Korfanty's speech in the Reichstag

On 25 October 1918 the deputy Wojciech Korfanty delivered the most famous speech of his career in the Reichstag. From the rostrum of the German parliament he demanded that the Province of Posen, the Polish part of West Prussia, the Polish districts of East Prussia and the Polish districts of Upper and Middle Silesia be joined to the Polish state. The speech caused uproar in the chamber and a wave of protests in Germany. For the Poles of the Prussian partition it was a sign that their fate would be decided not by Berlin but by the peace conference.

Polish demands in the autumn of 1918

At the beginning of October Germany asked President Woodrow Wilson for an armistice on the basis of his Fourteen Points. The thirteenth of them promised an independent Poland with territories “inhabited by indisputably Polish populations” and free access to the sea. The Poles in the Reich concluded that Berlin, by accepting this programme, had itself granted them the right to unite with the rest of the country. As early as 5 October the Poznań lawyer Władysław Seyda (PL) said so in the Reichstag on behalf of the Polish Circle. On 7 October the Regency Council in Warsaw announced a united Polish state, and on 12 October the Polish organisations and press in the eastern provinces of Prussia issued a joint appeal in the same spirit. German newspapers accused them of treason.

Korfanty, who had won a by-election in the Gliwice–Toszek–Lubliniec constituency in June, had headed the Polish parliamentary and press office in Berlin since September. According to his biographers, in October there was much talk of a map of the future Poland that he had drawn in the lobbies of the Reichstag. Deputies noticed that it included Upper Silesia as well. The authorities refused him permission to travel for talks with the Regency Council. Vice-Chancellor Friedrich von Payer explained that Korfanty was preparing “the separation of part of its territory from Germany”.

From 23 to 25 October the Reichstag debated the policy of the government of Chancellor Max von Baden, including the demands of the national minorities. On 23 October the priest Antoni Stychel spoke on behalf of the Polish Circle. He was answered by the Secretary of State Wilhelm Solf. Solf argued that the “access to the sea” promised to Poland need not mean territorial gains, and that the Polish claims to West Prussia contradicted the right of nations to self-determination. All the German parties, from the right to the Social Democrats, defended the Reich’s pre-war eastern borders. Only the Independent Socialists broke ranks. Hugo Haase supported the right of all the Reich’s nationalities to self-determination, though he considered the Polish demands excessive, and Georg Ledebour presented a map under which most of the Province of Posen should go to Poland.

The speech

On Friday 25 October the President opened the general debate and gave the floor first to Korfanty. The deputy began by saying that in recent days the Poles, the Alsatians and the Danes had turned away from the German state, and that they wished the last ties binding them to it to be dissolved by the peace congress. He said that the Poles felt no hatred for the Prussian system of government, only contempt, and that they respected the German nation, which had given the world Schiller and Goethe and had merely succumbed to Prussian ideas.

The heart of the speech concerned borders. “Gentlemen, we do not demand a single span of German soil. In accordance with point 13 of President Wilson’s programme we demand the creation of one Poland, made up of three parts, with access to the sea,” he said, according to the Polish translation of the stenographic record. He argued that “no statistical tricks” could change the fact that the left bank of the Vistula in West Prussia, as far as Hel, was inhabited by an undoubtedly Polish population. Referring to Ledebour’s speech of the previous day, he listed the Polish claims: the Polish districts of Upper and Middle Silesia (“not a single German district!”), the Province of Posen, Polish West Prussia and the Polish districts of East Prussia. When the President remarked that he was confusing the Reichstag with the future peace congress, Korfanty replied that he did not wish to hurt German feelings, and that from the very beginning of the Reichstag the Poles had regarded themselves in it as the delegation of the whole Polish nation. “That is so even today,” he added.

He also recalled how Germany understood Polish freedom: the removal of machinery and raw materials from the occupied Kingdom, its policy towards the Poles in Lithuania, and, on 20 October, the dispersal by German police of a crowd outside Vilna cathedral, where thanks were being given for the Regency Council’s manifesto. He spoke up for Józef Piłsudski, revered by Poles as the leader of the Legions, who despite the requests of the Polish authorities was still held in the fortress of Magdeburg. His words that it was “a miraculous dispensation of God” that old Prussia, Russia and Austria were perishing under the onslaught of the national ideas against which they had committed the greatest crimes provoked indignation. The speech was repeatedly interrupted by shouts from various parts of the chamber, while the Poles and the Independent Socialists applauded it. In conclusion Korfanty said that the two nations were bound to each other, and that the democratic Polish nation was extending a fraternal hand to the democratic German nation, “freed from Prussianism”.

Significance

The Polish deputies concluded that their mission in the German parliament had come to an end, and declared that, as members of the Polish nation, they would no longer take part in its sittings. In any case the imperial Reichstag met only once more, on 26 October. According to some accounts this was the last speech by a Polish deputy in the Reichstag. The scale of the Polish demands surprised German public opinion. As the Poznań historian Przemysław Hauser writes, the protests of the authorities, organisations and press now spread beyond Posen and West Prussia to Upper Silesia and East Prussia. In Poland the speech entered the canon of the parliamentary tradition, and for the Germans Korfanty became a symbol of the Polish claims to the Reich’s eastern provinces. Two weeks later revolution broke out in Germany, giving the Poles of the Prussian partition the chance to move from words to building an authority of their own.