European History Quarterly

43(2) 279–300

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The Author(s) 2013

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DOI: 10.1177/0265691413478095

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Article

‘Jammin’ with Karlik’: The
German-Polish ‘Radio War’
and the Gleiwitz
‘Provocation’, 1925–1939

Peter Polak-Springer

Qatar University, Qatar

Abstract
This essay aims to shed light on the role of radio in state territorial conflicts during the
interwar era, a topic that has hardly received serious attention from scholars. Its focus is on
the use of radio in the German-Polish contest over the Upper Silesian borderland. State
actors of both countries built radio stations at the border with the explicit aim of integrat-
ing the largely culturally-mixed and ‘nationally indifferent’ population of locals on both sides
of the borderland into – and thereby to secure the whole region for – their nation. A ‘radio
war’ thus erupted by 1927, as the two sides competed against one another in this effort, and
it lasted to the very end of the interwar era. This essay focuses its analysis on the pro-
grammes of the Polish Radio Katowice as they were broadcast over and received in
German Upper Silesia. It demonstrates that contrary to the views of Polish nationalists,
the popularity of this radio station stemmed not so much from widespread Polish con-
sciousness as the quality of the programmes and popularity of the performers.

Keywords
Borderlands, nationalism, radio, Upper Silesia, German-Polish relations, nationalization,
regionalism, irredentism, national indifference, politics of language

On 15 November 1925 German local administrators and national ministers gath-
ered for the ceremonial opening of the broadcast relay station in Gleiwitz, located
about nine miles from the Polish border in the region of Upper Silesia. According
to their statements, this contraption was to be a ‘fantastic means’ to help the
eastern area of Upper Silesia ceded to Poland in 1922 ‘to integrate itself ever
more with its [German] motherland’, since ‘Upper Silesia can only live as one
whole with and through Germany’.

1

Because Gleiwitz would strengthen the

Corresponding author:
Peter Polak-Springer, Qatar University, Humanities Department, P.O. Box 2713, Doha, Qatar.
Emails: [e-mail]; [e-mail]

broadcast signal of the main station of Silesia, Radio Breslau, and thus allow
German irredentist propaganda to be heard all over a strongly Germanophile
Polish Silesia, the Poles took to building their own radio station some six miles
away from the border. In 1927, the Polish Radio Katowice (PRK) opened with a
broadcasting signal that was eight times stronger than that of the Gleiwitz relay
station. Surrounded by provincial government and clerical elites, during the inaug-
ural celebration in December, the Silesian voivode (governor) Michal Graz_yn´ski
‘emphasized that the new and powerful station will be the best connector between
Poland and the thousands of Poles, who, unfortunately, were left behind the border
cordon’.

2

The German media regarded the opening of a radio station of such

strength and so close to the contested border as a provocation and declared that
the Poles had launched a ‘radio war’ against Germany.

3

In this article, my aim is to shed light on the role of radio in the contestation of

borderlands during the interwar era. Far from merely serving as just another means
to echo the propaganda otherwise disseminated in print, this technological novelty
shaped the nature of how nation-states contested and nationalized borderlands. As
I intend to demonstrate, radio became a critical instrument through which political
actors representing national interests exerted their cultural and political influence
upon their neighbouring nation’s borderlands to which they had claims. As such,
this media technology marked an important catalyst of what Rogers Brubaker
referred to as ‘external homeland nationalism’, or the state policy of maintaining
formal ties with communities of ‘ethnic kin’ residing in neighbouring nations.

4

At

the same time, radio also shaped the character of this phenomenon in several ways.
In one respect, it strengthened the influence and increased the role of political
actors at the regional level in international affairs. In another, it gave the nation-
state a powerful means to support the irredentist politics of its own ethnic minority
organizations within the borders of the neighbouring nation, as well as to interfere
with and impede the latter’s efforts to nationally integrate its own borderlands.
Thus, all the more on account of this new media, the nationalizing work of the
nation-state within its own borderlands was transformed from a ‘domestic affair’
into an inherently transnational contest. Ordinary borderland residents were not
just bystanders but active agents in these nation-state contests over borderlands. In
provinces such as Upper Silesia, where strong regional rootedness and relative
indifference to the nation was widespread, the German-Polish ‘radio war’ to
some extent helped locals resist each nation-state’s forceful policies of national
homogenization and centralization. As I will demonstrate in the last section
here, the Polish Radio Katowice’s programming aimed at countering Nazi
‘Germanization’ policies gave locals (native Upper Silesians) a seldom-found alter-
native discourse to the official one that the regime imposed on them.

In stark contrast to the sizeable research on interwar territorial strife in Central

Europe, the role of radio in these heated international conflicts has been largely
neglected in scholarship. Scholars of Polish-German relations have treated the role
of this media only in brief overview, and with regard to their attention to the
content of radio programmes, have not looked beyond lectures and readings.

5

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European History Quarterly 43(2)

One of my goals in this article is to shed light on the multifarious nature of irre-
dentist radio propaganda. Borderland radio stations aimed not only to ‘awaken’
national spirits by regurgitating printed propaganda through another medium, but
also strove to be entertaining. To lure audiences on the neighbouring nation’s side
of the border, they offered music, theatre, comedy and performances by talented
entertainers. As I demonstrate below, the main reason for the PRK’s popularity on
the German side of the border was not the widespread appeal of Polish national-
ism, but rather the wit, charm and popularity of one leading radio figure, Stanislaw
Ligon´. Since the relevant radio stations left few records of the content of their
programmes, I am forced to draw on the press, radio periodicals and the records
left behind by the state agents (police, local government, consulates) of the obser-
ving competing nation. Even these records do not allow me to give equal attention
to the work and impacts of both the German and Polish radio stations, but have
forced me – after offering a broad overview in the first section of this essay – to
focus on the role of the PRK in German Upper Silesia, first before 1933 and then
during the Nazi era and the last years before World War II. For the sake of sim-
plicity, I refer to the German part of the borderland as the Provinz (after Provinz
Oberschlesien) and the Polish part as the Voivodeship (after Wojewo´dztwo S´la˜sk).

A Struggle for the Soul

‘The Germans were merely getting a taste of their own medicine.’ They had forged
a ‘radio powder keg’ that only ‘naturally exploded for the first time in Poland’.
Such was the response of one Polish newspaper in the Provinz to charges by the
German media that Poland was responsible for beginning the ‘radio war’.

6

In

actuality, a transnational culture of building radio stations at or near border
areas, and often gearing them in a ‘struggle for the soul’ of the residents living
on both sides of the border there, had developed by the late 1920s. In Germany,
such stations were constructed in Aachen, Breslau (Wroclaw), Freiburg, Flensburg,
Ko¨nigsberg (Kaliningrad), Go¨rlitz (Zgorzelec), and Kiel; in Poland they broadcast
from Lwo´w (Lviv), Wilno (Vilnus), Cracow, Luck (Lutsk) and Lo´dz.

7

While also a

part of this trend, Upper Silesian radio stations were lent even greater urgency due
to the region’s economic value. Neither Germany nor Poland were satisfied with
the Allied partition of the region in 1922 (with the Germans particularly vocal in
rejecting their pre-war borderland), and calls for the return of the other part of the
border were widespread in the government and society of both countries. The
airwaves came to be a suitable forum for this irredentism.

The establishment of the two radio stations at the Upper Silesian border turned

the bilateral territorial conflict into a fight over broadcasting air space. The PRK
initiated the contest on the day it opened, transmitting its signal at 12 kilowatts, far
greater than the 0.7 kw of the Gleiwitz relay station (and 10 kw of Radio Breslau).
Pressured by official complaints that Poland had already ‘won the radio war’, in
1928 the Reich-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft increased the Gleiwitz station’s strength to
one roughly matching that of its Polish contender.

8

Soon after coming to power,

Polak-Springer

281

the Nazis initiated their offensive in this contest, first raising the strength of Radio
Breslau to 100 kw in 1934, and opening up a new and improved relay station in
Gleiwitz the following year – the site of the infamous regime-staged ‘provocation’
four years later.

