Greater Poland uprising

The Greater Poland uprising broke out unexpectedly, during the visit of Ignacy Jan Paderewski to Poznań. On the afternoon of 27 December 1918 a German procession, soldiers among them, marched through the city centre tearing Polish and Allied flags from the houses. Shots were fired outside the Bazar (PL) hotel, where Paderewski was staying, and Polish volunteer and underground units, ready to fight for weeks, took almost all of Poznań within a few days. The fighting quickly spread across the whole province. By mid-January 1919 the insurgents held most of Prussian Greater Poland, and then fought off counter-attacks by the German Grenzschutz. The fighting was ended only by the armistice which the Allies extended to Germany at Trier on 16 February 1919. It was one of the few victorious Polish uprisings, and its gains were confirmed by the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919.

Name and dates

The name “Greater Poland uprising” is universally accepted in Poland, though in 1918 itself people spoke rather of the “Poznań events” or the “December uprising”. German literature uses “Posen uprising” (Posener Aufstand) or “Greater Poland uprising”. It is taken to begin with the outbreak of fighting in Poznań on 27 December 1918 and to end with the signing at Trier on 16 February 1919 of a further extension of the Armistice of Compiègne, which also covered the Greater Poland front. Skirmishes on the demarcation line continued, however, for several more months, until the signing of the Treaty of Versailles on 28 June 1919. Since 2021, 27 December has been a national holiday (PL) in Poland.

Background

After the Congress of Vienna Greater Poland belonged to Prussia as the Grand Duchy of Posen, and after 1848 as the ordinary Province of Posen. After the unification of Germany the Poles of the Prussian partition became the target of a Germanisation policy: the Kulturkampf, expulsions, land purchases by the Settlement Commission and pressure on the schools. The answer was a dense network of Polish co-operatives, people’s banks, educational and gymnastic societies. During the war several hundred thousand Poles from the Prussian partition served in the German army, and the Act of 5 November 1916, which promised a Polish state on lands taken from Russia, said nothing about the Prussian lands.

In the autumn of 1918 the thirteenth of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, speaking of a Poland with territories “inhabited by indisputably Polish populations” and access to the sea, and then the revolution in Germany gave the people of Greater Poland hope. In November workers’ and soldiers’ councils were set up throughout the province, in which the Poles quickly gained a strong position, and in Poznań the Polish People’s Guard (PL) took over police duties. The Polish movement was headed by the Supreme People’s Council (NRL), whose leadership was elected on 3–5 December by the Provincial Diet in Poznań. Its Commissariat, whose members included Father Stanisław Adamski, Wojciech Korfanty and Władysław Seyda (PL), counted on the peace conference deciding the fate of the lands of the Prussian partition, and did not call for armed action. The conspirators of the Polish Military Organisation of the Prussian Partition (PL) thought otherwise, as did the Poles who had joined the German Guard and Security Service to obtain weapons and training. They stockpiled arms and prepared units, and according to some historians intended to strike at the beginning of 1919.

Tension was rising on the German side too. In mid-November the Prussian government began forming volunteer units to defend the eastern provinces, later known as the Grenzschutz Ost, and in mid-December the Germans of Greater Poland held their own congress and demonstrated for the province to remain in the Reich. On 15 December the government in Warsaw broke off relations with Germany. On the evening of 26 December Paderewski, on his way to Warsaw, arrived in Poznań from Danzig accompanied by British officers. Despite German attempts to stop him, crowds greeted him, and the city was decorated with Polish, American, British and French flags.

Outbreak in Poznań

On the afternoon of 27 December the Germans organised their own demonstration in response. According to an NRL communiqué, some 200 armed soldiers of the 6th Grenadier Regiment (PL) marched from their barracks in Jeżyce through the centre, burst into the Council’s headquarters and tore down Allied and Polish flags. In the late afternoon, between 4 and 5.30 p.m. (sources give different times), the first shots were fired near the Bazar hotel and the Police Presidium. Who fired first is unknown: the NRL communiqué blamed the Germans, who were said to have machine-gunned the hotel windows, while the German side blamed the Poles. Polish units of the People’s Guard, the POW and the Guard and Security Service attacked the Police Presidium. In the fight for it Franciszek Ratajczak (PL) was killed, later recognised as the first insurgent to fall in Poznań. That same night the Poles took the main railway station and the main post office.

On 28 December the insurgents took the Citadel, Fort Grolman and the arsenal, and the NRL Commissariat, although it had not planned the uprising, accepted the fait accompli and gave command to Captain Stanisław Taczak, a Polish Army officer who happened to be in Poznań. Promoted to major, he set up a General Command and began to bring order to the spontaneously forming units. On 30 December the 6th Grenadier Regiment was driven from its barracks and, after negotiations, left the city with its arms. The last German strongpoint near Poznań was the airfield at Ławica, taken on 6 January 1919 in a short assault. At Ławica and in the hangars at Winiary the insurgents captured a great quantity of aviation equipment. The figures are uncertain: Polish sources alone speak of several dozen airworthy aircraft and even of more than 300 machines, most of them dismantled or trainers.

