of the Polish Volkstum, compared to just over 147,000 self-declared
Germans. 73 While there is little evidence of direct government intimidation during the
census or of doctoring the results, the Nazis nonetheless seemed to rely on a general
atmosphere of fear. Openly declaring affinity for Polish nationalism was considered
dangerous by that point. One local Nazi noted the tangible fear over the census: “It was
71 Brief of ZPwN complaint, 20 March 1937, APO, USMO, Syg. 793.
72 Report from Oppeln Landrat to district president, 19 March 1937, APO, RO, Syg 2096.
73 Summary report of Oppeln Landrat, 15 July 1939, APO, RO, Syg. 1939.
360

established that very many of them [local citizens] who were Polish-minded and also
expressed it in their overall demeanor slyly self-identified with the German nationality and
the German language. Most of course did this out of fear of the eventual consequences.” 74
Local officials were also well aware that the census statistics did not give an accurate
portrait of national allegiances. The Oppeln/Opole Landrat Johnnes Slawik in March 1937
disputed any overt link between language use and national identity. He recognized that the
census proved incapable of measuring the number of active Polish nationalists and
sympathizers, so he developed his own statistics based on local intelligence reports. His
estimate for the number of committed members of the Polish minority totaled 5,629 for
the county, including children. Still, this represented a dms;; portion of the more than
150,000 residents in the county. Slawik was confident that the process of national
disambiguation was continuing apace in the Nazi era, chipping away at the supposed
Zwischenschicht of ideologically indeterminate citizens and driving many to support
Germany. “These national comrades [Volksgenossen] could have perhaps been depicted as
aimless followers during the Weimar era [Systemzeit],” he wrote. “But at the present time
this is no longer the case.” 75
After the expiration of the Geneva Accords in 1937, the regional German press went
on an offensive to proclaim the universal Germanness of Upper Silesia. The rhetorical goal
became, just as Slawik had suggested, to remove from public perception the idea of a racial
Zwischenschicht. The only people deemed Poles were those who openly declared it through
74 Report of Ernst Trautmann, 1940, APO, SPO, Syg. 276.
75 Report from Oppeln Landrat to Regierungspräsident, 19 March 1937, APO, RO, Syg. 2096.
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censuses, school selection, or politics. It was this logic that permitted the Oberschlesische
Tageszitung in August 1937 to publish an article titled “The Fairy Tale of the Half-Million
Poles.” The article claimed only 10,500 organized Poles in all of Germany, referring to the
ranks of ZPwN membership. They expounded upon the supposed freedoms guaranteed the
ZPwN, including the right to enroll students in Polish schools and hold Polish-language
meetings without police registration. These lenient policies, they claimed, made the
relatively small membership figures an even greater symbol of Polish national failures. 76
Ironically, it was at this moment, the end of the Geneva Accords era in mid-1937, when
Nazi administrators began using the expired protections as an excuse to persecute Polish
nationalist leaders. They claimed that they were serving the will of the majority of the
population by eliminating the subversive minority of active Polish nationalists.
The political manipulation of Upper Silesia’s demographic statistics went along with
Nazi efforts to rewrite the region’s history and cultural traditions. In the process, official
understandings of Heimat were entirely subordinated to the vision of a homogeneous,
racialized, ur-German landscape. The Oppelner Heimatblatt took on a more political tone
with Gleichschaltung in 1933. An article in July titled “Teutons in Oppeln County” began
with a quote from Hitler: “We want to nurture with humble reverence the great traditions
of our Volk, its history, and its culture as inexhaustible sources of a true inner strength and
of a potential renewal in dark times.” The article traced the “Teutonic” roots of Upper
Silesia, settled as early as the fifth century BCE before being sullied by “Slavic immigration
76 Oberschlesische Tageszeitung, 12 August 1937, nr. 186.
362

and racial mixing” in the ninth to eleventh centuries. 77 While the Heimatblatt rarely
adopted an explicitly anti-Slavic tone in subsequent years, by the late 1930s racialist
thinking had permeated the paper in more subtle ways. Almost all references to Slavs were
eliminated, accelerating trends which began in the Weimar era. The Heimatblatt moreover
showed greater signs of racial thinking about local culture and history. The “Teutonic”
character of the land was re-asserted through articles on family names and early medieval
(i.e. pre-Piast) histories. 78 One crucial theme in the late 1930s was Sippenforschung, a newly
popular form of genealogy that stressed the racial roots of local kinship networks. While
these themes in Heimat culture portended no physical clash with Poles, they racialized the
role of German culture in the region. The bilingual practices of Upper Silesian citizens, the
region’s multilayered history in various kingdoms, and above all the overwhelming imprint
of Catholicism on its people and architecture, had been slowly smudged out of the portrait
of Upper Silesia’s Heimat since the 1920s. Now the racialization of this narrative suggested
a sort of rhetorical violence against the region and a sign of Upper Silesia’s erosion as a
category of group belonging.
As important as the discourses surrounding statistics, race science, and history were, the
material and physical threats against Polish nationalist activists in the late 1930s had a more
visceral and terrifying effect on local societies. The expiration of the Geneva Accords and
the removal of any fear of international rebuke for persecution was combined with
increased German-Polish antipathy and Germany’s aggressive foreign policy (especially
77 Oppelner Heimatblatt, 19 July 1933.
78 See articles in Ibid., May, June, August 1937, July 1938.
363

after the takeover of the Sudetenland), breeding an attitude of impunity among regional
Upper Silesian officials. As soon as the Accords expired, Nazi administrators shut down
activities such as a summer camp for Polish scouts (a nationalist competitior to the Hitler
Youth). 79 In April 1939, when local SA troops allegedly threw stones through the windows
of three Polish activists’ homes in Vogtsdorf/Wójtowa Wieś, the police barely mustered an
official investigation. The village magistrate’s report focused mostly on the pro-Nazi effects
of the action: one Polish victim, Józef Baron, had been scared by the attack into sending his
children to the German school and festooning his property with swastikas for the first time.
The magistrate also noted the wider effect on the local bilingual, anational population. “The
so-called Zwischenschicht have fully participated this year in the celebrations for the
national holiday. This was also the case in surrounding communities, especially once word
of the [criminal] action quickly spread.” 80 A month later, the local Polish activist and farmer
Ryszard Knosalla was expelled from his home near Zlönitz/Zelasno to Dresden by the
Gestapo. As the local magistrate reported, “The effect is absolutely tremendous … one hears
in Eisenau [the new Nazi name for the village] and its surroundings not a single word of
Polish spoken anymore.” He noted that when he recently visited the village for a Nazi
ceremony, “there were Poles in attendance that had never been to such an event before.” As
the magistrate predicted, “Only a few Poles will need to be expelled, and then not a single
person will go to Polish-language religious services.” 81 In the final year before the invasion
79 Mendel, Polacy w Opolu, 52-53.
80 Vogtsdorf town official to Oppeln Landrat, 2 May 1939, quoted in: Deutsche und Polen, 922.
81 Birkental town official to Oppeln Landrat, 23 May 1939, quoted in: Ibid., 923.
364

of Poland, local officials saw a supposedly permanent solution to the Germanization of their
territory through the decapitation of the Polish movement.
The regional Nazi government in essence began testing the limits of totalitarian
control over an mistrusted population which remained largely distant from Nazi
Volksgemeinschaft ideals. Many of the most radical measures against the population, such as
compulsory sterilization, were also practiced elsewhere and had little explicit connection to
anti-Polish policy. Nazi sterilization illustrates the limitations of League of Nations
protections, which only covered cases where there was on overt national bias. When the 14-
year old Leon Schendzielorz, for example, was examined by a doctor in Beuthen/Bytom
and recommended for sterilization based on “insufficient mental development,” the ZPwN
appealed the decision to Calonder’s Mixed Commission. While the ZPwN argued that the
procedure violated Schendzielorz’s rights as a Pole, their only evidence for national
discrimination was that he was examined in German, his second language. Unable to
conjure up any legal rationale for human rights which had yet to be codified in the interwar
period, the ZPwN was forced to drop the case. 82
The firing of teachers deemed ideologically lax, meanwhile, blurred the line between
Nazi ideological and anti-Polish justifications. Local efforts in Oppeln/Opole county to
transfer or force into retirement “politically unreliable” teachers began in early 1936. Of the
23 teachers singled out, only one was explicitly condemned for being “Polish-minded.”
More common was the complaint of national apathy, ideological alienation from Nazi
tenets, or a strongly religious motivation for passive resistance. The teacher in Alt-
82 ZPwN complaint from 9 July 1936, German response on 15 July 1936, APO, USMO, Syg. 768.
365

Schodnia/Schodnia Stara, for example, was “very much religiously disposed and attends no
Nazi events,” which proved sufficient grounds for his transfer out of Upper Silesia. In other
cases, however, the line between Catholic adherence and pro-Polish activities became
blurred, often thanks to family ties. The teacher in Tarnau/Tarnów was married to a
suspected Polish sympathizer and had personal contacts with Czesław Klimas, the priest and
regional Polish leader. While a local official declared that the teacher “does not openly
pursue Polish politics,” he also suggested that “in any case he is not serving the German
cause in Tarnau.” This sort of national apathy became sufficient grounds for the teacher’s
transfer in 1937. Just down the road from his village, in Raschau/Raszowa, another teacher
was known as a long-standing supporter of the Catholic Center Party who answered the
Nazi salute by merely tipping his hat. Yet he was also the church organist, and used his
position to receive payments from the local government to perform at Polish-language field
processions. The teacher’s anti-Nazi, pro-Catholic stance was sufficient grounds for his
removal, but his support for Polish-language singing in a mostly Polish-speaking village
became a further sign of his national untrustworthiness. 83
From 1933-1937 Polish activists had successfully melded together Catholic and Polish
nationalist interests in order to provide Upper Silesians a shield against many Nazi
Gleichschaltung policies. Now, with Nazis ramping up repression, Polish and Catholic
interests remained melded together in the eyes of officials. The same logic was in place
among both groups, who sought to link Catholic identity to national self-belonging in
83 On Furch and Buchwald, see the report of Oppeln county school inspector, 4 March 1936. On Schall, see the
report of Tarnau town official, 13 September 1937. Both reports in APO, SPO, Syg. 276.
366

order to cast their nets of protection or of repression as widely as possible. The result, after
1937, was that nationally apathetic Catholics were increasingly treated as pro-Polish. Nazi
demands for national loyalty now necessitated, in some cases, a wholesale rejection of one’s
Catholic, bilingual heritage. Thus the lines between Nazi anti-Polish policies and other
measures of social repression worked to the detriment of local Catholics.
When it came to the regional economy, an outright conflict emerged between policies
of economic uplift and Germanization. Despite reaching practically full employment by
the summer of 1938, Upper Silesia continued to be home to some of the most depressed
wages in the Reich as well as the highest prices for housing and basic goods. 84 These
economic factors continued to drive native Upper Silesians out of the province seeking
higher-paying work. Some of these were seasonal workers: in Oppeln/Opole county alone,
the Landrat estimated that 5,675 citizens headed westward in summer 1938 to work as
agricultural laborers elsewhere in the Reich. Others left permanently. The census of May
1939 revealed that in the previous six years, excess births (i.e. the difference between births
and deaths) had brought 122,772 new Upper Silesians into the world, bringing the region’s
population above 1.5 million. Yet 76,285 others, totaling 5.1 percent of the population,
were lost to migration: 49,604 men and 26,681 women. In villages with under 2,000
residents, a full ten percent of men migrated out of the province. 85
Upper Silesia was wrapped up in larger pressures in the labor market as part of
Germany’s re-armament under the Four Year Plan of 1936. In particular it proved difficult
84 Report of Oppeln/Opole work office, 2 July 1938, APO, SPO, Syg. 276. Oppeln Landrat to Upper Silesian
Regierungspräsident, 8 January 1938. APO, SPO, Syg. 85.
85 Statistik des deutschen Reichs, Bd. 552, Heft 1.
367

