Poles in Kaisers Army On the Front of the First World War. Ryszard Kaczmarek

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СКАЧАТЬ of social democracy in this milieu; unjustified fears in the Upper Silesian case as the influence of the Social Democratic Party of Germany and the Polish Socialist Party of the Prussian Partition was imperceptible. Therefore, after the formation of the 63rd Infantry Regiment, the administration located its barracks in the capital of the Regierungsbezirk Opole and in Lubliniec, so that it could intervene at any time. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Prussian civil administration asked the army to increase the number of the military units on the German-Russian border, as the former feared social upheavals in the region.⁴²

Cavalry conscription was not so strictly associated with the territorial division of the military districts. However, after von Moltke’s military reform, even in this case, the recruits almost exclusively came from the Wrocław area of the VI Army Corps, let alone the group of professional officers. Whereas, especially among line regiments in 1914, for the sake of the mobilization plan, conscription was only limited to the districts in direct neighborhood with garrisons, depending on the deployment of battalions, squadrons, and batteries.⁴³ It allows us to treat soldiers of the Upper Silesian regiments as the representatives of the local communities, just like in the case of Greater Poland, Pomeranian, and East Prussian regiments. The term “Polish regiments” appeared in the Prussian Partition already in the Franco-Prussian War, which referred to regiments mostly formed of Poles as there were no uniform Polish regiments at that time. However, when it comes to ethnic origin, the Poles comprised the majority of these regiments, particularly in Poznań. They were called Katschmarek Regiments (Katschmarkenregimenten).⁴⁴ This name remained in use and popularity in Poznań even during the First World War.⁴⁵ For example, the famous Polish writer Arkady Fiedler mentions the name when thinking of 1915, when suddenly grew the numbers of deserters, those who refrained from military duty, and the hospitalized of real ←25 | 26→or imaginary diseases – they were all called the Katschmareks.⁴⁶ The name was also used during the Second World War, it even appeared in the official German documents as the name for soldiers ethnically Polish but called to arms due to their registration in the third category of the Deutsche Volksliste.⁴⁷

      Of course, the available sources allow no precise differentiation of the soldiers of Prussian regiments in terms of their ethnicity, it always was a true mix of regions, nationalities, and denominations. However, we may prove that the soldiers in these regiments were mostly Poles or spoke Polish at least in a few cases before the First World War, not necessarily by only referring to the very principle of conscription.

The nineteenth-century German officers from garrisons in Regierungsbezirk Opole had no doubt that their subordinates talked to each other almost exclusively in Polish. The officers described it explicitly and simply called these soldiers Poles, or so-called Poles, to differentiate them from the Poles who lived in the partitioned lands and emphasizing their lack of German-speaking abilities.⁴⁸ Poor knowledge of German or Polish origin rather did not contribute to the negative opinions about the recruits. The mixed origin of recruits was considered a typical situation in the German Empire, even if it hindered military training.

      Until the 1880s and the introduction of education reforms – linked to the bills in the period of Kulturkampf – most taken for granted that the officers needed to teach their soldiers German. However, this need resulted from military necessity, not administrative pressures. Later the need gradually waned because the following generations, since the turn of the twentieth century, spoke German without difficulty after the graduation from folk schools; however, the level of this knowledge still varied greatly.

All the regiment monographs confirm the existence of special nineteenth-century schools for teaching German, which existed at various organizational levels of the Prussian Army. In the 23rd Infantry Regiment of Nysa, the recruits’ complete ignorance of German justified the need for maintaining such institutions for regular soldiers, although this lack did not affect the assessment of their military skills: “The regiment mostly consisted of Polish recruits (polnisches Einsatz) whose training was difficult because the majority spoke no German. However, the recruits were generally skillful and highly resistant to fatigue.”⁴⁹

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The custom of sermons in Polish by Upper Silesian military chaplains continued until the 1890s, which confirms that the lack of German and sole use of Polish by the recruits were not an issue for the authorities that treated this as a portrayal of the actual situation on the eastern borderlands of Prussia. The authorities realistically assessed that the soldiers from Polish-speaking villages would not understand complicated messages in a foreign language: “The sermon at the mass was in Polish until the 1880s and the beginning of the 1890s, that is, until “the Polish” recruits in Nysa sufficiently mastered the German language. The progress of school education made Polish masses no longer necessary.”⁵⁰

      We may investigate the moods of the Poles on the basis of their attitudes toward Polish national uprisings in the nineteenth century. There is a huge difference between the involvement of Poles in the struggle for national liberation in Wielkopolska and the frequent indifference to these events among the inhabitants of Upper Silesia or Masuria.

After the outbreak of the November Uprising in 1830, the Prussian administration mobilized more than a thousand soldiers from the Wrocław corps. The person in command was assumed command Field Marshal Count August Neidhardt von Gneisenau, co-author of the Prussian military reform. The army never announced formal mobilization in the Provice of Silesia but gradually increased the number of Upper Silesian troops, which eventually reached its wartime levels; the troops quickly deployed along the Russian border under the pretext of forming a cordon sanitaire against cholera epidemic. The whole action ended terribly, particularly for its commanders. It was not only von Gneisenau who died of cholera but also his well-known chief of staff, Karl von Clausewitz. However, the concentration of Prussian troops finished only in July 1831.⁵¹ Both 22nd and 23rd Infantry Regiments (1st and 2nd Upper Silesian) controlled the border. There was no case of desertion or refusal of service.⁵² I should mention that no military action occurred at the time, so it is not surprising that there were no cases of insubordination in the units governed with Prussian drill.

The situation was different in 1846–1848, when the Prussian army concentrated the Upper Silesian regiments in winter 1846 during the Kraków Uprising to use them in significant pacification of the Polish insurgents. The administration created at the time a mixed unit to be quartered near Mikołów and commanded by Major General von Felden. The unit was to cooperate with Austrian and ←27 | 28→Russian troops in the suppression of the Kraków Uprising. It included the 2nd Silesian Uhlan Regiment of Gliwice and Pszczyna, the 22nd Infantry Regimentof Gliwice, and the 23rd Infantry Regiment of Nysa. The unit marched out on the night of February 24 and 25, first by train and then on foot, only to cross the border and enter Kraków on March 5, already after the insurgents’ capitulation. The Upper Silesian Battalion remained there for a week under formal Austrian command and then, after a short stay near Chrzanów and Trzebinia, it gradually returned to its quarters in July 1846. Meanwhile, the administration demobilized the reserves of the remaining battalions.⁵³

Like in the previous case, no Prussian unit showed signs of lacking discipline, desertion, or reluctance СКАЧАТЬ