9

The nationalist governor of the Voivodeship and main inspiration

behind the PRK, Michal Graz_yn´ski, followed suit, opening a technologically revo-
lutionary headquarters for Katowice’s station in 1936, and increasing its signal
strength from 12 to 50 kw just two months before the outbreak of World War II.

10

In general, Germany had a significantly higher volume of radio owners than did

Poland, and this was also the case for the Provinz in comparison to the
Voivodeship. While there were over 16,600 individuals with radio sets in the
German part of the borderland in the fall of 1927, there were only close to 1550
counterparts in the other part in early 1928. While the size of this group was close
to 40 per cent of the population in the Provinz by July of 1939, it was only 9 per
cent of that of the Voivodeship at the time. Nevertheless, Poles in the Voivodeship
were far more likely to own radios than those in other parts of Poland, while in
comparison to the rest of Germany, radio ownership in the Provinz was relatively
sparse.

11

Such statistics nonetheless fail to accurately measure the number of actual

listeners, which was likely to be much greater on each side, since listening to the
radio was a group activity. State officials on each side were proud of the exponen-
tially growing radio audiences, though of course in actuality they had no control
over which national radio stations their citizens chose to listen to.

Certainly the major point of contention of the ‘radio war’ was the content aired

in German and Polish programmes. Radio Breslau, the main broadcaster of the
programmes delivered via the Gleiwitz relay station, and the PRK, which was its
own broadcasting unit, occasionally served as venues of blatant irredentist and
nationalist propaganda aimed against the neighbouring nation. For example, by
1928, these stations started to give coverage to the rallies commemorating the
anniversary of the Upper Silesian plebiscite (21 March, observed mainly in
Germany) and of the third Silesian uprising (3 May, commemorated mainly in
Poland), which served as a major transnational forum for such provocative dis-
courses. Otherwise, news reports and educational programmes on the historical,
ethnographic and sociological character of Upper Silesia and larger ‘German East’
and ‘Polish Western Territories’ were often saturated with irredentist ideology.
Such programmes promoted well-known malicious images of the ‘Germans/
Poles’ – such as the German ‘carrier of culture’ (to the east) myth, and the
Polish myth of centuries of struggle against German oppression. They also pre-
sented a variety of scholarly narratives of the contested borderland as inherently
tied to Germany/Poland. The dissemination of irredentist propaganda by both
radio stations drove the heads of the Reich-Rundfunkgesellschaft and the Polskie
Radio

to sign several agreements to limit such ‘politically sensitive’ programming.

These were signed in October 1927, March of 1931, and as part of the German-
Polish Nonaggression Pact on 10 November 1934.

12

On the German side of the

border, various irredentist borderland groups such as the United Societies of Upper
Silesian Homeland (Heimat) Patriots (Die Vereinigte Verba¨nde heimattreuer

282

European History Quarterly 43(2)

Oberschlesier

, VVHO) likewise exerted their influence on radio programmes. Led

by the eminent regional folklorist and nationalist, Karl Sczodrok, another group
that collaborated with the first, the Union for Upper Silesian Heimat Studies
(Vereinigung der oberschlesischen Heimatkunde) promoted the history and culture
of this borderland in a Prussian and German, but not a Polish, guise. According to
Adelheid von Saldern, Radio Breslau’s broadcasts of this official regionalism was
part of a larger ‘Volk and Heimat’ tradition booming in the German media by the
late 1920s, which advocated the cultivation of age-old regional, local and populist
ways in reaction to commercialized pop-culture and ‘Americanization’.

13

In Upper Silesia the German ‘Volk und Heimat’ tradition and its Polish equiva-

lent of ‘regionalizm’ (regionalism) served yet another critical common function:
they competed against one another in an effort to nationalize a largely bilingual,
culturally mixed, and ‘nationally indifferent’ – or rather, primarily regionally-
oriented population.

14

Since each side shared this agenda, in this borderland

even seemingly non-political content that was commonly broadcasted over the
radio anywhere in the world, such as music, theatre, and literature readings,
became an object of political contention. German and Polish state agents referred
to high cultural and educational programming as ‘cultural propaganda’ and con-
sidered its purpose to be inherently irredentist: to persuade borderland residents to
favour one nation at the cost of the other.

15

The PRK seemed to be enjoying rapid

success in doing this to Poland’s advantage, as we shall see below.

Nationalizing with Humour

In December 1927 Stanislaw Ligon´ (1879–1954) made his on-air debut at the
Polskie Radio Katowice. He was already a well-known figure on account of his
activism for the Polish national camp during the plebiscite struggle in Upper Silesia
of 1920–1921. At that time, he edited the popular satirical, cartoon-filled news-
paper, Kocynder (Lazy Bones) using the pen name, ‘Karlik’, and authored many of
the pro-Polish propaganda posters, which remain perhaps the most popular rem-
nant of the plebiscite struggle today.

16

Born into a nationally-conscious Polish

family in the city of Ko¨nigshu¨tte (Chorzo´w), which became part of the
Voivodeship after 1922, he went on to study in Berlin, and was known for his
talents as a painter, playwright, Polish nationalist activist, and politician, a role in
which he represented the pro-Graz_yn´ski (Silesian Sanacja) party. But his fame
arose from his career as a radio broadcaster.

Next to his personal talent as an entertainer, his particular appeal stemmed from

his native Upper Silesian origins, which allowed him to appreciate the local men-
tality, the predominant Slavophone dialect (so-called Wasserpolnisch), and, most
importantly, the regional humour. These attributes allowed Ligon´ to tap into many
of the cultural features that made Upper Silesia into a region-wide community,
which transcended the arbitrarily-drawn German-Polish border. He was thereby
able to attract listeners from east of Katowice in Poland all the way to the outskirts
of Breslau in Germany.

17

Polak-Springer

283

Graz_yn´ski made good use of Ligon´ and his multiple talents for his own irreden-

tist agenda. In addition to the PRK, Ligon´ was also active in other organizations
and institutions of ‘regionalizm’, including the Silesian Museum, Silesian Institute
(for the social sciences), and the Defense Union of the Western Borderlands
(Zwia˜zek Obrony Kreso´w Zachodnich, ZOKZ). On the radio, Ligon´ served to pro-
mote this official Polish-Silesianism by often speaking in a ‘Wasserpolnisch’ dialect
deliberately ‘cleansed’ of many of its German words and Germanisms so as to
make it ‘of little difference from high-national Polish’. One of the gems of ‘regio-
nalizm

’, this standardized regional linguistic form was called the ‘gwara S´la˜ska’, or

Silesian dialect, and depicted as a mere regional variant of high Polish.

18

Even as he

spoke it with ‘Polonized’ inflections, Ligon´ was widely understood across the
region. Indeed, his use of the dialect marked one of the factors that gave him
the kind of appeal across Upper Silesia that hardly any other radio speaker
enjoyed.

Ligon´’s promotion of a distinct ‘Silesian humour’ in regularly aired radio pro-

grammes, including ‘Silesian Fairy Tales and Stories’ and ‘Jammin’ with Karlik’,
was particularly well received by his audiences.

19

As ‘Karlik’, he cracked jokes,

recited poetry, and sung the newsreel in numerous satirical and comical
programmes. The line between politics and humour in his remarks was often a

Figure 1. Stanisław ‘Karlik’ Ligon´ (second from right in the front row) during a radio broad-
cast, 1938. Courtesy of Andrzej Sas-Jaworski.

284

European History Quarterly 43(2)

hazy one. Indeed, on most occasions he just wanted to give his audience cheap
thrills. One joke provides an illustrative example. A German boasted to a Pole
about Nazi Germany’s technological accomplishments, insisting that machines in
Berlin could receive a cow in one end and issue a can of meat from the other. A
Pole responded by describing an even more remarkable invention in Warsaw: a
machine in which one places a can of meat in one end, and a cow turns out at the
other.

20

Records from the police who listened to his programmes on the German

side of the border demonstrate that occasionally ‘Karlik’ slipped into the forbidden
realm of ‘political sensitivity’ and risked being accused of violating international
radio conventions. In late March of 1928, Karlik told the following joke: a dog had
taught a rooster to bark, then discovered that a barking rooster sounded like a
Polish child who had learned German at a German minority school.