to balance the supply of workers needed in rearmament industries with sufficient labor in
agriculture, particularly when the issue of importing foreign labor created a conflict with
racialist fears of sullying the German ethnic stock. Between the slack labor market of 1933
and near full employment of 1938, over 500,000 workers in Germany left agriculture for
better-paying jobs, mostly in industry. This 20 percent drop in the labor force in just five
years led Hermann Göring to declare that “the lack of agricultural workers places the
German food supply in danger.” 86 The epidemic of outmigration for industrial work proved
worst in areas with the most depressed wages, particularly East Prussia and Upper Silesia.
Göring worked to recruit ethnic Germans from the near abroad into the labor force, 87 but in
reality agricultural jobs around Oppeln/Opole were often filled by Polish laborers. Poland’s
tight restrictions on their citizens migrating abroad created a strong black market for illegal
seasonal labor; while in 1938 there were only 100 Polish seasonal workers in Oppeln/Opole
county, widespread illegal border crossings likely made the figure higher. 88 Upper Silesia was
not alone in these trends. In 1936 foreign workers made up around one quarter of the
agricultural labor force in Germany; just two years later, that figure had shot above 40
percent. 89
Göring had declared that the exigencies of the rearmament economy temporarily
outweighed concerns over racial purity – a stance which would remain “temporarily” in
place throughout the pre-war and wartime years. Nonetheless, the trends deeply disturbed
86 Ulrich Herbert, Fremdarbeiter: Politik und Praxis des "Ausländer-Einsatzes" in der Kriegswirtschaft des Dritten
Reiches, new ed. (Berlin: J.H.W. Dietz, 1999), 49-50.
87 Ibid., 62.
88 Report of Oppeln work office, 2 July 1938, APO, SPO, Syg. 276.
89 Herbert, Fremdarbeiter, 64.
368

egional Nazi administrators. The lack of industrial development and professional jobs in
Upper Silesia meant that “precisely the most qualified part of its population was being
removed from an eastern border exposed to strong biological pressure from a foreign
nationality.” 90 This qualified stratum would also by virtue of their education, be more likely
to speak fluent German. Seasonal workers from Poland meanwhile received the support not
only of Polish activists, but also of “nationally-politically irreproachable farmers” desperate
for labor. To stem the tide of migration, regional officials pleaded for development money
from Berlin and Breslau for projects as various as new subsidized housing, theater and film
showings, pre-school German instruction, better teachers, a theater for Oppeln/Opole, and a
whole range of cultural and sporting activities and facilities. 91 Such measures, even when
approved, proved ineffective against the stark economic forces driving Upper Silesians out
of the province and Polish citizens into it. For all their concern, however, regional officials
stopped short of advocating “compulsory measures,” favoring incentives that worked
within the market system. The government remained unwilling to put a halt to the
economic forces which continued to exert an influence on the national-political
demographics of Upper Silesia, a trend which would accelerate in the wartime years.
One area where the Nazi party was willing to trample on traditional relations and
practices to remake society was the Catholic Church. The Nazi struggle against the Upper
Silesian Church became the largest, most protracted battle waged by the regional
government in the late 1930s. Piecemeal efforts at Germanizing church services before
90 Oppeln Landrat to Upper Silesian Regierungspräsident, 8 January 1938. APO, SPO, Syg. 85.
91 Ibid. See also report of same on 18 May 1938, APO, SPO, Syg. 276.
369

1937 had not yielded the drastic results envisioned by Nazi enthusiasts. In fact they had
largely had the opposite effect, driving local Catholics to self-identify as Poles. 92 A more
organized form of repression would be taken up by the nationalist Bund Deutscher Osten
[League for the German East – BDO]. Founded in 1933 as the Nazi successor to the former
Ostmarkverein, the BDO had built up a network of local activists committed to forcible
Germanization. By the mid-1930s hardly a village or town lacked a local BDO operative. It
was this group, under the direction of the SS, that increasingly took the lead within the Nazi
polycracy to define the problem of Polish influence and then suggest radical solutions to
stamp it out in the late 1930s. Yet in so doing, the Nazi government was simply trying to
solve a problem which they had partially created through anti-Catholic repression and the
resulting resurgence of Polish nationalist activity.
Events specific to Upper Silesia, such as the expiration of the Geneva Accords in July
1937, took a back seat to broader Nazi-Catholic relations in the timeline of increasing
repression. The Papal Encyclical of March 1937, Mit brennender Sorge [With Burning
Concern], marked the opening of a new, aggressive battle between Berlin and the German
Catholic Church. As an essential rebuke of Nazi ideology and particularly the government’s
refusal to uphold the terms of the 1933 Concordat, the Papal Encyclical – read aloud in all
of Germany’s Catholic churches – enraged Hitler. Anti-Church measures, coordinated by
92 German-language catechism remained one key mechanism for young children from Polish-speaking families to
become linguistically Germanized. In the village of Luboschütz/Luboszyce, for example, the local priest estimated
his parish at 90% Polish speaking, and 10% German. Yet among the local youth, only around 75% spoke Polish as
their everyday tongue. Moreover, the number of students in German catechism that year was 43, nearly as many as
the 51 in Polish-language instruction. As the priest noted in a 27 April 1933 letter to Cardinal Bertram, “The choice
of instruction is decided solely by the parents. One can surely assume that in the coming years German instruction
will come to be preferred.” AAW, 1 A 25, d40.
370

the Gestapo, intensified in the summer of 1937. Priests and theologians were banned from
Nazi party membership, and party members were likewise banned from having visible roles
in the Church. The Church press was suppressed, lay organizations disbanded, and select
Catholic clergy were put on trial as politically dangerous to the state. 93 These were German-
wide phenomena, yet in Upper Silesia their effects could not help but seem nationally
motivated, given the overlap between the Catholic movement and Polish nationalism,
which had grown only closer under the Nazis
The specific goal of eliminating public traces of the Polish language increasingly
became the main justification for regional anti-Church measures. Two months after the
Papal Encyclical, in May 1937, the Gestapo singled out 25 priests in Upper Silesia as Polish
nationalists or sympathizers. This represented only a small fraction of the more than 500
Catholic priests in the district, and no one on the Gestapo’s list ministered in Oppeln/Opole
county. In fact, most of the evidence proved circumstantial or based on outdated reports.
The elderly priest Karl Koziolek, from a neighboring county, was considered dangerous
even though “he had completely withdrawn from political life.” Few priests ever officially
joined the ZPwN, preferring informal relations with Polish nationalists. Most were singled
out for anational resistance to Nazification measures: for withstanding pressure to introduce
more German-language services, for continuing to hold catechism in Polish, or even for
merely refusing to let local veterans’ associations fly their flags in the church. 94 The
standards of national loyalty for priests had been raised to the point that anational priests’
93 John S. Conway, The Nazi Persecution of the Churches 1933-45 (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1968), 170-175.
94 Oppeln Gestapo report to Regierungspräsident, 22 May 1937, APO, NO, Syg. 86.
371

commitments to their bilingual flocks were now grounds for repression. German
nationalists in villages across Upper Silesia , under the direction of local BDO leaders, signed
petitions and hassled priests for more German-language masses. As the Polish press
complained in February 1937, even before the Encyclical, the German activists “would love
nothing more than to see our Piast land become Germanized into a ‘primal German’ land
overnight.” 95
At the end of that year, the BDO commissioned a more rigorous report on the status of
the Polish language in Upper Silesian churches. They calculated a decrease in the number of
Polish masses of nearly 25 percent between 1934 and the end of 1937. Whereas just under
60 percent of the masses in 1934 had been conducted in German, now the figure was
approaching 70 percent. Generally the more official and the larger the ceremony – such as
high masses – the greater the proportion of Polish heard. Four-fifths of regular Sunday
masses were now conducted in German, with roughly equal proportions for ceremonies
such as baptisms, weddings, and funerals. The BDO linked the continued use of Polish
mainly to the older generation, who tended to be both monolingual Polish speakers and the
Church’s most pious members. Yet the author of the report, SS-Obersturmbannführer Ernst
Müller, also had a keen awareness of the dynamic between Nazi anti-Church policy and the
strength of Polish nationalism. He blamed the repression of German church groups in part
for drawing some of the population “into Polish channels,” and saw the ban on teachers
serving as church organists as damaging the popularity of German-language church music.
Most of all, he felt that a notable part of the priesthood had, “despite their German
95 Katolik Trzyrazowy, 9 February 1937, nr. 16.
372

disposition” embraced the Polish language in their church services out of simple protest
against National Socialism. 96 For Nazi officials hoping to eliminate the Polish-speaking
Zwischenschicht, the dilemma of repression became troublesome. The supposed “natural”
decline of Polish seemed to be proceeding apace thanks to strong-handed Germanization
measures, yet it was precisely Nazi anti-Church policies which were arresting this process.
The solution, driven above all by the worsening international political climate and
Hitler’s aggression towards Germany’s eastern neighbors, was to pursue the short-term
appearance of national homogeneity through total repression of Polish in public religious
life. By early 1939 the battle lines were being drawn for a full-scale assault on the Catholic
Church. The sense of fear was so palpable that even the most committed German patriots
among the priesthood, including the prelate of Oppeln/Opole Josef Kubis, organized against
the threat. After a meeting of leading Upper Silesian clergy on 27 January 1939 to discuss
Nazi repression, Kubis, along with the former provincial party head Carl Ulitzka, drafted a
memorandum of protest to the government. They vigorously defended the use of Polish in
church services, seeing no contradiction between the language of religious piety and the
German loyalty of their flock. The course of Nazi repression had, in their minds, halted the
process of language integration which they claimed ran smoothly during the Weimar
period. But the priests argued this was being interrupted by nationalists who “are not
familiar with Upper Silesian conditions” and were set on the “total eradication” of Polish.
They summarized the counter-productiveness of this repression:
96 Hitze, Carl Ulitzka, 1169-1171.
373

