Outbreak of the First Silesian Uprising

Late in the evening of 16 August 1919, in the village of Urbanowice in the district of Pszczyna, several dozen members of the Polish Military Organisation of Upper Silesia (PL) disarmed a German post. During the night the fighting spread across the northern part of the district, and by morning to the area around Wodzisław as well. So began the first of the three Silesian Uprisings. It broke out without the consent of the Polish government, against the wishes of Wojciech Korfanty, and in such confusion that it is still hard to establish who actually gave the order.

Silesia after the war

Upper Silesia, Prussian for almost two centuries, became disputed land after Germany’s defeat. Korfanty had claimed it for Poland from the rostrum of the Reichstag in October 1918, and at the peace conference the Polish delegation argued that most of the region’s inhabitants spoke Polish. The Great Powers, however, did not award the region to Poland. The Treaty of Versailles, signed on 28 June, provided for a plebiscite there. This disappointed Polish activists, who had the victorious Greater Poland Uprising before their eyes, and it did not reassure the Germans.

The German authorities answered with repression. In January 1919 the government commissioner Otto Hörsig declared a state of siege in Upper Silesia, at the beginning of May about 160 Polish activists were arrested, and the region was held by units of the Grenzschutz and by volunteer formations paid for by the industrialists. Post-war poverty added to the tension. In August a great strike broke out among miners and steelworkers, who demanded, among other things, that members of German armed squads be removed from the mines. On 15 August, at the gate of the Mysłowice colliery in Mysłowice (PL), a crowd waiting for overdue wages forced its way into the site and the soldiers opened fire. Seven miners, two women and a thirteen-year-old boy were killed.

An order nobody wanted

According to the IPN, the Polish underground then had more than 23,000 members, but it had three centres of command: the headquarters of Alfons Zgrzebniok (PL) at Strumień (PL) in Cieszyn Silesia, the executive committee in Bytom headed by Józef Grzegorzek (PL), and a military department attached to the office of the Supreme People’s Council in Sosnowiec. Korfanty and the government in Warsaw, absorbed by the war in the east, considered an uprising madness: they feared the reaction of the Allies and German superiority. According to dzieje.pl, as early as June Korfanty, sent by the government on a night flight from Greater Poland to Sosnowiec, had stopped an outbreak that was already being announced.

In mid-August the Germans arrested several leaders of the underground, Grzegorzek among them, as well as couriers carrying orders. The organisation was exposed. In this situation Maksymilian Iksal (PL), who ran a camp for refugees from Silesia at Piotrowice, gave the order to begin the fight on the night of 16–17 August. He had no authority to do so. The commander of the Rybnik district did not carry it out, but in the Pszczyna district the order, which arrived around noon on 16 August, was taken for an instruction from headquarters. It is still not known whether someone from the staff at Strumień, which decided only in the afternoon not to start the fighting, had in fact sent it.

The first night

At about 11 p.m. Wiktor Szczygieł’s company disarmed the Grenzschutz at Urbanowice and marched on Paprocany, where after several hours of fighting the insurgents took about a hundred prisoners and four field guns. Stanisław Krzyżowski’s units seized the railway station and the post office in Tychy (PL). Towards morning on 17 August Iksal’s group took Gołkowice and the station at Godów. Pszczyna and Mikołów, however, could not be taken. When news of the fighting reached Bytom, the executive committee set the start of the uprising in the other districts for the night of 17–18 August, and command passed to Zgrzebniok, although he himself had opposed the outbreak.

The insurgents had few weapons and little ammunition, and according to estimates cited by the IPN there were then 70,000–80,000 German soldiers in Upper Silesia. The fighting in the districts of Pszczyna, Rybnik, Katowice, Bytom and Tarnowskie Góry brought local successes, but on 24 August Zgrzebniok ordered it to stop, and the last clashes died out on 26 August. According to IPN estimates about 500 insurgents fell, and with the reprisals and the civilian victims about 2,500 people died in Silesia in 1919. More than 9,000 participants in the uprising fled to Poland. They returned in the autumn, under the Polish–German amnesty agreement of 1 October.