Stanisław Taczak

Stanisław Taczak was the first commander-in-chief of the Greater Poland Uprising. A mining engineer and reserve officer of the German Army, in November 1918 he was one of the first Poles from that army to report to the Polish Army. When fighting broke out in Poznań at the end of December, he found himself in the city almost by chance and took command overnight. In less than three weeks he turned the spontaneously formed volunteer units into the nucleus of a regular army, and then handed over command without dispute to a general of higher rank. In independent Poland he rose to the rank of general, but in 1930 he was retired. He spent the Second World War in German prisoner-of-war camps, and in communist Poland he lived in obscurity.

Youth and engineering career

He was born on 8 April 1874 in Mieszków near Jarocin, in the Prussian Province of Posen, the son of Andrzej, a restaurant owner, and Balbina, née Warasiecka. He had several siblings. His younger brother Teodor became a priest, later a well-known Poznań clergyman and social activist, and it was he who was to play an important part in Stanisław’s career in 1918. In 1893 Taczak passed his school-leaving examinations at the Royal Gymnasium in Ostrów Wielkopolski, where he belonged to the secret Tomasz Zan Society, one of the organisations in which Polish youth in the Prussian partition learned the history and literature of their homeland.

He studied at the famous Freiberg Mining Academy in Saxony and qualified as an engineer in 1897. He worked in the mines of Westphalia, home to tens of thousands of Polish workers, and was active in the Polish organisations there. According to his biographers, he was later an assistant in the department of coal chemistry at the technical university in Berlin and co-author of a specialist work in the field. In 1903 he married Ewa Wichmann, daughter of a wealthy man of independent means from Kolberg (Kołobrzeg). They had two children: a son, Stanisław, later a cavalry officer, and a daughter, Aleksandra.

Like every Prussian subject, Taczak did his military service. Called up in 1898, he passed into the reserve a year later and in the following years was promoted to reserve officer. Poles rarely attained higher ranks in the German Army, and in 1914 Taczak was a reserve lieutenant.

The First World War

After the outbreak of war he was called up for active service on 2 August 1914. He fought on the Eastern Front, according to some biographers as a battalion commander in a Landwehr regiment, and in 1915 was promoted to captain. In the autumn of 1916 the Central Powers proclaimed the creation of a Kingdom of Poland on the lands taken from Russia and began to build a Polish army under German supervision. In December 1916 Taczak, at his own request, became an instructor in a battalion of the 6th Infantry Regiment of the Polish Legions, stationed at Nałęczów and later at Dęblin. From 1917 he helped to build up the Polish Armed Force (Polnische Wehrmacht), and in December of that year he headed a commission that translated and adapted German military regulations for its use. His biographers stress that he regarded Józef Piłsudski’s efforts to create a Polish army with approval.

November 1918

When Germany lost the war in November 1918 and Piłsudski took over military authority in Warsaw, Taczak placed himself at the disposal of the Ministry of Military Affairs. Polish sources state that he was the first Pole serving as an officer of the German Army to do so. On 15 November he was accepted into the Polish Army and assigned to the scientific section of the General Staff. Two days later he marched in the front rank of a demonstration through Warsaw by Poles who had served in the German Army, under a banner reading “Let us unite”.

Commander of the uprising

In the second half of December Taczak went on leave to Berlin, where his family had remained. On his way back to Warsaw he stopped in Poznań, where on 27 December, the day after the arrival of Ignacy Jan Paderewski, fighting broke out. Sources differ on the date of his arrival: according to some studies he was already in the city on 27 December, while the chronology of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) and his biographers have him arriving on 28 December. Through his brother, Father Teodor, he met Wojciech Korfanty, the member of the Commissariat of the Supreme People’s Council responsible for military affairs. The Commissariat had not planned an uprising and had no one who could lead it. Korfanty was looking for an experienced officer who understood military organisation, and on behalf of the Council he offered Taczak the post of provisional commander-in-chief, with promotion to major. Taczak accepted.

