Sub-project 6: The Origins of the Polish Army. National Defense and Military Violence (1914-1926)

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Jan C. Behrends
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 407133841

Within the research group, this sub-project continues the work on the question of military cultures of violence in Eastern Europe that was begun in the first project phase. Due to the inaccessibility of Russian and Ukrainian archives as a result of the war, a topic of Polish military history is being addressed, which at the same time builds bridges to the research group's other projects on Austria, Russia, France and the German Empire. The subject of the investigation is the question of the genesis of a specific military culture of violence in Polish units during the First World War, during the founding of the state in the border wars and in particular in the war against Lenin's Russia. In addition, the consequences of the use of military force for the Polish state up to the May Putsch of 1926 will be examined. In this way, the research will look beyond the established caesura of 1918 to the emergence of a self-image of the Polish military in various theaters of war during the World War and subsequently in the post-imperial situation in Eastern Europe. The research will be conducted against the background of the ongoing debates about the specifics of the Eastern Front in the First World War, the irregular violence against civilians, especially the Jewish population of Eastern Europe, between 1914 and 1921, and the controversies surrounding the emergence of the Polish state in conflict with its neighbors. This dissertation will place Polish actors from 1914 to 1926 at the center of the research. The aim is to work out how an emerging army determined its own relationship to military violence. This took place under close observation by other armies, which formally had supreme command over various Polish units until 1918 and then in the struggle for national self-assertion and state sovereignty from November 1918 onwards. Due to the close connection between the state and the military after 1918 - symbolically fused in the person of Józef Piłsudski - the behavior of the Polish armed forces was of particular importance for Poland's legitimacy in the international arena. At the same time, the Polish troops operated in a brutalized space in which mass violence against civilians, pogroms and violent attacks on cultural assets and holy sites had been part of everyday military life since 1915 at the latest. In the war of 1920/21, the Red Army, which had formed on the brutal battlefields of the Civil War, was an opponent of the Polish armed forces. This raises the question of the extent to which the new Polish armed forces and their culture of violence were shaped by the circumstances on the ground or by the norms, discourses and violent practices of the armies from which they emerged. Finally, it is important to address the extent to which Poland's armed forces were shaped by their political creators, who saw the French state as a role model and wanted to turn Poland into a Western nation.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 2898: Military Cultures of Violence - Illegitimate Military Violence from the Early Modern Period to the Second World War
• International Connection: France, Poland
• Cooperation Partners: Professor Dr. Nicolas Beaupré; Professor Dr. Maciej Górny