Stories from Upper Silesia. Spór o przynależność Górnego Śląska w latach 1919–1921 w relacjach brytyjskich korespondentów prasowych
Stories from Upper Silesia. The dispute over Upper Silesia’s 1919–1921 affiliation as presented in the reports of British press correspondents

Summary/Abstract: The interest in the fate of Upper Silesia between 1919–1921 overreached Poland and Germany. Apart from the contemporary superpowers, the situation of Upper Silesia was also of great interest to the Western public opinion, including the British one. Great Britain was then an undisputed superpower not only in the military, political and economic sense but also in the field of media. Consequently, British dailies sent out numerous press correspondents whose reports were printed in the press of great opinion-forming importance and large circulation. The years 1919–1921 were a turbulent period in the history of Upper Silesia, as three armed uprisings and a plebiscite took place on its territory. The unrest of these events was enhanced by the fact that both Silesian Germans and Poles supported their countries, and also that allied occupation troops were stationed there. In addition, the plebiscite area was governed by the Inter-Allied Ruling and Plebiscite Commission, which was to develop a plan for the division of Upper Silesia. For the British public opinion, the events in Upper Silesia may have seemed quite incomprehensible. That is why the most significant British newspapers – “The Times”, “Manchester Guardian” and “Pall Mall Gazette” – sent their correspondents who then resided in Warsaw and Berlin. They were writing down their experiences, observations and descriptions of the people they met – both those significant for current events, as well as for ordinary dwellers of Upper Silesian in the period around the plebiscite. Then they were sending their accounts to Great Britain. Now these documents constitute an extremely rich source of the history of Upper Silesia, also being primary sources as some of the information provided by the correspondents has not been published anywhere else.

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