Walter Priesnitz was born into a catholic family in Hindenburg (as Zabrze was known between 1915 and 1944), near Katowice in Upper Silesia. The region had been part of Prussia/Germany since 1740 but the narrow result of the March 1921 referendum had done nothing to still the ethnic tensions that had been intensifying ever since the middle part of the nineteenth century. Within this ever more polarising society, Priesnitz grew up as a member of the ethnic German community. His father worked in a bank. He attended school in nearby Gleiwitz till 1945 when he was removed from school and conscripted into the newly formed "Volksturn" ("people's militia"). Shortly after this he found himself taken as a prisoner of war to Prague. His period of detention lasted only a few weeks, however. By the end of the year he was back at school, now in Zwickau, where in 1950 he passed his "Abitur" (school final exams). It is likely that he was among the millions driven west by the ethnic cleansing of 1945 which had seen the German population of Silesia forcibly replaced by ethnic Poles, themselves driven out of the larger (but less densely populated) area which before 1939 had been internationally recognised as the eastern third of Poland. During 1950/51 Priesnitz undertook an apprenticeship with the Zwickauer .