The inner affiliation of the Upper Silesian with the German Volk is not
disturbed by the use of Polish in religious practice. For the Upper Silesian, use of
the Polish language is not a declaration of foreign nationality, but rather an
expression of attachment to his ancestors, to received tradition and to the land
on which he has grown up. Our Upper Silesians have proven this in the World
War and in the battles to maintain the Germanness of their Heimat. Use of the
Polish mother tongue is in this sense not an obstacle for the gradual organic
self-growth into the German nation, even with respect to language. This
process takes place slowly, but the expected result is all the more certain,
heartfelt, and sustainable, because it is based on voluntary will. Seen properly,
intervention with dictates and a rough hand amounts to harm to the German
nation.
In defiance of the obvious direction of Nazi policy, the letter insisted that every priest
would continue to use Polish “insofar as it is necessary to find the path to the heart of the
believers and enable the successful practice of his holy duty.” 97
Cardinal Bertram would eventually give his approval to the memorandum, forwarding
it to the Silesian President Josef Wagner in February, and instructing his clergy in bilingual
parishes to continue caring for their flock according to local linguistic preferences and
demands. Yet the protest letter was met with increased repression from regional Nazi
officials. The police stood idly by as priests were threatened and church windows destroyed,
as new orders from Berlin de-confessionalized the schools and barred priests from teaching
positions. 98 The official end to the German-Polish Non-Aggression Pact in April 1939
removed any remaining impediments to a full-scale assault on Poles. 99 The regional
government was clearly looking for a reason to ban the use of Polish completely, and its
excuse came in June 1939 from the Polish-controlled part of Upper Silesia. There, under
97 Memorandum drafted mid-February 1939 based on 27 January conference, AAW, 1 A 25, d40.
98 Hitze, Carl Ulitzka, 1176-1178, Conway, The Nazi Persecution of the Churches 1933-45, 182-185.
99 Richard Blanke, Orphans of Versailles: The Germans in Western Poland, 1918-1939 (Lexington, Ky.: University Press
of Kentucky, 1993), 222.
374

pressure from Polish nationalist protests, Bishop Stanisław Adamski banned German-
language services. According to Adamski, the chicanery of anti-German demonstrations in
his diocese had made for the “impossibility of using the German language at religious
services, without regard to the actual needs and obligations of pastoral care.” 100 Frustrated
with nationalist disruptions to the practical work of pastoral care, Adamski intended the ban
to be temporary.
The ban on German-language services in Polish Upper Silesia gave officials in Breslau
all the justification they needed. The BDO planned a major scare campaign against Polish-
language services for Sunday, 2 July. On the day before, BDO members posted unsigned
placards in villages around Upper Silesia strongly warning anyone from visiting Polish-
language services. One placard from a suburb of Oppeln/Opole read: “Whoever still takes
part in Polish religious services declares themselves a Pole and practices open treason against
Germanness [Deutschtum]. We therefore warn all residents of Bolko against taking part in
Polish religious services.” 101 Yet the BDO action proved mostly redundant. Earlier that week,
under intense Nazi pressure, Bertram agreed to a temporary ban on all Polish-language
services in his diocese. In his letter to clergy, he adopted a tone of regret in capitulating to
the “forcible measures and threats” which had increased in the previous months. 102 The first
Sunday after the ban, 2 July, passed peacefully in most of the countryside around
Oppeln/Opole, although the son of Franciszek Bul (the same Bul who married his
stepdaughter to a Nazi party leader) along with several other young men were beaten up by
100 Orders of Bishop Adamski, 22 June 1939, AAW, 1 A 25, p49.
101 Mendel, Polacy w Opolu, Illustration #8.
102 Orders of Cardinal Bertram, 27 June 1939, AAW, 1 A 25, p49.
375

local Nazis in Groschowitz/Groszowice for expressing public anger over the decision. The
local town administrator reported their protest as “acts of impudence [Frechheiten].” 103
Bertram’s hope that “it will be possible to return to earlier [language] practices in
quieter times” proved too optimistic. 104 Having gained a huge tactical victory, Silesian
President Wagner simply pushed the envelope further. The Polish services were initially
replaced not by German ones, but by silent masses, in which the Polish speakers in
attendance were encouraged to read their prayer books to themselves. The chilling effect of
churches falling silent epitomized Nazi efforts to silence the Polish population without
actually making real cultural efforts to Germanize them. Silence, however, could also be a
potent form of protest, which is why the day after the first silent masses regional officials
were already pressuring the Church to replace them with German-language services. On 14
July, Bertram ordered German singing at the silent masses, justifying the shift as a way to
stave off continued threats against his Polish-speaking flock. 105 Silent masses continued into
August, increasingly enraging the Nazi regional leadership. Wagner warned in mid-August
that “these silent masses are a rallying cry for the Polish opposition or threaten to be,”
demanding their replacement with German ones. 106 He justified Nazi measures as the
natural response to repression of German-speaking Catholics in Polish Upper Silesia.
Bertram’s reply to Wagner, two weeks before the outbreak of World War II, showed a
striking defiance of a now highly radicalized party-state bent on destroying all public traces
103 Bolko town official to Oppeln Landrat, 12 July 1939. Quoted in Deutsche und Polen, 924.
104 Order of Cardinal Bertram, 27 June 1939, AAW, 1 A 25, p49.
105 Order of Cardinal Bertram, 14 July 1939, AAW, 1 A 25, p49.
106 Wagner to Cardinal Bertram, 11 August 1939, AAW, 1 A 25, b113.
376

of Polish. Refusing to replace the silent masses with German ones, Bertram felt that further
Nazi politicization of church language practices “would rip from the hearts of the believers
their faith in justice and in the church’s equal love for all men.” In a final plea to an older
logic of national assimilation and integration, he wrote, “The situation is actually in no way
harmful or embarrassing for German interests, for the disposition of the Polish-speaking
Volk is through and through German and true to the fatherland; even those abroad know
this is true.” 107 Two weeks later, the debate over church language use would become largely
moot, as Germany invaded Poland. Upper Silesia was to become part of the Greater
German Reich. But where would its citizens fit into the grand vision for a Nazi Empire?
WAR OF COMPROMISES
As Germany invaded Poland on 1 September, officials and Nazi-backed groups in
Upper Silesia had already mostly achieved the appearance of national homogeneity. Nazi
leaders and activists who had spent the previous years harassing priests and Polish
nationalists rejoiced at the new state of war against their avowed Polish enemies. Now the
last vestiges of legality and protections were stripped away, leaving open to Nazis the
prospect of a definitive, non-reversible elimination of Polishness from the region. By in
essence declaring early victory in the prewar period, however, regional officials had little
room to maneuver to achieve full Germanization. Nazi leaders in Berlin were satisfied with
the officially propagated myth that Upper Silesians were now loyal Germans. With the war
effort demanding manpower, industrial output, and grain from Upper Silesians, this
107 Cardinal Bertram to Wagner, 16 August 1939, AAW, 1 A 25, b113.
377

argain – the appearance of German loyalty from Upper Silesians in exchange for general
safety from Nazi violence – was one that neither officials nor most citizens were in a
position to reject. Although the threat of violence loomed over the population, most Upper
Silesians enjoyed a sense of security from the war and genocide taking place just to the east.
Local and regional officials, like their counterparts throughout eastern Germany,
moved quickly after the outbreak of war to eliminate all forms of organized Polish national
life. On 31 August and 1 September, the Polish bank, agricultural cooperative, newspaper,
and consulate in Oppeln/Opole were all forcibly closed, their property expropriated, and
several Poles arrested. The Polish nationalists’ main meetinghouse at Nikolai Street 48,
directly across from the prison where these activists were temporarily held, was converted
into a Nazi administrative center, housing the local social welfare offices. Following this
initial attack, on 11 September Nazis arrested 35 leading members of the Polish movement
from Oppeln/Opole and another 26 from nearby villages. Among those arrested were
Franciszek Bul, his son Franciszek Jr., Antoni Pawletta, Jan Adamek, Wincenty Piechota,
Leon Powolny, Stefan Szczepaniak, and Jan Wawrzynek. 108 Some other nationalist leaders
had the ironic good fortune of being persecuted earlier, and thus fled Upper Silesia before
the war started. One such leader was Arkadiusz Bożek, the vice president of the regional
ZPwN, who was expelled from the region in January 1939, and found himself in
Katowice/Kattowitz at the war’s start. He subsequently fled to Romania, then through the
Balkans to France, and even visited the United States, giving a speech at a local Polish club
in Cleveland in March 1940, before settling in London for the remainder of the war. While
108 Mendel, Polacy w Opolu, 74.
378

his family remained at home in Upper Silesia, Bożek lobbied with other Poles in exile for the
secession of his homeland to Poland after the war. 109
Not all Polish nationalists were as lucky as Bożek. The majority of the 50-odd Polish
leaders from Oppeln/Opole spent the entire war locked up in the Buchenwald
concentration camp. (The few women arrested were mainly sent to Ravensbrück.) Along
with the thousands of Communists, Jews, POWs, and other targets of Nazi terror, these
Poles endured extreme suffering and dehumanization. The daily routine, as one prisoner
remembered – “the fatiguing labor, the constant hunger, the chronic lack of sleep, the
persecution by the Kapos [interned guards], the latrine duty, the floggings from the SS, the
assembly-line work in munitions factories, the crematory smoke, the public executions, the
endless roll calls in the winter snow, the exhaustion, the death of friends” – could only be
described as an “experience of radical Evil.” 110
As national Poles of German citizenship, Upper Silesian activists in Buchenwald lived
between two worlds. Buchenwald’s population exploded with foreign nationals at the war’s
start in 1939, most of them Poles. Those among the new prisoners who could claim ethnic
German ties or citizenship were removed from the particularly horrific conditions imposed
on new Polish prisoners. 111 These bilingual Upper Silesians thus had an interest in presenting
themselves as Germans. At the same time, the corps of regional Polish nationalists came to
lead ethnic Poles in the camp prisoners’ internal power struggles. When a secret Polish
109 Danuta Kisielewicz, Arka Bożek (1899-1954): Działacz społeczno-polityczny Śląska Opolskiego (Opole: Wydawn.
Instytut Śląski, 2006), 101-110.
110 Jorge Semprún, Literature or Life (New York: Viking, 1997), 87-88.
111 See report “Poles in the Little Camp, 1939” in David A. Hackett, ed., The Buchenwald Report (Boulder: Westview
Press, 1995), 275-276.
379

