THE MODERN POLISH FRONTIERS 373defending the industrial area against all assaults. Pitched battles, long since leg-
endary, were fought at Gora Sw. Anny (Annaberg) from 21 to 25 May and along
the Ktodnik Canal, from 4 to 5 June. Although the insurrectionary leaders failed
to recruit all Polish parties in Upper Silesia to their cause - the communists and
socialists argued that the separation of Silesian industry from its traditional
German market would have disastrous consequences - they convinced the
Allied Powers that the plebiscite result could not be allowed to stand. On 20
October 1921, the Council of Ambassadors ruled that Upper Silesia was to be
divided along new lines. Sixty-one per cent of the total plebiscite area was to
remain in Germany, whilst the greater part of the coalfield, including Kattowitz
(Katowice) and Koenigshutte (Chorzow), was to pass into Poland. This deci-
sion, which was widely denounced in Poland as a betrayal, was seen by its
authors as a concession to Polish interests.^11
The Polish-German frontier continued to rankle throughout the inter-war
period. Its revision was pursued no less by German democratic leaders in the
1920s, like Stresemann, than by Adolf Hitler in the 1930s. The glaring omission
from the Locarno Treaty of 1925 of any guarantee of the status quo on Germany's
border with Poland, parallel to that on her borders with France and Belgium,
drove a lasting wedge of suspicion between Poland and the Western Powers. The
problem of exporting Silesian coal across the new frontier to Germany lay at the
root of the Polish-German Tariff War of 1925-9. Although the Silesian
Convention, drafted by the League of Nations for problems of common concern,
worked quite smoothly, there was little doubt that Germany was seeking a radi-
cal revision of the settlement. This was done, in no uncertain manner in 1939,
when all former Prussian territory, was rein corpora ted into the Reich.
In 1945, the scheme to establish the Polish—German frontier on the Oder and
Lusatian Neisse, and to compensate Polish territorial losses in the East by equal
grants of territories in the North and West entirely denuded of their native
German inhabitants, must be largely attributed to Soviet policy. Although
British and American negotiators had long accepted the Oder line in the region
of Frankfurt, they did not accept its extension to the western, Lusatian Neisse,
as distinct from the eastern or Glatzer Neisse, until a very late stage. Although
all Polish parties were eager to obtain Danzig, few had hoped for Breslau, and
none had thought of Stettin. Mikolajczyk in particular was conscious of the bur-
den of annexations which might revive German revisionism and which would
tie Poland to the Soviet Union indefinitely. But he, and all who shared his reser-
vations, were overruled by official representatives of the PKWN and TRJN, loy-
ally mouthing the demands of their Soviet patrons. The last settlement, which
was not intended to be necessarily final, was embodied in a communique of the
Potsdam Conference of 2 August 1945:
The three heads of Government agree that, pending the final determination of Poland's
western frontier, the former German territories east of a line running from the Baltic Sea
immediately west of Swinemunde, and thence along the Oder River to the confluence of