Polish immigration to the Nord-Pas-de-Calais coalfield

Polish immigration to the Nord-Pas-de-Calais coalfield took place before and especially after the First World War. It took place mainly in the second half of the 1920s, when the mines, drowned in October and November 1918 by the Germans at the end of the war, were once again usable. Half of the Polish immigrants had initially entered Germany as Westphalian miners.

Several thousand were sent home in the five years following the 1929 crash, sometimes for strike action. A number of them were killed in the International Brigades, during the Spanish Civil War and then in the Resistance, particularly during the Patriotic Strike of the 100,000 miners of Nord-Pas-de-Calais in May–June 1941.

Between 1945 and 1949, when the battle for coal was being waged to combat electricity shortages in several countries, 62,000 Poles from France;^[1] returned to Poland via a "reemigracja", first spontaneous and then organized, including 5,000 miners^[1] from Nord-Pas-de-Calais, many of them communists who wanted to rebuild their country, despite or because of the arrival in power of the socialist government set up by the Soviet Union in September 1944.