Committee was eventually formed by prisoners in October 1943 to unite the interests of
Polish inmates, its leadership included Stefan Szczepaniak and Paweł Kwoczek, two Polish
nationalists with experience in Upper Silesia. 112 Fluent in German and mostly anti-
Communist, these Polish nationalists made prime candidates for prisoner leadership
positions. Wincenty Piechota was employed as the personal attendant to Buchenwald’s first
camp commander, Karl Koch. Kwoczek became director of a camp kitchen, while Bernard
Duda, a Polish nationalist leader from Grudschütz/Grudzice, was an officer in the camp’s
Lagerschutz police force. Duda, Piechota, Kwoczek and others on the Polish Committee
then used their meager influence to secure their friends in the camp easier work or other
privileges, especially increased food supplies. 113 Among the 29 Poles arrested in or around
Oppeln/Opole who were still known to be interned in mid-1941, the fate of 26 could be
determined. Of those 26, one died in Dachau in 1945, two died during Allied bombings of
Buchenwald in 1944, and one was released to the Wehrmacht and died on the front. The
rest survived the war. The ingenuity, organization, and camaraderie among Polish
nationalists at Buchenwald ensured a high rate of survival, one far greater than for Polish
foreign nationals.
The best estimate, made by Polish historians after the war, is that during the course of
the war 386 ZPwN members hailing from Upper Silesia, or working in the region, spent
significant time in concentration camps. 114 While these figures do not account for the full
112 “The Polish Secret Organization” in Ibid., 296-297.
113 Stanisław Drozdowski, Kartoteka śmierci: Lista aresztowanych działaczy dzielnicy I. Związku Polaków w Niemczech
w latach 1939-1945 (Opole: Wydawnictwo Opolskiego Towarzystwa Kulturalno - Oświatowego, 1973), 20-21.
114 Ibid., 25.
380

ange of suffering of regular Polish speakers, conspirators, or war deserters, they nonetheless
stand in stark contrast to the murderous rampage of Germans as they swept across newly
conquered territories outside the prewar borders of the Reich. The Warthegau – a newly
annexed slice of former Western Poland, much of it from the pre-World War I German
province of Posen/Poznań – became ground zero for violent Nazi efforts in 1939 to
remake the ethnic fabric of the eastern lands. The Nazi murder of Polish intellectuals and
leaders during and after the invasion, estimated at 50,000 throughout Poland, was intended
to decapitate Polish society and pave the way for German resettlement in the new
Lebensraum. In order for German settlers from Eastern Europe to move in, Poles needed to
be expelled. The massive ethnic cleansing of the Warthegau began in December 1939 with
an SS-led transport of 87,000 mostly Polish victims eastwards into the newly formed
Generalgouvernment. The first transports were delayed amid administrative chaos and
uncertainty at who was actually Polish, but by March 1941, over 400,000 Poles and Jews
had been expelled from the expanded Reich. 115
Yet no organized resettlement program existed for those Polish speakers from around
Oppeln/Opole. The overwhelmingly majority were allowed to stay in their homes. Amid the
initial triumph of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in mid-1941, and the plans for
a final racial solution which followed, the Oppeln/Opole Landrat did prepare for a wave of
expulsions. Yet his initial list called for 75 families to be expelled, and in the end only seven
families in the county, and 34 in the entire Upper Silesian district, were deprived of their
115 Mark Mazower, Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe, 1st American ed. (New York: Penguin Press, 2008),
78, 85, 97.
381

property and forced eastwards. Among them was the family of Franciszek Bul. 116 As far as
Nazi leaders were concerned, the area of Western Upper Silesia barely registered on the map
of ethnic cleansing. The Polish speakers there had been deemed mostly loyal Germans, and
the grand planners of racial purification treated the area as fundamentally German racial
territory.
The same mentality prevented local officials around Oppeln/Opole from
implementing policies that touched other parts of Upper Silesia. Part of the Nazi conquest
in September 1939 involved retaking the areas of Upper Silesia lost to Poland in the
partition. 117 With this came further reshufflings of the regional administrative landscape,
including the creation of a new eastern Kattowitz/Katowice district, which took over the
easternmost stretches of the Oppeln/Opole district, and the re-foundation of an Upper
Silesian province in 1941. These new divisions were intended to clarify the racial dividing
line between areas deemed German and those deemed mixed. In the Kattowitz/Katowice
district, east of Oppeln/Opole, Nazi administrators created an elaborate scheme of
classification to sort out the population along racial lines. 118 This Volksliste, borrowed from
the Warthegau, was born of necessity in a region where ethnic dividing lines were unclear.
In a rough census taken in December 1939, some 95 percent of the mostly Polish-speaking
population declared themselves Germans, no doubt to avoid the fate of terror or
116 Drozdowski, Kartoteka śmierci: Lista aresztowanych działaczy dzielnicy I. Związku Polaków w Niemczech w latach
1939-1945, 18.
117 Upper Silesia was expanded during World War II to include the concentration and death camps at Auschwitz.
118 The Volksliste included around 70,000 Upper Silesians on far eastern fringes of the Oppeln district, mostly around
Ratibor/Racibórz. See APW, 16/II, Syg. 8637.
382

expulsion. 119 Many of them certainly knew enough German to “pass” as members of the
Nazi Volksgemeinschaft. It was this malleable conception of nationality that prompted the
Volksliste, which set up four categories representing varying levels of loyalty to Nazi
Germany. Category I was reserved for the most loyal, typically nationally active Germans,
and Category II for more politically passive Germans. Category IV included “pure” Poles
who collaborated or had some political value for the Reich. Yet it was category III which
came to include the majority of Upper Silesians in the Kattowitz/Katowice district – nearly
one million of the one-and-a-half million counted – who were defined as mixed or
“contaminated” Germans but were still eligible for Nazi re-Germanization. 120 While these
categories came with various rights, advantages, and burdens (the latter being primarily
military duty for Categories I and II), they were never applied by Nazis to the Polish
speakers around Oppeln/Opole. Admitting the presence of non-Germans on territory
declared Germanized would have been an admission of racial weakness.
Local officials were well aware that the majority of Reich citizens around Oppeln/Opole
still spoke Polish at home. Nonetheless, many increasingly equated the elimination of
public signs of Polish with the death of a culture. An Oppeln/Opole Gestapo report in the
first month of the war laid out past and future “measures for the destruction of the Polish
minority in Upper Silesia.” Locals were reeling in fear of further arrests, and quickly
distancing themselves from any former Polish connections, according to the Gestapo. No
longer was concern for the treatment of the German minority in Polish Upper Silesia a
119 Adam Ehrlich, "Between Germany and Poland: Ethnic Cleansing and Politicization of Ethnicity in Upper Silesia
under National Socialism and Communism, 1939-1950" (Ph.D. Dissertation, Indiana University, 2005), 49-50.
120 Ibid., 65.
383

consideration. “Under these conditions there exists the opportunity,” the Gestapo reported,
“to deal blows to the minority that they can no longer survive.” The Gestapo brimmed with
confidence at the power of their newfound leeway to terrorize, and nationalize, the
population. 121
The Oppeln/Opole Landrat, Friedrich Seifarth, was not so sanguine about
Germanization. During the war he showed a consistent abhorrence of coercive or repressive
techniques to Germanize the local population. Born in 1906 to tenant farmers in a heavily
Polish-speaking area outside Posen/Poznań, Seifarth was among the few Germans to
remain in his home after it became part of Poland in 1919. Living in a “foreign” state and
attending high school in Poznań/Posen, Seifarth spent his formative years as a minority
depending on the goodwill of Poles for his education. He went on to write a dissertation on
autonomy in Polish Upper Silesia, then entered the civil service. 122 His experience as a
minority and his understanding of local relations and Polish language use led him to
recognize that Nazi claims of full Germanization in Oppeln/Opole were a “fiction.” He felt
that Nazi officials had all but abandoned the project of Germanizing local citizens, declaring
false victory with the onset of war. Seifarth, moreover, saw Nazi hopes that these Polish-
minded Reich citizens might emigrate on their own as pipe dreams, thanks to the “inborn
love of Heimat” of most Upper Silesians. 123
121 Report of Oppeln Gestapo, 13 September 1939, APO, RO, Syg. 2014.
122 See Seifarth’s Lebenslauf in his dissertation, Friedrich Seifarth, Die Autonomie der Wojewodschaft Schlesien und
ihre Garantie nach der polnischen Verfassung (Glogau: Flemming-Wiskott, 1930).
123 Report of Oppeln Landrat, 8 January 1940, APO, RO, Syg. 1939.
384

While Seifarth openly admitted that a passive approach to Germanization would take
“truly decades,” he did not suggest further repression as the solution. He instead advocated a
“lawful” treatment of Polish-speaking German citizens, rather than the “indiscriminate
measures” of repression. “The lawful and therefore proper handling of the minority in all
fundamental questions of life has an assimilationist effect which should not be
underestimated,” Seifarth insisted at a time when Poles were being ethnically cleansed and
Jews forced into ghettos in other parts of Germany. Seifarth even suggested that the law
banning mixed-race marriages between Germans and Poles in the newly annexed regions,
if applied to Oppeln/Opole, “would make the further assimilation of the Polish nationality
completely impossible.” 124 As Landrat, Seifarth was essentially proposing Weimar-era
solutions to a Nazi-defined problem. He saw integration, assimilation, equal treatment, and
even intermarriage as the best policy solutions for Germanization.
These two positions, of terror and of kid gloves – articulated by the Gestapo
commander and by Seifarth – represented the fork in the road for future anti-Polish and
pro-German actions in Upper Silesia. The exigencies of war over the next five years made it
difficult to pursue either of these paths. Germanization ran into several stumbling blocks.
As early as January 1940, the Oppeln/Opole mayor warned municipal civil servants that no
citizen was allowed to communicate in Polish with local authorities. He even threatened to
cut off welfare payments to mothers receiving child welfare or spousal combat pay. 125 Yet
the moral economy of wartime gave significant leverage to soldiers dying at the front, and
124 Ibid.
125 Orders of Oppeln mayor to civil servants, 16 Jaunary 1940, APO, AMO, Syg. 996.
385

to their families. The wives of Polish-speaking soldiers continued to receive welfare
payments, just like German speakers, in some cases so generous that they were altering
social relations in the countryside. These “war women” received up to 500 marks each
month, enough income to hoard goods at market and pay others to perform labor they had
previously done themselves. This raised fears among some local officials that Upper Silesians
were becoming spoiled and losing their former “thriftiness.” 126 Even the families of Polish
nationalists were given special consideration. Local Polish leaders slated for expulsion or the
expropriation of property had their fate delayed or halted if any of their family members
were serving in the Wehrmacht. Some of the families of interned Polish activists received
various forms of state welfare assistance. 127 Several leading Poles at Buchenwald indeed had
brothers, uncles, or nephews on the front. When, in August 1941, the Interior Ministry
began ordering that the military relatives of those interned in camps be discharged, the
Wehrmacht often delayed or ignored the orders, desperate as they were for able-bodied
fighting men. As late as 1943, at least two Polish nationalists held at Buchenwald, Josef
Glattki and Franz Panda, still had sons in military uniform. 128 Rumors also spread across the
district of soldiers returning home and speaking Polish in uniform, then loudly defending
their right to do so if attacked. The power of wartime patriotism and sacrifice in key
instances thus overrode concerns about racial purity among Upper Silesians.
By far the greatest and most persistent wartime concern for Nazi officials around
Oppeln/Opole centered on the effect of Polish POWs and forced laborers on local relations.
126 Situation report of Oppeln Landrat, 10 January 1940, APO, RO, Syg. 1939, 1940.
127 Report of Oppeln Landrat, 24 April 1942, APO, RO, Syg. 1940. See also reports on soldiers' property in Syg. 2170.
128 For files on concentration camp prisoners with family members in Wehrmacht, see APO, RO, Syg. 2170.
386

They shared their concerns with officials from across the Reich. The massive importation of
foreign workers into Germany became a wartime necessity not only for agriculture but
throughout industry; by August 1944 there were over 7.6 million foreign workers in
Germany, including 1.7 million Poles. 129 Fearful over the influx of Polish workers in
particular, Nazi officials in March 1940 released tight regulations on the behavior of Polish
civilian laborers. Poles were banned from leaving residences or camps at night, using public
transportation, drinking in German taverns, or attending German cultural events and
religious services, all in hopes of strictly confining their social worlds and minimizing
contact with Germans. Fear of sexual relations between German women and Polish men
became a near-obsessive concern for Nazi officials, who promised execution for men found
sleeping with German women, and some combination of public humiliation and
concentration camp internment for the women. 130 While enforcing these regulations
proved difficult throughout Germany, especially as the war went on, Upper Silesia posed a
particular problem as a linguistically mixed borderland. The massive importation of Polish-
speaking laborers threatened (as it had before the war on a smaller scale) the carefully crafted
appearance of German purity in the region and the repressive measures which maintained
this fiction of a Polish-free Upper Silesia. The main question remained whether the needs of
a wartime economy would override concerns over the potential resurgence of Polish
language and culture with the influx of laborers.
129 Herbert, Fremdarbeiter, 11.
130 Ibid., 89-93.
387