The uprising spreads

The call to arms reached the provinces as early as 27 December. That day Jan Mertka was also killed near Szczypiorno, close to Kalisz, and in response the Poles took the border town of Boczków. In the last days of December and the first days of January the insurgents seized power in the towns of central and eastern Greater Poland, where the Poles were in the majority: Gniezno, Września, Środa, Śrem, Kórnik, Grodzisk, Wągrowiec, Kościan, Oborniki, Ostrów Wielkopolski, Jarocin, Krotoszyn and Nakło. Many German garrisons, demoralised and cut off from their command, left after brief talks, with or without their weapons, abandoning their depots. After heavy fighting and an agreement with the Germans, the insurgents took over Inowrocław on 6 January. In the west, where more Germans lived, things went harder: two attempts to take Zbąszyń failed. On 8 January the Poles recaptured Chodzież (PL), and on 11 January they won the fight for Szubin.

Mid-January brought stabilisation. Most of the province was in Polish hands, but not its northern fringes with Bydgoszcz and Piła, nor its western and south-western edges with Leszno and Rawicz. The command forbade crossing the Obra and advancing into areas inhabited mainly by Germans, because fighting there would no longer be a struggle for national liberation and could harm the Polish cause at the peace conference. On 9 January the NRL officially proclaimed that it had taken power in the province and began staffing offices with Poles.

The Greater Poland Army

Officers were scarce, because the Germans had rarely promoted Poles. The NRL therefore turned to Warsaw, and with the consent of Józef Piłsudski command was taken by General Józef Dowbor-Muśnicki, former commander of the I Polish Corps in Russia. According to his biography he arrived in Poznań on 8 January and on 16 January took over the duties of commander-in-chief from Taczak. Many officers from the former Russian army followed him. The volunteer units were turned into a regular army: on 17 January the conscription of men born in 1897–1899 was announced, and on 18 January the line of battle was divided into fronts: northern, western, south-western (near Leszno) and southern. On 26 January, on Wilhelmplatz, renamed Freedom Square (PL), the soldiers took the oath. Thus arose the nucleus of the Greater Poland Army (PL), which by the spring numbered several tens of thousands of soldiers.

German counter-offensive

In the second half of January the Germans, reinforced by Grenzschutz volunteers, went over to counter-attacks from the Bydgoszcz area, from the Oder and from Lower Silesia. The heaviest fighting was on the northern front, on the Noteć. At the end of January the Germans took Szubin and attacked near Rynarzewo and Łabiszyn, but on 3 February the Poles defeated them at Kcynia, and on 4 February they recaptured Szubin. In the south two assaults on Rawicz in early February failed, and in the west there was fighting for Kargowa, Babimost and the villages on the Obra. Polish–German talks in Berlin were broken off on 5 February, when the Germans demanded the disbanding of the Polish units and recognition of the Reich’s authority over the province. In mid-February the German supreme command moved to Kolberg, which the Poles took as a sign of a larger offensive.

Armistice of Trier

The NRL Commissariat and the Polish National Committee in Paris pressed the Allies to end the fighting. It helped that the armistice with Germany had been concluded for a short term and had to be extended every month. In the next extension, signed at Trier (PL) on 16 February 1919, Marshal Ferdinand Foch added a clause about the Poles to the terms. The Germans were to cease at once all offensive operations against the Poles in Posen and in other districts, and their troops were forbidden to cross a line running from the old border with Russia, north of Szubin and Kcynia, west of Międzychód, Zbąszyń and Wolsztyn, and north of Leszno and Rawicz as far as the Silesian border. Polish tradition holds that the Allies thereby recognised the Greater Poland Army as an allied force, although the text of the agreement does not say so. It imposes obligations on the Germans alone.

Losses

According to the latest list of names, cited by the Institute of National Remembrance, the uprising cost the lives of 2,261 Poles (136 of them unknown by name), killed in action or dead of wounds and disease. Some 6,000 were wounded. Older studies gave lower figures. German losses are not known precisely. The memories of the first days of fighting in Poznań are also known to have grown into legend. For years veterans argued over who fell first on 27 December, Ratajczak or the eighteen-year-old Antoni Andrzejewski (PL).

Significance

The Greater Poland uprising is one of the few victorious uprisings in Polish history. Before the peace conference began discussing borders, the Poles had in fact taken power in most of Greater Poland and created their own army. The Treaty of Versailles, which came into force on 10 January 1920, gave Poland almost the whole Province of Posen, including Leszno, Rawicz, Zbąszyń and Bydgoszcz, which the insurgents had not taken. Only western and northern fragments with Piła and Międzyrzecz remained with Germany. Units of the Greater Poland Army were already fighting in the spring of 1919 in the Polish–Ukrainian War, and later in the war against the Bolsheviks, and its veterans helped in the Silesian uprisings. In 1939 the Germans, aware of this past, sought out and murdered former insurgents.