Plebiscite in Warmia, Masuria and Powiśle

On 11 July 1920 a plebiscite (PL) was held in the southern part of East Prussia and in Powiśle, in which the inhabitants were to decide whether their communes would go to Poland or remain in East Prussia. For Poland it ended in defeat. In the Allenstein (Olsztyn) district, which covered Warmia (PL) and Masuria, 363,209 votes were cast for East Prussia and 7,980 for Poland. In the Marienwerder (Kwidzyn) district in Powiśle (PL), East Prussia received about 96,900 votes and Poland about 8,000. The vote took place as the Red Army was marching on Warsaw.

A plebiscite from Versailles

The Polish delegation to the peace conference had demanded the districts where Polish was spoken. Jules Cambon’s commission proposed to give Poland four districts of Powiśle and to hold a plebiscite only in Masuria, but the British forced through a vote over a much larger area. The Treaty of Versailles provided for one in the Allenstein government district (Article 94) and in four districts on the right bank of the Vistula: Stuhm (Sztum), Rosenberg (Susz) and the eastern parts of Marienburg (Malbork) and Marienwerder (Kwidzyn) (Article 96). Only the Działdowo area, with the Warsaw–Danzig railway, went to Poland without a vote. Everyone, women and men alike, who had reached the age of 20 and had been born in the area or had lived there since a date set by the commission could vote. The result was counted by communes.

In February 1920 inter-Allied commissions took over power in the plebiscite areas: in Olsztyn (PL) headed by the Briton Ernest Rennie, and in Kwidzyn (PL) by the Italian general Angelo Pavia. The Allied troops, however, were few, and the commissions agreed to leave the German officials in place.

An unequal campaign

The Polish claims rested on language. In many Masurian districts most of the inhabitants spoke Polish, but, as Polish activists themselves admitted, the Masurian “clings stubbornly to his mother tongue, but has no national consciousness”. The Masurians were Protestants attached to Prussia and the Hohenzollerns, and their land, unlike Warmia, had not been part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth before the partitions. It was different with the Catholic Warmians, whose bishopric had belonged to Poland until 1772, but even there the pro-Polish movement was weaker than Warsaw believed.

The Germans had an enormous organisational and material advantage. The Ostpreussischer Heimatdienst and other organisations ran a mass campaign, the German press during the plebiscite period printed more than 13 million copies according to the historian Waldemar Brenda, and gangs broke up Polish meetings. On 21 January 1920 in Szczytno the Masurian activist Bogumił Linka was beaten to death. The Polish side organised late. The Masurian Plebiscite Committee, led by the superintendent general of the Evangelical-Augsburg Church, Juliusz Bursche (PL), and the Warmian Plebiscite Committee, led from April 1920 by Father Antoni Ludwiczak (PL), had little money, few people who knew the area and little press of their own. For the vote the Germans brought in tens of thousands of people born in the area from all over the Reich. Brenda writes of 157,000 in the Allenstein district and at least 30,000 in Powiśle.

Polling day

The choice on the ballot was “Poland” or “East Prussia”, not “Germany”. Each ballot had its own box, so the choice was visible to those present in the polling station. The plebiscite came at the worst possible moment for Poland: the Tukhachevsky offensive had been under way for a week, and on the eve of the vote Prime Minister Władysław Grabski had been seeking help from the Powers at the Spa Conference (PL). German propaganda portrayed Poland as a “seasonal state” that would collapse any day.

The most votes for Poland were cast in the districts of Sztum (about 19 per cent) and Olsztyn (about 13.5 per cent). In the Oletzko (Olecko) district Poland received two votes out of nearly 29,000 cast, and the town of Marggrabowa was later renamed Treuburg, “loyal town”. In Powiśle many Poles did not go to the polls at all. “Injustice has won, not truth, but force, violence and terror,” Father Ludwiczak wrote on 15 July. On the basis of the results the Powers gave Poland only a few border villages, among them Lubstynek (PL) in Masuria, and five communes in Powiśle. The rest of the area remained in Germany, and the border in Powiśle now ran along the eastern bank of the Vistula.