By early 1940 regional officials already encountered two problems: the rise of Polish
language usage, and the inability to properly identify the nationality of imported workers.
In Upper Silesia many workers flooded in from the formerly Polish, eastern slice of the
province re-annexed by Germany, and were thus more likely to be ethnically ambiguous.
Police in Oppeln/Opole in particular had difficulty identifying the nationality of civilian
laborers working in shops and factories across the city. In May 1940 the police reported that
“only in the rarest cases can it be immediately decided whether the worker is of Polish
nationality or a member of the German Volk.” During the often months-long verification
process, all of these workers were treated as Germans, given full civil rights and not forced
to wear the “P” designation on their clothing deeming them Poles. 131 The approximately
500 civilian rural laborers imported into the county by mid-1940, meanwhile, were
upsetting the language balance in the villages around Oppeln/Opole. 132 Already in April
1940, Seifarth warned that Polish usage was on the rise thanks to the recent influx of
workers, and could be widely heard on the streets and in the taverns. Yet he recommended
taking no action, in order to not disturb the peace or, more importantly, the agricultural
productivity of farmers. 133
Over the course of the war, as the intermixing of locals with outside workers increased,
the Nazi government responded with half-hearted and ultimately ineffective measures to
segregate the two populations. Reich-wide measures against Polish workers drinking publicly
131 Oppeln police report, 11 May 1940, APO, RO, Syg. 9000.
132 Oppeln Landrat report, 6 June 1940, APO, RO, Syg. 9000.
133 Landrat report to Silesian President, 20 April 1940. Printed in Andrzej Brożek, Język polski na Opolszczyźnie w
początkach II Wojny Światowej (Opole: Nakł. własny, 1965), Appendix.
388

at “German” taverns or guesthouses proved unenforceable in villages where everyone –
locals included – spoke Polish while enjoying their beer and schnapps. A regional
recommendation to ban all consumption of spirits by Polish workers in public or private
was rejected by most county officials as impossible to enforce. 134 Despite the enormous rise
in labor imported into Germany from the Soviet Union after Operation Barbarossa, Upper
Silesia continued to draw most of its laborers from nearby lands, especially the formerly
Polish area of Upper Silesia. These workers were more likely to know some German and less
likely to be categorized clearly as Poles. By July 1942, some 64 percent of the “outside”
agricultural laborers in Upper Silesia actually came from within the province. 135
The roughly 2,100 workers in Oppeln/Opole county in the summer of 1942 (around
1,800 of them Polish speaking) regularly disobeyed restrictions on movement and on
interaction with locals. They borrowed bicycles from their employers in order to leave their
village illegally, visited movie theaters and taverns, and even took surreptitious train
journeys. Many refused to wear the labels of “P” or “Ost” designating them as foreign
workers. 136 Seifarth noted a major rise in Polish usage not just among the older population,
but also among children who had supposedly been Germanized. 137 The files of those who
abandoned their posts or never returned from yearly wintertime leave numbered in the
hundreds for the county. 138 Even more exasperating for officials than regular desertion,
134 Upper Silesian Regierungspräsident to Silesian Oberpräsident, 14 January 1941, APO, RO, Syg. 8995.
135 Report of Agricultural Workers Office and Reich Repository of Work for Upper Silesia to Regierungspräsident,
30 July 1942, APO, RO, Syg. 8996.
136 Ibid. Also see report of Oppeln Landrat, 24 April 1942, APO, RO, Syg. 1940.
137 Landrat report to Oppeln Regierungspräsident, 30 June 1942. APO, RO, Syg. 8996.
138 See APO, SPO, Syg. 59.
389

however, were signs of everyday interaction between laborers and locals. By 1942 there were
several cases reported in Oppeln/Opole county of Polish laborers sitting at the dinner table
with local farmers. Some even slept in the farmers’ homes instead of in camps, as mandated.
One woman in the town of Zirkowitz/Żerkowice openly lived with a Polish worker, and had
even supplied him with a full wardrobe and smoking supplies. In this and other cases, local
authorities suspected sexual relations between workers and local women as men served at
the front. 139 The general lack of police presence and Nazi authority in remote villages, and
lack of men at home, led to fears that laborers were acting as the “man of the house” in two
senses: as the literal male leader on farmsteads, and as rebellious workers who ignored Nazi
directives. 140 Disobedience, fraternization, and domestic socialization were all exacerbated by
the demographic structure around Oppeln/Opole and the use of civilian laborers from
nearby. Strong regional bonds allowed for linguistic, religious, and social camaraderie
between Upper Silesians who toiled as underpaid and often forced laborers, and other Upper
Silesians who remained privileged German citizens.
Nazi counter-measures focused both on the increasing interaction between locals and
Polish laborers, and on the spread of Polish usage, but in both cases they failed against a tide
of social changes compelled by the wartime economy. Since the outbreak of the war Polish-
language church services were put on long-term hiatus, then slowly replaced by German
services. Yet the introduction of Polish laborers created a new need for Catholic Polish-
language pastoral care. Orders from Berlin in July 1942 set out a minimal number of
139 Report of Oppeln Landrat, 24 April 1942, APO, RO, Syg. 1940. See also reports in same file from 30 June 1942, 13
April 1943.
140 Report of Oppeln Landrat, 12 October 1943, APO, RO, Syg. 1940.
390

eligious services for Polish workers in the Reich, to take place only on major church
holidays and on the first Sunday of every month. Even then, the only Polish allowed at
these services were pre-approved communion prayers; even confession in Polish was
officially banned, and the mixing of laborers and citizens at services was strictly
forbidden. 141 Around Oppeln/Opole, it seems that these rules rarely applied. In December
1942 certain “persons of German nationality,” especially the elderly, were still being
allowed to receive confession in Polish. 142 While Polish speakers still heard priests preach in
German, they would quickly file out of church and openly speak Polish to each other. 143
Priests refused to adhere to stricter measures that cut off private interaction in Polish with
parishioners, citing their religious duty. By late 1943 the situation was only worsening, as
Seifarth noted a continued increase in the use of Polish. 144 Blaming the trend on increasing
interaction with laborers, measures were taken such as a ban on all bicycle ownership among
laborers in Upper Silesia, along with the requirement to attain an official permit every time
they wished to borrow their employer’s bike. With insufficient rural police, however, such
measures were effectively unenforced. More radical solutions, such as the expulsion of
Polish-speaking workers from the borderland and the importation of other nationalities,
were dismissed as infeasible and a potential detriment to the war economy. 145
141 Orders of Himmler and German police, 26 July 1942, APO, RO, Syg. 2169.
142 Report of Neustadt Landrat to Regierungspräsident, 15 December 1942, APO, RO, Syg. 2169.
143 Report of Oppeln Landrat, 13 April 1944, APO, RO, Syg 1940.
144 Report of Oppeln Landrat, 12 October 1943, APO, RO, Syg. 1940.
145 Report of the President of the Agricultural Workers Office and Reich Repository of Work for Upper Silesia to
Upper Silesian district president, 30 July 1942, APO, RO, Syg. 8996.
391

While advocating punishment of individual lawbreakers, Seifarth promoted, even as
late as 1943, a moderate approach to the spread of the Polish language in his county. “I find
it wrong to fight the Polish language with only police measures. In my view it is much more
important to cultivate German nationality systematically and pursue the further
assimilation of the population.” The importation of volunteers and workers, especially
female ones, to spread German culture through lectures and cultural events, was deemed by
Seifarth a great success, through which “the rural population, without noticing it, is
increasingly reared to be German.” 146 By late 1943, however, resources for Germanization
had dried up. With the war clearly turning against Germany, foreign workers proved even
more rebellious, drinking heavily, skipping work, and openly listening to foreign radio
broadcasts. 147
By 1944 Seifarth was at wit’s end. On the one hand, as the district president noted,
Upper Silesians had proved more than willing soldiers, pointing in particular to “the
Zwischenschicht and even … members of the minority.” With only one known case of
refusing to serve on national grounds, “the Upper Silesian is highly valuable racially and is
no worse a soldier than some others of German heritage.” 148 Yet in his county, Seifarth saw
the complete failure and even reversal of Germanization measures from before the war.
Repression had failed to stamp out Polish usage, and pro-German educational and
propaganda measures had in his eyes achieved too little, too late. Polish had become so
widespread, Seifarth insisted, that it was easy to get the impression that the Oppeln/Opole
146 Report of Oppeln Landrat, 13 April 1944, APO, RO, Syg 1940.
147 Report of Oppeln Landrat, 12 October 1943, APO, RO, Syg. 1940.
148 Report of Regierungspräsident, 3 May 1944, APO, RO, Syg. 1940.
392

area “does not belong to the old areas of the Reich, but rather to the newly annexed eastern
zones.” Yet the SS continued to treat the area as part of a racial German core. It even
expelled a Polish doctor, Taddeus von Lewandowski, from Łódź to a village outside
Oppeln/Opole with the unrealistic hope of Germanizing him. The SS also experimented
with small-scale relocations of Volksdeutsche into confiscated properties near
Oppeln/Opole. One such settler, from Galicia, had a Polish wife and spoke little to no
German himself. Seifarth felt that the settler’s desire for quick profits overwhelmed his work
ethic, and noted the decline of the farm’s condition since its former occupants were
expelled. “Through this resettlement,” Seifarth noted, “a strengthening of Germanness has
surely not been achieved.” Implicit in his logic was that the Polish nationalist whose
property was confiscated, Kazimierz Kasperek, embodied the “German” principles of hard
work more clearly than the Volksdeutsche settler from Galicia. Seifarth made a last-ditch
appeal to Himmler to recognize his county as a “nationally-politically endangered” zone,
something it had never conceivably been except in the plebiscite period after World War
I. 149 The area was indeed in more danger than Seifarth dared to imagine publicly expressing.
Within a year, it would no longer be in German hands.
CONCLUSION
When Soviet soldiers marched through Upper Silesia in late January 1945, they made
practically no distinction between Oppeln/Opole and the homogeneously German-
speaking areas closer to Berlin. In this sense, they unwittingly followed the lead of the Nazis
149 Report of Oppeln Landrat, 13 April 1944, APO, RO, Syg. 1940.
393

in defining Upper Silesia as a core ‘German’ territory. Once the Soviets crossed the wartime
border into the Nazi Reich, they were told to treat the local population as the enemy. Their
ruthless rampage of murders, rapes, and pillaging in Upper Silesia attests to their belief that
they were indeed facing the Germany enemy. The great irony is that, after 12 years of life
under Hitler, Upper Silesians were arguably speaking as much Polish as at any time in the
previous generation.
When Arkadiusz Bożek claimed in 1933 that the Nazi government in Upper Silesia
might treat Polish speakers better than the Weimar government had, he could not predict
the unforeseen ways in which his prediction came true. Life was most definitely worse for
the activists, like Bożek, who self-identified as national Poles and continued to preach the
Polish cause to their fellow Upper Silesians. For these men, Nazi repression, intimidation,
and imprisonment would traumatize and deprive them of basic freedoms and rights, and
sometimes of their lives. The radicalization of German and Polish nationalist activists in
Upper Silesia reached its climax in the barbed wire hell of Buchenwald. Yet, just as the
divisiveness and warfare between national groups increased in the Nazi period, so too did
the gap between nationalist activists and the larger population. Polish speakers consistently
sought ways to exclude themselves from the demands of the Nazi racial state. They used the
protections offered by the League of Nations to organize alternate forms of civil society
under the umbrella of Polish nationalists, whose resurgence depended on their de-
emphasizing ethnicist arguments for national belonging. Intensified Nazi efforts in the
1937-1939 period to eliminate public use of Polish created only the temporary appearance
of victory in their Germanization drive. During World War II, local Polish speakers largely
394

ignored the demands of Nazi racial conformity, reviving the use of Polish thanks in large
part to an influx of Polish labor. While regional Nazi officials set off alarm bells about the
national apathy of their populace, the Germanization of Upper Silesia took a back seat to
more pressing wartime priorities. Ironically, the experience of war was only beginning for
Upper Silesians at the end of 1944, when Soviet soldiers amassed on the eastern border of
the region. For the second time in 25 years, the end-of-war and postwar period would prove
more traumatic for Upper Silesians than the actual wartime experience.
395

