“Volkszeitung” — People's Daily (1923-1939). The untold story of Poland's German Labour Party and its newspaper

The Lodzer industrial workers, who supported the DSAP, used to live in such small, well-ordered tenements. On the ground floor, in the front of the main streets, there are still small groceries where you can smell something from the atmosphere of the inter-war period. (ulica Wojska Polskiego – the Polish Army Street)

The German Socialist Labour Party of Poland (DSAP) was an authentic, moderate left-wing party, a party of industrial workers and miners. She represented the citizens of the Second Republic of Poland who spoke German at home. There were the so-called Polish Germans who were at the head of this party. If we think of the Pole Germans, it is absolutely necessary to point out that this ethnic group lived for generations in the clearly Polish area, loved their homeland and shared the fate of the Polish people. Thus the Polish Germans became Polish patriots who, however, aspired to a limited autonomy to preserve the language and their ancestors denomination.

The most important press organ of the party was founded in 1923 in Lodz as "Volkszeitung" (People's Daily)

She also appeared in Katowice (as "Volkswille" — People's Will) and Bielitz ("Volksstime" — Voice of the People). Respective regional edition attentively dealt with the course of events at home of it's editorial staff. Unfortunately only a few copies of this newspaper kept preserved until today, which are now a valuable source of knowledge on the society and economy of the Second Polish Republic.

One of the last issues of the People's Daily, composed for printing in the night of 1, Sept. 1939 with a Linotype-typesetting machine. In the main editorial the aggressions´ policy of Hitler was judged.

The so-called Socialist Germans have established close cooperation with other Polish Germans (the liberal-conservative thinkers and journalists), later with the Polish non-Communist left camp, especially the Polish Socialist Party (PPS). They had been clearly antifascist-minded from the very beginning. In the 1930s they fought against the influence of the Young German Party, a strongly influenced by Nazi ideology grouping of the German minority in Poland. The fact that the German Labour Party never gave up despite the formal recognition of the Young Germans as representation of the entire German population in Poland by the government in Warsaw, has not been enough emphasized in Polish journalism.

The recreational area on the left side of the picture was created on the square where Hitler's air force perpetrated a massacre in the housing district of the German Socialists.

After the Hitler's Germans attack on Poland, the German Labour members were in the first ranks of the defenders of the Polish Republic

During the war, they fought with weapons in their hands against their Reich German compatriots. A whole German battalion with Emil Zerbe in the lead supported the defense of Warsaw in September 1939. During the German Nazi occupation of Poland, they continued to fight in the underground.

After the liberation of Central Poland from Nazi reign of terror, Comrade Zerbe tried in vain to get permission from the Communists to continue the work of the DSAP. The goal of the new regime in Lodz (the city was then the actual capital) was political and ethnic uniformity of Poland, achieved with totalitarian methods. So this was the end of the history of the German Labour Party of Poland, in 1945.

The so to say private history of the Polish Germans and their positive role in Poland does not end therewith

Thousands but thousands of them stayed here to rebuild their Polish motherland. They were bilingual and that is why they played a particularly important role in the development of the Polish western territories, in the operation and maintenance of German made machines. Their role in the anti-fascist resistance and the reconstruction of Poland after the Second World War is another story that can be told in a few essays.