It decisively refutes the contention by purveyors of Polish nationalism that Polish insurgents did not use terrorist violence against ethnic German civilians in the Eastern Borderlands in the wake of the First World War in the context of the Polish attempt to seize those territories.
Relating to the second Polish uprising of Agust 1920 (p.189) [all emphases by me]:
Page 191Generally speaking, the [Plish] insurgents concentrated on removing the leading representatives of German authority, such as local officials, customs officers, and above all schoolteachers, who were apparently overrepresented in the groups imprisoned, aken as hostages to Poland, or murdered. The Verband heimattreuer Oberschlesier, the most visible and most blatantly anti-Polish plebiscite group, claimed that 150 of its members were murdered. Thoughthe German White Book on the uprising listed only 35 confirmed mrders, beatings and other mistreatement were common, the result of the rising level of violence on both sides and of the pent-up frustrations of the Poles. Soon German refugees began streaming from the insurgent areas, some expelled by Poles, some on their own.
Pp 228-229Certainly eastern Upper Silesia had gotten a taste of what might come in the way of recrimination against individuals voting for Germany, and many of the estimated ten thousand [German] refugees would not return to vote in any case.
The German State terrorism against ethnic Poles between 1939 and 1944, much decried on this Forum, needs to be seen against the background of the preceding Polish chauvinist terror against ethnic German civilians in the period 1918-1921, of which the examples quoted were only part.The POW [= Polska Organizacja Wojskowa = Polish Military Organisation, the main Polish clandestine terrorist organisation] was in a particularly strong position for engaging in outright terrorism. As late as January 1921 the best information available to Percival and the British Foreign Office was that the Germans were, on the whole, disarmed, while the Poles ahd kept most of the weapons that they had used in August [1920, the Second Polish Uprising]. The most spectacular case of terrorism was the murder of Theophil Kupka, a Polish "renegade" journalist who professed himself sick of the corruption on the Polish side and left Korfanty's Plebiscite Commissariat to start an Upper Silesian Commissariat nominally neutral but in fact pro-German. With aid from Urbanek and Spiecker, Kupka founded a bilingual newspaper, Wola ludu / Der Wille des Volkes, which railed in sensational language against the corruption of Korfanty and the Warsaw "carperbaggers". Korfanty's equally strident denunciation of the "renegade" led to the general belief that it was on Korfanty's order that a Pole rang Kupka's doorbell on 20 November [1920] and pumped four shots into the journalist as his wife and children watched. The murderer was apprehended, but the commission postponed the trial, fearing the Polish demonstrations that would result. Apparently he was never brought to trial.