From Upper Silesians to German Minority
396
Epilogue
In August 1945, the Polish sociologist Stanisław Ossowski went to observe national
relations in the small town of Dobrzyń Wielki/Groß Döbern, 11 kilometers northwest of
Opole/Oppeln. Like all formerly German lands east of the line carved by the Oder/Odra
and Neiße/Nysa rivers, the town had recently come under Polish rule after the defeat of the
Nazis. While the border shift was still officially provisional, Poles and Soviets were quickly
moving to make it permanent by organizing the expulsion of millions of German
residents. In the town Ossowski studied, however, the vast majority of residents remained in
their homes. In his three weeks living among the roughly 3,000 residents, Ossowski spoke
mostly with the “village aristocracy” of around 40 farmers. It was from this group, he noted,
that the ten or so local Polish activists from the interwar period were drawn, a social pattern
which he saw repeated across rural Upper Silesia. 1 Yet this “rather closed” national group also
interacted with (and simultaneously belonged to) a local Polish-speaking village culture that
maintained what Ossowski called a “nominalism in questions of nationality.” 2 He identified
most local citizens as Poles in an “adjectival sense” rather than a “nounal sense.” 3 While
Ossowski used a different vocabulary, he was essentially describing the difference between a
groupist identity as Poles among activists and a loose cultural affiliation to Polishness
among the broader village population. The German-Polish battles of the previous
1 Stanisław Ossowski, "Zagadnienia więzi regionalnej i więzi narodowej na Śląsku Opolskim," Przegląd Socjologiczny IX,
no. 1-3 (1947): 90, 94.
2 Ibid.: 97.
3 Ibid.: 121.

generations had politicized conceptions of national belonging to the point that most
villagers saw nationality as “something that reminded them of membership in a political
party.” 4 Identification as Upper Silesians, rather than Germans or Poles, allowed locals to
escape the politicization of nationality, Ossowski suggested.
Ossowski’s study was remarkable for its candor about national relations in village life,
and for the specific moment in time that it captured. The underlying logic in his article, if
not his actual conclusions, showed that villagers had intentionally crafted their own
national ambiguity as a response to the increasing radicalization of national politics. From
his interviews it is clear that the plebiscite served as the key catalyst: first- or second-hand
experience of the potentially dire consequences of ending up on the ‘wrong’ national side
after World War I had motivated many villagers to abstain subsequently from national self-
declarations. Even more remarkably, Ossowski avoided the typical diagnosis of nationalist
activists, namely that these local Upper Silesians were true Poles who were too terrorized to
express their nationality. He instead emphasized the appeal of material security and upward
mobility regardless of national affiliation or identity. “For all I care we can be Poles,
Germans, Russians, or Prussians,” a 70-year woman told him. “The main thing is that we
can work in peace, have something to eat and sugar for our children.” 5 Such statements, and
indeed all of Ossowski’s article, are difficult to imagine being made public even a few years
later. Ossowski managed to capture a special moment in early postwar history: after the
violence and terror of the 1945 Soviet invasion, but before an ideological conformity
4 Ibid.: 115.
5 Ibid.: 97.
397

enacted under Stalinist repression had quashed public debate on Upper Silesans’ national
ambiguity.
The poor integration of Upper Silesians into the Polish state after 1945 was an
extension of interwar failures to integrate the same population into Germany. The Polish
government targeted the broad, nationally ambiguous population of Upper Silesians for
Polonization more forcefully, and with more repression, than the Nazis had ever
contemplated. As public and private signs of German language and culture were ruthlessly
stamped out by the new Warsaw-centric government, Upper Silesians around
Opole/Oppeln – the vast majority having avoided expulsion – now retreated into closed-off
communities. The logic of forceful statist nationalization in a Communist political system
also made little room for interwar Upper Silesian Polish activists, with their social
conservatism and pro-agrarian political interests. Initially underrepresented at the highest
echelons of regional administration, these interwar activists would be almost totally
excluded by the subsequent Stalinization of Poland starting in 1948, which stamped out
their main party organ, the Polish People’s Party (PSL). These policies of repression and
failed integration, over the long term, would lead many of the nationally apathetic Polish
speakers like those in Ossowski’s study, and even former Polish nationalist activists, to
identify generations later as Upper Silesians or Germans. 6
The Soviet invasion of January 1945 marked an historical nadir for Upper Silesians. As
most Silesians fled westwards to escape the invading first Ukrainian army, many of Polish
background stayed in their homes, hoping the Soviet soldiers would recognize them as
friends, and not as enemies. They were tragically mistaken. Soviet soldiers, informed they
6 For one interpretation of this process see Philipp Ther, "Die einheimische Bevölkerung des Oppelner Schlesiens
nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg: Die Entstehung einer deutschen Minderheit," Geschichte und Gesellschaft 26 (2000).
398

were now on enemy territory, pillaged, raped, and murdered civilians with abandon. In one
of the most infamous local cases, in Boguschütz/Boguszyce, soldiers went on a three-day
rampage of mass rape and murder, leaving around 200 dead with many others being
dragged off to prison camps. Death tolls in other towns around Oppeln/Opole were also
gruesome: 80 to 90 murdered in Groschowitz/Groszowcie, 60 to 70 in Kupp/Kup, and 29 in
Groß Döbern/Dobrzyń Wielki, where Ossowski would set foot just months later. 7 One
witness to the atrocities in Boguschütz/Boguszyce remembered whole families of up to nine
people being shot together; and when a mother refused to give over her 13 year-old
daughter to the Soviet soldiers, they shot dead 36 people in retaliation. 8 Such atrocities were
commonplace across Nazi Germany during the final Soviet march to Berlin, but Polish
speakers were notably not spared this violence. Their claims to national ambiguity or to
anti-German sentiment made little difference to Soviet soldiers who knew they were on
enemy territory.
Among those who fled to Germany, the first returned to their homes in late March
1945, but significant numbers would stream back into the province until 1948. The
pervasive uncertainty about the future of the German-Polish border resulted in masses of
people moving in multiple directions simultaneously. Polish-speaking soldiers released from
prisoner camps in the west would return home, while soldiers’ wives looking for their
husbands, or hoping to secure veterans’ benefits, moved westwards. Families were separated
through flight and expulsion. These stories were repeated millions of times across German-
inhabited lands east of the Oder-Neiße line, as Poland and the Soviet Union worked to
7 Madajczyk, Przylaczenie, 90.
8 BArch, OstDok, 9/47a.
399

expel all Germans living in newly claimed western zones. Upper Silesia’s uniqueness lay in
the large number of ethnically ambiguous locals, who spoke Polish with varying levels of
proficiency, and who were neither clear targets for expulsion nor clear members of the
Polish nation. 9
Upper Silesians’ status within the new Polish state was initially just as precarious and
undefined as it had been under Nazi rule. Upper Silesians were subject to discrimination
based on their German patterns of language use and political affiliations. Aleksandr
Zawadzki, the new president of the enlarged Silesia-Dąbrowski province, set a tone of
uncompromising anti-German sentiment. Upon his arrival in March 1945 he told new
county officials in Upper Silesia, “An insurmountable abyss has arisen between the Polish
and German nations and there will be no talk of cooperation or attempts to cohabit.” 10
Zawadzki and other leaders allowed no space for national ambiguity, and brought a rigidly
groupist conception of two eternally divided nations to a region where such distinctions
made little sense. Zawadzki was not native to Upper Silesia, and those who were –
particularly the interwar Polish activists of the ZPwN – never held significant policy sway.
The assertion of regional power by outsiders was predictable for a centralizing nation-state
and repeated interwar trends. In the mid 1920s Wojciech Korfanty, the Polish plebiscite
leader, had been removed from power in Polish Upper Silesia in favor of a more hard-line
nationalist from outside the province. These Upper Silesian Polish activists, for all their
9 For a general study of expulsions and Polish resettlement, see Philipp Ther, Deutsche und polnische Vertriebene:
Gesellschaft und Vertriebenenpolitik in der SBZ, DDR, und in Polen, 1945 - 1956 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 1998). On the postwar in Silesia and the fate of native Upper Silesians, see Andreas R Hofmann, Die
Nachkriegszeit in Schlesien: Gesellschafts- und Bevölkerungspolitik in den polnischen Siedlungsgebieten 1945-1948
(Köln: Böhlau, 2000), esp. Ch. 6.
10 Quoted in Bernard Linek, “ ‘De-Germanization’ and ‘Re-Polonization’ in Upper Silesia, 1945-1950” in Philipp Ther
and Ana Siljak, eds., Redrawing Nations: Ethnic Cleansing in East-Central Europe, 1944-1948 (Lanham, Md.: Rowman
& Littlefield, 2001), 125-126.
400

interwar failures, understood regional ethno-linguistic relations far better than outside
officials, and often had disparate policy ideas. Arkadiusz Bożek, the highest-ranking native
Upper Silesian in the new regional government, opposed the verification process, arguing
in favor of Polonization regardless of the population’s previous loyalties. 11 Through this
position he seemed to understand the difficulty of distinguishing clear national identities
after several generations of bilingual practice and ethnic ambiguity. Native Upper Silesians
did occupy many mid-level and minor positions, comprising over 40 percent of the
regional bureaucracy in 1946, but they never were allowed to convert their knowledge of
local national ambiguity into over-arching policy.
In line with Zawadzki’s uncompromising view of two divided nations, many Upper
Silesian civilians with suspected German loyalties or connections to the Nazi Party were
imprisoned by the Polish government. The network of camps across western Poland for
Germans and other prisoners, sometimes occupying the space of former Nazi concentration
camps, housed over 200,000 Germans in the postwar years. 12 One historian has estimated
that the seven main camps located on the lands of interwar German Upper Silesia – four
civilian camps and three for soldiers – housed around 13,000 prisoners. Thousands more
Upper Silesians were in camps elsewhere. Horrific conditions led to high death rates: in one
camp near the industrial area, an estimated 3,300 out of 4,600 prisoners died in 1945. 13
Most of the Germans who survived the camps were expelled to Germany. The camps also,
11 Maria Wanatowicz, Od indyferentnej ludności do śląskiej narodowości? Postawy narodowe ludności autochtonicznej
Górnego Śląska w latach 1945-2003 w świadomości społecznej (Katowice: Wydawn. Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 2004), 29-
30.
12 A discussion of figures can be found in Bernard Linek, Polityka antyniemiecka na Górnym Śląsku w latach 1945 -
1950 (Opole: Stowarzyszenie Inst. Śląski, 2000), 165-166.
13 Piotr Madajczyk, Przyłączenie Śląska Opolskiego do Polski 1945-1948 (Warszawa: Instytut Studiów Politycznych
PAN, 1996), 244.
401

