Upper Silesia located in the administrative territorial entity Silesian Voivodeship
Geography
Upper Silesia is situated on the upper Oder River, north of the Eastern Sudetes mountain range and the Moravian Gate, which form the southern border with the historic Moravia region. Within the adjacent Silesian Beskids to the east, the Vistula River rises and turns eastwards, the Biała and Przemsza tributaries mark the eastern border with Lesser Poland. In the north, Upper Silesia borders on Greater Poland, and in the west on the Lower Silesian lands (the adjacent region around Wrocław also referred to as Middle Silesia).Plebiscite and partition
In 1919, after World War I, the eastern part of Prussian Upper Silesia (with a majority of ethnic Poles) came under Polish rule as the Silesian Voivodeship, while the mostly German-speaking western part remained part of the Weimar Republic as the newly established Upper Silesia Province. In early 1919, the Polish–Czechoslovak War broke out around Cieszyn Silesia, whereafter Czechoslovakia gained the Zaolzie strip in addition to the Hlučín Region.
From 1919-1921 three Silesian Uprisings occurred among the Polish-speaking populace of Upper Silesia; the Battle of Annaberg was fought in the region in 1921. In the Upper Silesia plebiscite of March 1921, a majority of 59.4% voted against merging with Poland and a minority of 40.6% voted for, with clear lines dividing Polish and German communities. The plan to divide the region was suggested by the Inter-Allied Commission on Upper Silesia, headed by the French general Henri Le Rond. The plan was decided by an ambassadors conference in Paris on 20 October 1921. The exact border, the maintenance of cross-border railway traffic and other necessary co-operations, as well as equal rights for all inhabitants in both parts of Upper Silesia, were all fixed by the German-Polish Accord on East Silesia, signed in Geneva on 15 May 1922. On 20 June 1922 the Weimar Republic ceded the East Upper Silesia region to Poland.  The area became part of Silesian Voivodeship of the Second Polish Republic.After the 1939 German invasion of Poland, Polish Silesia was annexed to the Nazi German Reich as part of the  Gau of Silesia. In 1941 Upper and Lower Silesia were split into separate Gauer.
After 1945, almost all of Upper Silesia that was not ceded to Poland in 1922 was placed under the administration of the Republic of Poland. German civilians, as well as Nazi criminals, were interned in labor camps such as the Zgoda labour camp. The majority of the German-speaking population that had not fled was expelled, an activity that was euphemized as "transfers [to] be effected in an orderly and humane manner" in accordance with the decision of the victorious Allied powers at their 1945 meeting at Potsdam. This expulsion program also included German-speaking inhabitants of Lower Silesia, eastern Brandenburg, eastern Pomerania, Gdańsk (Danzig), and East Prussia. The German expellees were transported to the present-day Germany (including the former East Germany), and Polish migrants, a sizeable part of whom were themselves expelleés from former Polish provinces taken over by the USSR in the east, settled in Upper Silesia. A good many German-speaking Upper Silesians were relocated in Bavaria. A small part of Upper Silesia stayed as part of Czechoslovakia as Czech Silesia.
The expulsions of German-speakers did not totally eliminate the presence of a population that considered itself German. In contrast to the situation in Lower Silesia, where almost the totality of the pre-war population that was expelled was exclusively German-speaking, the pre-war population of Upper Silesia was in considerable number Roman Catholic mixed bilingual that spoke both German and Polish dialects, and their Polish linguistic skills were considered solid enough for them to be kept in the area (Aleksandra Kunce, Being at Home in a Place: The Philosophy of Localness, pp. 41-112 [1]). Firstly, after the war, Poles displaced from Polish territories incorporated into the USSR settled in Upper Silesia, but also Polish settlers from other overpopulated parts of Poland. And later, in the years 1945-1989, a large number of Poles from various parts of Poland settled in Upper Silesia, who received work, e.g. in the mines.
The area formally became part of the Republic of Poland by virtue of the German-Polish border treaty of 14 November 1990. With the fall of communism and Poland's joining the European Union, there were enough of these remaining in Upper Silesia to allow for the recognition of the German minority in Poland by the Polish government.
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