Central Poland
Central Poland
Etymology
‘Central Poland’ does not refer to a distinct historical region. In Polish geological and geographical publications, the terms ‘Polska Centralna’ (Central Poland) and ‘Polska Środkowa’ (Central Poland) have occasionally been used since the 1920s to denote the geographical centre of the country.
In German-language publications, the term ‘Mittelpolen’ first appeared in 1931 as an equivalent for ‘former Congress Poland’, that is, the Kingdom of Poland created at the Congress of Vienna, which was linked to Russia through a personal union.[1] The German ‚Volksforschung‘ was led by the local historian Albert Breyer (1889–1939) introduced the term ‘Central Poland’ to German ‘folklore studies’ to refer to the Polish territory that had belonged to Russia until 1914–18 and was part of the‘General Government of Warsaw’, which was occupied by Germany from 1915 to 1918,[2] whilst Viktor Kauder (1899–1985) classified the ‘Cholm and Lublin region’, which had been grouped together during the First World War to form the ‘General Government of Lublin’ occupied by Austria-Hungary, to ‘Eastern Poland’ together with Polish Volhynia.[3]
Today, in German-speaking countries, the term ‘Central Poland’ is generally understood to refer to the territory of the Kingdom of Poland from 1815 to 1918, commonly known as ‘Congress Poland’ and, at the time, also referred to as ‘Russian Poland’.
Location
To the west, Central Poland bordered the Prussian provinces of Silesia and Posen (parts of the border ran along the Prosna); west of Thorn/Toruń, the border ran along the Drewenz (Drwęca), then along the southern border of East Prussia as far as the Memel (Niemen); west of Grodno/Hrodna, it followed the Biebrza, then the Narew, then through the narrowest point to the Bug as far as Kryłów to the south. From there, the southern border ran overland to the San, then along the Vistula (Wisła) westwards to just before Kraków, then north of the Vistula overland toDąbrowa Górnicza on the border with Silesia.
‘Central Poland’ thus refers, according to the territorial boundaries of Poland in 1923, to the area between Posen-Pomerania and the Bug, that is, the central region between the western territories of the Second Polish Republic and today’s eastern border.
Topography
To the south of the Masovian Lowlands liePodlasie andPolesie, followed by the Central Polish Uplands. The main cities are Warsaw (Warszawa), Łódź (Łódź), Lublin, Kielce and Kalisz (Kalisz).
Historical Geography
Historically, the territories that were incorporated into the Kingdom of Poland in 1815 belonged to Greater Poland (including Kalisz and Konin, which became part of the Greater Poland Voivodeship [Województwo wielkopolskie] in 1999), Kuyavia (Kujawy), Masovia (Mazowsze), Galicia (Galicja) and, in part, Podlasie (Podlasie).
Following the occupation during the First World War, Germany and Austria-Hungary divided the occupied territory into the General Governments of Warsaw and Lublin. In the Second Polish Republic, until the administrative reform of 1938, the area was administratively divided into the voivodeships of Warsaw, Łódź, Kielce and Lublin; following the administrative reform of 1999, it was divided into the voivodeships of Lublin, Łódź, Masovia (Województwo mazowieckie) and Holy Cross (Województwo świętokrzyskie).
Up to 1815
Central Poland corresponds to the historical heartland of Poland in the early modern period. Following the partition of the inheritance in 1138, the Duchy of Masovia—which had been a fief of Poland since 1351—remained an independent entity until the male line of the Masovian Piasts died out in 1526 (voivodeship from 1529). Among the elected kings, Sigismund III (1566/1587–1632) moved his principal residence to Warsaw. Following a period of decline and destruction resulting from the Northern Wars, the Saxon kings (1698–1763) developed Warsaw into the capital. In 1793, the western part of Mazovia and Greater Poland fell to Prussia (the province of South Prussia); in 1795, the remainder of Poland was divided between Prussia (South Prussia, including Warsaw, and New East Prussia) and Russia. Prussia confiscated state and church lands and converted them into royal domains. A scandal arose due to the donation or transfer of large estates to high-ranking individuals at rock-bottom prices.
From the Prussian territorial gains resulting from the second and third partitions of Poland (1793–1795) (excluding Danzig/Gdańsk and the Białystok district), the Napoleonic Duchy of Warsaw was formed following Prussia’s defeat in 1807 and was expanded in 1809 to include ‘Western Galicia’ – Austria’s territorial gain from the Third Partition – in 1809. However, as early as February 1813, following the retreat of the Napoleonic armies from Russia, Russian troops occupied its capital, Warsaw.
