page_title: Gliwice
section_title: 20th century
hierarchical_section_title: Gliwice / History / 20th century
context_page_description: Gliwice is a city in Upper Silesia, in southern Poland. The city is located in the Silesian Highlands, on the Kłodnica river. It lies approximately 25 km west from Katowice, regional capital of the Silesian Voivodeship.
  Gliwice is the westernmost city of the Upper Silesian metropolis, a conurbation of 1.9 million people, and is the third-largest city of this area, with 178,603 permanent residents as of 2019. It also lies within the larger Upper Silesian metropolitan area which has a population of about 5.3 million people and spans across most of eastern Upper Silesia, western Lesser Poland and the Moravian-Silesian Region in the Czech Republic. It is one of the major college towns in Poland, thanks to the Silesian University of Technology, which was founded in 1945 by academics of Lwów University of Technology. Over 20,000 people study in Gliwice. Gliwice is an important industrial center of Poland. Following an economic transformation in the 1990s, Gliwice shifted from steelworks and coal mining to automotive and machine industry.
  Founded in the 13th century, Gliwice is one of the oldest settlements in Upper Silesia, with a preserved Old Town core.
context_section_description: According to the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, Gleiwitz's population in 1905 was 61,324. By 1911 it had two Protestant and four Roman Catholic churches, a synagogue, a mining school, a convent, a hospital, two orphanages, and a barracks. Gleiwitz was the center of the mining industry of Upper Silesia. It possessed a royal foundry, with which were connected machine factories and boiler works. Other industrialized areas of the city had other foundries, meal mills, and factories producing wire, gas pipes, cement, and paper.
  After the end of World War I, clashes between Poles and Germans occurred during the Polish insurrections in Silesia. Some ethnically Polish inhabitants of Upper Silesia wanted to incorporate the city into the Second Polish Republic, which just regained independence. On May 1, 1919 a Polish rally was held in Gliwice. Seeking a peaceful solution to the conflict, the League of Nations held a plebiscite on 20 March 1921 to determine which country the city should belong to. In Gleiwitz, 32,029 votes (78.7% of given votes) were for remaining in Germany, Poland received 8,558 (21.0%) votes, and 113 (0.3%) votes were declared invalid. The total voter turnout was listed as 97.0%. This prompted another insurrection by Poles. The League of Nations determined that three Silesian cities: Gleiwitz (Gliwice), Hindenburg (Zabrze) and Beuthen (Bytom) would remain in Germany, and the eastern part of Upper Silesia with its main city of Katowice (Kattowitz) would join restored Poland.
  In the interbellum the city witnessed not only Anti-Polish, but also Anti-French incidents and violence. In 1920, local Polish doctor and city councillor Wincenty Styczyński, protested against the German refusal to treat French soldiers stationed in the city. In January 1922, he himself treated French soldiers shot in the city. On April 9, 1922, 17 Frenchmen died in an explosion during the liquidation of a German militia weapons warehouse in the present-day Sośnica district. Styczyński, who defended the rights of local Poles and protested against German acts of violence against Poles, was himself murdered by a German militant on April 18, 1922. Nevertheless, various Polish organizations and enterprises still operated in the city in the interbellum, including a local branch of the Union of Poles in Germany, Polish banks and a scout troop. On June 9, 1933 Gliwice was the site of the first conference of the Nazi anti-Polish organization Bund Deutscher Osten in Upper Silesia. In a secret Sicherheitsdienst report from 1934, Gliwice was named one of the main centers of the Polish movement in western Upper Silesia. Polish activists were increasingly persecuted since 1937.
  An attack on a radio station in Gleiwitz on 31 August 1939, staged by the German secret police, served as a pretext, devised by Reinhard Heydrich under orders from Hitler, for Nazi Germany to invade Poland, which marked the start of the Second World War.
  After the invasion of Poland, the assets of local Polish banks were confiscated by Germany. During the war, the Germans established numerous forced labour camps in the city, as well as five working parties of the Stalag VIII-B/344 prisoner of war camp. From July 1944 to January 1945, Gliwice was the location of four subcamps of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
  On 24 January 1945, Gliwice was occupied by the Red Army as part of their Allied Occupation Zone. Under borders changes dictated by the Soviet Union at the Potsdam Conference, Gliwice fell inside Poland's new borders after Germany's defeat in the war. It was incorporated into Poland's Silesian Voivodeship on 18 March 1945, after almost 300 years of being outside of Polish rule.
caption: The present Administrative Court building in the 1920s
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