21

It was his

means of highlighting the nationalist ZOKZ’s propaganda that the German minor-
ity in the Voivodeship was using its League of Nations-sanctioned rights to estab-
lish its own schools to ‘Germanize’ the souls of ‘Polish’ local children. At other
moments, he very clearly stood right within the ‘sensitive’ zone and made blatantly
irredentist remarks, such as, ‘Oh, Piast folk [referring to Upper Silesians] planted
by God all the way to the Oder River, defend this Polishness until one day
Zygmunt’s Bell [from atop Wawel Castle in Cracow] calls for you’.

22

During the 1930s, Ligon´ became a region-wide celebrity, whose popularity

only increased as the clouds of intolerant German nationalism gathered over
western Upper Silesia. According to reports from the Polish consulate, ‘Ligon´
and his dialect . . . and humorous histories are listened to in S´la˜sk Opolski
[or German Upper Silesia] without regard to political party membership –
indeed, even by Nazis – and to such a degree that crowds of people gather
around every radio’.

23

In the Provinz, ‘Karlik’ had his own fan club.

24

And

while on the air, he boasted of his transnational popularity by reading letters
from fans on the German side of the border.

25

At public gatherings in

the Provinz, such as theatre performances, vendors sold ‘Karlik’ paraphernalia,
including photographs and caricatures of Ligon´, publications of his joke books,
plays, and art work to the public.

26

Under the sway of Graz_yn´ski and the

ZOKZ, the Upper Silesian section of the Union of Poles in Germany (Zwia˜zek
Polako´w

w

Niemczech

, ZPwN), the main Polish minority organization,

worked hard to fan the flames of the radio comic’s popularity. According to
its leaders, ‘Ligon´’s auditions in the gwara S´la˜ska are a very important aspect
of our propaganda in S´la˜sk Opolski [German Upper Silesia], and something
that German propaganda does not possess, as out of standard operating principles,
it is promoted exclusively in the German language’.

27

Indeed, here they had a point

that distressed the German regional government, dominated by the centrist
Catholic People’s Party (Katholische Volkspartei, KVP) during the Weimar era.
Fearful of the influence of Ligon´’s ‘Upper Silesian chat fabricated in Polish’ – as
the centrist press referred to it – the head of the KVP, Father Carl Ulitzka, called
on Radio Breslau to air German programming in the ‘Wasserpolnisch’ dialect as a
way of countering the PRK. His appeals fell on deaf ears, as Radio Breslau’s

Polak-Springer

285

directors remained committed to promoting the German language in the
borderlands.

28

One assumption that Polish and German government officials shared – to the

former’s pride and latter’s alarm – was that the widespread listening to ‘Karlik’ was
turning ‘nationally indifferent’ Upper Silesians into Poles. This view was problem-
atic in the light of official reports on listening patterns, which point out that the
ordinary listeners were considerably less eager to tune in to the cultural or political
programming from Warsaw that was also commonly broadcast over the PRK.

29

If anything, their consumption of ‘Karlik’ demonstrates their identification with
regional over Polish high-national ways. Locals also tuned in to the Upper Silesian
comic for pure thrills and entertainment, rather than cultural or political enlight-
enment. According to one official German report, ‘Karlik’ was being listened to
because his auditions ‘exhilarate and amuse the radio listener’.

30

Thus, rather than

doing one of the things that Graz_yn´ski expected of the PRK, to ‘destroy’ what he
called ‘the nightmare of provincialism’ – or in other words, ‘national indifference’ –
Ligon´ was actually only reinforcing this identity by uniting his listeners in a cross-
border regional community.

31

While this regionalism aimed to make locals less

Silesian and more national (e.g. Polish), it was possible for them to consume it
in such a way as to remain more of the former and less of the latter. This they did as
a means to safeguard their provincial ways against Nazi homogenization and cen-
tralization policies, without necessarily becoming Polish patriots, a topic I turn to
next.

War on the Air

Rather than intensifying the ‘radio war’, the Nazi rise to power mollified it by way
of the radio agreements signed as part of the German-Polish Nonaggression Pact.
The two sides once again agreed not only to keep politically disturbing discourse
off the airwaves, but also to engage in an exchange of broadcasting one another’s
cultural programming.

32

Only after the expiration of the Geneva Convention on

15 July 1937 did the propaganda war over the airwaves grow heated again – and
particularly so in the last year before the war’s outbreak. This set of international
measures had guaranteed rights of cultural self-determination to Upper Silesians
on both sides of the border, protecting this population, including Jews, from forced
assimilation and other forms of repression at the hands of the state. Its termination
gave the Nazis and Graz_yn´skiites wider freedoms to carry out their ambitions of
cultural, ethnic and political homogenization. The PRK took to rebutting and
encouraging resilience to Hitler’s more radical politics of ‘Germanization’
(Eindeutschung) by way of propaganda and ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the Provinz. The
‘radio war’ had thus now entered a new phase in which this medium was used to
interfere directly with the policies of the neighbouring state.

At the beginning of June of 1938, the PRK initiated a programme series specif-

ically geared towards addressing the populace of western Upper Silesia, entitled
‘Behind the Border’ (Za Miedza˜).

33

It marked a venue through which pro-Polish

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European History Quarterly 43(2)

activists could give locals of the Provinz an alternative source of information to the
propaganda they were being fed by the Nazi regime and its own organization
devoted to ‘guarding’ the ‘endangered’ eastern border provinces, the Union of
the German East (Bund der Deutschen Osten, BDO). One of the programme’s
aims was to encourage this population to resist using the new ‘German’ place
names the BDO had introduced, to refuse to ‘Germanize’ their ‘Polish-sounding’
surnames at this organization’s behest, and to defy other measures of forced assimi-
lation. Making a guest appearance on this programme, the Polish literartus and
author of a Polono-centrist work on the folklore of western Upper Silesia,
Stanislaw Wasylewski, commented on how the BDO was instructing locals to
speak ‘only German’ and propagating that for millennia this region was inhabited
by ‘German blood relatives of superior civilizational character’. ‘These Germans
are quite strange if they have to be invited to speak German’, Wasylewski com-
mented sarcastically, and ‘it is quite strange that one hardly shouts that Hannover
or Brandenburg are German, but with regard to Upper Silesia, this message is
repeated to death’.

34

During another broadcast aired in the summer of 1938, a

less notable speaker told of how the BDO’s politics of ‘Germanization’ were having
the opposite effect: locals in the Provinz were actually more conscious and proud in
their use of the original names of places and their own native first and family
names, even if these had been officially changed, and in speaking to one another
in ‘Polish’. (In actuality, they more commonly spoke in an often significantly
Germanized Slavophone ‘Wasserpolnisch’, but in a further attempt to nationally
appropriate the latter, Polish nationalists commonly referred to it as ‘Polish’.) This
speaker ended by telling the story of how Nazism had caused one Catholic priest
from the Provinz, who had been an activist of the German KVP to abandon his
sympathies with the latter and ‘return’ to being a conscious Pole.

35

Exposing the

rifts in the logic of Nazi propaganda and telling stories in which the moral was that
ordinary individuals were defying ‘Germanization’ and turning themselves into
Poles, the PRK was trying to encourage locals to follow its example. To facilitate
this further, the programme also briefed the public of their rights under German
law, which did not require them to replace their ‘Slavic-sounding’ with ‘German’
family names, and encouraged them to resist similar regime pressures.

36

One of the most important episodes of PRK interference with ‘Germanization’

policy was the census contest in the Provinz in the first half of May of 1939. In this
borderland where most of the populace was bilingual, and thus exhibited the core
‘objective’ characteristic of both German and Polish nationality, census-taking
campaigns were highly political affairs. Data collections were often accompanied
by terror and propaganda as political activists in both parts of the region worked to
pressure and persuade locals to identify themselves only as nationals of the nation
in which they lived and were citizens. The stakes in this effort were high for state
actors on both sides of the border: if their own citizens had declared the nationality
of the rival nation-state, it would have only strengthened the legitimacy of the
latter’s claims to the borderland and weakened those of the opposite side.
And so, throughout the interwar era, German and Polish state actors used all

Polak-Springer

287

kinds of manipulation and chicanery to maximize the number of their nationals,
and minimize those of their neighbour. The data collection campaign in the
Voivodeship (and throughout Poland) in late 1931 marked one of the first major
censuses in which government agents utilized heated propaganda, threats, and even
violence, to intimidate locals into declaring the ‘correct’ mother tongue and nation-
ality. These tactics and other manipulation allowed the official census statistics to
reflect that Silesia was ‘the most Polish region in Poland’, when in actuality the
opposite was more the case.