Germans in the Republic of the Nobility
In the first half of the 17th century, ‘Dutchmen’ – that is, settlers with experience in draining marshy areas – were settled in the Vistula lowlands from the lower Vistula and from Pomerania. From 1730 onwards, there was a new wave of settlement that lasted until around 1830.
In the Dobrzyń region (ziemia dobrzyńska, on the border with East Prussia), landowners established villages between 1700 and 1780 with settlers, including those from neighbouring Ducal Prussia. Further settlements were established between 1820 and 1863.
From 1750 to 1795, Polish landowners also established 110 small German villages in the Kuyavian Lake District; after 1795, under South Prussia, seven larger Swabian settlements were founded.
In the town of Dabie/Dąbie, a colony of clothmakers emerged at the end of the 18th century. In the second half of the 19th century, however, artisanal weaving could no longer compete with the textile industry in Łódź. The same applies to the towns of Zagorow/Zagórów, Konin and Kolo/Koło in the central Vistula Valley, where, as in the Kalisz region, landowners had settled peasant colonists from the mid-18th century onwards.
In the Gostynin area, peasant settlement began around 1780; at the same time, rural colonies were established in the vicinity of Łódź, whilst others emerged after 1795 in South Prussia and after 1807 in the Duchy of Warsaw. The ‘Swabian settlement’ near Warsaw began around 1800 under South Prussian administration. Prior to the introduction of a state settlement policy, settlers from German-speaking regions were settled by the landowners; in towns, cloth makers had also been settled since the end of the 18th century. In the 18th century, Warsaw was home to a German-speaking, predominantly Protestant middle class, which largely assimilated into the Polish environment during the 19th century.
The Kingdom of Poland (Russian Poland)
The Congress of Vienna redrew the boundaries of the partitioned territories: the Duchy of Warsaw was linked to Russia ‘in perpetuity’ as the ‘Kingdom of Poland’ under personal union. The remaining Russian-held territories, such as Volhynia, were incorporatedinto the Russian Empire.
A progressive constitution was enacted for the Kingdom of Poland, granting it extensive domestic autonomy whilst maintaining a common foreign policy with Russia; yet, from the accession of Tsar Nicholas I (1796/1825–1855) onwards, differences increasingly came to the fore.
Until 1820, Polish landowners sought to attract clothmakers and craftsmen from German-speaking regions for their new private towns, such as Aleksandrów, Ozorków, Zduńska Wola, Tomaszów Mazowiecki and others. Immigration to the private industrial settlements continued until 1830, but from 1820 onwards it faced competition from government-led settlement schemes, which established new towns for ‘manufacturers and craftsmen’ (including those from Silesia and the Grand Duchy of Posen) in places such as Zgierz, Pabianitz/Pabianice or Łódź alongside existing settlements. The 1821 Zgierz Agreement with three cloth manufacturers from the Grand Duchy of Posen is regarded as a pioneering model contract. In Zgierz alone, as many as 500 master clothmakers were already producing for the Russian and Chinese markets by 1825. By 1830, some 10,000 families of clothmakers had immigrated to the Kingdom of Poland.
On 29 November 1830, a group of officer cadets in Warsaw launched an uprising which culminated in the deposition of Nicholas I and the Romanov dynasty in January 1831. The insurgents were able to mobilise more than 100,000 soldiers, including from the other partitioned territories, but the Russian side emerged victorious in September 1831. Some of those involved went into exile as part of the ‘Great Emigration’, particularly to France. Those who remained were sentenced to prison terms and forced labour, and their property, like that of the emigrants, was confiscated.
Liberals from central and southern Germany celebrated the émigrés at events including the Hambach Festival of 1832. On the left wing of the politically divided émigré community, the historian Joachim Lelewel (1786–1861) is thought to have coined the powerful slogan ‘For our freedom and for yours’, meaning that the political struggle to restore an independent Poland was also a struggle against the autocracies of Europe. The Constitution of the Kingdom of Poland was replaced in 1832 by the ‘Organic Statute’, and the state of war was not lifted until 1856; however, a separate administration, limited in its scope, remained in place.
