The Greater Poland Uprising begins

Late in the afternoon of 27 December 1918 shots rang out in the streets of Poznań, and with them the Greater Poland Uprising began. No one had planned it for that day. The Polish military underground had been stockpiling weapons for weeks, but the Supreme People’s Council (Naczelna Rada Ludowa, NRL), which led the Polish movement in the Prussian partition, wanted to wait for the peace conference to decide the fate of these lands. The spark turned out to be the visit of Ignacy Jan Paderewski, whom Poznań had welcomed the day before as a statesman, and a German demonstration organised in response. By nightfall the Poles controlled the railway station, the post office and some of the city’s fortifications, and the call to arms was already spreading to the provinces.

Poles in the Prussian state

Greater Poland had belonged to Prussia since the Second Partition of Poland in 1793, apart from an interlude in the days of the Duchy of Warsaw. After the Congress of Vienna it was the Grand Duchy of Posen, and after the Springtime of Nations an ordinary Province of Posen. Following the unification of Germany in 1871 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 from the state of more than 30,000 people without Prussian citizenship, most of them Poles; and finally the buying up of Polish land by the Settlement Commission and the struggle over the language of instruction in schools, symbolised by the Września school strike of 1901.

The people of Greater Poland responded with “organic work”. A dense network of Polish co-operatives, people’s banks, farmers’ circles, educational societies and branches of the “Sokół” gymnastic society meant that the Polish community in the province was prosperous, well organised and used to running its own institutions. In Poznań itself, which before the war had more than 150,000 inhabitants, Germans made up over two-fifths of the population according to the 1910 census, including most of the officials, officers and wealthier townspeople. The city was also one of the largest fortresses in the Reich, surrounded by a ring of forts.

During the war several hundred thousand Poles from the Prussian partition served in the German army. The Central Powers’ plans for Poland concerned only the lands taken from Russia; Berlin had no intention of discussing its Prussian territories. The autumn of 1918 changed everything. The thirteenth of the Fourteen Points of President Woodrow Wilson, on the basis of which Germany had asked for an armistice, called for an independent Poland that would include the territories “inhabited by indisputably Polish populations” and have free access to the sea. On 25 October Wojciech Korfanty demanded from the rostrum of the Reichstag that the lands of the Prussian partition be joined to Poland. A few days later revolution broke out in Germany, Wilhelm II abdicated, and on 11 November an armistice was signed in the forest near Compiègne. That same day Józef Piłsudski assumed military authority in Warsaw.

November and December in Poznań

In November workers’ and soldiers’ councils sprang up throughout the Reich. In the Poznań region Poles quickly gained a strong position in them, and in the provincial capital the Polish People’s Guard (PL) (Straż Ludowa) took over many police duties. Poles also joined the German Guard and Security Service (Służba Straży i Bezpieczeństwa) in large numbers – a public-order formation in which they could legally obtain weapons and training. Alongside it operated the Polish Military Organisation of the Prussian Partition (PL), an underground made up mainly of young men, many of them former scouts and members of “Sokół” who had come back from the front.

Political leadership was assumed by the Supreme People’s Council, which had grown out of a secret inter-party committee active since 1916. On 3–5 December the Polish Provincial Sejm (PL) met in Poznań, an assembly of more than a thousand delegates of the Poles from all over the Reich, elected with women also voting. It recognised the Council as the sole authority of the Poles in the German state and declared its wish for the lands of the Prussian partition to be united with an independent Poland. The Council’s Commissariat, elected afterwards, whose members included Father Stanisław Adamski, Wojciech Korfanty and Władysław Seyda (PL), nevertheless favoured a peaceful path. It reckoned that the matter would be settled by the victorious Allies, and that a premature uprising would give the Germans a pretext for a reckoning with the Poles. The conspirators thought otherwise. According to some historians they were preparing an armed rising for early 1919.

