Industrialization and Migration: The COP Plan for Poland

• In Event: Developmental Migration: Human Mobility, Populationist Politics, and the Transnational Engagements of the Interwar Polish Second Republic

Abstract

This paper focuses on attempts to control and encourage migration – internally as well as return migration – during the buildup of the Central Industrial Area (COP), a concentrated military-industrial project which lasted from 1937-1939 in Poland. During this short period, in an area of south-central Poland hundreds of new arms factories, iron and steel works, power plants, gas works, water works – whole new cities – rose out of a densely populated rural territory, an almost entirely state-sponsored campaign resembling the steel town drives of Magnitogorsk, Nowa Huta or Sztálinváros/Dunaújváros that required the movement of thousands of people and goods into areas where there was little infrastructure. As all of these projects required the attraction (or forced migration) of thousands, and a serious drought of skilled workers with experience in heavy industry obtained in Poland, many of these Polish workers had to be found abroad, most often in Germany, France or Belgium, a task undertaken by the migration office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Author

• Zachary Adam Mazur, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews (Poland)