Silesia

Silesia, Polish Śląsk, Czech Slezsko, German Schlesien, historical region that is now in southwestern Poland. Silesia was originally a Polish province, which became a possession of the Bohemian crown in 1335, passed with that crown to the Austrian Habsburgs in 1526, and was taken by Prussia in 1742. In 1945, at the end of World War II, Silesia was one of the regions of German territory that was granted to Poland by the Soviet Union in compensation for land in eastern Poland that was incorporated into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Silesia consists largely of the basin of the upper and middle Oder River, which flows from southeast to northwest. The region is bounded by the Sudeten mountains to the southwest, by the Beskid range to the south, and by the Kraków-Wieluń plateau to the northeast. Silesia is now divided principally into four Polish województwa (provinces): Lubuskie, Dolnośląskie, Opolskie, and Śląskie. The remainder of the historical region forms part of Brandenburg and Saxony Länder (states) of Germany and part of the Moravia-Silesia kraj (region) of the Czech Republic. The chief cities of the region are Wrocław and Katowice.

By the 9th century ce Silesia was exclusively inhabited by Slavic peoples: the Dziadoszanie and the Bobrzanie in the north and the Ślęzanie (from whom it got its name), the Opolanie, and the Golensicowie in the south. In the 10th century the Czech dynasty of the Přemyslids and the Polish dynasty of the Piasts contested the territory. Mieszko I, prince of Poland, was able to acquire the region from Boleslav II, prince of Bohemia, between 989 and 992. The Polish king Bolesław I consolidated this possession by founding a bishopric in 1000 with its seat first at Smogorzów and later at Wrocław. Following the death of the Polish king Bołeslaw III in 1138, a succession dispute arose that eventually resulted in Silesia’s being divided in 1163 into Lower (northwestern) and Upper (southeastern) Silesia, each ruled by a Piast prince. A third Silesian principality was created in 1203. The subsequent princes of Lower Silesia, Henry I and his son Henry II, tried without success to reunite the territory. In 1241 Henry II was killed in the Battle of Legnica (Liegnitz), in which his army of Polish and German knights halted an invasion of Mongols who had ravaged the country.

All of the Silesian Piast rulers encouraged the immigration of Germans, who increased the region’s agricultural productivity, developed its coal mining and textile weaving, and populated new towns. The population thus took on an increasingly German character.

As the Silesian Piasts were prolific, the three existing principalities were subdivided again and again, until by the end of the 15th century there were no less than 16 Silesian principalities. The petty Silesian princes often sought the help of the powerful kings of Bohemia against their brothers and cousins, thus enabling those monarchs to revive their old claims to the overlordship of Silesia. In 1335 an arbitral award rendered by Charles I of Hungary assigned all Silesia to the Bohemian crown, thus making it part of the Holy Roman Empire. The change, however, was only one of overlordship; the Silesian princes continued to rule their individual principalities, and on occasion they even took positions different from those of the king of Bohemia in important matters. Silesia thus joined the Holy Roman emperor Sigismund in his struggle against the Bohemian Hussites, and consequently the region was devastated in the Hussite Wars between 1425 and 1435. The Silesians’ alienation from the Bohemian crown enabled Hungary to rule the area between 1469 and 1490. Silesia was subsequently reacquired by Bohemia, however, and it passed to the Habsburgs in 1526 with the accession of the Austrian archduke Ferdinand (later Holy Roman emperor Ferdinand I) to the Bohemian throne.

The Reformation turned Silesia almost entirely Protestant, and Silesia aligned itself with Protestant Bohemia and Saxony in rebellion against the Habsburgs in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48). Still, the Silesian Protestants were assured freedom of worship after the war. By the 18th century Silesia’s flourishing mining and textile industries had made it the richest of all the Habsburgs’ Austrian provinces.

