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Polish Masuria, Danzig, and Upper Silesia after World War I

J

Jackson Lennock

Well-known member
What if after the first World War, Poland had been granted Masuria, Danzig, and Upper Silesia? Poland got a slice of Upper Silesia historically, but here Poland gets more.

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Ricardolindo said:
It's impossible for Poland to get Masuria. Masurians while Polish speaking identified as Germans because they were Lutherans.
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Price of Beans.

Also the plebiscite was impacted by the state of the Polish-Soviet war at the time.

Chonky Poland probably doesn't really change much though which I guess is to say that outside of maybe some future Nazis dying in Freikorps nonsense that the big question becomes what the post war settlement looks like at Alt-Yalta
 
Japhy said:
Price of Beans.

Chonky Poland probably doesn't really change much though which I guess is to say that outside of maybe some future Nazis dying in Freikorps nonsense that the big question becomes what the post war settlement looks like at Alt-Yalta
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They actually held a referendum in Masuria in 1920 and it was 97% pro-German, read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1920_East_Prussian_plebiscite. Poland has little reason to want a territory almost universally hostile to them.
 
Japhy said:
Also the plebiscite was impacted by the state of the Polish-Soviet war at the time.
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You wrote this while I was writing my reply and, thus, I am replying now: No Polish-Soviet War or a better Polish performance in the beginning could have substantially changed the results of the plebiscite in Upper Silesia but not in Masuria. You can't change a 97% pro-German vote.

Japhy said:
Except they very much wanted it and at the Paris Peace talks could have gotten it. There wasn't a plebcite for the corridor.
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The Polish corridor was economically necessary for Poland for sea access and most of the population was Polish or at least Kashubian. Why did Poland want Masuria? I don't think the area was of much value.
 
Ricardolindo said:
You wrote this while I was writing my reply and, thus, I am replying now: No Polish-Soviet War or a better Polish performance in the beginning could have substantially changed the results of the plebiscite in Upper Silesia but not in Masuria. You can't change a 97% pro-German vote.
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The vote was somewhat dubious and held at a very bad time. However, you have to be careful here because both sides present some very interestingly dubious statistics. A properly held vote at a different time might have produced more accurate results but I doubt if a single area would have changed from staying with Germany.

The Polish corridor was economically necessary for Poland for sea access and most of the population was Polish or at least Kashubian. Why did Poland want Masuria? I don't think the area was of much value.
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The Corridor is another one of those difficult areas to judge, there is a Polish majority corridor through the Baltic, it's just rather thin in places and didn't contain the important railway lines. Some areas of that were transferred were majority German-speaking and that was much less influenced by counting Yiddish-speaking Jews as Germans than in parts of Provinz Pozen. You also had the old problem of German-majority towns in a rural Polish majority area.

However. The Allies could have pretty much done what they wanted, after all they did with other areas and they were happy to ignore the results of some of the plebscites.
 
iainbhx said:
However. The Allies could have pretty much done what they wanted, after all they did with other areas and they were happy to ignore the results of some of the plebscites.
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The Allies didn't actually ignore the results of any of the post-World War I plebiscites where they were held. The Aland Islands voted almost unanimously for union with Sweden but the smart Finnish diplomats were able to convince the League of Nations to let Finland keep the Aland Islands with autonomy. Carinthia was divided between Austria and Yugoslavia as per the plebiscite results with the large majority in Austria. The Eupen-Melmedy plebiscite was a sham of course. North Schleswig voted to rejoin Denmark while Central Schleswig voted to remain in Germany.
The Sopron plebiscite went for Hungary and it remained Hungarian.
 
