The Greater Poland Uprising

The Greater Poland Uprising broke out in Poznań on the afternoon of 27 December 1918, the day after Ignacy Jan Paderewski arrived in the city. A German procession that included soldiers marched through the centre, tearing down Polish and Allied flags, and shots were fired near the Bazar hotel. Polish volunteer and underground units, which had been ready to fight for weeks, took almost the whole of Poznań within a few days, and the call to arms spread quickly across the province. By mid-January 1919 the insurgents held most of Prussian Greater Poland. For several weeks after that they beat off counter-attacks by the German Grenzschutz, and in the meantime the volunteer units were turned into a regular force, the Greater Poland Army. The fighting was ended only by the agreement under which the Allies, at Trier on 16 February 1919, extended the armistice with Germany and added to it a clause about the Poles. It was one of the few victorious uprisings in Polish history. Its gains were confirmed in June 1919 by the Treaty of Versailles, and the border drawn at that time became for twenty years one of the main targets of German revisionism.

Name and dates

The name “Greater Poland Uprising” (powstanie wielkopolskie) is universally accepted in Poland, although contemporaries tended to speak of the “Poznań events” or the “December uprising”. In German literature it is known as the “Posen uprising” (Posener Aufstand) or simply the “Polish uprising”. Its beginning is taken to be the outbreak of fighting in Poznań on 27 December 1918, and its end the signing at Trier on 16 February 1919 of a further extension of the Armistice of Compiègne, which also covered the Greater Poland front. This closing date is a convention. The agreement did not state precisely when it came into force, so skirmishes along the demarcation line went on for several more days, and isolated clashes occurred right up to the signing of the Treaty of Versailles on 28 June 1919. The Greater Poland front itself was wound up only in March 1920, when the Poles took over the lands awarded to them at Versailles. Since 2021, 27 December has been a national holiday (PL) in Poland.

Background

After the Congress of Vienna Greater Poland belonged to Prussia as the Grand Duchy of Posen, which at first enjoyed a degree of autonomy but after 1848 became an ordinary Province of Posen. After the unification of Germany the Poles of the Prussian partition became the target of an increasingly harsh policy of Germanisation. First came the Kulturkampf, directed against the Catholic Church, then the Prussian deportations – the expulsion of Poles without German citizenship – the buying up of land by the Settlement Commission, and pressure on the schools, which in 1901 provoked the Września children’s strike. The Poles responded with “organic work”: a dense network of cooperatives, people’s banks, farmers’ circles, educational societies, the “Sokół” gymnastic movement and scouting. No other partition had so disciplined and prosperous a Polish community, and in 1918 this proved invaluable.

During the Great War, according to Polish estimates, some 700,000 Poles from the Prussian partition served in the German army. They were hardly ever promoted to officer rank, but many gained combat experience at the front. The Act of 5 November 1916, which announced a Polish state on the lands taken from Russia, was silent about the Prussian lands. Hope came to the people of Greater Poland only with President Wilson’s Fourteen Points, the thirteenth of which spoke of an independent Poland including the territories “inhabited by indisputably Polish populations” and with access to the sea. In February 1918 the Polish Military Organisation of the Prussian Partition (PL) was founded in Poznań, linked to the camp of Józef Piłsudski; alongside it operated underground groups drawn from the “Sokół” and the scouts.

The turning point came in the autumn of 1918. Defeat on the Western Front and the revolution in Germany shattered the authority of the Prussian state. In November workers’ and soldiers’ councils sprang up throughout the province, and the Poles quickly won a strong position in them. On 13 November in Poznań a group of Polish soldiers forced changes in the executive committee of the soldiers’ council, which gave the Poles influence over the city command and the headquarters of V Corps. The People’s Guard (PL), mixed at first but soon dominated by Poles, took over police duties. Poles also began to join the German Guard and Security Service (Wach- und Sicherheitsdienst) en masse in order to obtain weapons and training. At the head of the Polish movement stood the Supreme People’s Council (NRL). Its leadership was elected on 3–5 December 1918 by the Polish Provincial Sejm (PL), a congress of 1,399 delegates from Greater Poland, Pomerania, Silesia, Warmia and Masuria and from the Polish economic emigrants living deeper inside Germany, which demanded the union of the lands of the Prussian partition with the reborn Poland. The members of the NRL’s Commissariat included Father Stanisław Adamski, Wojciech Korfanty and Władysław Seyda (PL).