unsurprisingly, housed many prisoners of ambiguous nationality, and internment caused
many of them to lose faith in the Polish state. Weronika Łukasz, for example, had been
originally declared a Pole. But when her husband Paweł allegedly stole a goat and fled the
police, Weronika was arrested instead. Desperately fighting her imprisonment over a crime
she did not commit, she subsequently declared herself in court records not of Polish, but
rather of “Upper Silesian nationality.” 14 Even when not denied their freedoms, native
Upper Silesians were often treated as second-class citizens by the new Polish government,
denied benefits, jobs, and housing. 15 Such experiences of disillusionment were compounded
by widespread insecurity which in the area: well into 1947 Oppeln/Opole resembled a semi-
lawless town plagued by theft, assault, arson, and murder. 16
Given Upper Silesians’ pervasive fear of discrimination, lawlessness, and
imprisonment, it may come as a surprise that locals would choose to stay in their homes
rather than emigrate to Germany. Yet, as many Upper Silesians knew well, material
conditions were typically no better in occupied Germany. Ultimately, the vast majority of
native inhabitants from Opole/Oppeln county stayed in the new Polish state. In their
appeals to the government, these locals most commonly framed their desire to stay not as
the result of any deep-felt Polish nationalism, but rather as a commitment to their homes
and communities. Many were honest about their often weak command of Polish (especially
among children), but were equally vigilant in declaring their distance from German
nationalism. “I have never belonged to German groups” or “I am not a colonist” were
14 See letter of Łukasz on 21 May 1946 and government reply of 29 May in APO, SPO, Syg. 117.
15 Danuta Berlińska, Mniejszość niemiecka na Śląsku Opolskim w poszukiwaniu tożsamości (Opole: Stowarzyszenie
Instytut Śląski, 1999), 115-116.
16 See situation reports in APO, SPO, Syg. 41, 62.
402

typical declarations made by locals to distinguish themselves as worthy of Polish
citizenship. 17 Cases of ethnic ambiguity and mixed-language use were the norm, and many
native Upper Silesians did little to proclaim their loyalty to Poland beyond what was
necessary to remain in their homeland. The skepticism of singular national loyalties, passed
down from generation to generation, had allowed these Upper Silesians to craft an ethnic
ambiguity robust enough to survive Polish expulsions.
Responsibility for deciding who stayed and who would be expelled fell to the
verification committees working under the Polish National Repatriation Office [Państwowy
Urząd Repatriacynjy]. In the case of natives from Polish Upper Silesia, the verification
committees already had a statistical measure of Polish loyalties which they considered largely
accurate: the Nazi Volksliste of World War II. In the vast number of cases, Upper Silesians
who were deemed nationally ambiguous or Polish by the Volksliste (i.e. categories III and
IV) were automatically granted Polish citizenship. This remarkable continuity of racialist
thinking between Nazi and Polish regimes could not, however, be replicated for those
around Oppeln/Opole who were never formally categorized by the Nazis. Instead, these
Upper Silesians applied for verification by filling out a thorough questionnaire that asked
about their language use (including their language of prayer), patriotic feelings and
activities, and former affiliations with German or Nazi groups. Those with minimal or no
knowledge of Polish were suspect, but even they could often gain approval. Personal or
family links to the Nazi Party, SA, or affiliated groups proved the only automatic grounds
for expulsion, except in cases where membership was clearly against the person’s will.
17 See, for example, the appeals for repatriation in APO, SPO, Syg. 80.
403

The highly inclusive definition of Polishness practiced by verification committees was
based not on tolerance for ambiguity, but rather on the assumption that this “Polish”
population had been forcefully Germanized and would soon return to its true national
heritage. While it is certainly true that very many nationally ambiguous Upper Silesians,
often with minimal Polish language skills, were verified as Poles, their embrace of the Polish
nation proved elusive. The case of Małgorzata Szwirc proves but one example. A 20-year old
woman working in Opole/Oppeln’s municipal offices after the war, she sent a letter in late
1946 to her close friend Richard Langhoff, who had yet to return home from Germany.
While fluent in German, Szwirc had great difficulties learning Polish in her office job, but
had made progress. She wrote to Langhoff, “You would make eyes at me, I have become a
real Pole, but only for the time being. Times change and so do we.” She encouraged him to
return: “You would have no difficulties. You simply go to the Polish consulate there and
show your papers; you will still certainly be able to show a little knowledge of Polish, and
then you will be well on your way home.” 18 Unfortunately for Małgorzata Szwirc, her letter
entered the historical record thanks to Polish censors who intercepted it, and she was
subsequently imprisoned for being a “pseudo-Pole” with German loyalties. Nonetheless, her
story was certainly not singular, as native Upper Silesians adapted to the new national-
political circumstances without adopting enduring national loyalties. Indeed, many seemed
to think the Polish “occupation” was only temporary. Many of these ambiguous or
German-loyal verified “Poles” also had no choice but to stay. Those with technical training,
such as engineers or locomotive operators, were particularly subject to forced containment
within Upper Silesia by the Polish government. One expellee who maintained contact with
18 Private letter of October 1946 intercepted by police in APO, SPO, Syg. 205. See also
404

his fellow villagers and family members in Kotórz Mały/Klein Kottorz estimated in 1955
that up to half of those who stayed were forced to do so. 19
Given the significant population shifts and deaths from World War II, expulsions, and
internal migrations, it is difficult to pinpoint the exact percentage of interwar Upper
Silesians who were verified and remained in their homes. Nonetheless, over 750,000 native
Upper Silesians continued to live in their homeland in 1950 under Polish rule. They
comprised more than 56 percent of all residents in Upper Silesia, with the rest mainly
migrants from central Poland and evacuees of forced resettlement from areas of eastern
Poland ceded to the Soviets. In sheer numbers, Opole/Oppeln county was home to the
greatest number of “autochthons,” as they were known. In 1950 just over 106,000 of the
127,000 residents (excluding the city) were native Upper Silesians. Although applicants for
verification certainly formed a self-selecting group more likely to be approved, the figures
were still stark: by September 1946 (with close to two-thirds of applications processed), only
4.6 percent of Upper Silesian applicants had been denied Polish citizenship. 20 In some
villages nearly everyone remained except the German teacher and gendarme. With native
Upper Silesians comprising 86 percent of residents in postwar Opole/Oppeln county, the
national demographic fabric of village life remained largely unchanged from German
times. 21 Far more disruptive than national shifts was the gender imbalance created by men’s
19 Report of Theodor Schnotalla, March 1955, BArch, OstDok, 1/243.
20 Calculations based on figures in Jan Misztal, Weryfikacja narodowościowa na Śląsku Opolskim 1945-1950 (Opole:
Inst. Śląski, 1984), 136.
21 Statistics from Michał Lis, Ludność rodzima na Śląsku Opolskim po II wojnie światowej, 1945-1993 (Opole:
Państwowy Instytut Nauk., 1993), 32. In the city of Opole/Oppeln the proportion of autochthons was much lower
at 23 percent.
405

wartime deaths and imprisonment in camps. In 1947 there were 230 women for every 100
men in Upper Silesia. 22
While the people inhabiting many villages around Opole/Oppeln remained largely the
same, their patterns of language usage did not, thanks to Polish policies determined to
eliminate all traces of German. With technocratic rigor, local commissions conducted
searches of businesses and homes. They tore down signs in bars and made sure all ashtrays
and beer glasses were free of German lettering. They inspected homes, confiscating
artworks or crafts (such as ceremonial plates) with German words, and forcing occupants to
efface German names on appliances. By April 1948 some 6,000 confiscated German-
language books sat locked up in the basement of a government building in Opole/Oppeln,
many of them classic works in translation, such as Dante’s Inferno. Gravestones in German
were targeted for replacement or effacement, although complete eradication was
unsuccessful. At cemeteries around Oppeln/Opole, one can still find signs today of German
among the dead. A process even existed for “cleaning up” individuals’ Germanized names;
by 1949 over 1,500 applications in the county had been submitted to change a first or last
name, with over 350 additional requests for spelling alterations. 23
Local authorities found it much more difficult to eliminate traces of German in
everyday speech, as locals continued to use the language in defiance of strict bans. One
official in February 1947 reported that his city, Krapkowice/Krappitz, “comes across as a
German town.” German dominated on the streets and at home there, with residents (many
22 Adam Ehrlich, "Between Germany and Poland: Ethnic Cleansing and Politicization of Ethnicity in Upper Silesia
under National Socialism and Communism, 1939-1950" (Ph.D. Dissertation, Indiana University, 2005), 120.
23 Information on the commission’s work in Opole/Oppeln can be found in APO, SPO, Syg. 113-114. Statistics on
confiscated books from report of Opole starosta, April 1948, Syg. 113. Applications for name changing as of January
1949 in Syg. 114.
406

of them verified as Poles) unwilling or often unable to speak Polish. 24 As similar reports
streamed in from Opole/Oppeln and its surrounding villages, local officials levied fines for
public usage of German. In the first seven months of 1948, 155 reports of illicit German
use in the city of Opole/Oppeln yielded 16 separate fines totaling over 50,000 złoty. 25
Incentives were also offered through widespread “re-Polonization” courses, which at their
peak attracted over 3,000 in Opole/Oppeln county with weak knowledge of Polish. 26 Yet
the elimination of German from public life would proceed slowly, and only under the
pressure of fines and even imprisonment.
Imprisonment of native Upper Silesians and harsh de-Germanization measures served
as only the most severe examples of a pervasive system of discrimination and alienation.
Thanks to Upper Silesians’ continued mixed-language practices, Zawadzki and other
imported Polish officials increasingly viewed the autochthons as nationally untrustworthy,
or even closeted Germans. Not surprisingly, Upper Silesians subsequently kept their
distance from Polish social and political groups. 27 Similar tensions also developed between
Upper Silesians and settlers from central and eastern Poland, who began arriving as early as
April 1945. In some cases, after fleeing to Germany, Upper Silesians returned to their
homes to find them already occupied by settlers, resulting in property disputes. Across
western Poland, officials overestimated the space available for resettlement, and thus were
left with a surfeit of forced evacuees lacking housing. 28 Polish officials had hoped these new
settlers, particularly from central Poland, would help to Polonize Upper Silesians. But
24 Report of Gimnna Rada Narodowa president in Krapkowice on 17 February 1947 in APO, SPO, Syg. 205.
25 Opole starosta to Katowice privincial president, August 1948, APO, SPO, Syg. 113.
26 Opole starosta report for first quarter of 1948, APO, SPO, Syg. 65.
27 See reports of 1947-1949 in APO, SPO, Syg. 63-64
28 Ther, Deutsche und polnische Vertriebene, 123 ff.
407