Ricardolindo said:
The Allies didn't actually ignore the results of any of the post-World War I plebiscites where they were held. The Aland Islands voted almost unanimously for union with Sweden but the smart Finnish diplomats were able to convince the League of Nations to let Finland keep the Aland Islands with autonomy. Carinthia was divided between Austria and Yugoslavia as per the plebiscite results with the large majority in Austria. The Eupen-Melmedy plebiscite was a sham of course. The Sopron plebiscite in went for Hungary and it remained Hungarian.
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The Ödenburg plebiscite was a sham, the allies just didn't hold plebiscites in many places where they just transferred control.
 
iainbhx said:
I’m sure the French would have been in favour and I’m sure the Poles would have been.
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Poland was promised all of Upper Silesia and Danzig IIRC but the Allies decided to go with the plebiscite and Free State instead. Poland would happily gobble up extra lands if there's a sizable Polish-speaking element (Masuria and Upper Silesia) or the mouth of the Vistula.
 
Jackson Lennock said:
Poland was promised all of Upper Silesia and Danzig IIRC but the Allies decided to go with the plebiscite and Free State instead. Poland would happily gobble up extra lands if there's a sizable Polish-speaking element (Masuria and Upper Silesia) or the mouth of the Vistula.
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Oh, I know. It would have left the Poles with an interesting problem as German-speakers left. If you take the example of the city of Bromberg/Bydgoszcz - it had around 45,000 German speakers and about 10,000 Polish-speakers before WWI. Now some of those were the Garrison of Bromberg, but that was about 5,000 people (plus some families etc), by 1926, the German speaking population had halved and it diminished further before 1939, so that German-speakers were probably less than 20% of the inhabitants. The Landkreis around it was much more Polish, but still majority German (just) and was less than 10% German by 1939. It was very similar in Kattowitz/Katowice but there was more of a population transfer (Polish speaking workers in the industries moved to Katowice and German speaking workers moved to Gleiwitz and Beuthen) the countryside around Katowice and the smaller towns were far more Polish than Landkreis Bromberg.

Now imagine that effect on in those areas, Danzig has 200,000 people, well over 90% are German-speakers, possibly up to 95%. Similarly for Upper Silesia, yes, there are quite a lot of Polish speakers in the east industrial cities and some of the western parts of Upper Silesia were 95%+ German speaking. If half of them left in the first few years, I'm not sure that Danzig or the Upper Silesian industrial complex can actually function properly for a few years. Of course, it would only be a few years. And you'd create another couple of million embittered people, many of whom in Upper Silesia were otherwise fairly reliable Zentrum voters.
 
iainbhx said:
Oh, I know. It would have left the Poles with an interesting problem as German-speakers left. If you take the example of the city of Bromberg/Bydgoszcz - it had around 45,000 German speakers and about 10,000 Polish-speakers before WWI. Now some of those were the Garrison of Bromberg, but that was about 5,000 people (plus some families etc), by 1926, the German speaking population had halved and it diminished further before 1939, so that German-speakers were probably less than 20% of the inhabitants. The Landkreis around it was much more Polish, but still majority German (just) and was less than 10% German by 1939. It was very similar in Kattowitz/Katowice but there was more of a population transfer (Polish speaking workers in the industries moved to Katowice and German speaking workers moved to Gleiwitz and Beuthen) the countryside around Katowice and the smaller towns were far more Polish than Landkreis Bromberg.

Now imagine that effect on in those areas, Danzig has 200,000 people, well over 90% are German-speakers, possibly up to 95%. Similarly for Upper Silesia, yes, there are quite a lot of Polish speakers in the east industrial cities and some of the western parts of Upper Silesia were 95%+ German speaking. If half of them left in the first few years, I'm not sure that Danzig or the Upper Silesian industrial complex can actually function properly for a few years. Of course, it would only be a few years. And you'd create another couple of million embittered people, many of whom in Upper Silesia were otherwise fairly reliable Zentrum voters.
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German-Polish relations would certainly be even worse, critically without necessarily making Poland stronger. I mean, an intact Danzig would keep Poland from building up Gdynia from nothing, but that is the only clear advantage I can see.
 
rfmcdonald said:
German-Polish relations would certainly be even worse, critically without necessarily making Poland stronger. I mean, an intact Danzig would keep Poland from building up Gdynia from nothing, but that is the only clear advantage I can see.
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I think gaining the whole of the Oberschlesische Industriegebiet is not to be sniffed at by a long way. There's not much gain in Masuria.
 
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