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The Politics of Ethnic Cleansing: The P.P.R., The P.Z.Z. and Wielkopolska's Nationalist Revolution, 1944–1946

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

T. David Curp
T. David Curp*
Affiliation:
Ohio University
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Extract

“… all of society is caught up in a hatred of Germany … [this] creates a serious possibility of uniting all of society into one entire national front.”

Władysław Gomułka

Three costly revolutions began in Poland between spring 1944 and summer 1946. The first two were primarily state-sponsored political and socioeconomic revolutions initiated by a minority comprising the Moscow-appointed and -controlled Polish Workers' Party (Polska Partia Robotnicza, P.P.R.) and their allies. Although they dominated the commanding heights of regional and national politics and administration, the P.P.R. and its supporters faced fierce opposition and waged these revolutions with only partial success, relying heavily on fraud and force. These ongoing state-sponsored transformations established an uneven hold on Polish society and depended upon the police power of the new Polish state and, ultimately, the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union was no longer willing to support its satellites in Eastern Europe by force of arms and the Polish people dismantled their regime's coercive power, much of the laboriously developed political and socioeconomic superstructure of the People's Republic of Poland collapsed.

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Articles
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 29 , Issue 4 , December 2001 , pp. 575 - 603
Copyright
Copyright © 2001 Association for the Study of Nationalities 

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References

Notes

1. Gomułka, Włatisław. Excerpt from a paper of the Secretary of the Central Committee of the P.P.R. entitled A New Situation, New Tasks: Poland's Situation and the Tasks of Our Party in the Second Stage of the Country's Liberation,” presented to an enlarged Plenum of the Central Committee of the Polish Workers' Party on 6 February 1945. Quoted in Zofia Polubiec, ed., Polska Partia Robotnicza: dokumenty programowe 1942–1948 (Warsaw: Ksiazka i Wiedza, 1984), pp. 279–299. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Polish are the author's.Google Scholar

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4. For Poland alone this included not only the expulsion of over 3.5 million Germans then living within the country's newly reconfigured borders, but also the removal of over half a million Ukrainians, Byelorussians, and Lithuanians to the Soviet Union and the additional deportation of over 140,000 Ukrainians from their homes in eastern Poland to Poland's newly annexed Recovered Territories. Sakson, Andrzej, “Socjologiczne Problemy Wysiedleń, in Hubert Orłowski and Andrej Sakson, eds, Utracona Ojczyzna: Przymusowe deportacje i przesiedlenia jako wspólne doświadczenie (Poznań: Instytut Zachodni, 1996), pp. 158–159. Sakson's figures exclude millions of Germans who fled the Soviet wartime advance and were prevented by the Polish government from returning to their homes. Thus the number of Germans expelled from their homes in Poland's Oder–Neisse territories (as well as Poland's pre-war German minority) totaled over ten million people. Sebastian Siebel-Achenbach, Lower Silesia from Nazi Germany to Communist Poland 1942–49 (Hong Kong: St Martin's Press, 1994), pp. 86–90.Google Scholar

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23. No. 24, December 1943, Lódz—An Article Stating the Relations of the PPR to the German Population in Poland. On Our Relations with the Germans, in Polubiec, Zofia, ed., Polska Partia Robotnicza: dokumenty programowe (Warsaw: Ksia̦żka i Wiedza, 1984), pp. 174–179.Google Scholar

24. It is worth noting that in his report in January 1944 on the political situation in wartime Poland, Gomułka grouped the National Democrats among fascists and other reactionary organizations. Gomułkca, Władysław, Artykuły i Przemówienia: Tom I: styczeń 1943–grudzień 1945 (Warsaw: Ksia̦żka i Wiedza, 1963), pp. 67–68.Google Scholar

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26. The Manifesto of the Polish Committee of National Liberation, 22 July 1944, in Bester, Liliana, ed., Manifest PKWN (Warsaw: Ksia̦żka i Wiedza, 1974), pp. 13–25.Google Scholar

27. The manifesto was vague enough to avoid committing the P. K.W. N. (and more importantly, the Soviet Union) to claiming all of Lower Silesia or the entire Pomeranian coast, including the port of Szczecin, as Polish territorial objectives. Kołomejczyk, Norbert, Ziemia Zachodnia w dzialalnosci PPR (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, 1966), p. 46.Google Scholar

28. Using the eastern or the western Neisse to delineate a Polish–German frontier determined whether Breslau (WrocBaw), over 24,793 square kilometers of German territory, and an additional two to three million Germans would fall under Polish rule, those Germans to be ultimately expelled. Siebel-Achenbach, , Lower Silesia, pp. 88–89.Google Scholar