The Commissariat, most of whose members were associated with National Democracy, counted on the peace conference to decide the fate of the lands of the Prussian partition and did not call for armed action. It feared that a premature rising would give the Germans a pretext for bloody repression and the Great Powers a reason to treat the matter as an internal affair of the Reich. The conspirators of the Polish Military Organisation and the former Sokół squads thought otherwise. They stockpiled weapons, often stolen from German depots, and prepared units. According to some historians they intended to strike at the beginning of 1919. Tension was rising on the German side too. In mid-November the Prussian authorities began forming volunteer units to defend the eastern provinces against “Bolshevism” and “Polish rebellion”, called first Heimatschutz Ost and then Grenzschutz Ost. In mid-December the Germans of Greater Poland held a congress of their own and demonstrated for the province to remain in the Reich, and on 15 December the government in Warsaw broke off diplomatic relations with Germany.

It was in this atmosphere that Paderewski arrived in Poznań from Gdańsk on the evening of 26 December, on his way to Warsaw in the company of British officers. The German authorities tried to route his train straight to the capital, bypassing Poznań, but the pianist and the British officers with him would not allow it. Crowds greeted him at the station, and the city was decorated with Polish, American, British and French flags. Paderewski stayed at the Bazar (PL) hotel, a symbol of Polish life in Poznań, and addressed the crowd from its window.

The outbreak in Poznań

On the afternoon of 27 December the Germans staged a demonstration of their own in response. According to a communiqué of the NRL, some 200 armed soldiers of the 6th Grenadier Regiment marched from their barracks in Jeżyce through the centre, burst into the Council’s headquarters and tore down Allied and Polish flags. In the late afternoon, at around 5 p.m. (some sources give 4.40 p.m.), the first shots were fired near the Bazar hotel and the Police Presidium. Who fired first is not known. The NRL communiqué blamed the Germans, who were said to have raked the hotel windows with machine-gun fire, while the German side blamed the Poles. Polish units of the People’s Guard, the Polish Military Organisation and the Guard and Security Service moved against the Police Presidium. In the fight for it Franciszek Ratajczak (PL) was mortally wounded; he was later recognised as the first insurgent to fall in Poznań. The Germans left the building during the night under an agreement, and that same evening the Poles also took the main railway station and the main post office.

On 28 December the insurgents seized the Citadel, Fort Grolman and the arsenal, and one unit burst into the headquarters of V Corps and detained the German generals. The NRL Commissariat, although it had not planned the uprising, accepted the fait accompli. It decided to take control of it before it got out of hand, and entrusted command to Captain Stanisław Taczak, an officer of the Polish Army who happened to be in Poznań. Promoted to major, Taczak set up a High Command and a staff and began to bring order to the units that were springing up spontaneously. A delegation of the Prussian government arrived in Poznań on 30 December, but the talks achieved little. The 6th Grenadier Regiment, which both sides held responsible for the clashes, left the city with its weapons after negotiations.

The last point of German resistance in the Poznań area was the Ławica airfield, from which the Germans could have bombed the city. On the night of 5–6 January 1919 the insurgents took it in a brief assault. At Ławica and in the hangars at Winiary a large quantity of aviation equipment fell into their hands, which made it possible to create an insurgent air arm. The figures are uncertain: Polish sources themselves speak of several dozen airworthy aircraft and even of more than 300 machines, most of them dismantled or trainers.

The uprising spreads

As early as 27 December the leaders of the conspiracy sent the call to arms out into the province. That day Jan Mertka was killed at Szczypiorno near Kalisz, and the Poles took the border village of Boczków. In the last days of December and the first days of January the insurgents took power in the towns of central and eastern Greater Poland, where Poles formed a clear majority: Gniezno, Września, Środa, Śrem, Kórnik, Grodzisk, Wągrowiec, Kościan, Oborniki, Ostrów Wielkopolski, Jarocin, Krotoszyn and Nakło. Many German garrisons, demoralised and cut off from their commands, left after brief negotiations, with or without their weapons, abandoning their depots. In this way the insurgents obtained the machine guns and artillery they had lacked at the outset. Polish railwaymen, telegraph operators and postal workers played a major role, taking over stations and exchanges and delaying German transports. At Zdziechowa, on the night of 30–31 December, the insurgents repulsed a detachment sent from Bydgoszcz to retake Gniezno.

