Armistice of Trier

On 16 February 1919 at Trier the Allies extended for the third time the armistice that had ended the fighting on the Western Front. This time Marshal Ferdinand Foch added a clause about the Poles. The Germans were to cease at once all offensive operations against the Poles in the Posen region and in other districts, and their troops were forbidden to cross a demarcation line that ran along the German–Greater Poland front. Poles regard this day as the formal end of the Greater Poland Uprising. The gains of the insurgents, who since December had taken most of the province, appeared for the first time in a document signed by the Powers.

An internal German affair

The Armistice of Compiègne had left the lands of the Prussian partition with Germany until the peace conference decided otherwise. From the point of view of international law the uprising, which had broken out in Poznań on 27 December 1918, could therefore pass for an internal rebellion in a Prussian province. Already at Compiègne Foch had wanted the Germans in the east to withdraw behind the frontier of 1772, before the First Partition of Poland, but the British objected. The armistice, however, had been concluded for only a month and had to be extended regularly. Successive rounds of talks were held at Trier, in December and in mid-January, and each gave the Allies an opportunity to add new conditions.

Around the turn of January and February the Polish question gained weight in Paris. The insurgents had held the territory they had taken, Ignacy Jan Paderewski, who was well regarded in the West, had become prime minister and foreign minister in Warsaw, and the Polish National Committee in Paris was pressing for the Greater Poland front to be covered by the armistice. The Germans made their own position worse. To a British note of 8 January calling on them to refrain from provocations against the Poles in Prussia, Posen and Silesia, the government in Berlin replied a week later that it would not tolerate the “rebellion” and “high treason” of Polish citizens of the Reich. Polish–German talks in Berlin broke down on 5 February, and the German Grenzschutz was preparing a larger offensive.

Foch’s ultimatum

The existing extension was due to expire at five in the morning on 17 February. On 16 February at Trier Foch demanded that the new conditions be accepted and threatened to break off the talks, which would have meant a resumption of the war. The Germans gave way and signed the agreement that same day. According to the summary in the American documentary series Foreign Relations of the United States, the Germans were to cease hostilities against the Poles at once, and the armistice was prolonged for a short period, the Allies reserving the right to terminate it at three days’ notice. In practice this meant an extension with no fixed end. From then on the armistice remained in force until the peace treaty came into effect.

The clause on the Poles listed the places the Germans were not allowed to pass. The line ran from the old frontier of East and West Prussia with Russia at Dąbrowa Biskupia, north of Szubin and Kcynia, south of Chodzież, west of Międzychód, Zbąszyń and Wolsztyn, north of Leszno and Rawicz, and west of Odolanów and Ostrzeszów as far as the Silesian border. It thus left on the Polish side almost everything the insurgents had taken, but not Bydgoszcz, Leszno or Rawicz.

Significance

Polish tradition holds that at Trier the Allies recognised the Greater Poland Army as an allied force and the Greater Poland front as a front of the Entente. The text of the agreement does not say so. It places obligations only on the Germans and does not mention the Polish troops. Even so, it was a great success. The IPN historian Piotr Grzelczak writes that it meant recognition by the Powers of an outcome of the uprising favourable to the Poles and the removal of the Posen region from Germany’s actual control.

The fighting on the demarcation line did not stop at once. The text did not define exactly when it came into force, and the Germans committed numerous provocations and tried to shift the front in their favour. According to Polish figures, another 121 Poles were killed in these incidents before the peace treaty was signed. In the end the fate of Greater Poland was settled by the Treaty of Versailles, which gave Poland almost the whole Province of Posen.