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":[2]
The population more than doubled during the next five decades, reaching over 1,2 million inhabitants by year 1867, including around 742 thousand Poles[3]: 8–9 and around 457 thousand Germans.[4] 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.[5] 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.[6]
Exact ethnolinguistic figures for the 19th century and early 20th century can be found in Table 1.:
Table 1. Numbers of Polish, German and other inhabitants (Regierungsbezirk Oppeln)[2][3][7]
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,[8][9] 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,[10] 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.[11]
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.[12] 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.[13]
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.[14] 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.[15] In August 1937, the Germans arrested 31 Polish youth activists.[16]
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.[17]
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[18] based on lists made before the war that pointed out Poles active in social and political life.[18] A second wave of arrests happened during October and November in Intelligenzaktion Schlesien, aimed against Polish intellectuals, many of whom perished in prison camps. A third wave of arrests came in April and May 1940 during the AB Aktion.
In Katowice, according to the historian Czesław Madajczyk, one of the harshests centres of oppression was the prison on Mikołowska street where people were reported to be murdered by Germans through the use of guillotine.[18] A prison and penal camp were also established in the region in which Polish activists from Upper Silesia were held.[18]
At the same time, the Polish population was expelled from eastern Upper Silesia; from 1939 until 1942, 40,000 Poles were expelled.[19] 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.[20][21] 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.[18]
Province of Upper Silesia during World War II, composed of merged German and Polish territories.
In 1941, the Province of Silesia was again divided into the Provinces of Upper and Lower Silesia; German-occupied Katowice was made the capital of Upper Silesia instead of the smaller city of Oppeln (Opole).
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:
1950 population by place of residence back in 1939:[23]
^* Cf. Philipp Graf, Die Bernheim-Petition 1933: Jüdische Politik in der Zwischenkriegszeit, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008, (= Schriften des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts; vol. 10), 342 pp., ISBN978-3-525-36988-3.
^Rosenbaum, Sebastian; Węcki, Mirosław (2010). Nadzorować, interweniować, karać. Nazistowski obóz władzy wobec Kościoła katolickiego w Zabrzu (1934–1944). Wybór dokumentów (in Polish). Katowice: IPN. p. 49. ISBN978-83-8098-299-4.
^Cygański, Mirosław (1984). "Hitlerowskie prześladowania przywódców i aktywu Związków Polaków w Niemczech w latach 1939-1945". Przegląd Zachodni (in Polish) (4): 24.
^ abcdeCzesław Madajczyk "Polityka III Rzeszy w okupowanej Polsce" Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, Warszawa 1970 volume 1, page 384
^Czesław Madajczyk "Polityka III Rzeszy w okupowanej Polsce" Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, Warszawa, volume 1 pages 424-426
^Czesław Madajczyk "Polityka III Rzeszy w okupowanej Polsce" Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, Warszawa, volume 1 page 352
^Czesław Madajczyk "Polityka III Rzeszy w okupowanej Polsce" Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, Warszawa, volume 1 page 249
^Megargee, Geoffrey P.; Overmans, Rüdiger; Vogt, Wolfgang (2022). The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos 1933–1945. Volume IV. Indiana University Press, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. pp. 254, 446. ISBN978-0-253-06089-1.
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