It was chiefly its wealth that tempted Frederick II (the Great) of Prussia to wrest Silesia from the Habsburg heiress Maria Teresa in the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48). After Prussia’s victory, Austria retained only the Silesian districts of Krnov (Jägerndorf), Opava (Troppau), and Cieszyn (Teschen), which constituted extreme south-southeastern Silesia. These districts were united to Moravia until 1849 and afterward made a separate crown land of the Austrian Empire. The Silesian Germans and Protestants welcomed Prussian rule, which brought a more efficient administration and great attention to the region’s economic development. Expanded coal, iron-ore, lead, and zinc mining and manufacturing in time made Silesia the second most important industrial area in Germany.

Lower (northwestern) Silesia was by this time almost entirely German. In Upper (southeastern) Silesia the population was mixed, with Germans concentrated in the towns, Poles in the agricultural areas, and the latter making up a large proportion of the miners and unskilled industrial workers.

After the defeat of Germany and Austria-Hungary in World War I, several conflicting claims for Silesian territory were addressed to the chief Allied powers. The former Austrian districts of Cieszyn and Opava were divided between Poland and Czechoslovakia. This left the important question of the conflicting claims of Germany and Poland to the bulk of Upper Silesia. As finally amended concerning the Silesian question, the Treaty of Versailles (1919) called for the population of Upper Silesia to declare, by plebiscite, whether it wished to belong to Germany or Poland.

On the night of August 16–17, 1919, Poles in Silesia who were disappointed that Upper Silesia had not been granted outright to Poland staged the first of three Silesian Uprisings against the Germans. The First Silesian Uprising was put down by the Germans by August 24. The Second Silesian Uprising began a year later, on August 19–20, 1920, and was similarly suppressed within a few days, although it won the dissolution of the German police force and its replacement with a Polish-German force. In the actual plebiscite (March 20, 1921), about 706,000 votes were cast for Germany and about 479,000 for Poland. In all, about 100 more communes voted for Germany than for Poland, but the Poles secured a majority of votes in the southeastern area, which was economically the most important part of Silesia. In May 1921 the Silesian Poles staged a third, more extensive armed uprising, which ended on October 20, 1921, when the Allied powers endorsed the inclusion of the southeastern part of Upper Silesia into the new country of Poland. This area held three-quarters of Silesia’s coal production and nearly two-thirds of its steelworks. Lower Silesia, meanwhile, was left entirely to Germany.

Nazi Germany reacquired Upper Silesia with its conquest of Poland in 1939. The Germans killed or deported many educated Silesian Poles during World War II and filled the area with German settlers. But German-held Silesia was overrun in early 1945 by the Soviet Red Army. In August 1945 the Allied powers agreed to assign nearly all of Silesia to Poland and to transfer the region’s German population to Allied-administered Germany. The Red Army and the Poles then forcibly expelled Silesian Germans to the west, in the process committing atrocities as serious as those previously perpetrated by the Germans on the Silesian Poles. More than three million Germans left Silesia (roughly 109,000 remained in the early 21st century, according to the 2011 census, down from 153,000 in the 2002 census, owing to a number of factors), and the area was repopulated by Poles from the east and north, Silesia’s devastated industries were subsequently rebuilt. Modern Silesia contained about one-fourth of the total population of Poland in the early 21st century.

As nationalist movements spread throughout Europe in the 19th century, the notion of a Silesian nation was sparked, and by the early 20th century began to grow in Upper Silesia. Ethnic identity in Silesia, however, was much influenced by the region’s shifting sovereignty and the concomitant imposition of Germanization and Polonization. In postcommunist Poland after 1989 the existence and rights of the German minority were recognized. The Polish government was more resistant to acknowledging Silesian ethnicity, which was forwarded by the founding of the Silesian Autonomy Movement (Ruch Autonomii Śląska) in 1990 and the Union of People of Silesian Nationality (Związek Ludności Narodowości Śląskiej) in 1996. Central to the controversial assertion of Silesian nationality were conflicting linguistic interpretations: some scholars (and Silesian nationalists) argued that Silesian was a language unto itself, while other scholars (and the Polish government) classified Silesian as a dialect of Polish. Nonetheless, the 2002 census allowed Polish citizens to indicate their ethnicity, and some 173,000 self-identified as Silesian, making them the country’s largest ethnic minority. In the 2011 census that number swelled to more than 800,000 (though that census allowed respondents to claim a double national-ethnic identity).