Is it true that a large part of Lodz's German population was expelled in or around 1918?

[Futurist]

Is it true that a large part of Lodz's German population was expelled in or around 1918? It says this here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%81%C3 ... _of_Vienna

In the aftermath of World War I, Łódź lost approximately 40% of its inhabitants, mostly owing to draft, diseases, pollution and primarily because of the mass expulsion of the city's German population back to Germany.

What prompted and motivated this expulsion (I mean, other than Germany's defeat in World War I) and where in Germany did these Germans subsequently end up?

I also wonder why specifically a large part of Lodz's German population was expelled after the end of World War I but not the Germans in the rest of post-WWI Poland.

Thoughts?

[wm]

Łódź was a socialist den, it was the least likely place for that.

[Futurist]

The least likely place for a mass expulsion of Germans?

[wm]

Of course, they loved their socialism/communism so much that over 50 percent draftees avoided military service during the Polish-Soviet War there.

[Futurist]

Did they ever actually get punished for this?

[wm]

I don't know; I suppose it was easy to weasel out.
I wasn't at home; I visited my uncle in a different city.

[Futurist]

But what about once you returned back home to Lodz?

[gebhk]

Hi MW

I presume you are referring to Lodz town rather than the district as a whole? Even so, I am surprised given that Lodz recruiting district supplied the second highest number of draftees (ahead of Warsaw) and the third highest number of volunteers for the Volunteer Army. With nearly half the volunteers being workers, it seems surprising that the town was as anti-war as you suggest??? Given that 96.5% of the volunteers were Christians, perhaps this had some impact - though i thought non-Poles were not drafted into the regular army during the war in any case?

That being said, the statistic of 1.7k out of 4k reporting for duty in the town is oft reported, though how anyone would have known that there were 4k eligible people to begin with I am struggling to see. Futurist - it is precisely due to the fact that there was no reliable data on the population or a call-up register that made it very easy to avoid military service or any consequences.

Anyone have "Łódź i łodzianie wobec wojny polsko-bolszewickiej 1920 roku" (Lodz and its citizens in the Polish-Bolshevik war 1920)?

[gebhk]

As to the German expulsion question, having waded through a few histories of the period in Lodz I have found no trace of this, beyond the withdrawal of the German military garrison in November 1918. I presume they would have been accompanied in their leaving by the occupation administration. Perhaps this is what is meant? Germans made up circa 10% of the population during the interbellum and had their own organisations, publications etc.; so again this doesn't seem to jive with a mass expulsion event. The general decline of the population compared to before 1914 is generally ascribed to the economic catastrophe caused by the war and the failure to recover from it (for various reasons) after it had ended.

[wm]

It was 4,000 called for duty, not merely eligible.
They weren't anti-war, they simply loved socialism too much to fight with the first socialist country in history.

But what about once you returned back home to Lodz?

Then the war was over and they weren't needed. It wasn't a crime to absent at home.

[Futurist]

Do you know what % of these 4,000 were Jewish?

[gebhk]

Hi WM

It was 4,000 called for duty, not merely eligible.

You may well be right - the description varies with source. But that is my point - there seems little consistency about what this number represents, it is remarkably small for the second largest town in the country and is a suspiciously round number. Are we talking the March 1919 draft or the June 1920 draft? Given the massive support for the Volunteer Army in Lodz in July 1920 - the biggest chunk of which was workers - traditionally the bedrock of popular support for Socialism - I find these positions difficult to reconcile. If we are talking about the March 1919 draft, my first thoughts would be that the main culprit was administrative chaos: this explanation seems to be a better fit for the limited information I have on the matter. However, I am happy to be persuaded otherwise if there is reliable evidence for an alternative explanation.

[Futurist]

I've previously read that Polish workers during this time were actually rather nationalistic; is this true?

[gebhk]

There were both trends in evidence ie nationalist and internationalist. Both were represented in Lodz, but don't know offhand which was stronger there.

[Futurist]

Did internationalist-minded workers want a one-world government?