natives mostly looked down on them as culturally inferior easterners: lazy, uneducated,
impious, or unable to work Upper Silesia’s sandy soil. As a result, Upper Silesians tended to
form closed-off communities, refusing to interact with the settlers. These processes of Upper
Silesian withdrawal from Polish society were only enhanced by subsequent Stalinization in
the late 1940s. Up to 90 percent of interwar Polish activists who assumed positions in Polish
regional governance were purged, above all for their socially conservative leanings and
membership in the agrarian PSL party. 29 These same activists, like many of their less
nationalist Upper Silesian neighbors, were modest yet successful independent farmers, and
thus also among the main targets of Stalinist collectivization policies. 30 Native Upper
Silesians, whether nationally active or apathetic, were thoroughly disillusioned and
disadvantaged by economic and political repression, becoming quietly but deeply hostile to
Poland as a state and as a nation.
This antagonism between the Polish state and Upper Silesians diminished over time,
but never entirely disappeared. By the mid-1950s, most native Upper Silesians in towns
around Opole/Oppeln formed insular communities, rarely interacted with officials, tended
to inter-marry, and maintained regular contact with expelled relatives or friends in
Germany. 31 By this time the regional Polish government was making efforts to better
integrate the population, which had fallen behind economically and educationally through
its own insularity. Yet these new integration efforts worked from the now entrenched myth
that Upper Silesians were fundamentally Polish, and that the origin of their problems could
29 In 1946-1947 native Upper Silesians comprised 44% of regional governance, but by 1950 the figure was just 4%. See
Berlińska, Mniejszość niemiecka, 118, fn. 52.
30 Ehrlich, "Between Germany and Poland", 186-187.
31 See report of Günther Moschek in BArch, OstDok, 1/243. See also the retrospective interviews in Berlińska,
Mniejszość niemiecka, 139 ff.
408

e found in social ills rather than in a disparate cultural or linguistic orientation. When,
from 1956-1959, a thaw in Polish-West German relations opened the border for Germans
still in Poland to emigrate westwards, thousands of Upper Silesians chose to leave their
homeland. Of the nearly 49,000 Upper Silesians who left in this three-year window, over
6,100 departed from Opole/Oppeln city and another 7,100 from the surrounding county. 32
Subsequent waves of emigration in the following decades – totaling nearly 280,000 from
Upper Silesia between 1956 and 1985 – served to highlight the continued connections to
Germany and disenchantment with Poland among Upper Silesians. 33 While sociologists
who studied Upper Silesia, and others familiar with regional conditions, were well aware of
bitterness and continued nostalgia or loyalty for Germany among autochthons, many
could not openly publish or discuss their work until after 1989. 34 Yet feelings of Upper
Silesian solidarity and identification with Germany had clearly survived through two
generations, even as German usage remained forbidden in public until 1989. With the fall
of Communism, a German minority group, led by Henryk Kroll in Opole/Oppeln, quickly
established itself as a political and social force. Kroll has served as the representative for the
Opole district in the Polish parliament [sejm] since 1991, and in 2002, ten percent of the
residents in his province declared themselves of German nationality, with another 2.3
percent identifying as Silesians. 35 Many of these people were the children or grandchildren
of former Prussian citizens, and had only known life in post-1945 Poland. The Polish
32 Piotr Madajczyk, Niemcy polscy 1944-1989 (Warszawa: Oficyna Naukowa, 2001), 230.
33 Figure calculated from data in Lis, Ludność rodzima, 44-47.
34 Berlińska, Mniejszość niemiecka, 53-55.
35 Małgorzata Kałaska et al., Ludność: Stan i struktura demograficzno-społeczna 2002, Narodowy spis powszechny 2002
(Warszawa: GUS, 2003), 220-221.
409

takeover after World War II had thus arguably resulted in the belated nationalization of
Upper Silesians – but not with the opposite results from what Poland had expected.
CONCLUSION
While Upper Silesia ceased to be a territorial borderland in 1945, it has re-emerged in
recent decades as an ethno-national one. The history of Upper Silesia reveals that
borderlands often multiply in complexity the more closely one zooms in on regional and
local relations. The Opole/Oppeln area remains, as it was 150 years ago, dotted with
linguistically diverse villages and populations distributed in such a way as to make drawing
clear territorial lines between nations impossible. It remains that way primarily because
Upper Silesians did not willingly participate in repeated efforts by Polish and German
nationalists to draw national borders through local communities. Upper Silesians of the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries instead accepted bilingual practices and local
ethnic ambiguity as the basis of their communal structure. Everyday interactions within
local social life were not primarily structured by awareness of living on the edge between
two disparate national groups, but rather by a tolerance and even embrace of this diversity.
Subsequent efforts to turn this landscape into a threatened border, and to delineate national
belonging, ultimately failed to make sense of the rootedness of local diversity. The postwar
Polish state’s efforts to eradicate all signs of Germanness ultimately created a nationally
aware native population – except that Upper Silesians, in the eyes of Poland, embraced the
“wrong” one. Given the instability of national loyalties over time in Upper Silesia, it is
difficult to say how long this modern-day German minority around Oppeln/Opole will
continue to exist.
410

The creation of territorial nation-states required more than the simple delineation of
lines on a map; especially along territorial borders between states and among populations
uncommitted to the national project, it required drawing new boundary lines within
communities and between individuals’ diverse loyalties. The greatest success of nationalist
activists across Central Europe was to paint this process as a natural progression or growth of
inborn ethnic traits into stable national groups. The Polish takeover of Upper Silesia from
1945-1950 served as the culmination of this logic of ethnic nationalism as practiced by
activists in Oppeln/Opole. Yet this seeming triumph of ethnicist, groupist thinking – of
creating loyal nations out of pre-existing ethnic bodies – proved doubly ironic. First, the
Polish postwar measures hardly ended in long-term success. Repression meant to eradicate
German language and culture only drove Upper Silesians underground, awakening their
German loyalties in the process. The Nazis, too, had experienced a similar fate in
attempting to Germanize Upper Silesians: having driven Polish usage underground by
1939, they were surprised to see its reemergence during World War II. It seems unlikely
that the Nazi project would have succeeded in the long term any more than the Polish
project did – except through complete annihilation of the population. The nationalization
of local populations in Upper Silesia thus ended with analogous German and Polish
programs rooted in violent repression. As this dissertation has argued, the increasing
radicalism of competing German and Polish national projects was not unrelated to the cool
reception of local Upper Silesians. In fact, it was precisely this indifference or apathy to
nationalization that drove increasing radicalism among activists.
This is related to the second irony of postwar efforts to Polonize Upper Silesians: They
were implemented without the regional Polish activists who had worked for decades on the
411

same project. This, too, makes more sense in light of analogous projects in previous decades.
Nationalist activists may have proved unsuccessful in appealing to most Upper Silesians, but
they did create a powerful social network and moral world among themselves. These
activists, working from their own personal experiences living in a nationalized social milieu,
became more insular and more isolated from the communities they claimed to represent.
Unable to convince Upper Silesians to nationalize, these regional activists instead saw their
goals reached only through the mechanisms of state coercion and repression emanating
from Warsaw. Local Polish activists thus became victims of their own logic: their desire to
create homogeneous national bodies was best achieved by repressive, centralizing state
powers from which they were ultimately excluded.
This century-long story of nationalization efforts in and around Oppeln/Opole has
several key turning points, all of which shaped the possibilities and limitations of
nationalism and its alternatives. The decades after 1848 saw the establishment of regional
loyalties based not on national difference, but rather on an embrace of Upper Silesia’s
linguistic diversity. The national division predicted by constructivist theorists as the natural
accompaniment to modernization actually yielded the opposite result in Upper Silesia: an
embrace of religious unity above ethnic difference. The years 1866 and 1871 served as the
key turning points when Upper Silesia’s fate was sealed as a borderland in the kleindeutsch
nation-state. Subsequent repression of Catholic practice only cemented the region’s
religious unity, without any premonition of national division.
Another key turning point came in 1890 to 1893, when Bronisław Koraszewski arrived
in Oppeln/Opole and quickly demonstrated the power of national activism to reshape
political loyalties. But the subsequent failure of his project to nationalize society before
412

World War I, even as it remade electoral politics, proved that non-national allegiances to
religion, locality, region, and increasingly to class, remained the basis of communal ties. It
would take the radicalization of Upper Silesia during World War I, and particularly during
the subsequent plebiscite, to truly test the boundaries of national belonging among Upper
Silesians. The plebiscite era and accompanying occupation proved a testament to both the
trauma of national radicalism and the power of democracy to upend groupist
understandings of nationality. While communities were torn apart by violence framed as a
battle of two nations, the democratic appeals of the plebiscite campaigns revealed the
instability of national loyalties among Upper Silesians.
The radicalization of the plebiscite manifested itself subsequently as a growing gap
between well-defined nationalist groups and a broader populace more skeptical of the
dangers of singular national loyalty. In education, church, and associational life, local Polish
speakers around Oppeln/Opole proved largely unreceptive to the Weimar-era program of
Polish nationalism. Their indifference prompted Polish activists to define policies of
integration and assimilation into German society as the enemy, as they increasingly
promoted racial division which shared its logic with German National Socialists. Thus
another turning point came in the early 1930s with the mutual embrace by German and
Polish activists of strict racial separation. Their failures to enact this division were seen in
religious practice and village life, which remained rooted in bilingual practice well into the
1940s. Nazi efforts to stamp out this diversity proved unsuccessful, particularly as they
prioritized war victory over Germanization of Upper Silesians. The great turning point of
1945 was one of regime change, but also one which showed a continuity in ideologies of
eliminating national ambiguity. Postwar Polonization efforts were able to stamp out signs
413

public and private signs of Germanness among the “Polish” autochthons, but the myth of
Polish national homogeneity proved skin-deep.
The efforts of nationalists and the states supporting them in Upper Silesia in the
century after 1848 increasingly limited the options available for local citizens to structure
their lives and communities in non-national ways. Yet this was far from a linear process,
and complete national division was never a pre-ordained outcome. Upper Silesians
consistently found ways to navigate the channels of social change, war defeat, and state
transformation without being swept out to the seas of unitary German or Polish national
identification. Their agency in these processes is often difficult to pinpoint, given its
expression primarily through indifference. Yet the large numbers who managed to remain
in their homes across generations, avoiding deportations, genocides and ethnic cleansings,
testify to the agency crafted out of their indifference and ambiguity. At the same time, this
indifference must be seen as a key catalyst for the radicalization of nationalist activists who,
frustrated with the unwillingness of Upper Silesians to adhere to a logic of national division,
used increasingly radical, illiberal measures to enforce this division. In the case of Upper
Silesia, these activists’ efforts to forge nationalized societies ultimately failed over the long
term, in the process revealing the instability of the categories “German” and “Pole” as
markers of loyalty in this German-Polish borderland.
414

Figure 2: The German Empire, 1871-1918
APPENDIX: MAPS
415

Figure 3: Silesia, 1740-1918
The dotted line running through the province just west of Opole/Oppeln separates the
Upper Silesian district from Lower Silesia.
416

Figure 4: Interwar Partitioned Upper Silesia
Oppeln/Opole is on the German side of the Upper Silesian interwar partition, represented
by thick horizontal striping. The thinly-striped area to the east is the Polish partition.
417

Figure 5: Poland After World War II
Shaded areas represent territories ceded from Germany to Poland in 1945.
418

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