Tension was mounting on both sides. The province’s Germans held rallies of their own and demanded that the Poznań region remain in the Reich, and the Prussian government began forming volunteer units to defend the eastern territories, from which the Grenzschutz Ost later grew. In mid-December the government in Warsaw broke off diplomatic relations with Germany.

Paderewski arrives

It was in this atmosphere that Ignacy Jan Paderewski came to Poznań: a pianist of world renown and the representative in the United States of the Paris-based Polish National Committee. He was travelling to Warsaw as a man trusted by the Allies, to reconcile Roman Dmowski’s Committee with Piłsudski. On 25 December the British cruiser HMS Concord brought him to Gdańsk (Danzig), where a delegation of the Supreme People’s Council led by Korfanty was waiting. He was accompanied by his wife and a semi-official British military mission. The German authorities wanted the train to bypass Poznań and go straight to Warsaw, but Paderewski and the British accompanying him refused.

On the evening of 26 December the train pulled into Poznań station. Although the authorities had ordered the street lamps to be left unlit, crowds with torches greeted the visitor, and the procession passed through the jubilant city to the Hotel Bazar (PL), for decades the centre of Polish life in Poznań. Paderewski addressed the crowd from a window. He called for unity, not for fighting. The streets were decked with white-and-red flags, to which the Germans had grown accustomed since the Provincial Sejm, but also with British, American and French flags. The Germans took the latter as a provocation: only a few weeks earlier the Poles of the Poznań region had been fighting in German uniform against those very countries.

The morning of 27 December

Paderewski did not appear in public that morning. He put this down to a cold he had caught on the sea voyage. Historians point out that it was also a diplomatic illness: any violent incident in Greater Poland connected with him could harm the Polish cause in Paris. At around noon a procession of several thousand schoolchildren carrying little flags marched past the hotel, watched by a crowd of adults that included many Germans. The pianist’s wife, Helena Paderewska, came out to greet the children. Paderewski himself spent the whole day in talks with members of the Council’s Commissariat, and a banquet in his honour was being prepared for the evening.

That same morning, far from Poznań, on the old Prussian–Russian border near Kalisz, there was an exchange of fire between Polish soldiers and Germans. At Szczypiorno Jan Mertka, a soldier of a Polish frontier battalion, was killed, and in response the Poles occupied the border village of Boczków on the Prussian side. Polish studies often list him among the first insurgents to fall.

The German march

In the afternoon the city’s German inhabitants gathered for a rally of their own. Some 200 armed soldiers of the 6th Grenadier Regiment (PL), recently returned from the front, left their barracks in Jeżyce and marched towards the centre. According to a communiqué of the Supreme People’s Council published on 29 December in the Kurier Poznański, the soldiers sang German songs, burst into the offices of the Council’s Commissariat and wrecked them, and then marched along Święty Marcin, Wiktorii and Berlińska streets to Wilhelmsplatz (plac Wilhelmowski). On the way they forced their way into houses and tore Allied and Polish flags from the balconies. Crowds of Poles poured into the streets, and units of the People’s Guard and the Guard and Security Service stood ready.

Shots outside the Bazar

As dusk fell, the march reached the area around the Bazar and halted in front of a Polish cordon. The sources give different times: some speak of shots just before 4 p.m. or at around 4.40 p.m., others of a time between 5 and 5.30 p.m. Nor is it known who fired first. The Council’s communiqué claimed that the Germans had set up two machine guns by the Police Headquarters, opposite the Municipal Theatre, and opened fire, among other targets on the windows of Paderewski’s suite, and that the Poles returned fire only once the first casualties had fallen. The German side blamed the Poles. Historians from the Poznań branch of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) write cautiously of an accidental shot which, amid the general tension, was enough to start a firefight.

Paderewski and his guests were taken to rooms deeper inside the hotel. Bullet marks were later found in the windows of his suite, but none of the guests was hurt. In the evening an envoy of the German Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council came to the Bazar to demand that the Poles lay down their arms, while one of the British officers tried to obtain protection for the visitor and the British mission from the headquarters of the V Army Corps. Neither attempt achieved anything.

