Silesia

• 1. Introduction

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  Silesia sits at the hinge of Central Europe, a region of roughly 40,000 square kilometers whose borders have been redrawn so many times that the same city has flown Polish, Bohemian, Habsburg, Prussian, German, and Soviet flags within a single lifetime. Today its eight million people live mostly within Poland, with smaller communities straddling the borders of the Czech Republic and Germany. What makes Silesia so difficult to summarize is the sheer density of what has happened here: Celtic settlers camped around Mount Ślęża before the Common Era; a Mongol army crushed a combined European force at Legnica in 1241; concentration camps operated alongside prisoner-of-war camps during World War II; and after 1945, nearly the entire population of the region was replaced in one of the largest forced migrations in modern history. The questions this documentary will pursue are equally large. How did a region first absorbed into the Polish state end up as part of the German Empire? What did the forced expulsions of 1945-48 actually look like on the ground? And what is left of Silesian identity when the people who gave it that identity were driven away?

• 2. The Land and Its Name

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  Mount Ślęża rises in mid-southern Silesia, and long before it had a name anyone would recognize, it served as a place of cult for pagan communities in the region. Every version of Silesia's name, in Polish, German, Czech, Latin, French, and Dutch, traces back to that mountain and the river Ślęza that runs nearby. Some Polish scholars argue the name connects to old Polish words for dampness or moisture; others tie it to the Silings, a Germanic tribe. The debate remains unresolved.

  The landscape itself is divided into two distinct personalities. Lower Silesia occupies the west, dominated by the broad valley of the Oder River and anchored by Wrocław, the region's largest city with a population of 673,923. Upper Silesia lies to the east, its terrain rising toward the Sudeten Mountains along the southern border and the Silesian Beskids at the southeastern extreme. The Katowice metropolitan area, centred on Katowice itself, forms the biggest urban concentration. Parts of the Czech city of Ostrava and the German city of Görlitz fall within Silesia's historical borders, a geographic fact that still complicates simple national maps.

  The Jelenia Góra valley, in particular, accumulated an exceptional density of castles and strongholds over the centuries, a direct consequence of the region's habit of changing hands. Whoever controlled Silesia built fortifications; whoever lost it left them behind.

• 3. A Thousand Years of Sovereignty

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  Celtic settlers reached Silesia from the south through the Kłodzko Valley in the fourth century BC, camping around Mount Ślęża near what would become Wrocław, Oława, and Strzelin. Germanic Lugii tribes appeared in written records by the first century BC. West Slavs and Lechites arrived around the 7th century and had stabilized their settlements by the early 9th century, even building boundary structures like the Silesian Przesieka and the Silesia Walls.

  In the 10th century, the Polish ruler Mieszko I of the Piast dynasty brought Silesia into the newly formed Polish state. The Diocese of Wrocław was established in 1000 as the oldest Catholic diocese in the region. Poland twice repulsed German invasions, at Niemcza in 1017 and at Głogów in 1109. But after the fragmentation of Poland in the 12th century, Silesia splintered into smaller duchies ruled by various Piast lines. The Mongol invasion of 1241 shattered the region; the combined Polish, Moravian, and German force was defeated at Legnickie Pole near Legnica, the commander Duke Henry II the Pious dying in the battle.

  Bohemia gradually absorbed the duchies, and by the 14th century Silesia was a constituent part of the Bohemian Crown Lands under the Holy Roman Empire. Polish kings did not formally renounce their hereditary rights to Silesia until 1335. The Bohemian Crown passed to the Habsburg monarchy in 1526, though individual duchies continued under Polish Piast, Jagiellon, and Sobieski rulers as formal Bohemian fiefdoms, some as late as the 17th and 18th centuries.