After heavy fighting and an agreement with the Germans, the insurgents took over Inowrocław on 6 January. In the west, where more Germans lived, progress was harder: two attempts to take Zbąszyń, on the night of 4–5 January and on 11 January, failed. In the north the Poles recaptured Chodzież (PL) on 8 January and won the fight for Szubin on 11 January. Between Czarnków and Wieleń the insurgents closed the sluices on the Noteć, flooding the valley and hampering the German advance. On 7 January the High Command divided the territory under its control into military districts, which were to supply recruits for the army.

Mid-January brought relative stability. Most of the province was in Polish hands, but not its northern fringes with Bydgoszcz and Piła, nor its western and south-western margins with Leszno and Rawicz. The command forbade crossing the Obra and pushing into areas inhabited mainly by Germans. Fighting there would no longer have been a struggle for national liberation, and it could have harmed the Polish cause at the peace conference, where the ethnic argument carried weight. On 3 January the NRL Commissariat decided, secretly for the time being, to take over the administration; on 9 January it announced this officially and began to fill government offices with Poles. German Landräte (district administrators) were subordinated to Polish starostas, and Polish was restored in the schools.

From volunteer units to the Greater Poland Army

The uprising’s greatest weakness was a lack of officers, since the Germans had seldom promoted Poles. Taczak, a reserve officer who had risen to captain during the war, was one of the few Poles in Poznań with front-line experience as an officer, but his rank was too low for him to command an army. The NRL Commissariat therefore turned to Warsaw. According to some studies Piłsudski proposed two candidates, Generals Eugeniusz de Henning-Michaelis and Józef Dowbor-Muśnicki, and the Council chose the latter. Dowbor-Muśnicki, a former general of the Russian army and commander of the I Polish Corps in Russia, who had fought the Bolsheviks in 1918, was summoned on 6 January, held talks with Piłsudski in Warsaw and arrived in Poznań on 8 January. A decree of the NRL of 11 January appointed him Commander-in-Chief of the Polish Armed Forces in the former Prussian partition, and he took over from Taczak on 16 January. Taczak remained in the Greater Poland Army in lower posts. Many officers from the old Russian army and the I Corps followed the general, among them Daniel Konarzewski.

Dowbor-Muśnicki turned the volunteer units into a regular army. On 17 January conscription was announced for men born in 1897–1899, and later for further age groups. On 18 January the battle line was divided into fronts: northern, western, south-western (near Leszno) and southern. The general made sure that the army stayed out of politics. He removed officers with radical views and dissolved the soldiers’ councils. A dispute over the wording of the oath, which bound soldiers to loyalty to the NRL rather than to the authorities in Warsaw, led to the departure of the chief of staff, the Piłsudski loyalist Julian Stachiewicz. He was replaced by Władysław Anders, who twenty years later became one of the most famous Polish commanders of the Second World War. On 26 January, in Wilhelmplatz, renamed Plac Wolności (PL) (Freedom Square), the soldiers took a solemn oath. Thus the nucleus of the Greater Poland Army (PL) came into being. In May it numbered some 70,000 soldiers, and according to the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) about 102,000 in June 1919, including reserve units.

The German counter-offensive

At first the German authorities made no vigorous attempt to crush the uprising. In those weeks Friedrich Ebert’s government in Berlin was fighting the revolutionary left, and the army was in disarray. By mid-January, however, the Germans had assembled considerable forces in the Bydgoszcz area, on the Oder near Frankfurt and in Lower Silesia, and the Grenzschutz units were reinforced by volunteers from all over the Reich. In the second half of January they went over to counter-attacks, and the fighting became much bloodier.

The heaviest fighting took place on the northern front, along the Noteć. At the end of January the Germans took Szubin and attacked at Rynarzewo and Łabiszyn, but on 3 February the Poles defeated them at Kcynia, despite German artillery and an armoured train, and on 4 February retook Szubin. In the south two assaults on Rawicz at the beginning of February failed, and the Poles lost Zduny. In the west there was fighting for Kargowa, Babimost and the villages on the Obra. On 12 February the Germans, supported by armoured trains, retook Kargowa and Babimost, and their advance was halted only at Kopanica, where, according to Polish studies, they used poison gas.