The fight for the Police Headquarters

Polish units converged on the centre from the outlying districts: the People’s Guard, members of the Polish Military Organisation and soldiers of the Guard and Security Service. Their main objective was the nearby Police Headquarters, held by the Germans. A detachment of the Guard and Security Service heading for the Imperial Castle, which was held by Poles, came under fire from the building. In this fighting the 31-year-old Franciszek Ratajczak (PL), a miner from Westphalia and a member of “Sokół”, was gravely wounded; he died the same evening. He is considered the first insurgent to fall in Poznań, although for years veterans argued over whether that distinction should go to eighteen-year-old Antoni Andrzejewski, who was mortally wounded the same day.

The fight for the Police Headquarters ended in an agreement: the German garrison left the building, which, according to the IPN chronology, was then occupied by 24 Poles and 24 Germans. The account of the storming, immortalised in a painting by Leon Prauziński, became overlaid with legend over time. The Poznań military historian Zbigniew Pilarczyk observed that if everyone who later claimed to have taken part had really fought at the Police Headquarters, insurgents would have had to be brought in from outside the city. According to the IPN chronology, seven people were killed and about 30 wounded in the fighting in Poznań on 27 December.

The night of 27–28 December

That same evening and night the Poles seized the Main Station, where they disarmed German soldiers arriving by train, the main post office and several forts. The leaders of the Poznań underground, among them Mieczysław Paluch (PL) and Bohdan Hulewicz (PL), sent word to the provinces that there was no point in waiting any longer. Volunteers from Kórnik, Środa and Pleszew set off for Poznań, and in Pniewy and other towns Poles took power that very day.

The Supreme People’s Council had not wanted this fight, and for several more days it sought an understanding with the Germans. Both sides tried to present the events as a local conflict within Germany rather than the start of a Polish–German war. But the Commissariat had to accept the fait accompli. On 28 December the insurgents took the Citadel with its depots, and command of the spontaneously forming units was assumed by Captain Stanisław Taczak, a native of Greater Poland and a former officer of the German army who had been an officer of the Polish Army since November and happened to be in Poznań. According to some biographers he had arrived in the city on 27 December, according to others a day later. On behalf of the Commissariat, Korfanty appointed him provisional commander-in-chief and promoted him to major. Paderewski stayed in Poznań for a few more days and reached Warsaw on 1 January 1919.

Significance

The shots outside the Bazar started one of the few victorious uprisings in Polish history. Within a few weeks the insurgents had taken most of the province, and their units had been turned into a regular army. The fighting was halted by the armistice that the Allies imposed on Germany in February 1919. The Treaty of Versailles subsequently awarded Poland almost the whole of the Province of Posen, as well as most of West Prussia with access to the sea.

On the road to the Second World War the Greater Poland Uprising played a part its participants could not have foreseen. For Poles, the western border won in Greater Poland and later in Upper Silesia was the fulfilment of Wilson’s thirteenth point. For Germany it became a source of lasting grievance. The loss of the Poznań region and Pomerania, the so-called Polish Corridor separating East Prussia from the rest of the Reich, and the Free City of Danzig were among the chief slogans of German revisionism throughout the interwar period – from the Weimar governments, which never recognised the border with Poland in the way they had recognised the border with France at Locarno, to Hitler, who in 1939 made Gdańsk and the “Corridor” a pretext for war. In the Poznań region a large part of the former German population left for Germany, and the minority that remained became an object of propaganda and of disputes before the League of Nations.

The memory of 1918 returned with full brutality after September 1939. Greater Poland was annexed to the Reich as Reichsgau Wartheland (the Warthegau), and the Germans hunted down and arrested former insurgents, national activists and members of the Polish intelligentsia. Many were killed in the Intelligenzaktion, among other places at Fort VII in Poznań, the first concentration camp on Polish soil. Today 27 December is the National Day of the Victorious Greater Poland Uprising (PL) in Poland, a state holiday established in 2021.