  Then came a single military campaign that reoriented everything. In 1742, King Frederick II of Prussia seized most of Silesia in the War of the Austrian Succession. The region formally became the Prussian Province of Silesia in 1815 and, when the German Empire was proclaimed in 1871, Silesia entered it as one of that empire's industrial heartlands. Its capital, Breslau, grew into one of Germany's major cities: a centre of Jewish life, university learning, and locomotive manufacturing.

• 4. Writing, Law, and Early Culture

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  Henry the Bearded, duke of Silesia in the early 13th century, holds an unusual place in Polish legal and cultural history. He granted the first municipal privileges in Poland to the town of Złotoryja. The legal models he developed, modeled after Lwówek Śląski and Środa Śląska, became the basis for municipal government in several Polish cities and formed two of the five local Polish variants of medieval town rights.

  Silesia also produced two of the oldest documents in the Polish language. The Book of Henryków, written in Henryków, contains the earliest known sentence in Polish. A separate document created in Wrocław holds the oldest known printed text in Polish. Both artifacts emerged from a region that would later be associated predominantly with German culture, an irony that says something about how thoroughly Silesia's demographic character would change over the following centuries.

  Walloon immigrants, among the first foreign settlers in Poland, were probably already in Wrocław by the 12th century. Henry the Bearded invited further Walloon immigrants in the early 13th century. German cultural influence began growing from the 13th century onward as settlers arrived from German-speaking states of the Holy Roman Empire. By the early 19th century, between two-thirds and three-quarters of Prussian Silesia's population spoke German, with between one-fifth and one-third speaking Polish.

• 5. Coal, Copper, and Industry

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  Coal mining in Silesia has continued without interruption since the middle of the 18th century. The industry grew while Silesia was part of Germany and peaked in the 1970s under the People's Republic of Poland, when the region became one of the world's largest coal producers. The record year for coal tonnage was 1979. The 41 coal mines that operate in Silesia are mostly part of the Upper Silesian Coal Basin, which sits in the Silesian Upland and covers an area of roughly 4,500 square kilometers. In 2008, an estimated 35 billion tonnes of lignite reserves were identified near Legnica, placing them among the largest deposits in the world.

  Iron ore has been mined in the upland areas since the fourth century BC, and the same ancient period saw lead, copper, silver, and gold extraction. The names of former mining towns encode that history directly: Złotoryja and Złoty Stok derive from the Polish word for gold, złoto; Srebrna Góra from srebro, silver. Lower Silesia features major copper mining and processing concentrated between the cities of Legnica, Głogów, Lubin, and Polkowice. Annual production figures from the region include 95 million tonnes of bituminous coal, 571,000 tonnes of copper, and 160,000 tonnes of zinc, alongside smaller quantities of silver, lead, and cadmium.

  Agriculture has been equally productive, particularly in the Opole Silesia area, which has for decades ranked first in Poland for the effectiveness of agricultural land use. The region grows wheat, rye, barley, oats, corn, potatoes, rapeseed, and sugar beets. German mass tourism to the Silesian mountains, around the areas known in German as Hirschberg and Schneekoppe, was already a recognized phenomenon during the period of German control.

• 6. Plebiscites and Partition

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  After World War I ended, Silesia became a contested border zone between the new German republic and the newly independent Second Polish Republic. The League of Nations organized a plebiscite in Upper Silesia in 1921. The result was 60% for Germany and 40% for Poland. But the vote did not settle the matter cleanly. Following the third Silesian uprising in 1921, the Entente Powers awarded the easternmost portion of Upper Silesia, including Katowice, to Poland. That territory, with its predominantly ethnic Polish population, became the Silesian Voivodeship. The German province was then divided into the provinces of Lower Silesia and Upper Silesia.

  The slice of Silesia that Austria had retained after the 18th-century wars, known as Austrian Silesia, was largely awarded to the new Czechoslovakia, where it became Czech Silesia and Trans-Olza. Most of the area around Cieszyn, however, went to Poland. These overlapping claims and split decisions would leave grievances that the following two decades would make catastrophic.

