ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the Nazi wartime vision of a national-racially homogeneous Greater German Reich and the Polish communist postwar vision of an ethnically homogeneous Polish nation-state impacted on the linguistically heterogeneous residents of Upper Silesia. During the Second World War, Hitler, Himmler and other Nazi leaders took the age of the ethnically homogeneous nation-state in Europe to its vicious culmination. The chapter examines the extent to which the partition of Upper Silesia between Germany and Poland in May 1922 after three years of uprisings and civil war in 1919-21 continued to have consequences for the region's inhabitants during and after the Second World War. In this decade in which the most radical attempts in European history were made to realize dystopian visions of the ethnically homogeneous nation-state, both the Nazis and the Polish communists dealt with Upper Silesia's linguistic and cultural complexities by seeking to assimilate most of the region's Slavic-dialect-speaking and bilingual residents.