After 1833, landowners once again recruited peasant settlers. The abolition of the customs border with Russia in 1851 fuelled the growth of the textile industry into a major industry, which had been supplanting the weavers’ craft since the 1850s. Karl Scheibler (1820–1881), a native of Monschau (Eifel), was one of the major industrialists. His company, founded in Łódź in 1854, employed more than 10,000 workers before 1914.
From 1855 onwards, as part of his reform programme, Tsar Alexander II (1818/1855–1881) also advocated reconciliation with Poland. Polish society used the new freedoms it had gained for patriotic demonstrations and the formation of conspiratorial circles. The uprising by a small group of conspirators in January 1863 (the ‘January Uprising’) failed due to inadequate organisation and the inability to mobilise broader sections of the population. Prussia and Russia were able to crush the insurrection in April 1864. The Russian administration cracked down harshly on the entire population. The name ‘Poland’ was banned from official usage and replaced by ‘Vistula Land’. The use of the Polish language was suppressed; from 1865, Russian became the sole language of administration; and the autonomous institutions of the ‘Vistula Region’ were dissolved.
The emancipation of the peasants, proclaimed in 1863 in response to the uprising, freed up labour for the developing industry, but also led to rural overpopulation and a rise in emigration overseas. The industrial centres of Warsaw and Łódź grew rapidly. The population of the textile industrial town of Łódź grew from 4,700 in 1831 to 32,400 in 1865 and reached 505,500 at the start of the First World War, whilst the proportion of the German population fell from 62.4 per cent in 1862 to 15 per cent in 1914.[4]
Polish society organised itself through ‘Organic Work’ and developed its own national ideology, strongly influenced by the Catholic Church. In 1892–93, the Polish Socialist Party was formed in exile in Paris and soon afterwards also illegally within Poland itself. In 1894, the internationalist Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland split off from it under Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) and Julian Marchlewski (1866–1925). In 1897, the General Jewish Labour Union ( Bund) was founded, as was the National Democratic Party led by Roman Dmowski (1864–1939). Following the 1905 Revolution, admission to political parties was permitted in Russia. In the 1906 Duma elections, the National Democrats – who were favoured by the curial system – secured a majority in the formerly Polish territories of the Russian Empire as representatives of the Polish national resistance against Russian central authority.
At the start of the First World War, following the defeat of the Russian invading army in East Prussia at the end of August 1914, German and Austrian troops advanced into Russian Poland. German forces occupied Łódź from 8 to 29 October 1914, but were forced to withdraw from the city due to the advance of Russian troops; they did not recapture it until 6 December 1914, retaining control until the end of the war. Following a series of fluctuating battles around Warsaw and Łódź, a line of defence became established. The Russian troops fought back and managed to hold their ground until mid-1915. The Central Powers were not able to march into Warsaw until 5 August 1915.
At the outbreak of the war, a large proportion of the German and Jewish population living in rural areas and small towns was resettled to the interior of Russia. The use of the German language in public was banned, and German associations and private schools were dissolved. On 2 February 1915, the Russian government enacted a liquidation law for the German colonies in Congress Poland and Volhynia, under which the Germans were required to dispose of their property and leave their residential areas by the end of the year. Due to the advance of German troops, the western part of Congress Poland was spared; around 120,000 Germans from the eastern part and from Volhynia were deported to the Russian interior and to Siberia in the spring of 1915.
Russian Poland was divided into a ‘General Government of Warsaw’ under German administration and a ‘General Government of Lublin’ under Austrian administration, both with civilian administrations. On 5 November 1916, the German and Austrian emperors proclaimed a ‘Kingdom of Poland’ for these two occupied territories, with a hereditary monarchy in close alliance with the Central Powers. The civil administration of the General Government of Warsaw established its own scientific commission to conduct systematic research into the country, the findings of which remain relevant to this day.
The Germans in the Kingdom of Poland
The eight geographically separate regions, in which German-speaking farmers were settled, primarily by Polish landowners during the 18th century (the Vistula Lowlands, the Dobrin Region, the Kuyavian Lake District, the Warta River Valley, the Łódź Industrial Region, the Kalisz Region, the Gostynin Region, and the Swabians near Warsaw) had no connections whatsoever with one another. They consisted mainly of isolated villages. In the Vistula Lowlands, for example, 25,000 Germans lived in 274 villages after the First World War; these stretched for 300 km along the Vistula in a predominantly Polish environment. After 1860, peasant settlements were also found in the Lublin Governorate, particularly in theChełm district. The peasant settlers, predominantly members of the German- and Polish-speaking Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession, often assimilated into their Polish-speaking surroundings. Until the 1905 Revolution, political and national organisations were banned; it was only through the work of the Regional Studies Commission during the First World War that information came to light regarding the existence of German-speaking settlements.
