Founding of the Supreme People's Council

On 14 November 1918 in Poznań the Polish leaders of the Prussian partition finally abandoned conspiracy. The Provisional Commissariat of the Supreme People’s Council issued its first appeal to the Poles in the Reich. It called for Polish people’s councils and people’s guards to be formed in the towns and districts, and summoned to Poznań for 3 December a sejm that was to choose a proper representation of all the Poles in the German state. Thus was born the authority that over the following months led the Polish movement in Greater Poland, Pomerania and Upper Silesia.

The Council grew out of a secret inter-party committee that Polish deputies to the parliaments in Berlin and activists from Poznań had founded in the first years of the war. Known as the Central Citizens’ Committee, it relied on a network of local, secret citizens’ committees in the towns and small towns of the Province of Posen. National Democracy had the greatest influence in it. The committee kept in touch with politicians in the Kingdom and in Galicia, and later with the Polish National Committee in Paris. Its leading figures included the Poznań lawyer Władysław Seyda (PL), the priest Stanisław Adamski, Adam Poszwiński (PL) and Wojciech Korfanty, who on 25 October had demanded in the Reichstag that the lands of the Prussian partition be joined to Poland.

The revolution in Germany and the armistice allowed the committee to come out of hiding. On 11 November it revealed itself as the People’s Council, and the deputy Wojciech Trąmpczyński became chairman of its organisation in Poznań. Korfanty arrived in the city the same day. On 12 November a three-member Provisional Commissariat was chosen, made up of Adamski, Korfanty and Poszwiński. The decision to act openly was hastened by events in the city: the Polish workers’ council was already in the hands of the committee’s people, and on 13 November young conspirators forced the admission of Poles to the leadership of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council, which the same day recognised the People’s Council as the representation of the Polish people. On 14 November the organisation took the name of the Supreme People’s Council. “Poles! From a sea of blood rises the WHITE EAGLE of a reborn Poland, the fulfilment of our longings, desires and hopes (…). POLES! The present moment demands of us calm, the straining of all our strength, material sacrifice, discipline and concord!” the Commissariat’s appeal proclaimed.

The Council’s aim was to unite the lands of the Prussian partition with reborn Poland, and its method, as it was put, was a peaceful but consistent pursuit of redress for the wrong of the partitions. The Council’s leaders did not want an uprising. They counted on the peace conference to fix the borders, and until then they wanted to take over authority in the province step by step and give the Germans no pretext for a crackdown on the Poles. The elections to the sejm, called the Polish Provincial Sejm, were held in haste between 16 November and 1 December, mostly at public meetings, by voting for lists prepared in advance. All Poles, men and women, aged 20 or over could vote.

District and commune people’s councils sprang up across the province. The committee advised them, wherever workers’ and soldiers’ councils existed, to come to terms with them and to bring Polish representatives into them. The Prussian government, however, was unwilling to grant the people’s councils any powers. When, in mid-November, representatives of the Supreme People’s Council demanded from envoys of the Prussian government the right to appoint controllers in offices that were still pursuing an anti-Polish policy, they were told that control belonged solely to the workers’ and soldiers’ councils. The Council also had to deal with the impatience of the young military conspirators, who wanted to move faster than its cautious leaders. At the beginning of December the Provincial Sejm elected a new 80-member Council and recognised it as the supreme authority of the Poles in Germany until the lands of the Prussian partition were taken over by the Polish government.