37

The German census of 17 May 1939 was preceded by

a crackdown on ‘Poles’ and ‘Polish behaviour’ and a propaganda barrage calling
on all to declare German nationality. Opened in 1936, the new Gleiwitz relay tower
played an important role in this effort to influence how individuals filled out their
census questionnaires.

Stanislaw Ligon´ mobilized the PRK to counter this propaganda head-on.

‘Behind the Border’ worked to expose the chicanery and manipulative motives
inherent in this census count to the wider public. It declared that ‘there will be
no doubt that the number of Poles will be extraordinarily low’ in the outcome since
the aim here is to ‘give proof . . . that the number of Poles [in Germany] is too low to
be called a minority’.

38

In an effort to prevent this from happening, Radio

Katowice joined the Polish press and ZPwN grassroots agitators to encourage
locals in the Provinz to defy this latest ‘Germanization’ policy by declaring
‘Polish’

as

both

their

mother

tongue

and

their

‘national

belonging’

(Volkszugeho¨rigkeit). Romantic nationalist mythology, including the belief that
this was just another episode of the ‘Polish’ Upper Silesian people’s ‘seven cen-
tury-long struggle against Germanization’, marked an important aspect of this
propaganda.

39

The German media was quick to respond to the PRK’s interference with its

census-taking campaign by threatening locals with prison lock-ups if they ‘falsified’
their declarations by stating ‘Polish’ as mother tongue and nationality. This coun-
ter-attack also deployed an interesting tactic. In the days before the census, the
Gleiwitz relay station declared that the people of Upper Silesia (Oberschlesien)
spoke in ‘Oberschlesisch’, a dialect (Mundart) which they represented as closer to
German than Polish, and barely comprehensible to Poles in general. This assertion
was hardly new: German nationalists had a history of representing the Slavophone
dialect that even they simultaneously referred to as ‘Wasserpolnisch’ (watered-down
Polish) as inherently Germanic and non-Polish.

40

Widely used in local private life

in the Industrial District and countryside of the Provinz, this dialect was Polish in
its syntax, but – particularly as it was spoken in the industrial areas – strongly
mixed in Germanic and Slavic words, inflections and expressions. Since 1933, the
Nazis had used threats and intimidation to try to stamp it out of existence, precisely
because to them it sounded too ‘Polish’ for their comfort. Having largely failed in
this effort, on the eve of the census-taking campaign of 1939 they sought to appro-
priate this dialect for German cultural heritage. Referring to it as ‘Oberschlesisch’
rather than ‘Wasserpolnisch’ marked one important step in this direction. Indeed,
this effort was in large part meant as a counter-attack against the PRK, which

288

European History Quarterly 43(2)

represented this dialect as the ‘gwara S´la˜ska’, a mere regional variant of high
Polish. The Nazis were interested in legitimating the dialect only temporarily and
strictly for census-taking purposes. Through the radio and by way of other media
forms, the BDO urged locals who refused to declare ‘German’ as their mother
tongue to report ‘Oberschlesisch’ instead, an option that likewise called for their
declaration of German nationality.

41

The long-term consequences of the German-Polish struggle to influence the

outcome of the census in the Provinz were not as significant as were the immediate
ones. Indeed, by the time the final results of the count were known, the Nazi
regime’s occupation of Poland and forceful liquidation of all Polish organizations
in Upper Silesia made them practically insignificant.

42

According to reports by the

Nazis’ underground opponents in Gleiwitz, locals also regarded the whole census-
taking affair to be a politically orchestrated farce, and compared it to the equally
bogus elections and referendums the regime had held in past years.

43

However, they

certainly did not forget that the media had officially legitimated their local dialect,
and, from then on and into the war years, reminded authorities of this whenever
the latter made any attempts to compromise their linguistic rights. The census
taking campaign was hardly over before regime officials again resumed their
effort to stamp out what they continued to refer to as ‘Wasserpolnisch’. This
caused conflicts in the coal mines, as managers tried to get reluctant workers to
speak ‘only German’ as the BDO demanded. According to one eyewitness account:

[I]n the coal mines these discussions of ‘Polish-Oberschlesisch’ take place on an almost
daily basis, and our buddies [and fellow workers] do not let [the authorities] prohibit
their ‘Oberschlesisch’. Our friends say that ‘Oberschlesisch’ is now the ‘mother tongue’
of conversation. And so does the Union of German Oxen [Bund der Deutschen Ochsen,
the popular derogatory term for the BDO], which had deemed ‘Oberschlesisch’ the
equivalent of a German dialect.

44

To note an example of such a conflict, in early July in the Delbru¨ck coal mines in
Gleiwitz managers reproached a group of workers for speaking ‘Polish’ to one
another. The men lashed back:

[W]hat do you want from us? It’s just Oberschlesisch, and it’s not forbidden. If you
don’t believe us, then we’ll bring you fliers tomorrow, in case you haven’t already
heard it on the radio. And get used to it, because we’re not going to let anyone forbid
us from speaking Oberschlesisch.

45

In the nearby coal mines of Guidogrube, a management trustee was even laughed
out of the room by close to one hundred workers after they had made the same
point to him.

46

These efforts to counter the Nazis’ politics of ethnic cleansing serve

as a prime example of how far from swallowing wholesale the discourse of one
national radio station or the other, ordinary Upper Silesians exploited official
propaganda to safeguard their own culture and identity.

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289

While encouraging resistance to the Nazis marked one important goal of the

PRK’s broadcasts over the Provinz, the ultimate aim here was to win the hearts and
minds of the public for Poland. Radio Katowice had used a number of tactics to
stir up sympathy with Poland, most notably promoting the Polish cause in Silesia
as one which defended long-standing Catholic religious traditions against Nazi
secularism, ‘neo-paganism’ and anti-clericalism. German and Polish official propa-
ganda was largely in accord in its assertion that the worship of Catholic masses in
the Polish language – which, according to BDO estimates, accounted for roughly
half of such services held in the countryside even as late as 1938 – marked a gesture
of Polish consciousness and patriotism.

47

This view, indeed all the more so since it

was endorsed for irredentist propaganda by the eastern neighbour, legitimated
the Nazis’ attitude to Catholic religiosity – much like their view of the
Slavophone dialect – as a threat to German interests in the borderland. This
strengthened the regime’s resolve to harass and persecute clerics and worshipers
and to use terror and propaganda to discourage public religiosity. To defy the
regime, particularly in its war against public worship in the Polish language, the
PRK broadcast Sunday masses and pilgrimages from Poland.

48

It also gave radio

coverage to masses and rallies organized by the ZPwN on the top of Mount of St
Anne (Annaberg/Go´ra s´wie¸tej Anny), the most important site of pilgrimage and
worship in the Provinz, and at the same time the main Nazi nationalist lieu de
me´moire

in this region. Although locals defiantly resisted Nazi anti-Catholicism,

they did not do so by joining the Polish minority, but rather by engaging in pil-
grimages and processions on their own. As Jim Bjork and Robert Gerwarth
pointed out, religiosity experienced a revival on the eve of the war in German
Upper Silesia.

49

Contrary to the assumptions of German and Polish nationalists,

widespread engagement in religious worship did not denote a rising pro-Polish
spirit among locals, but rather only demonstrated the latter’s resolve to preserve
age-old regional customs.

Another reason why the PRK had limited success in ‘Polonizing’ local con-

sciousness was that Graz_yn´ski’s own nationalist politics inadvertently provided a
centrifugal force to this effort. Largely in reaction to the Nazis, and in echo of the
general right-wing turn in Poland after the death of Pilsudski, in the late 1930s, the
voivode stepped up his already long-running persecution of the Volksbund and
other German organizations, as well as ‘German behaviour’ among ordinary indi-
viduals. Word of firings from jobs, blacklistings, denial of border crossing rights
and violence against the ruling faction’s ethnically and politically ‘unwanted’ –
along with news of the unpopularity of Graz_yn´ski among locals and also of the
non-Silesian Polish elite that he favoured – all easily got around across the border.
According to reports by Nazi opponents in Gleiwitz, ‘everyone has relatives on the
other side whom [Polish border guards] have refused a visit,’ which ‘makes it
hardly doubtful that in Poland terror is promoted against Germans.’