The Łódź ‘activists’ led by Adolf Eichler (1877–1945) had begun before the war to awaken a sense of national identity amongst their German compatriots in the towns of the Łódź industrial region, aided primarily by the *Deutsche Post* and the *Deutsche Lodzer Zeitung*, both published by Eichler between 1915 and 1918. The German authorities reacted cautiously and did not approve the German Association for Łódź and the Surrounding Area, led by Eichler, as an organisation for the entire General Government until March 1916. The activists demanded the annexation of the Łódź industrial region to the German Reich. Pan-German circles, the Ostmarkenverein, General Erich Ludendorff (1865–1932) as head of German military operations, and economic circles planned to establish a ‘Polish border strip’ on the western edge of what had previously been Russian Poland, with the Polish population resettled, to serve as a security zone.
Although the German activists’ hopes of support from Governor-General Hans von Beseler (1850–1921) proved illusory, the German Association for Łódź and the Surrounding Area enjoyed favourable opportunities for development compared with the Russian era. The German rural population, insofar as it had not been resettled or had been forced to flee the combat zones, was not politically organised. When the German Association was forced to disband in early 1919 under pressure from the Polish authorities, it is said to have had more than 30,000 members in 230 local branches.[5] Encouraged by Paul Althaus (1888–1966), who was serving as a military chaplain in Łódź, the German pastors of the Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession attempted, at the Łódź Synod in October 1917, – unsuccessfully – to establish a German Evangelical Lutheran Church.
Interwar period
After 1918, the region of Central Poland no longer constituted a political entity in its own right. Along with Warsaw, the administrative and economic centre, and the Łódźtextile industry region, it was of central importance to the state as a whole. Only the southern part, comprising the provinces of Kielce (in Radom) and Lublin, was part of the Central Industrial Region (Centralny Okręg Przemysłowy), which was promoted after 1920 and specialised in heavy industry and armaments.
The German minority in the central Polish voivodeships, 1918–1939
In place of the German Association, the Federation of Germans in Poland was founded in Łódź in 1921, with a view to the Sejm elections announced for 1922; it is said to have quickly established “a comprehensive organisational network across the German settlements in Central Poland”,[6] though it had to be dissolved in accordance with association law in 1924 after the state authorities failed to approve its statutes. It was not until the German People’s Association in Poland (DVV), founded in 1924, that a common organisation for both urban and rural areas in the Central Polish voivodeships was successfully established. Shortly before the Second World War, it also extended its sphere of activity to the district of Chełm and the Białystok region. The DVV was led by the teacher August Utta (1886–1940) as chairman from 1924 to 1938. From 1925 to 1928 and from 1930 to 1932, he was a member of the Sejm; from 1933 to 1938, he served in the Senate of the Republic of Poland. In 1938, he was succeeded by Ludwig Wolff (1908–1988), who reorganised the DVV along National Socialist lines. In 1939, following the German invasion of Poland, he became the first NSDAP district leader for the city of Łódź, as well as an SS Obersturmbannführer. In 1929, the German Socialist Labour Party of Poland was founded, with its main base in the Łódź area.
The German pastors of the Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession were divided between the older, more pro-Polish generation, most of whom had studied in Dorpat/Tartu, and the younger, nationally German-oriented generation, who had mostly completed their studies in Germany and showed sympathies for a German church and National Socialism. Their arch-enemy was General Superintendent Julius Bursche (1862–1942), whom they accused of the ‘Polonisation’ of their church.
During the Second World War
Under German occupation from 1939 to 1945, the area was divided between the Reichsgau Danzig-Westprussia (Dobriner Land), the Reichsgau Wartheland and the General Government. The Łódź industrial area was assigned to the Reichsgau Wartheland as the ‘eastern Wartheland’. Łódź (Lodsch in 1939, Litzmannstadt in 1940), with its ghetto and the immigration centre for ‘ethnic German resettlers’, was a key location for Nazi population policy. An increasing number of ‘resettlers’ from the Soviet sphere of influence were settled in the region. The remaining area, including Warsaw, was placed under the authority of the General Government. With the ghetto uprising in 1943 and the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, Warsaw became a focal point of Polish and Jewish resistance.
