Also sprach Richard Heli on 5 Feb 97 at 11:59 about Re: ahe1814.txt:
upper Silesia esat of Opole held a plebiscite on March 20, 1921. The results were inconclusive, however, so that a final decision to divide the area between Poland and Germany (over the latter's protest) was made by the Allied Council of Ambassadors (10/19/1921).
I could check into this in detail if it matters but I think the problem was that the Poles lost the plebiscite against everybody's expectations. The Allies then re-wrote the rules so that Poland could get the parts of Silesia where they did have a majority of the votes. A little gerrymandering after the fact so to speak. The Germans were obviously pissed at this development and it created rancor which simply stoked later fires.
In neighboring Cieszyn/Tesi'n/Teschen, which had been the easternmost part of the former Austrian province of Silesia, the Allies rejected the idea of a plebiscite and simply divided the area and its main city between Poland and Czechoslovakia. At the same time (July 28, 1920), the Council of Ambassadors assigned to Poland small fragments of the former Hungarian counties of Orava/A'rva and Spis/Szepes in the Tatra region of north-central Slovakia.
Now, the question is, do we have all of that represented properly?!
It sounds correct to me. Wilsons whole idea was to give people self-determination and thereby secure a new and just peace. To the winning Europeans that idea ran counter to centuries of grab what you can while you have the upper hand - they thought him a bloody fool and simply went about their business cutting up the pie and creating countries as they saw fit. For all practical reality the German/Austrian Bohemian people should have had something to say about where they wanted to be too, but in that case they were included in the larger majority which was rejected by the Poles in their situation. Fred Fred Rump http://www.k2nesoft.com/~fred 26 Warren St Beverly, NJ 08010 fred@compu.com or 609-386-6846 fred@k2nesoft.com