Talks were going on at the same time. Polish–German negotiations opened in Berlin on 2 February but were broken off on 5 February, when the Germans demanded the disbanding of the Polish units, recognition of the Reich’s authority over the province and compensation. In mid-February the German Supreme Army Command moved to Kołobrzeg. The Poles took this as a sign that a major offensive was coming, which according to the Institute of National Remembrance was to be directed by Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg himself, who had been born in Poznań in 1847.

The Armistice of Trier

The NRL Commissariat, Prime Minister Paderewski, who had become head of the government in Warsaw in mid-January, and Roman Dmowski’s Polish National Committee in Paris all pressed the Allies to put an end to the fighting. It helped that the armistice with Germany had been concluded for a short term and had to be extended regularly. At the next extension, signed at Trier (PL) on 16 February 1919, Marshal Ferdinand Foch added a clause about the Poles to the terms. The Germans protested but gave way under French pressure. They were to cease immediately all offensive operations against the Poles in the Poznań region and in other districts, and their troops were forbidden to cross a line running from the old border with Russia north of Szubin and Kcynia, west of Międzychód, Zbąszyń and Wolsztyn, and north of Leszno and Rawicz to the border of Silesia.

Polish tradition holds that the Allies thereby recognised the Greater Poland Army as an allied force, and many studies say the same. The text of the agreement, however, does not say so: it imposes obligations only on the Germans. The demarcation line left part of the contested territory on the German side, and since it had not been specified when the armistice took effect, the Germans went on trying to push the front forward for several more days. According to some studies, more than a hundred Poles were killed in incidents on the demarcation line before the peace treaty was signed. In March an Allied mission led by Joseph Noulens arrived in Poznań to monitor compliance with the armistice.

Losses

According to the most recent list of names, cited by the Institute of National Remembrance, the uprising cost the lives of 2,261 Poles (136 of them unidentified) who were killed or died of wounds or disease. The IPN estimates total losses at nearly 2,500 killed and about 6,000 wounded. Older studies gave lower figures, and the burial place of several hundred of the fallen has never been established. German losses are not known precisely. Memories of the first days of fighting in Poznań quickly became the stuff of legend. For years veterans argued, for instance, over who had been the first to fall on 27 December: Ratajczak or the eighteen-year-old Antoni Andrzejewski (PL).

Significance

The Greater Poland Uprising is one of the few victorious uprisings in Polish history. Before the peace conference began to discuss borders, the Poles had in practice taken power in most of Greater Poland and created a well-organised army of their own. This gave Dmowski and Paderewski in Paris an argument they lacked in the case of Silesia or Pomerania. The Treaty of Versailles, which came into force on 10 January 1920, awarded Poland almost all of the Province of Posen – including Leszno, Rawicz, Zbąszyń and Bydgoszcz, which the insurgents had not taken – and, in addition, most of West Prussia with access to the sea. Only the western and northern fringes of Greater Poland, with Piła and Międzyrzecz, remained with Germany. At the beginning of 1920 Greater Poland units occupied the Pomeranian lands awarded to Poland. The Greater Poland Army, incorporated into the Polish Army in August 1919, had already fought in the spring of 1919 in the Polish–Ukrainian War, and later in the war against the Bolsheviks. Its veterans helped in the Silesian Uprisings.

For Germany, however, the border drawn at Versailles became a wound that no government of the Weimar Republic intended to accept as final. The strip of Polish Pomerania separating East Prussia from the rest of the Reich, known in Germany as the “Corridor”, and the Free City of Danzig were the main targets of German revisionism. In the Locarno treaties of 1925 Germany recognised its western border but refused to guarantee its eastern ones. From the autumn of 1938 Hitler demanded the annexation of Gdańsk and an extraterritorial motorway across Pomerania, and Poland’s refusal became the pretext for war in September 1939. Nor did the memory of 1919 fade on the German side. The names of veterans of the uprising were entered in the Sonderfahndungsbuch Polen, the German wanted list prepared before the war. In the autumn of 1939, as part of the Intelligenzaktion, the Germans hunted down former insurgents and murdered them, including in public executions in the market squares of Greater Poland’s towns. Greater Poland was annexed to the Reich as Reichsgau Wartheland (the Warthegau), and the expulsion of Poles from it began, as if to undo the effects of the victory won twenty years earlier.