In line with the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, in January 1920 power in Upper Silesia was taken by the Inter-allied Administrative and Plebiscite Commission, composed of representatives of France, Great Britain, and Italy. The German troops were withdrawn but the police, despite its formal subordination to the Commission, retained its German character and acted against the Polish movement. To prepare the referendum both sides established referendum commissariats. The Polish commissar was Wojciech Korfanty and the German one the mayor of Rossbark, Kurt Urbanek. The propaganda campaign was conducted on an unprecedented scale and with the use of modern technology, such as, radio and film. The German campaign was very brutal. In response to numerous excesses of the police the Poles, led by Wojciech Korfanty, started an uprising on 18 August 1920. Their objective was to establish a law enforcement service composed in equal parts of Poles and Germans for the purpose of protecting the Polish population and leveling the chances of agitation. After about a dozen days of fighting the powers agreed to set up the Upper Silesian Police, known as the Referendum Police.
Outside, they were crying “Finis Poloniae.”
It seems to me that it will not be a mistake to say that the failure of the First Silesian Uprising was something like an inevitable necessity, it was to constitute a foundation of the experience for the Second and the Third Uprisings. That was when the people of Silesia fully realized that they had to do their best so that the Prussian soldier would never set foot on their soil again.
