Lublin in the First World War

Lublin, a provincial capital in the south-eastern part of the Kingdom of Poland, lay in 1914 on the most important supply line of the Russian forces in the Kingdom, the railway from Ivangorod through Lublin to Chełm. In the summer of 1914 it was the goal of an Austro-Hungarian offensive that came to a halt on the hills before the city. In July 1915 the Russians abandoned it, and for the next three years Lublin was the capital of the Austro-Hungarian occupation zone. In November 1918 the first Polish government to call its state a republic was formed here.

The goal of an offensive (1914)

In August 1914, at the start of the Battle of Galicia, the Russian 4th Army set out south from Lublin to cut off the Austrians’ line of retreat. It ran into the Austro-Hungarian 1st Army of General Viktor Dankl and in the Battle of Kraśnik had to fall back towards Lublin. At the turn of August and September Dankl’s leading units stood on the hills before the city. The Russians, however, built up superior forces and in the Battle of Tarnawka, a dozen or so kilometres south of Lublin, broke the Austrian front on 7–9 September. Dankl had to fall back behind the San.

The Lublin–Chełm railway (1915)

After the breakthrough at Gorlice the front returned to the Lublin region. In July 1915 the armies of the Central Powers attacked from the south towards the Ivangorod–Lublin–Chełm railway. After the Second Battle of Kraśnik and the Battle of Krasnystaw the Russians defended the railway for several more weeks so that they could withdraw their armies from the middle Vistula in good order. Only after the breakthrough at Biskupice did they order a retreat.

Early on the morning of 30 July Russian sappers blew up the railway station and set fire to the post office, and the last Russian governor left the city. Around noon patrols of Austro-Hungarian cavalry from Archduke Joseph Ferdinand’s 4th Army rode into Lublin. In the afternoon the Legions’ uhlans paraded along Krakowskie Przedmieście; Piłsudski had allowed them to enter the city in defiance of a ban by the Austrian command. A few days later the Russians abandoned Warsaw.

Capital of the Austrian occupation (1915–1918)

From October 1915 Lublin was the seat of the Military Government-General that ruled the Austro-Hungarian part of the Kingdom. There were four governors-general: Erich von Diller, Karl Kuk, Stanisław Szeptycki and Anton Lipošćak. On 5 November 1916, at the same moment as the Act of 5 November was being read in Warsaw, Kuk proclaimed it in the governor-general’s palace in Lublin. Szeptycki, appointed in 1917, tried to win the Poles over to Austria and supported the emerging Polish institutions.

The occupiers did not impose harsh censorship, and Lublin became a centre of the independence underground, above all of the Polish Military Organisation. What the inhabitants remembered most, however, were the requisitions: at the end of the winter of 1917 companies sent to the city took from people not only food but also clothes, shoes and money.

The Lublin government (1918)

At the end of October 1918 the Austro-Hungarian administration stopped working, and on 2 November Lipošćak resigned. The independence-minded left chose Lublin as the seat of a national government, because it was already free of the Austrians and protected by strong POW units. Edward Rydz-Śmigły arrived here on 3 November. On the night of 6–7 November the Provisional People’s Government of the Republic of Poland was formed, headed by Ignacy Daszyński, and it took over the former building of the government-general. The government failed to extend its authority even over the whole of the former Austrian occupation zone, and after a few days it stepped aside for Józef Piłsudski.