The evacuation order, issued in January 1945, came too late to allow for an orderly evacuation of the German population ahead of the advancing Red Army. The remaining Germans were stripped of their rights as ‘enemy elements’, detained in camps and, after 1948, largely resettled.
After 1945
After 1945, ‘Central Poland’ comprised the eastern part of Poland between the western territories of 1920 and the Bug River. It is not regarded as a distinct region today.
The remaining German minority, which reorganised itself after 1990, relies largely on the Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession, but appears to be marginal in relation to the region as a whole.
Controversies surrounding German culture and history
The conflict within the Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession, which had been raging since the Łódź Synod of 1917 and centred on the figure of General Superintendent Julius Bursche (1862–1942) – who was vilified as a ‘Poloniser’ – concerning the nationalGerman or primarily Protestant character of the church was continued after 1945, primarily by the pastors Eduard Kneifel (1896–1993) and Alfred Kleindienst (1893–1978). On the Polish side, Waldemar Gastpary (1908–1984), head of the Warsaw Theological Academy, highlighted Bursche’s achievements. Bernd Krebs took up this approach in his Warsaw doctoral thesis,[7] against which the Aid Committee for Evangelical-Lutheran Germans from Poland reiterated the old arguments.[8]
Bibliography
- Włodzimierz Borodziej, Hans Lemberg (eds.): ‘Our homeland has become a foreign land to us...’. The Germans east of the Oder and Neisse 1945–1950. Documents from Polish archives. Vol. 2: Central Poland. Silesian Voivodeship (Upper Silesia). Marburg 2003 (Sources on the History and Regional Studies of East-Central Europe 4.2).
- Severin Gawlitta: Between Invitation and Expulsion: German Peasant Settlers in the Kingdom of Poland 1815–1915. Marburg 2009 (Materials and Studies on East-Central European Research 20).
- Severin Gawlitta (ed.): German Settlers in the Kingdom of Poland 1815–1915. Herne 2010 (Contributions to the History of Germans in Poland and German–Polish Relations 4).
- Otto Heike: The German Minority in Poland up to 1939. Their Cultural, Social and Political Life and Activities. Leverkusen 1985.
- Lucjan Meissner (ed.): Central Poland in German Eastern Studies. History and the Present Day. Łódź 1999.
- Joachim Rogall: The Germans in the Poznań Region and in Central Poland. Munich 1993 (Areas of Expulsion and Expelled Germans 3).
- Joachim Rogall (ed.): Land of the Great Rivers. From Poland to Lithuania. Berlin 1996 (German History in Eastern Europe 8).
Periodicals
- Weichsel-Warthe Yearbook. Edited by the Weichsel-Warthe Association. Wiesbaden, 1955 onwards.
Notes
[1] Leopold Schenzel: ‘On the History of German Choirs in Central Poland’, in: Deutsche Blätter in Polen 8 (1931), pp. 283–290.
[2] Albert Breyer: ‘The Regional Organisation of the German Community in Central Poland’, in: Deutsche Schulzeitung in Polen 12 (1932/33), pp. 161–165, definitively established in the same author’s: Deutsche Gaue in Mittelpolen. Plauen 1935 (Ostdeutsche Heimathefte 4).
[3] Viktor Kauder: The German Community in Eastern Poland. Leipzig 1939 (German Districts in the East, pp. 8–9).
[4] Wiesław Puś: ‘The Occupational and Social Structure of the Main Ethnic Groups in Łódź and Their Development in the Years 1820–1914’, in: Jürgen Hensel (ed.): ‘Poles, Germans and Jews in Łódź 1820–1939’. Osnabrück 1999, p. 37.
[5] Adolf Eichler: German Identity in Congress Poland. Stuttgart 1921 (Publications of the German Institute for Foreign Studies, Stuttgart 4), p. 123.
[6] Otto Heike: The German Minority in Poland until 1939. Leverkusen 1985, p. 174.
[7] Bernd Krebs: National Identity and Ecclesiastical Self-Assertion. Julius Bursche and the Debates on the Mission and Path of Protestantism in Poland 1917–1939. Neukirchen-Vluyn 1993.
[8] Arthur Schmidt, Hugo Karl Schmidt: The Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession in Poland 1915–1945. Hanover 1995.
Citation
Wolfgang Kessler: Central Poland. In: Online Encyclopaedia on the Culture and History of Germans in Eastern Europe, 2020. URL: ome-lexikon.uni-oldenburg.de/p32570 (as at 29 July 2020).
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