29. Quoted in Kałomejczyk, , Ziemia Zachodnia, p. 48.Google Scholar

30. Polonsky, Antony and Drukier, Bołesław, eds, The Beginnings of Communist Rule in Poland (London: Routledge&Kegan Paul, 1980), pp. 47–53, 227.Google Scholar

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32. Musielak, , Polski Zwia̦zek Zachodni, p. 65.Google Scholar

33. To the Polish Committee of National Liberation, 2 November, 1944, WAPP Wojewódzkie Archiwum Panstwowe w Poznaniu [henceforth WAPP] Polski Zwia̦zek Zachodni [henceforth PZZ] 579, pp. 213–214.Google Scholar

34. PZZ Correspondence with the Chairman of the Committee of National Liberation, 21 November 1944, WAPP PZZ 579, p. 217.Google Scholar

35. Musielak, , Polski Zwia̦zek Zachodni, 76. The four-member organizational committee of the P.Z.Z. included two activists from the P.P.R. and one from the Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partiy Socjalistyczna, P.P.S.). The most important of these was P.P.R. member and P.Z.Z. Secretary General Józef Dubiel, a member of the pre-war Communist League of Polish Youth and a wartime communist partisan commander who played an important role in the subsequent history of the P.Z.Z., and later as Vice Minister of the Ministry of Recovered Territories. Polonsky and Drukier, The Beginnings of Communist Rule, p. 162.Google Scholar

36. “A Memorial,” WAPP PZZ 589, p. 3.Google Scholar

37. At the May 1945 Plenum there was a call for Dubiel to leave the P.Z.Z. He was later caught up in the post-1948 P.P.R. witch hunt of national-deviationists. Accused of wartime cooperation with the Gestapo, he was arrested along with many others of Gomułka's political allies in 1949. Polonsky, Antony and Drukier, Bołesław, eds, The Beginnings of Communist Rule in Poland (London: Routledge&Kegan Paul, 1980), pp. 162, 438.Google Scholar

38. “To the Leadership of the Polish Committee of National Liberation, Lublin, 2 November, 1944,” WAPP PZZ 579, p. 1, which contained the initial formulation of the P.Z.Z.'s mission and self-definition, stated that the P.Z.Z. was an “all-Polish, non-Party, anti-Fascist and democratic institution.”Google Scholar

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43. So called because of the Polish nationalist claim that all German territory east of the Oder and Neisse rivers was historically Polish land. Norman Davies points out the fictions inherent in arguing for any real continuity between early medieval Polish settlements in the Oder–Neisse region and Poland's right to territories that, in 1945, had for over 600 years been outside the orbit of any Polish state. Ultimately the Z. O. was, for Poland, booty of war. Davies, , God's Playground: A History of Poland: Volume II: 1795 to the Present (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), pp. 492–535.Google Scholar

44. Musielak, , Polski Zwia̦zek Zachodni, p. 89.Google Scholar

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49. Report of the Starosta in Moglino and Report of the Starosta in Ostrów for 14 May 1945, in WAPP Urzad Wojewodzkie Poznańskie (henceforth UWP), pp. 73, 110, 213. Local government officials referred to the P.Z.Z. as the elite of local society. In Mogline the president of the local circle of the P.Z.Z., K. Szymański, was a pharmacist, and the vice-president, E. Zawadzki, was the Inspector of Schools. In Ostrów the P.Z.Z. leadership was described as apolitical and among the most highly educated members of local society.Google Scholar

50. In Poznań, (which eventually became the headquarters for the Union in all of Poland) the P.Z.Z. became a mass organization, present in 40 of the province's 43 counties and organized in 136 local circles with 23,000 members. The Poznań Circle in 1945, WAPP PZZ 586, p. 130.Google Scholar

51. The Poznań Circle in 1945, WAPP PZZ 586, p. 146. In late April, the Ministry of Public Administration commissioned the P.Z.Z. to develop a practical plan for colonizing all of the Recovered Territories.Google Scholar

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106. For an in-depth discussion of negotiations surrounding the referendum, see Marczak, , Propaganda Polityczna, pp. 45–71.Google Scholar

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114. Łach, , Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe, pp. 271–272.Google Scholar

115. Compare the “Circular Concerning the 1st of May Celebrations [1946] to All Provincial, Town and Country Committees and All Party Organizations,” AAN KC PPR 295/vii–7, pp. 71–73, and “Circular Concerning the 1st of May Celebrations [1945] to All Provincial, Town and County Committees and All Party Organizations of the PPR,” AAN KC PPR 295/ix/378 pp. 10, 12.Google Scholar

