A GERMAN VIEW AS TO UPPER SILESIA.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3131, 21 August 1922, Page 7

A GERMAN VIEW AS TO UPPER SILESIA.

In the Deutsche Rundscbau for April Wilhelni Bolz writes with beat, even bitterness at times, indeed, but ably and effectively, on Upper Silesia. It has never, he declares, been Polish. The whole story of its rise is an epic of German thrift, energy, and progress. Until the 12th century the few Slavic natives were without knowledge of iron, mere forest-dwelling savages. Then, following German traders, came German power and capital, the German hoes and ploughs. Forests wire felled, agriculture and comfort arrived. The long line of barter by waggons, between Orient and Occident, passed through a cultured and prosperous German Silesia. When the Turks blocked the world highway and the age of sea voyages and the great discoveries came, Silesia lost both wealth and culture. A 17th century traveller says:— "They have nothing of humanity but the shape." But the steam engine, the steamship, the railroad turned the wheel of fortune once again. Coal became "black diamonds." Again, according to Herr Bolz, the Poles did nothing. Germans have made Silesia as important for the coal and iron industry as Lorraine—tenfold more so than tho entire Saar Valley. Down to 1918, or, indeed, to the present moment, the capital, the direction, the intelligence, have been purely German. Even tho native Slavic laborers, raised to prosperity in a land which now supports more than 6000 people to the square mile, were never subjects of Poland, nor in any way indebted to the Poles. When the League of Nations rescinded the free gift to Poland, and ordained a plebiscite, the Germans worked vigorously and hopefully, and were successful. In the opposite event, would there have been any talk of revision ? A commission headed by a Swiss has "cleft Silesia with a bloodstained axe," with no real reference to racial population, but to give Poland, in less than a third of the territory, the lion's share of wealth, both natural and that created by German thrift. Yet even in that section, more than nine in twenty votes were pro-German. The region of Lublinitz, etc., including i'our-fift/hs of the natural resources, went German by 56 in 100 votes. Some 375,000 pro-Poland folk are left under German rule; fully 400,000 Germans are handed over to Poland. The very fact that the development of the two sections is to go on unitedly, during the trial period of 15 years, is accepted as an acknowledgment that the German capital, intelligent control, in fact the present organisation, is indispensable. An Englishman is cited as remarking recently to a prominent Teutonic mine-operator: "1 don't see why you Germans make quite so much fuss over this matter. Of course you know you'll have it all back inside of ten years." "Well, even so,"was the spirited retort, "would you yourself care to loan your silk hat that long to a chimney-sweep." Pqland is credited with securing all the iron mines and the whole present supply of iron, 90 per cent, of the coal now above ground and four-fifths of the mines, with nearly complete control of zinc and lead. Poland, naturally, is treated by the writer as a mere outlying annexe to France, and these two losses by Germany, Lorraine and Silesia, are described as raising France from a poor fourth in relative to world-trade to a more dangerous prospective rival for England than Germany had become in 1914 —to which latter rivalry the war itself, certainly England's interest in it, is calmly attributed as a familiar fact. Cause for hope is found in this united exploitation of the whole country. "All Upper Silesia is ours, and must again become ours unless we ourselves renounce it. The enemy must make concessions to us, because we are a necessity to him. In 15 years there will lie many changes on both sides. . . . By union alone the weak become strong!" One essential fact, here eagerly dwelt on, is perhaps little known to foreign renders : "By far the largest part of the iron ore smelted in Upper Silesia comes from elsewhere —from Jsie South, the Fast, and from Scandinavian countries; and the coke for the furnaces, also, is brought from Lower Silesia. This foreign industry the Germans may hope largely to monopolise in the immediate future in their lands along the Oder, downstream from Broslau. As a whole, the article seems a frank statement of the German case, and gives an impression of sincere conviction on the writer's part, ft is deserving of careful perusal by all competent to pass on the merits of the international problems so deeply invoved.