50

The German radio had a field day in helping to promote the reports of,
and indeed, doing all it could to exaggerate, what Nazi propaganda referred
to as Poland’s ‘war of destruction’ (Vernichtungskrieg) against ‘Germandom’.

51

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European History Quarterly 43(2)

While this propaganda may have helped to keep locals from flocking to Polish
banners, it certainly hardly assuaged widespread resentment against the Nazis.

The one figure who unequivocally benefited from the tense political atmosphere

was Stanislaw ‘Karlik’ Ligon´, the nationalist who spoke with a regionalist voice.
Indeed, according to the sources of Nazi and anti-Nazi German agents, his popu-
larity was only heightened as a result of the regime’s increasing intolerance towards
regional ways. As the Landrat (district administrator) of Beuthen (Bytom) com-
mented in the spring of 1939:

[I]n many apartments . . . one finds people gathered listening to these programmes
together, and they do not just include known supporters of Poland but also members
of the layer-in-between [Zwischenschicht or the ‘nationally indifferent’], who until
recently have maintained their neutrality vis-a`-vis matters concerning Poles.
The broadcasts of the so-called ‘[Karlik from] Kocynder’ enjoy particularly strong
popularity. People will be discussing these PRK broadcasts in constantly increasing
frequency, [and] they are acquiring an ever greater resonance as more people tune into
them.

52

Indeed, Nazi officials were well aware that hardly any of their programmes could
match the appeal of Ligon´’s dialect, talent and local sense of humour. According to
the Landrat of Ratibor (Raciborz) the broadcasts of ‘Karlik’ constitute ‘an out-
right calamitous source of danger, since they are so nicely tailored to psychologic-
ally appeal to the border people . . . The tone and derisive laugh of Ligon [sic] are
poison for the German in Upper Silesia who is not absolutely certain [of his/her
nationality]’.

53

Quite powerless from keeping Ligon´’s broadcasts from coming over

the border, regime officials used terror and propaganda to pressure locals not to
listen to them.

54

Having encountered those who listen to the PRK even among their

own ranks, BDO activists specifically instructed those who gathered at the organ-
ization’s propaganda assemblies not to listen to ‘Karlik’.

55

Ligon´ played a central role in the PRK’s contestation of the borderland against

the Nazis. Performing for the Behind the Border series, among other programmes,
he criticized regime policy and disseminated Polish nationalist overtures, while still
maintaining an aura of wit and entertainment. Taking to the air a week after the
notorious Nazi-orchestrated ‘Kristallnacht’, he talked about how ‘just out of fun’
the municipal synagogue of the border city of Beuthen was burned down and the
windows of Jewish businesses had been smashed, among other acts of vandalism
and violence.

56

Comparing these incidences to those that German nationalists had

imposed on pro-Polish Upper Silesians during the plebiscite struggle, he claimed
that ‘we [the Poles] do not laugh when injustice is done to someone else. Every
injustice will avenge itself’.

57

However, as a Graz_yn´skiite – or follower of a camp

that was known for its own anti-Jewish politics – Ligon´ did not go further than
using ‘Kristallnacht’ to merely ridicule and demonize Germans. Without making
any other comment about the fate of the Jews under the Nazis, Karlik ended his
brief discussion of this topic with the comment ‘but all of this is none of our business’.

58

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291

Indeed, in accordance with Polish nationalism, only the ‘Poles’ – in this case,
Catholic Upper Silesians – mattered. And so, ‘Karlik’ finished this broadcast by
singing a summary of the current events in Germany, in which he referred to the
Germans as ‘pagans’ who will earn ‘God’s punishment’ and called on his ‘fellow
countrymen [Upper Silesians]’ in the Provinz ‘not to let yourselves be done in’.

59

In the summer of 1939, the propaganda conflict over the air waves grew so

heated that locals began to feel that war between the two nations was drawing
near. By July, the PRK started to broadcast the news in German to make locals
believe that they were listening to radio from the Third Reich, as well as in Czech to
address the public in the Nazi-occupied ‘Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia’.

60

This was an old trick that Radio Katowice had already employed in the early
1930s. While at the time they felt pressured to do the same, officials at Radio
Breslau remained true to their ‘in German only’ broadcasting policy, fearful that
otherwise they would only officialize the Polish language in Germany’s border
provinces and thereby strengthen Poland’s cultural and political influence there.
On the eve of the outbreak of war, Nazi propaganda officials reversed this policy
and began to broadcast news reports in Polish and Ukrainian via radio stations in
Breslau, Ko¨nigsberg, Go¨rlitz, Opava and Vienna.

61

Having desired such an out-

come since the early 1930s, the Polish minority used it as an occasion to promote
rumours that these broadcasts were actually coming from a new radio station the
Poles had opened up in Breslau, as all of Silesia would soon fall to Poland.

62

In general, Third Reich propaganda towards Poland stressed that the Polish

government had fallen under the hegemony of France and Great Britain, who were
exploiting Poland’s economy to their own benefit. While this marked an important
pillar of its message in Polish addressing the Poles, that in German addressing the
publics of the eastern German provinces depicted the Polish minority in Germany –
next to Jews – as agents of communism and western-allied Polish aggression
against the Third Reich. In their heated propaganda on Danzig and other parts
of the ‘bleeding border’, the Nazis depicted themselves as the camp of peace and
Poland as that of forceful expansion and aggression. Indeed, the hysterical propa-
ganda of Poland’s internal ‘war of destruction’ against everything German marked
an important aspect of this effort to paint the eastern neighbour as an aggressor
against Germany.

63

According to reports on the mood in Gleiwitz by anti-Nazi

observers, many ordinary locals were quite sceptical of this information, and
believed that Hitler was merely seeking an excuse to attack Poland.

64

Nevertheless, they were likewise disappointed with the similar exaggerated tone
of Polish radio reports. As opponents of the Nazis in Gleiwitz observed, ‘no neutral
reply is delivered by way of [Polish] radio broadcasts in German, which could serve
to defend against the anti-Polish agitation’. Instead, the Polish media ‘is only
repeating the mistakes of the German press, and exaggerating all incidents’.

65

Nevertheless, along with ‘Karlik’ and Polish-language church services, the PRK’s
news reports in German were widely listened to, since they offered the populace a
rare alternative source of information to, and critical perspective on, the hege-
monic, omnipresent and monotone official discourse of the Nazis.

66

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European History Quarterly 43(2)

Using his wit, humour and regionalist appeal, ‘Karlik’ played his own role

in fuelling the tense and belligerent atmosphere of the final summer of the interwar
era. He tackled one of Nazi propaganda’s main efforts during this time: to promote
the notion that life in Poland was unbearable for Upper Silesians due to chaos and
state persecution. Encouraged by pro-Nazi minority organizations within the
Voivodeship, such as the Jungdeutschepartei (JdP), during this time ordinary indi-
viduals crossed the border – at times by the hundreds per day and often at illegal
crossing points – from Polish to German Upper Silesia. They did so largely in
search of better-paid jobs, which they had often been promised by the Nazi
agents in Poland. Although some fled to escape Polish nationalist terror, many
men also did so in fear of being drafted into the army and having to fight a lost-
cause war against Germany, that according to popular rumours, was about to
break out. Once they made their crossing, Nazi officials placed them in ‘refugee
camps’ (Flu¨chtlingslager) built for this purpose across the Provinz. There, a number
of these ‘refugees’ were ideologically schooled for their new function of grassroots
agitators for the regime, and then sent out to mines and industrial plants, and other
public places, to promote anti-Polish propaganda as ‘eyewitnesses’.

67

In an attempt

to dissuade the public in the Provinz from listening to these refugees, Ligon´ told of
how, although the Nazis referred to them as ‘victims of Polish [Germanophobic]
chauvinism’, in actuality ‘most of them cry ‘Heil Hitler!’ but know no other word in
German’.