116. Gomułka, , Artykuły i Przemówienia, Vol. 2, pp. 155–156.Google Scholar

117. Program of Work for the PZZ in 1946, WAPP PZZ 589, pp. 13, 16.Google Scholar

118. Musielak, , Polski Zwia̦zek Zachodni, pp. 140–141.Google Scholar

119. Ibid., pp. 91–92.Google Scholar

120. Protocol Number 1: From a Meeting of the Presidium of the Governing Board of the PZZ on 15 June, 1946,” WAPP PZZ 596, pp. 2–4.Google Scholar

121. See for example a P.Z.Z. poster for the referendum (AAN MZO 283, p. 3) which calls for a vote of “three times yes” to answer “all of the enemies of our borders on the Oder, Neisse and the Baltic.”Google Scholar

122. “Report on the Activities of the Administrative Circle of the PZZ in Poznań in 1946, WAPP PZZ 586, p. 300.Google Scholar

123. The Poznań Circle 1945 and The Report on the Activities of the Administrative Circle of the PZZ in Poznań in 1946, WAPP PZZ 586, pp. 130, 291. This was part of a larger, nationwide drop in P.Z.Z. membership in 1946. Though the Union eventually recovered (and even expanded) from these losses, the new members were often registered en masse and evinced little interest in the activities or ideas of the Union. Musielak, Polski Zwia̦zek Zachodni, pp. 97–108.Google Scholar

124. Report on the Activities of the Administrative Circle … for 1946, WAPP PZZ 586, p. 291.Google Scholar

125. Ibid., p. 300.Google Scholar

126. Coutouvidis, and Reynolds, , Poland, pp. 253–254.Google Scholar

127. An Evaluation of the People's Vote in the Province of Poznań, WAPP WUIiP 26 Secret Correspondence, p. 39. The significant margins of error in the Ministry of Information and Propaganda's tally may be attributed to local information on the extent of administrative fraud. Actual results were even lower than the above: according to Paczkowski in Wielkopolska the no vote on the first and second questions was 83.1% and 58%, respectively, whereas the third question received a yes vote of 81% (from a total of 521,668 valid votes cast). Some (but not all, given the heavily falsified pro-regime results of the voting in Ziemia Lubuska) of the discrepancy can be accounted for by the use in the Poznań Ministry of Information's report of results from Ziemia Lubuska. Even these assessments cannot be regarded as completely accurate, given the prevalence of fraud at the site of the voting prior to any count. Paczkowski, , Referendum, pp. 11–12, 97.Google Scholar

128. Władysław Raczkiewicz and General Władyslaw Anders were leaders of the Polish government-in-exile in London who did not return to Poland after the war; Churchill gained the ire of many Poles for his increasingly critical stance towards Poland's postwar territorial gains. The NSZ (Narodowe Siły Zbrojne, National Armed Forces) and WiN (Wolność i Niepodległość, Freedom and Independence) were anti-regime insurgencies that had all but been destroyed by the spring of 1946. Kersten, , The Establishment of Communist Rule, pp. 229, 325.Google Scholar

129. Minutes of the Provincial Meeting of Active Members in Poznań on 9 July, 1946, WAPP KW PPR 51, pp. 97–99.Google Scholar

130. Czarnecka, Ewa and Fiut, Alexsander, Conversations with Czeslaw Milosz (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), p. 53.Google Scholar

131. Musielak, , Polski Zwia̦zek Zachodni, pp. 164–167, 252–255.Google Scholar

132. By 1948, of the 3,020 (mostly Protestant) churches in the Recovered Territories, the regime had turned over 2,895 to the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church also gained additional confiscated Protestant church properties in areas of former German settlement within pre-war Poland, especially Wielkopolska. “Church Property in the Recovered Territories in 1948 According to Confession,” AAN MZO 50, p. 236.Google Scholar

133. Oșkowski, , Społeczenstwo Polski, pp. 173–174, 189–193.Google Scholar

134. Museilak, , Polski Zwia̦zek Zachodni, pp. 109–110.Google Scholar

135. Jankowiak, Stanisław, Wielkopolska w Okresie Stalinizmu 1948–1956 (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, 1996), pp. 155–156.Google Scholar

136. Musielak, , Zachodni, Polski Zwia̦zek, in Wiceniewska and Dymek, 40-Lecie Powrotu Ziem Zachodnich, p. 161.Google Scholar

137. The ongoing importance of anti-German imagery in officially sanctioned art as late as the 1970s can be seen in Kubik's analysis of the play The Song of Wavel. Kubik, Jan, The Power of Symbols against the Symbols of Power: The Rise of Solidarity and the Fall of State Socialism in Poland (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), pp. 75–102.Google Scholar