Górny Śląsk podczas II wojny światowej : między utopią niemieckiej wspólnoty narodowej a rzeczywistością okupacji na terenach wcielonych do Trzeciej Rzeszy

Abstract

World War II in Upper Silesia was a turning point in the history of the region. It was comparable only with the treaty in Trenczyn, giving Silesia back under the rule of the Czech Luxembourgers in the 14th century, and the peace treaty in Hubertsbourg, bringing about a definite transition of Silesia to Royal Prussia. A period of a two-hundred-year affiliation of Upper Silesia to first Prussia and later on united Germany finished in 1945. What began together with the rebirth of the Polish state was the process of moving the borderlines of Poland westward. The 19th and 20th century in Upper Silesia was an intensive nation-building process, consisting in self-identification of Upper Silesians, making a choice or being in favour of the “historical nations”, or aspiring to build a separate nation. The real “Silesian tragedy”resided in the fact that this dramatic decision was taken by the citizens during the bloodiest war in the history of Europe, caused by regime making use of a murderous ideology. Thus, the main aim of this work was to answer the question on how the attitudes of Upper Silesians were created after Upper Silesia had been integrated with the Third Reich, when they had to decide whether they perceived their future as creators of the Nazi “New Ruhr Basin” in the east or members of the Polish nation fighting with the invader. The work is divided into three parts. The first one presents the military effects, administrative-legislative and economic integration of Upper Silesia with Germany. The second part shows the realization of the programme of the German nation commonwealth creation, and the role Upper Silesians played in these plans. The last part is devoted to attitudes of Upper Silesians in the World War II. The epilogue itself is composed of the attempt to use Upper Silesians to create “the Tower of Upper Silesia” in 1945. As early as at the end of the war Upper Silesian had to take sides in a Polish-German conflict. In the remaining part of the occupied Poland, maybe apart from the Pomeranian district, there was no such an acute dilemma because in General Government and Great Poland the war was an act of unprovoked aggression of the western neighbour towards Poland, conducted in the name of the realization of a racist programme of capturing a “life-space”. However, in the appropriated territories of Upper Silesia, Germans who were invading used to repeat persistently that their aims were different; that it was not about aggression and occupation, but “liberation” and “throwing off the Polish yoke”. In that case, Upper Silesians have a right to feel that they are being liberated after 17 years of the Polish occupation. Officially, they were not told about extermination, deportations or wasteful exploitation of resources in the region, but rather about a fast economic growth in there. The German triumph in the Blitzkrieg in 1940 additionally confirmed a belief increasing among some Upper Silesians that this was possible to happen. The offer of modernizations of the council infrastructure, development of industry and transformations of Upper Silesia into a new economic centre in the east given to the region, which did not experience a necessary modification of its heavy industry in the interwar period under the rule of the Polish government, was attractive, especially in the beginning years, not only for those who were convinced of the necessity of appropriating the territory of Upper Silesia to Germany, on the grounds of their national and political choices before the war, but also for those who hesitated but, at the same time, saw their future in this vision. The slogan of building a “New Ruhr Basin” was to mean that Upper Silesians would be treated differently than the rest of population in the Polish occupied territories. What was dramatic for them was the fact that they had to react immediately to this proposal, either accepting it unconditionally or being aware of the situation in which they’ll have to leave their homes, become objects of extermination, and will be relegated into the category of “subpeople” as all Poles. The choice was easy only for those most patriotic ones. Germans treated them like aggressors who they had to fight with using all the methods available. However, in the beginning, many Upper Silesians conceived of the German offer as a convenient pretext to wait and postpone their decisions concerning their national choice in time. Hence, a mass registration in the Volkslist could be observed. This, however, did not entail a common collaboration of Upper Silesians. For many of them, a turning point covered the first defeats of Germans in the eastern front at the turn of 1942 and 1943, and mass incorporation of Upper Silesians into Wehrmacht. The importance of this fact for the attitudes of Upper Silesians has not been appreciated yet. This mass incorporation, involving almost all adult men capable of carrying a gun in the territories integrated with Upper Silesia, was no clear example of collaboration. On the contrary, the obligation it resulted in the fact that it was no longer concealed in the German army that Upper Silesians were not, in fact, real Germans, together with blood sacrifice made by soldiers fighting against their will, was perceived by many Upper Silesians as the reason for redefining their attitudes. When the Russian army invaded the territory of Upper Silesia in 1945, this whole complicated “Silesian knot” was impossible to undo. As a matter of fact, Upper Silesians were longing for the end of this 6-year- war as much as all European nations were. They were under no illusions about the effectiveness of German defence, however, unnecessarily, as it turned out later, feared the Red army attacking Poland. The only action which seemed rational at that time consisted in waiting. It is symptomatic that the Polish resistant movement in Upper Silesia took the same measures. The abandonment of the “Thunder” Plan west of the Vistula, gained recognition also among those most patriotic Upper Silesians for taking the solution of waiting, either for another war or normalizing the political situation after a diplomatic action of the eastern Allies. The year 1945 finished the process in which Upper Silesia was being incorporated into the borderline of Poland. A criminal system of the German Third Reich was a factor that should have played an important role in favour of Poland also in the process of the national self-identification of Upper Silesians. The reason why it was not like that was a totally unexpected continuation of the totalitarian system in the new political reality after the end of the war. The process of looking for the answer to the question of the national identity of Upper Silesians under these conditions has not been deactualised till the end of the century.