His task was above all one of organisation. The uprising had broken out spontaneously: in Poznań and in dozens of small towns the fighting was done by units of the People’s Guard, conspirators from the Polish Military Organisation of the Prussian Partition (PL), soldiers of the Guard and Security Service and volunteer district companies, often with no contact with one another or with Poznań. Taczak set up a General Command and a staff, divided the province into nine military districts to which the local units were subordinated, and began to create quartermaster, medical and signals services. Under his command the insurgents took Poznań, including, on 6 January 1919, the Ławica airfield with a large quantity of aviation equipment, and most of central and eastern Greater Poland. At the same time the leadership of the uprising made sure that the insurgents did not push deep into areas inhabited mainly by Germans, since this could have harmed the Polish cause at the peace conference. According to his biographers, by the end of his command the insurgent forces numbered more than ten thousand men.

The Commissariat of the Supreme People’s Council had treated his appointment as temporary from the start. A major was too junior to command an army, and politicians on the Council accused him of tolerating soldiers’ councils in the units. At the Council’s request, Warsaw sent General Józef Dowbor-Muśnicki, former commander of the Polish I Corps in Russia. On 16 January 1919 (according to some sources a day earlier) Taczak handed over command to him and became second quartermaster and then deputy chief of staff. Historians, among them Lech Trzeciakowski, stress that it was his organisational skills that saved the uprising from chaos in its first and most difficult weeks.

The war with the Bolsheviks and his career as a general

In the summer of 1919 Taczak took command of the 11th Greater Poland Rifle Regiment, later renamed the 69th Infantry Regiment, which held the front near Rawicz. In 1920 he chaired a commission at the Ministry of Military Affairs that vetted officers from the former German Army, and then, as a colonel, commanded an infantry brigade in the Polish–Soviet War. During the Battle of Warsaw, on 23–26 August 1920, he was acting commander of the 17th Greater Poland Infantry Division, and in January 1921 he became its commander. For his part in the war he received the Silver Cross of the Virtuti Militari. In 1924 he was promoted to brigadier general, with seniority from 1923, and a year later settled in Gniezno, where the division’s headquarters was based.

In May 1926 Piłsudski seized power by force. According to some biographers, Taczak then sided with the legal government, as did many commands in Greater Poland. After the coup, however, he remained in service, and in October 1928 took command of Corps District No. II (PL) in Lublin. At the end of 1929 he was recalled, and at the end of February 1930 he was retired, like many officers from outside the Legionary camp. He returned to Poznań. He headed the Union of Veterans of the National Uprisings, the fire brigades’ organisation in the province and a society researching the history of the Greater Poland Uprising, and in 1935 he was elected a deputy senator.

The Second World War

In September 1939, by then a 65-year-old retired general, he tried to join the fighting army. Around 5 September he went to Gniezno to report to the headquarters of the Poznań Army, and a few days later, near Łowicz, he was taken prisoner by the Germans. To the Germans he was not only a Polish general but also a former officer of the imperial army and the commander of the uprising that had taken the Poznań region from the Reich. Many of his former subordinates who had stayed in Greater Poland, now annexed to the Reich as Reichsgau Wartheland, were arrested and murdered. Taczak passed through a series of Oflags, among them those at Prenzlau, Colditz and Murnau, where many Polish generals were held. He was liberated by the Americans on 29 April 1945.

After the war

He was accepted into the Polish Armed Forces in the West and sent to Nice for medical treatment, but he did not remain in exile. He returned to Poland, in 1946 or 1947 according to different sources. In communist Poland a pre-war general had no place in public life. He lived in the provinces, according to some sources in Kuyavia, and spent his last years in Malbork. He kept in touch with former insurgents. He died in Malbork on 2 March 1960 and was buried there.

Significance and memory

For decades Taczak’s role remained in the shadow of Dowbor-Muśnicki, who commanded the uprising during the phase of heavy fighting against the German Grenzschutz (frontier guard) and created the Greater Poland Army (PL). Historians today stress that it was Taczak who in the first weeks gave the spontaneous rising a military framework, without which it might have ended like many local revolts that winter. His work mattered far beyond 1919: the gains of the uprising were confirmed by the Treaty of Versailles, and Poland’s western frontier became one of the main targets of the German revisionism that led to war in 1939. Taczak himself lived through that war in captivity.

In 1988, thanks to the efforts of Poznań veterans’ associations, his ashes were moved from Malbork to the Cemetery of Distinguished Greater Poland Citizens in Poznań. The funeral took place with military honours. In 2018, on the centenary of the outbreak of the uprising, he was posthumously awarded the Order of the White Eagle. The 12th Greater Poland Territorial Defence Brigade, numerous schools and streets bear his name, and a monument to him stands in his native Mieszków.