68

He also attempted to stem the flight from Poland to Germany by

warning the public on his side of the border not to be seduced by fantasies of a
‘brown paradise’ (Third Reich), for in actuality, the Nazis were incarcerating new-
comers in conditions ‘that mirror those of our zoological gardens’, and thereafter
putting them ‘to heavy labour for little pay’.

69

In further efforts to defy the cam-

paigning of JdP agitators in Poland, Ligon´ spoke of widespread poverty and aus-
terity measures in the Third Reich, placing particular emphasis on how underfed
German soldiers were as a way of persuading men that it was better to be in Polish
uniform. According to one of his witty and exaggerated statements, ‘they [the
Germans] come to our markets to eat themselves full, since at home they have
nothing. They dream that by marching through Poland [in a military invasion]
they’ll be able to just eat up everything at once’.

70

In an effort to stem the tide of popular defection to Germany, to counter the

Nazi propaganda’s aims of demoralizing the public on the Polish side of the
border, and also to deliver a response to German radio’s irredentist aggression,
the PRK promoted its own muscle-flexing gestures. While claiming to be reading
from a letter sent by a fan in occupied Czechoslovakia during one of his broad-
casts, Ligon´ announced that ‘it was better to fall in battle than to become a part of
the Protectorate’, thus dismissing the option of also surrendering to Germany.

71

His broadcasts did much to convey the message that war with the Third Reich was
imminent, and that Poland should prepare for this. From informing the public that
Nazi propaganda on Danzig is ‘already a war game’, to holding a fund-raiser for
the Polish military forces during August of 1939, ‘Karlik’ made it quite clear that
war was to come.

72

And he did this in a confident and high-spirited manner,

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293

warning the Nazis to ‘get your behinds ready [for punishment]’, and that ‘they [the
Germans] should just come and we will tear out their bloody and crusty claws’.

73

He even made gestures in the direction of Poland’s making the first move.
Referring to the fortifications the Nazis were building on their side of the border
during this time, Ligon´ commented that this was ‘so that they will be able to hide
their behinds when we come’.

74

When the Germans expressed their annoyance with

such statements, Polish officials accused them of not being able to take a joke.
According to the Graz_yn´skiite daily newspaper, Polska Zachodnia, ‘how tense
must the nerves of the ‘‘fuehrers’’ [sic] be if they are bothered even by humour
and laughs’.

75

If Ligon´ could always excuse his statements as mere jokes, the actors of

Graz_yn´ski’s highhanded militant ceremonies held at the border on the eve of the
war certainly could not. Since coming into power, the voivode had been holding
rallies of this nature usually several times a year to praise and commemorate both
the second and third Polish Silesian insurgencies against Germany after World War
I, and proudly display his paramilitary force, the ‘Insurgent Union’ (Zwia˜zek
Powstan´co´w

, ZP), largely made up of the veteran fighters of these uprisings.

76

During the first decade after the partition, the bombastic militant character of
these stirred much uproar in the Provinz, and even raised fears among ordinary
locals that the Poles were going to invade. Eventually, such rallies became a com-
monplace ‘tradition’ and hardly drew attention from the German media. This
changed in the last year before the war, when the Nazi propaganda bureau was
searching for any ‘evidence’ to support its propaganda of Polish aggression. Surely
aware of this, in the summer of 1939, Graz_yn´ski, the ZP, local administrators, and
units of regular soldiers nevertheless staged several of these official gestures of
military aggression and open irredentism. In early June of 1939, the voivode him-
self presided over the unveiling of a statue of the insurgent in Ruda S´la˜ska
(Friedrichsdorf) about 220 yards from the border. As was common for these sta-
tues, a number of which been erected around the border area since the late 1920s,
this one pointed to the German side of the border as a public reminder of Poland’s
still unfulfilled irredentist mission. During this ceremony, which the PRK broad-
cast over the airwaves, and at which units of the ZP and also the Polish army
surrounded Graz_yn´ski, the latter vowed that ‘what the heroes of the third insur-
gency did not complete will be finished by us’ – in other words, the seizure of
western Upper Silesia by military force.

77

Such statements of the voivode, had

been repeated for years and had become quite banal by this time, as were other
‘invented traditions’ that were officially observed that summer, including the
unveiling of another statue of the insurgent at the end of June in the border village
of Boruszowice, a monument that was 33 feet high and clearly visible from the
German side.

78

In addition, in mid-August, the ZP staged their annual ‘March to

the Oder’, a march from Poland’s border with Germany to that with
Czechoslovakia (this time including the Teschen/Zaolzia area that the Polish
state had annexed in October of 1938), to commemorate the second insurgency
of August 1919 with warmongering militancy.

79

Indeed, the German media had a

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European History Quarterly 43(2)

field day exposing these rallies under provocative headlines such as ‘the insurgents
want to ‘‘take back’’ Silesia – the agitation has made Poland crazy’.

80

This Nazi propaganda on Poland’s intention to capture all of the German east-

ern provinces up to the Oder River inadvertently gave the well-known Gleiwitz
‘provocation’ on the last day before the war’s outbreak at least some foundation
of logic. The attack on the newly built relay station, with its awe-aspiring 361-
foot-high wooden broadcasting tower, had been orchestrated by the SS, which
dressed up its agents and Polish-minority members, who were concentration
camp prisoners, in Polish military uniforms. However, the German media’s
account of the event strove to give it credibility by linking it to Graz_yn´skiite irre-
dentism towards western Upper Silesia. And so, the official accounts reported that
‘bands of the ‘‘Insurgent Union’’ ’ accompanied by regular soldiers had performed
the deed.

81

Having broadcast official rallies commemorating the Polish Silesian

insurgencies of 1919–1921, along with other propaganda that lauded Poland’s
taking of all of Upper Silesia by force, the PRK had helped to make a Polish
attack on the Provinz at least conceivable. The heated military muscle-flexing
that both German and Polish radios interactively promoted on the airwaves in
the last months before the war likewise provided the Nazis with a suitable atmos-
phere to stage this final propaganda event to legitimate the invasion of Poland.

Conclusion

A zeal to integrate both their own and their national neighbour’s part of the con-
tested Upper Silesian border province into their respective nation-state marked one
of the major original intentions behind the building of the German relay station in
Gleiwitz and the Polish Radio Katowice. By broadcasting political and cultural
programming that promoted high national and nationally oriented regional trad-
itions, state officials on both sides of the border aimed to gradually homogenize the
mixed and multifarious culture of this borderland to the advantage of their own
respective nation’s policies of borderland nationalization and irredentism. In real-
ity, mostly the opposite occurred. The multifaceted contestation of Upper Silesia
between the two nation-states and between each and the local level only encour-
aged the preservation of the local transnational diversity of this province. Focusing
on the national contest over the western (German) part of the region, my intention
in this study has been to address some of the highlights of this many-sided German-
Polish ‘radio war’ of the interwar era, as well as the complex, and often unexpected,
impacts it had on relations between the two nations, and on the disputed region
and its local populace.

Radio facilitated the intrusion of one state into the ‘domestic’ affairs of the

other, thus helping to make each national camp’s ventures to appropriate this
borderland into inherently entangled cross-border affairs. My focus on the final
years of the interwar era reveals how to varying degrees both radio stations used
their programming to counter and undermine their neighbour’s policies of forceful
homogenization. As a result, such politics (including Nazi policies of ethnic

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cleansing), should be examined not just as internal but inherently transnational
affairs, in which the interactive roles of both states are accounted for. Serving as a
precedent of sorts to the kinds of tactics that Radio Free Europe would employ
against the Soviet regimes of the post-war era, Polish radio posed a barrier to the
Nazi regime’s attempt to engineer an ideologically monotone, culturally and eth-
nically homogenous, and politically totalitarian society. Indeed, the interwar-
period-long German-Polish bilateral engagement in a ‘radio war’, and the latter’s
intensification towards the end of this epoch, forged a spirit of belligerent aggres-
sion over the ether. Not only did this discursive war on the air allow the local public
to anticipate the actual war’s outbreak, but it provided the Nazis with a logical
premise for their most well-known orchestrated excuse to attack Poland – the
so-called Gleiwitz ‘provocation’.

