First Uprising (1919) On 15 August 1919, German border guards (
Grenzschutz Ost) massacred ten Silesian civilians in a labour dispute at the
Mysłowice mine (
Myslowitzer Grube). The massacre sparked protests from the Silesian Polish miners, including a
general strike of about 140,000 workers, and caused the First Silesian uprising against German control of Upper Silesia. The miners demanded the local government and police become ethnically mixed to include both Germans and Poles. Some 9,000 ethnic Poles sought refuge in the Second Polish Republic, taking along their family members. This came to an end when Allied forces were brought in to restore order, and the refugees were allowed to return later that year.
Second Uprising (1920) The
Second Silesian Uprising () was the second of the three uprisings. In February 1920, an Allied Plebiscite Commission was sent to Upper Silesia. It was composed of representatives of the Allied forces, mostly from France, with smaller contingents from United Kingdom and Italy. On 19 August, the violence eventually led to a Polish uprising which quickly resulted within the occupation of government offices in the districts of
Kattowitz (Katowice),
Pless (Pszczyna) and
Beuthen (Bytom). Between 20 and 25 August, the rebellion spread to
Königshütte (Chorzów),
Tarnowitz (Tarnowskie Góry),
Rybnik,
Lublinitz (Lubliniec) and
Gross Strehlitz (Strzelce Opolskie). The Allied Commission declared its intention to restore order, but internal differences kept anything from being done; British representatives held the French responsible for the easy spread of the uprising through the eastern region. The fighting was slowly brought to an end in September, by a combination of allied military operations and negotiations between the parties. The Poles obtained the disbanding of the
Sipo police and the creation of a new police (
Abstimmungspolizei) for the area, which would be 50% Polish. The French troops generally favored the insurrection, while within some cases, British and Italian contingents actively cooperated with Germans. UK Prime Minister
Lloyd George's speech in the
British Parliament, strongly disapproving of the insurrection, aroused the hopes of some Germans, but the
Entente appeared to have no troops ready and available for dispatch. The only action the 'Inter-Allied Military Control Commission' and the
French government made was demanding immediate prohibition of the recruiting of German volunteers from outside Upper Silesia, and this was promptly made public. After the initial success of the insurgents in taking over a large portion of Upper Silesia, the German
Grenzschutz several times resisted the attacks of Wojciech Korfanty's Polish troops, in some cases with the cooperation of British and Italian troops. An attempt on the part of the British troops to take steps against the Polish forces was prevented by General Jules Gratier, the French commander-in-chief of the Allied troops. Eventually, the insurgents kept most of territory they had won, including the local industrial district. They proved that they could mobilize large amounts of local support, while the German forces based outside Silesia were barred from taking an active part in the conflict. The fighting in Upper Silesia was characterized by numerous atrocities on both sides with rape and mutilation being integral and routine methods of war. The men of both sides tended to conflate "national honor" and their sense of masculinity with their perceived ability to "protect" the women of their respective communities from the other side. For both sides, rape served as a way to symbolically "unman" the men of the other side by proving that they were incapable of defending their women and as a way of asserting their power over the women of the other side, hence the frequency of rape. Complaints about rape by both sides started to become common after the 1919 uprising, but were most common after the 1921 uprising. The British historian Tim Wilson wrote about sexual violence by the German forces: "Eighteen such incidents can be easily verified. Many of these were multiple rapes; in other cases of mass rape the number of victims were not even given". In September 1922, the Polish government submitted a detailed dossier about the rape of Polish Upper Silesian women to the League of Nations. Wilson also wrote that rape of women believed to be supporting the German cause by "Polish militants" was "relatively common". Mutilation by both sides were a common tactic as a way to show dominance over the other side. Both sides liked to mutilate the faces of their victims to the point of obliviating the face as a way to show their dominance by robbing the victim of not only their lives, but even their identities that they held in life. Reports from the British officers state that the "corpses of both men and women have been mutilated". The most common means of mutilation was by smashing in the face with rifle butts into a bloody mash. Likewise, castration of prisoners were a common tactic, again as a way to show dominance and to literally "unman" the other side. Violence against the genitals was the second common form of mutilation of faces. One British Army officer wrote in 1921 "It is revolting the number of murders that took place, generally at night and in the woods, which no amount of patrolling could stop. For instance, a one-armed German ex-soldier was taken out and murdered by the Poles one night, and the same night the French reported several murders by the Germans near their post in the woods close by". Wilson wrote that these tactics were not "the triumph of innate barbarism in the absence of social constraint", but rather were tactics quite consciously chosen to express contempt and dominance. Much of the grotesque violence was due to the fluidity of identities in Upper Silesia where many people saw themselves as neither German nor Polish, but rather Silesian, thus leading to nationalists to take extreme measures to polarize society into diametrically opposed blocs. In May-June 1921, at least 1,760 people were killed in the fighting in Upper Silesia. The support of France for Poland proved to be crucial. On 23 May 1921, the
Freikorps defeated the Poles at the Battle of Annaberg, which in turn led to a French ultimatum demanding that the
Reich cease at once its support of the German para-military forces. The next day, much to the shock of the
Freikorps who were expecting to follow up their victory by keeping all of Upper Silesia for Germany, the German president Frederich Ebert bowed to the ultimatum and banned the
Freikorps. Twelve days after the outbreak of the insurrection, Korfanty offered to take his troops behind a line of demarcation (the "Korfanty Line"), conditional on the released territory not being re-occupied by German forces, but by Allied troops. It was not, however, until 1 July that the British troops arrived in Upper Silesia and began to advance in company with those of the other Allies towards the former frontier. Simultaneously, with this advance, the Inter-Allied Commission pronounced a general amnesty for the illegal actions committed during the insurrection, with the exception of acts of revenge and cruelty. The German
Grenzschutz was withdrawn and disbanded. ==Aftermath==