1918-1919 жылдардағы Ұлы Польша көтерілісі

1918 19 military insurrection in German occupied Greater Poland
other uprisings in Greater Poland

The Greater Poland uprising of 1918–1919, or Wielkopolska uprising of 1918–1919 (powstanie wielkopolskie 1918–1919 roku; Großpolnischer Aufstand) or Posnanian War was a military insurrection of Poles in the Greater Poland region (German: Grand Duchy of Posen or Provinz Posen) against German rule. The uprising had a significant effect on the Treaty of Versailles, which granted a reconstituted Second Polish Republic the area won by the Polish insurrectionists. The region had been part of the Kingdom of Poland and then Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth before the 1793 Second Partition of Poland when it was annexed by the German Kingdom of Prussia. It had also, following the 1806 Greater Poland uprising, been part of the Duchy of Warsaw (1807–1815), a French puppet state during the Napoleonic Wars.

After the Third Partition of Poland in 1795, Poland had ceased to exist as an independent state. From 1795 through the beginning of World War I, several unsuccessful uprisings to regain independence took place. The Great Poland Uprising of 1806 was followed by the creation of the Duchy of Warsaw, which lasted for eight years before it was partitioned again between Prussia and Russia. Under German rule, Poles faced systematic discrimination and oppression. The Poles living in the region of Greater Poland were subjected to Germanisation and land confiscations to make way for German colonization. At the end of World War I, US President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points and the idea of national self determination were met with opposition from European powers standing to lose influence or territory, such as Germany, which dominated Greater Poland. German politicians had signed an armistice leading to a ceasefire on 11 November 1918. Also, Germany had signed the with Bolshevik Russia to settle the territorial boundaries of the eastern frontiers. That treaty took into consideration of a future Polish state and so from then until the Treaty of Versailles was fully ratified in January 1920 many territorial and sovereignty issues remained unresolved. Wilson's proposal for an independent Poland initially did not set borders that could be universally accepted. Most of Poland that was partitioned and annexed to Prussia in the late 18th century was still part of Greater Germany at the close of World War I, the rest of the Kingdom of Poland being in Austria Hungary. The portion in Germany included the region of Greater Poland, of which Poznań (Posen) was a major industrial city and its capital. The majority of the population was Polish (more than 60%) and hoped to be within the borders of the new Polish state.

In late 1918, Poles hoping for a sovereign Poland started serious preparations for an uprising after abdication on 9 November 1918, which marked the end of the German Empire. The monarchy was replaced by the Weimar Republic. The uprising broke out on 27 December 1918 in Poznań, after a patriotic speech by Ignacy Paderewski, the famous pianist, who would become the Polish prime minister in 1919. The insurrectionist forces consisted of members of the Polish Military Organization, who formed the Straż Obywatelska (Citizen's Guard), later renamed as Straż Ludowa (People's Guard), which included many volunteers, who were mainly veterans of World War I. The first contingent to reach the Bazar Hotel, from where the uprising was initiated, was a 100 strong force from wildecka kompania Straży Ludowej (Wilda's People's Guard) led by Antoni Wysocki. The ruling body was the Naczelna Rada Ludowa (Supreme People's Council). Initially, the members of the council, including Captain Stanisław Taczak and General Józef Dowbor Muśnicki were against the uprising, but they changed their minds in support of the insurrection on 9 January 1919. The timing was advantageous for the insurrectionists since between late 1918 and early 1919, internal conflict had weakened Germany, and many of its soldiers and sailors engaged in mutinous actions against the state. Demoralized by the signing of the armistice on 11 November 1918, the new German government was further embroiled in subduing the German Revolution. By 15 January 1919, Poles had taken control of most of the province, and they engaged in heavy fighting with the regular German army and irregular units such as the Grenzschutz. Fighting continued until the renewal of the truce between the Entente and Germany on 16 February. The truce also affected the front line in Greater Poland, but despite the ceasefire, skirmishes continued until the final signing of the Treaty of Versailles on 28 June 1919. The uprising is one of the two most successful Polish uprisings, the other being the Great Poland uprising of 1806, which ended with the entry of Napoleon's army on the side of the Poles fighting against Prussia. Many of the Greater Poland insurrectionists later took part in the Silesian Uprisings against German rule, which started in late 1919 and ended in 1921.

The uprising had a significant effect on the decisions in Versailles that granted Poland not only the area won by the insurrectionists but also major cities with a significant German population like Bydgoszcz (Bromberg), Leszno (Lissa) and Rawicz (Rawitsch), as well as the lands of the Polish Corridor, which were also part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth before the First Partition of Poland in 1772 and connected Poland to the Baltic Sea. Germany's territorial losses following the Treaty of Versailles incited German revanchism, and created unresolved problems such as the status of the independent Free City of Danzig and of the Polish Corridor between East Prussia and the rest of Germany. This revanchism was not a popular political idea in the Weimar Republic. Attending to these issues was part of Adolf Hitler's political platform, but failed to gain any traction in the 1920s. The idea was relegated to the political margins, until the Nazis seized power. Nevertheless, Nazi Germany effectively recognised Poland's new borders in the German–Polish declaration of non aggression of 1934, which normalised relations between the two countries. However, after the death of Polish leader Józef Piłsudski (who was admired by Hitler), the German Anschluss with Austria and the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, Hitler unilaterally withdrew from the German Polish Non Aggression Pact and invaded Poland in 1939, which led to the outbreak of World War II.

24 March 2005: the last surviving Polish fighter in the uprising, Lieutenant Jan Rzepa, dies at the age of 106.