Radio also helped make irredentist international politics into a popular culture

of sorts. Aiming to turn the minds of locals on the German side of the border
towards Poland, the programmes of the Polskie Radio Katowice did much more
than just disseminate serious pro-Polish polemics in a monotonous voice. By using
charm, wit and humour, its director and star speaker, Stanislaw ‘Karlik’ Ligon´,
rapidly became a widely listened-to and popular regional celebrity – thereby giving
the Polskie Radio Katowice a seemingly winning edge in its ‘radio war’ against the
Germans. Rather than reading out of the press, official reports, and politicized
academic lectures, ‘Karlik’ sang songs, cracked jokes, and told amusing stories –
all in the name of extending Poland’s influence in its claimed territory. Popular
humour and joy thus became a new way of attracting the attention of the masses in
this interwar period when contesting national borders took on a mass-political
character, which, particularly in borderlands, invaded everyday local life.

Even as they were caught up in this irredentist fervour, Upper Silesian locals still

formed their own opinions and chose their own sides. What helped them to do so,
ironically, were some of the irredentist radio programmes that were geared to
nationalize their identity, and which nationalists endorsed in the hope of eventually
stamping out ‘nationally indifferent’ regionalism. An open Polish nationalist, the
Upper Silesian radio comic, Stanislaw ‘Karlik’ Ligon´, strove to capture the hearts
and minds of locals for Poland not by imposing high Polish culture on them, but by
enticing and amusing them using partially Polonized inflections of their own folk
language and humour. He achieved at least one part of his agenda: his programmes
helped to empower and encourage locals in their resistance against Nazis. While
they did this, and eagerly tuned in to listen to ‘Karlik’, locals likewise remained
sceptical towards Polish nationalist propaganda over the ether, and alienated from
Warsaw radio programming. When to counteract the PRK’s ‘Polish’ regionalism,
the Nazis instrumentally appropriated the local dialect as a (German)
‘Oberschlesisch’, locals likewise interpreted this as a legitimation of their regional
language and an Upper Silesian triumph over ‘Germanization’. The ‘radio war’
may have done as its best to promote regional ways, principally to fuel the official
myth that this borderland ‘belonged’ to Germany/Poland, but to locals, these ways
remained part of the heritage of their enduring Upper Silesian identity.

296

European History Quarterly 43(2)

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Belinda Davis, Paul Hanebrink, and Andrew Demshuk for their
valuable critical reading of earlier drafts of this essay, as well as the anonymous readers
for their important comments. I thank the American Council of Learned Societies/Mellon
Foundation and Qatar University (Start-Up Grant) for their financial sponsorship of this
research.

Notes

1. Oberbu¨rgermeister of Gleiwitz, Georg Geisler, quoted in Margrit-Esther Schauerte, ‘Die

Oberschlesienfrage in der Schlesischen Funkstunde in Breslau, 1924–1932’ (unpublished
manuscript, Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv), 72.

2. ‘Otwarcie Radjostacji Katowickiej’, Polonia, 334 (5 December 1927), 2.
3. Schauerte, ‘Die Oberschlesienfrage’, 99–102.
4. Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the

New Europe

(Cambridge 1996).

5. See Peter Fischer, Die Deutsche Publizistik als Faktor der deutsch-polnischen

Beziehungen, 1919–1939

(Wiesbaden 1991), 144–54; Juliane Haubold-Stolle, Mythos

Oberschlesien: der Kampf um die Errinerung in Deutschland und Polen

(Osnabru¨ck

2008), 248–55.

6. ‘Wojna radjowa Gliwice-Katowice’, Katolik Codzienny, 24 (29 January 1928), 1.
7. Schauerte, ‘Der Oberschlesienfrage’, 101–10.
8. Polish Consulate in Bytom (KonByt), report, 23 November 1927, Archiwum Akt

Nowych (AAN) 482 (Konsulat RP w Opolu), 192, 40; Oberbu¨rgermeister Beuthen,
report, 20 December 1927, Archiwum Pan´stwowe w Opolu (APO), 1191 (Regierung
Oppeln), 260, 6; Polish Consulate in Opole (KonOp) to Polish Foreign Ministry
(MSZ), 13 March 1928, AAN 482, 192, 80.

9. Polish Consulate in Breslau, 27 November 1934, AAN 474 (Polska Ambasada RP

Berlin)

2470,

69;

Kulturarbeit

in

Oberschlesien:

Ein

Jahrbuch,

1936

(Provinzialverwaltung von Oberschlesien), 143–4.

10. German Consulate in Kattowitz (KonKat), report, 19 June 1937, Politische Archiv des

Auswa¨rtigen Amtes (PA-AA), Warschau, 195; ‘Nowe Gmachy Polskiego Radia,’
Antena

, IV, 38 (1937), 4–5; ‘Nowa radjostacja w Brzez_nicy juz_ czynna’, Polska

Zachodnia

(PZ) (24 June 1939), 9.

11. Schauerte, ‘Der Oberschlesischenfrage’, 87; Haubold-Stolle, Mythos, 251; ‘Stan radjo-

fonizacji Polski’, PZ 203 (25 July 1939); ‘O/S [Oberschlesien] immer Rundfunkarm’,
Ostdeutsche Morgenpost

(ODM), 27 July 1939.

12. Polish Embassy in Berlin (AmbBer), report, circa November 1934, AAN, 474, 2470, 105.
13. Adelheid von Saldern, ‘Volk and Heimat Culture in Radio Broadcasting during the

Period of Transition from Weimar to Nazi Germany’, The Journal of Modern
History

, vol. 76 (June 2004), 312–46, esp. 316–19.

14. See James Bjork, Neither German nor Pole: Catholicism and National Difference in a

Central European Borderland

(Ann Arbor, MI 2008); Andrzej Michalczyk, Heimat,

Kirche und Nation: Deutsche und Polnische Nationalisierungsprozesse im geteilten
Oberschlesien (1922–1939)

(Cologne 2010); Tara Zahra, ‘Imagined Noncommunities:

National Indifference as a Category of Analysis’, Slavic Review 69 (2010), 93–119.

Polak-Springer

297

15. ‘Otwarcie Radjostacji’, 2; Reichszentrale fu¨r Heimatdienst (RzHd), November 1925

Grenzbericht, Geheimstaatsarchiv Preussische Kulturbesitz (GStA PK), HA I, Rep.
77, Tit. 856 (Preussische Ministerium d. Innern, Ost-West), Nr. 592, 117ff.

16. This translation from T. Hunt Tooley, National Identity and Weimar Germany: Upper

Silesia and the Eastern Border, 1918–1922

(London 1997), 226. On Ligon´, see: Edward

Wichura-Zadel, Stanislaw Ligon (Karlik z Kocyndra), Katowice: Wydawnictwo ‘S´la˜sk’,
1969.

17. June 1939 Situational Report (SR), Archiwum Pan´stwowe w Katowicach (hereafter

APK) 38/I (Policja Wojewo´dztwa S´la˜skiego), 176, 30.

18. On dialect (‘subdialect’ or ‘Slavic-Germanic creole’) and the politics of language in

Upper Silesia, see Tomasz Kamusella, Schlonzka mowa, Je¸zyk, Go´rny S´la˜sk i nacjona-
lizmy

(Zabrze 2005), 13–34; and Eugeniusz Kopec, ‘Z zagadnien˜ integracji je¸zykowej

s´la˜skich kreso´w Rzeczypospolitej (1918–1939)’, in Jo´sef Chlebowczyk, ed., Z problemo´w
integracji i unifikacji II Reczypospolitej

(Katowice 1980), 7–48.

19. This is my translation of ‘S´la˜skie Bery i Bo´jki’, and ‘U Karlika Gro Muzyka’. Other

shows included: ‘S´la˜ska Pozytywka’, and ‘Niedziela przy Z

_ elez´nioku’.

20. ‘Malowiela o s´la˜skim humorze’, Antena, IV, 49 (1937), 6.
21. Polizeipra¨sident der oberschlesische Industriegebiet in Gleiwitz (Polizeipra¨sident),

report, 1 May 1928, APO, 1191, 260, 43.