  The religious landscape of Silesia before these upheavals was roughly balanced between Catholics and Lutherans. An 1890 census of the German portion recorded Catholics at 53% and Lutherans at nearly all of the remaining 47%. Upper Silesia leaned Catholic; Lower Silesia leaned Lutheran, with the exception of the Glatzer Land. Protestants in Upper Silesia were concentrated in larger cities and tended to identify as German. The expulsions after 1945 effectively ended Silesia's Protestant tradition, as Germans formed the bulk of the Lutheran population.

• 7. Occupation, Genocide, Expulsion

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  Polish Silesia was among the first regions invaded when Germany attacked Poland in September 1939, beginning World War II. The Nazi occupation brought systematic atrocity. Two thousand Polish intellectuals, politicians, and businessmen were murdered in the Intelligenzaktion Schlesien in 1940, part of a wider Germanization campaign across Poland. Silesia also housed one of the two wartime centers where Nazis conducted medical experiments on kidnapped Polish children.

  For the Jewish population, the process was methodical extermination. Einsatzgruppe z. B.V., led by Udo von Woyrsch, and Einsatzgruppe I, led by Bruno Streckenbach, carried out executions. Between the 5th of May and the 17th of June, 20,000 Silesian Jews were sent to the gas chambers at Birkenau. During August 1942, between 10,000 and 13,000 Silesian Jews were murdered by gassing at Auschwitz. Nazi Germany operated the Gross-Rosen concentration camp in Silesia, along with major prisoner-of-war camps including Stalag VIII-A, Stalag VIII-B, and Stalag VIII-C, and thousands of forced labour camps.

  The Potsdam Conference of 1945 fixed the Oder-Neisse line as the border between Germany and Poland. Germans who had fled the fighting assumed they could return; they could not. From June 1945 to January 1947, 1.77 million Germans were expelled from Lower Silesia and 310,000 from Upper Silesia. The town of Głogów fell from a population of 33,500 to 5,000. Wrocław's population dropped by 25% between 1939 and 1966. Nearly all of the 4.5 million Silesians of German descent were expelled or fled, including around a thousand German Jews who had survived the Holocaust and returned.

  The Polish settlers who filled the void came partly from the former Polish Eastern Borderlands annexed by the Soviet Union, including refugees from the formerly Polish city of Lwów. Silesia's population did not recover to pre-war levels until the late 1970s. In the immediate aftermath, a Jewish community of 15,000 formed in Lower Silesia by autumn 1945, rising to seventy thousand by 1946 as survivors from across Poland relocated there.

• 8. Language, Identity, Aftermath

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  Silesian identity today carries the full weight of that layered history. The Silesian language, still spoken by a minority in Upper Silesia, sits at the centre of an ongoing argument: is it a dialect of Polish or a separate language? The 2011 Polish census found that Silesians constitute the largest ethnic or national minority in Poland, with Germans as the second, both groups concentrated mostly in Upper Silesia.

  Previously German-speaking Lower Silesia, emptied and repopulated, has developed a new mixed Polish dialect and, remarkably, novel folk costumes. The Lower Silesian German dialect, by contrast, is now nearing extinction as its remaining speakers age and die without the communities that once sustained the language. Czech Silesia, meanwhile, is inhabited by a mix of Czechs, Moravians, Silesians, and Poles.

  The region's administrative boundaries have been redrawn repeatedly since 1945. Since 1999, Polish Silesia has been divided between Lubusz Voivodeship, Lower Silesian Voivodeship, Opole Voivodeship, and Silesian Voivodeship. German Silesia persists as the Silesia-Lusatia region west of the Neisse, part of the federal state of Saxony. The controversies around German expulsion found a political voice in the Christian Democratic Union politician Herbert Hupka, described in the sources as one of the most notable but controversial spokesmen for expelled German Silesians. His career points to how thoroughly the events of 1945-48 outlasted the immediate postwar decades, shaping German and Polish politics well into the late 20th century.