Poland regains independence

On the evening of 11 November 1918 in Warsaw the Regency Council handed Józef Piłsudski military authority and supreme command of the Polish armed forces. All day Polish soldiers, members of the Polish Military Organisation and ordinary inhabitants had been disarming the German garrison in the city, which only a few days earlier had held the whole Kingdom in its grip. That same morning, in the forest near Compiègne, Germany signed the armistice with the Entente. After four years of war and more than a hundred and twenty years of bondage, Poland for the first time since the partitions had its own army under a single command in a capital free of foreign soldiers. This day was later adopted as the symbolic date of the recovery of independence.

Disarming the Germans

The disarming had begun on the evening of 10 November, the day of Piłsudski’s return from Magdeburg. During the night Polish soldiers took over barracks, the posts on the bridges, the Belweder and the town hall. The fiercest fighting was for the Vienna Station, where German sentries opened fire on the Poles, and around the Citadel, which the Germans tried to defend. In a shoot-out in Muranów, by the railway bridge near the Citadel, many Poles were seriously wounded. On the morning of 11 November Piłsudski met delegates of the German soldiers’ council. He guaranteed the soldiers’ safety and evacuation to Germany on condition that they handed over the buildings they were guarding, laid down their arms and did not provoke clashes.

During the day the Poles took over the Royal Castle, the Citadel and the former viceroy’s palace, where the soldiers’ council had its seat. At one in the afternoon Polish soldiers took over the guardhouse on Saxon Square. In the streets two or three young men would go up to a German soldier, seize him round the waist and take his rifle, and the captured weapons were carted away in cabs and cars. Most of the Germans, weary of the war and absorbed by news of the revolution in Berlin, gave them up without resistance, but shooting broke out again and again and there were dead on both sides. The Warsaw press wrote of an excitement such as the city had not seen since 1905. The inhabitants formed civic guards, and white-and-red flags appeared on the houses. Political prisoners were released from the Citadel.

About 30,000 German soldiers left Warsaw over the following days under an agreement with their soldiers’ council. Governor-General Hans Hartwig von Beseler, who for three years had ruled occupied Warsaw, left it in disguise. The last unit, the Citadel garrison, departed on 19 November.

Lublin and the street

That day the socialists of the PPS called a general strike and organised a large demonstration that converged from several parts of the city. They supported Ignacy Daszyński’s Lublin government, which did not recognise the regents. That government, however, had no intention of fighting Piłsudski. Daszyński and his ministers regarded the Commandant as their man and placed themselves at his disposal. According to some accounts they tendered their resignation to him on 11 November, according to others a day later, when Daszyński came to Warsaw.

The regents’ proclamation

The regents, Archbishop Aleksander Kakowski, Prince Zdzisław Lubomirski and Józef Ostrowski, had for several weeks been governing without the occupiers’ consent, ever since they announced on 7 October their will to create an independent Poland. By early November, however, their authority was very weak. Józef Świeżyński’s government had refused them obedience and been dismissed, and the left in Lublin was demanding the dissolution of the Council. On the evening of 11 November, between five and ten, the regents deliberated in the flat of the ailing Ostrowski. At about eight Piłsudski joined them.

They decided to hand him the army. The proclamation “The Regency Council to the Polish Nation” read:

In view of the threatening danger from without and within, in order to unify all military orders and to maintain order in the country, the Regency Council hands over military authority and supreme command of the Polish forces subordinate to it to Brigadier Józef Piłsudski.

The second part of the proclamation announced that the Regency Council would place supreme state authority in the hands of a future national government. Piłsudski undertook to hand military authority over to that government as well, and confirmed this with his signature on the document beside those of the three regents. The proclamation was published in the Dziennik Praw Państwa Polskiego (Journal of Laws of the Polish State). Piłsudski’s authority now extended over the Polish Armed Force, a small army organised while the Germans were still there, and the Polish Military Organisation, and soon also over thousands of soldiers returning from the armies of the partitioning powers. A day later the regents entrusted him with the task of forming a national government.

Poland on the map

In the west that day the guns fell silent at eleven in the morning. The Habsburg monarchy had already broken up into national states, and in Germany power had passed to the Social Democrats and to workers’ and soldiers’ councils. Russia had sunk into civil war. All three powers that had partitioned the Commonwealth at the end of the 18th century had lost the war or fallen apart. The Warsaw daily Kurier Warszawski remarked the next day that for the first time in more than four years it was appearing without a communiqué from the battlefield, and wrote: “We have lived to see the very powers that tore Poland apart fall humiliated and themselves torn apart, though they fought in opposing camps. And Poland, united, rises from the dead!”

Jędrzej Moraczewski, a minister in the Lublin government and soon prime minister, recalled the joy of those days in these words: “It is impossible to convey the intoxication, the frenzy of joy that seized the Polish population at that moment. After 120 years the cordons had burst. ‘They’ were gone. Freedom! Independence! Unification! A state of our own!”

The state being born in Warsaw, however, had no borders, no recognised government and no recognition from the powers. The Entente regarded the Polish National Committee in Paris as Poland’s representative. In Kraków the Polish Liquidation Commission governed, in Lviv the Poles had been fighting the Ukrainians for ten days, and Greater Poland, Pomerania and Silesia remained within Germany. In the east the troops of the German Ober Ost still stood, with the Bolsheviks approaching behind them. The struggle for the borders was to go on for several more years.

Why 11 November

The recovery of independence was a process spread over weeks. Each date had its supporters: the regents’ proclamation of 7 October, their taking over of the army on 12 October, the liberation of Kraków on 31 October, the formation of the Lublin government on 7 November, or the dissolution of the Regency Council on 14 November. In favour of 11 November was the fact that on that day Polish authority took over the army in the capital, while at the same time the Great War ended with the defeat of the last of the partitioning powers.

In the first years the anniversary was marked mainly with military ceremonies. After the May Coup, Prime Minister Piłsudski, by a circular of 8 November 1926, made the day a holiday for state officials. The act of 23 April 1937 established National Independence Day, which was to link the recovery of sovereignty with the end of the war and to commemorate Piłsudski. The communist authorities abolished it in 1945, and it was restored by the act of 15 February 1989. For the right in the interwar period the events of October were the more fitting date, and part of the left points to 7 November to this day. Yet 11 November remains the day on which Poles celebrate their independence.