22. Ibid. (21 February 1928), 38.
23. KonOp., 21 April 1932, AAN 474, 2468, doc. 191ff.
24. AmbBer to MSZ, 21 August 1931, AAN 474, 2468.
25. Reichsfunkgesellschaft to Polish Radio, 28 April 1932, AAN 474, 2468, 191.
26. BDO, report, 3 May 1939, Archiwum Pan´stwowe we Wroclawiu (APWr) 170/0, 838,

237.

27. KonOp, July 1938, AAN 474, 2475, 25.
28. Deutsche Staatsvertreter, to Oberpra¨sidium der Provinz Oberschlesien (OP), 20 January

1928, APO 1191, 260, 11–14.

29. Ibid., 11–14; AmBer to MSZ, ‘propaganda zagraniczna’, 21 August 1931, AAN 474,

2468.

30. Polizeipra¨sident, report, 28 December 1927, APO 1191, 260, 38.
31. ‘Otwarcie Radjostacji’, 2.
32. AmBer to MSZ, 10 November 1934, AAN, 474, 2470,109. See also Fischer, Die

Deutsche

, 182–8.

33. KonOp., report, 27 May 1938, AAN 474, 2475, 5; ‘Za miedza˜’, PZ 153 (5 June 1938), 12.
34. ‘Za Miedza˜, Napisy Mowia˜’, summer 1938, AAN 474, 2475, 9ff.
35. Jan Przybyla, ‘Na Wesele do Swoich’, AAN 474, 2475, 13.
36. Verschiedene Nachrichten (984/38, S.4), 18 November 1938, Bundesarchiv (BArch), 153

(Publikationsstelle Berlin-Dahlem), 1302.

37. RzHd, October–December 1931 Grenzbericht, GStA PK, Tit. 856, Nr. 593, Bd.3, 38ff;

‘Co cala Polska winna wiedziec´ o S´la˜sku’, PZ 93 (3 April 1936), 3; on the German census
of 1933, see Brendan Jeffrey Karch, ‘Nationalism on the Margins: Silesians between
Germany and Poland, 1848–1945’ (PhD dissertation, Harvard University 2010), 331–4.

38. BDO report, 30 May 1939, APWr. 170/0, 838, 158.
39. Ibid., 158.
40. Karch, ‘Nationalism’, 326–34.

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41. Even some official German reports openly admitted that ‘Wasserpolnish ist kein

deutschen Dialekt’: Regierungspra¨sidium Oppeln (RO), 3 July 1939, APO 1191, 1937;
and PolicjaWoj., 15 June 1939, APK 38/I, 176, 31ff.

42. Polizeipra¨sident, SR, 18 Juli 1939, APO 1191, 1939, 157–8.
43. June 1939 SR, APK 38/I, 176, 32ff.
44. Ibid., 32.
45. Ibid., 33ff.
46. Ibid., 35.
47. Michalczyk, Heimat, 116–18.
48. Polizeipra¨sident, SR, 18 July 1939, APO 1191, 1939, 187; PRK to Director of Polskie

Radio, 29 July 1939, AAN 482, 193; BDO Kreisverband Hindenburg, Report, 8 May
1939, APK – Gliwice Section, 95 (BDO), 37, 34.

49. James Bjork and Robert Gerwarth, ‘The Annaberg as a German-Polish ‘‘Lieu de

Memoire’’ ’, German History, vol. 25 (2007), 388.

50. May and June 1939 SR, APK 38/I, 176, 21–32ff.
51. May 1939 SR, ibid., 21ff; and July 1939 SR, same, 56ff.
52. Landrat Beuthen, Mai 1939 SR, APO 1191, 1937, 414.
53. Landrat Ratibor, SR, 18 March 1939, ibid., 101.
54. KonOp to MSZ, 28 July 1939, AAN 482, 193, 2.
55. WojPol, report on BDO meeting, 19 March 1937, APK 38/1, 390, 7.
56. This was an on-air conversation between ‘Karlik’ and his harmonica-playing compan-

ion, ‘Gustlik’. Karl Sczodrok to Nordostdeutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (NOFG)
(984/38), 18 November 1938, BArch 153, 1302.

57. Ibid.
58. Ibid.
59. Ibid.
60. BDO report, 5 June 1939, APWr. 170/1, 838, 169; KonOp to MSZ, 23 August 1939,

AAN 482, 193, 1; Appendix to July SR, 26 July 1939, APK 38/I, 176, 80.

61. KonOP to MSZ, 7 July 1939, AAN 474, 2475, 51; July 1939 SR, APK 38/I, 176, 53.
62. Polizeipra¨sident, SR, 22 July 1939, APO 1191, 1939.
63. May & July 1939 SR, APK 38/I, 176, 15 & 57–8.
64. July 1939 SR, APK 38/I, 176, 54.
65. May 1939 SR, APK 38/I, 176, 23ff.
66. KonOP to MSZ, AAN 482, 193, 1; June SR 1939, APK 38/I, 176, 30.
67. May SR 1939, APK 38/I, 176, 12ff, 15ff; ‘Spowiedz_ z poszukiwaczy szcze¸s´cia: co mowia˜

ci, kto´rzy wro´cili z ‘‘tamtej strony’’ ’, PZ 199 (21 July 1939), 9; Peter Polak-Springer,
‘Personifying the Versailles Dictate: The Political Use of Refugees from the Polish
Upper Silesian Province in Germany, 1921–1939’, unpublished paper (German
Studies Association Conference, in Louisville, Kentucky, USA, 22–25 September
2011), 4–8.

68. ‘Po tamtej stronie kordonu: Karlik z Kocyndra dobrze sluz_y rodakom’, PZ 178 (30 June

1939), 3.

69. Ibid., 3.
70. BDO, report, 27 May 1939, APWr. 170/0, 838, 190.
71. Landrat Ratibor, May 1939 SR, APO 1191, 1937, 440ff.
72. Ibid., 440ff; BDO, report, 190; PZZ Katowice-De¸bie, meeting minutes, 15 May 1939,

APK 40/I (Dyrekcja Policji Katowickiej), 91, 4.

Polak-Springer

299

73. BDO, report, 190–1.
74. Ibid., 190.
75. ‘Niemcy walcza˜ z audycjami z Kocyndra’, PZ 203 (25 July 1939), 8.
76. On the ZP, see Richard Blanke, Orphans of Versailles: The Germans in Western Poland,

1918–1939

(Lexington, KY 1993), 117–20.

77. BDO, report, 6 Juni 1939, APWr. 170/0, 838, 167.
78. Boruszowice was located outside of Tarnowskie Go´ry/Tarnowitz. ‘Wielka Manifestacja

narodowa na pograniczu’, PZ 175 (27 June 1939).

79. ‘Wielkie S´wie¸to S´la˜skiego Czynu Zbrojnego’, PZ (12 August 1939): 2. On the ‘March to

the Oder’, see also Haubold-Stolle, Mythos, 230–1.

80. ‘Aufsta¨ndische wollen Schlesien ‘‘zuru¨ckholen’’: die Hitze hat Polen verru¨ckt gemacht’,

Ostdeutsche Morgenpost

/ODM (18 Juli 1939), cover page; ‘Aufsta¨ndische ziehen in den

Krieg wie zu einem Tanz’, ODM (19 August 1939); ‘Marsch an die Oder’, ODM (22
August 1939).

81. Quoted from Ju¨rgen Runzheimer, ‘Der U¨berfall auf den Sender Gleiwitz im Jahre 1939’,

Vierteljahrshefte fu¨r Zeitgeschichte 10,4 (1962), 408–9ff.; ‘Polnische Aufsta¨ndische haben
die oberschlesische Grenze u¨berschritten’, ODM (1 September 1939), 1.

Author Biography

Peter Polak-Springer earned his PhD in Modern European History from Rutgers
University and specializes in twentieth-century Central Europe, Germany and
German-Polish relations. He was a Berlin Program and Social Science Research
Council (IDRF) dissertation research fellow, as well as an American Council
of Learned Society and Mellon Foundation postdoctoral fellow. He is currently
Assistant Professor of History at Qatar University and is turning his dissertation
on the cultural politics of the German-Polish contestation of Upper Silesia into a
monograph.

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European History Quarterly 43(2)