Wojciech Korfanty

Wojciech Korfaty in 1905

Wojciech Korfanty (20 April 1873 - 17 August 1939) was a Polish nationalist activist, journalist and politician, serving as member of the German Reichstag and the Prussian Landtag, later in the Polish Sejm. Briefly, he also was a paramilitary leader. He is known for organizing violent uprisings in Upper Silesia.

He was known for his irredentist policies after World War I. He fought to protect Poles from discrimination and the policy of Germanisation in Upper Silesia before the war, and was one of the chief advocates of joining Upper Silesia to Poland after the war.

Korfanty was born the son of a coal miner in Sadzawka, part of Siemianowice, in Upper Silesia, which was then German territory. From 1895 until 1901, he studied philosophy, law, and economics, first at the Technical University in Charlottenburg (Berlin) (1895) and at the (then German) University of Breslau, where Werner Sombart was among his teachers and remained on friendly terms with him for many years.

A plaque dedicated by the University of Wrocław to celebrate the 130th anniversary of Korfanty's birth in 2003. The text reads: Student of philosophy, law, and economics at Wrocław University; journalist, defender of Polishness, leader of the Silesian Uprisings; member of parliament and senator of the Polish Republic.

In 1901, Korfanty became editor-in-chief of the Polish language paper Górnoslązak (The Upper Silesian), in which he appealed to the national consciousness of the region's Polish-speaking population. In 1903, Korfanty was elected to the German Reichstag and in 1904 also to the Prussian Landtag, where he represented the independent "Polish circle" (Polskie koło). This was a significant departure from tradition, as the Polish minority in Prussia had so far predominantly supported the Catholic Centre Party in elections. As the Catholic Centre Party refused to protect Polish rights the Poles distanced themselves from the party, seeking protection elsewhere. In a polemic paper entitled Precz z Centrum ("Away with the Centre Party", 1901), Korfanty had urged the Catholic Polish-speaking minority in Germany to overcome their national indifference and shift their political allegiance from supra-national Catholicism to the cause of the Polish nation. However, Korfanty retained his Christian Democratic convictions and later returned to them in domestic Polish politics.

The collapse of the German Empire at the end of World War I in 1918 resulted in the restoration of an independent Polish state, which had not existed since 1795. In a Reichstag speech on October 25, 1918, Korfanty demanded that the Prussian provinces West Prussia (including Ermeland and the city of Gdańsk (then Danzig), Poznań (Posen), and parts of the provinces East Prussia (Masuria) and Silesia (Upper Silesia), all of which had been parts of Poland until 1795. After this date the inhabitants of these areas were under the pressure of germanization for years.

After the war, during the Great Poland Uprising, Korfanty became a member of the Naczelna Rada Ludowa (Supreme People's Council) in Poznań, and a member of the Polish provisional parliament, the Constituanta-Sejm. He was also the head of the Polish plebiscite committee in Upper Silesia. In 1921 he was one of the leaders of the Third Silesian Uprising — a Polish insurrection against German rule in Upper Silesia, roughly half of which was eventually attached to Poland. Korfanty was occused by some Germans of organizing terrorism against German civilians in Upper Silesia. They also occused him of ordering the murder of Silesian politician Theofil Kupka.

Korfanty was a member of the national Sejm from 1922 to 1930, and in the Silesian Sejm (1922-1935), where he represented Christian Democratic views. He opposed the autonomy of the Silesian Voivodship, which he saw as an obstacle against its integration into of Poland as a whole. However, Korfanty defended the rights of the German minority in Upper Silesia, because he believed that the prosperity of minorities enriches the whole society of the region. He briefly acted as vice prime minister in the government of Wincenty Witos (October-December 1923). From 1924, he resumed his journalist activities as editor-in-chief of the papers Rzeczpospolita ("The Republic", not to be confused with the modern paper of the same name) and Polonia. He opposed the May Coup of Józef Piłsudski and his subsequent establishment of Sanacja government from a Christian Democratic position. In 1930, he was arrested and imprisoned in the Brest-Litovsk fortress, together with other leaders of the Centrolew, an alliance of left-wing and centrist parties in opposition to the ruling government.

In 1935, he finally left Poland and emigrated to Czechoslovakia, from where he participated in the center-right Morges Front group formed by émigrés Ignacy Paderewski and Władysław Sikorski. After the German invasion of the Czechoslovakia, Korfanty moved on to France. He returned to Poland in April 1939, after Nazi Germany had cancelled the Polish-German non-aggression pact of 1934, hoping that the renewed threat to Polish independence would help overcome the domestic political cleavage. However, he was arrested immediately upon arrival. In August, he was released as unfit for prison due to his bad health, and died shortly afterwards, two weeks before World War II began with the German invasion of Poland. Although his cause of death remain unclear, it has been claimed that the treatment he received in prison caused his health to deteriorate.

After 1945, when the Polish communists sought legitimation as champions and guarantors of Polish independence, Korfanty was finally rehabilitated as a national hero due to his fight to protect the Polish population in Upper Silesia from discrimination and his efforts to join the Polish population in Silesia to Poland. Today, many streets, places and institutions are named after him. When Opole Silesia became part of Poland in 1945, the town of Friedland in Opole Silesia was renamed Korfantów in his honour.