Historical population Perhaps the earliest exact census figures on
ethnic or
national structure of Regierungsbezirk Oppeln (Regierungsbezirk Kattowitz did not yet exist) are from 1819. In 1819 the Oppeln Region had 561,203 inhabitants, including the following "Nationalverschiedenheit": and around 457 thousand Germans. The indigenous Polish population was subjected to
Germanisation policies. The last pre-World War I general census figures available, are from 1910 (if not including the 1911 census of school children - Sprachzählung unter den Schulkindern - which revealed a higher percent of Polish-speakers among school children than the 1910 census among the general populace). Large demographic changes took place between 1819 and 1910, with the region's total population quadrupling, the percent of German-speakers increasing significantly, and that of Polish-speakers declining considerably. Also the total land area in which Polish was spoken, as well as the land area in which it was spoken by the majority, declined between 1790 and 1890. Polish authors before 1918 estimated the number of ethnic Poles in Prussian Upper Silesia as slightly higher than according to figures from official German censuses. Exact
ethnolinguistic figures for the 19th century and early 20th century can be found in Table 1.:
Weimar Republic From 1919 to 1921 three
Silesian Uprisings occurred among the Polish-speaking populace of Upper Silesia; the
Battle of Annaberg was fought in the region in 1921. In the
Upper Silesia plebiscite of March 1921, 59,4% voted against merging with Poland and 40,6% voted for, with clear lines dividing Polish and German communities. The exact border, the maintenance of cross-border railway traffic and other necessary co-operations, as well as equal rights for all inhabitants in both parts of Upper Silesia, were all fixed by the
German-Polish Accord on East Silesia, signed in Geneva on 15 May 1922. On 20 June the
Weimar Republic ceded,
de facto, the eastern parts of Upper Silesia, becoming part of the Silesian Voivodeship of the
Second Polish Republic. Within
Weimar Germany, the Prussian
Province of Silesia was divided into the provinces of Upper Silesia and
Lower Silesia The territory remaining in Prussian Upper Silesia was administered within the
Oppeln Region and — according to
Polish sources — had 530,000 Poles within it.
Nazi Germany After the
Nazis' takeover in Germany, anti-Semitic laws were also introduced in German Upper Silesia, against the
German-Polish Accord on East Silesia of 1922. Among other stipulations, according to the treaty each contractual party guaranteed in its respective part of Upper Silesia equal civil rights for all the inhabitants. The German Upper Silesian
Franz Bernheim succeeded in convincing the
League of Nations to force Nazi Germany to abide by the Accord, by filing the
Bernheim petition. Accordingly, in September 1933 the Reich's Nazi government suspended in German Upper Silesia all anti-Semitic discrimination laws already imposed and excepted the province from all new such future decrees, until the Accord expired in May 1937. The Polish population was also increasingly persecuted. The first conference of the Nazi anti-Polish organization
Bund Deutscher Osten in Upper Silesia was held on 9 June 1933 in
Gliwice. A secret
Sicherheitsdienst report from 1934, mentioned
Bytom, Gliwice,
Prudnik,
Strzelce Opolskie,
Zabrze and the Olesno and Opole rural districts as the main centers of the Polish movement in the province. In August 1937, the Germans arrested 31 Polish youth activists. The Province of Upper Silesia was joined to Lower Silesia to form the
Province of Silesia in 1938. The persecution of Poles then further intensified.
World War II After the
invasion of Poland in 1939, Polish Upper Silesia, including the
Polish industrial city of
Katowice, was directly annexed into the Province of Silesia. This annexed territory, also known as East Upper Silesia (
Ostoberschlesien), became part of the new
Regierungsbezirk Kattowitz. German occupation forces began a policy of
repression against the Polish population of eastern Upper Silesia, which started as early as September 1939 based on lists made before the war that pointed out Poles active in social and political life. In their place,
ethnic Germans from
Volhynia and the
Baltic countries were settled in Upper Silesia's urban areas. Until 1943, about 230,000
ethnic Germans were located on the Polish territories of eastern Upper Silesia and the
Wartheland. The death toll of the Polish population in Upper Silesia at the hands of Germans is about 25,000 victims, with 20,000 of them being from urban population. The German province of Upper Silesia was conquered by the
Soviet Red Army from February until the end of March 1945 during
World War II's
Lower and
Upper Silesian Offensives. The post-war
Potsdam Agreement granted the entire province's territory to the
People's Republic of Poland; the territory is now in the Polish
Opole and
Silesian Voivodeships. Most Germans remaining in the territory were
expelled westward in accordance with the Potsdam Agreement. The
Landsmannschaft Schlesien represents German Silesians from Upper and Lower Silesia. Near and in Opole, a German minority remains. Upper Silesia was known to be a poor, but heavily industrialised and polluted area. This was one of the Areas that
P. G. Wodehouse was sent to after he was captured in the North of France as an Enemy Alien. He was said to have commented on the state of the area "If this is Upper Silesia, one has to wonder what Lower Silesia is like."
Post-war period During the Polish post-war census of December 1950, data about the pre-war places of residence of the inhabitants as of August 1939 was collected. In case of children born between September 1939 and December 1950, their origin was reported based on the pre-war places of residence of their mothers. Thanks to this data it is possible to reconstruct the pre-war geographical origin of the post-war population. The same territory corresponding to pre-1938 Province of Upper Silesia (which became part of Poland in 1945) was inhabited as of December 1950 by: Before the war, German Upper Silesia was home to a very large ethnically
Polish/
Silesian minority
in Germany, so the
flight and expulsion of Germans did not affect the region as much. In 1950, most of the region's population were its
autochthons, who had had German citizenship before
World War II, and were granted Polish citizenship after 1945. There were also many newcomers, especially from
Eastern Poland annexed by
the USSR and from
pre-war Polish Upper Silesia. == Government regions ==