Briefly, he also was a paramilitary leader, known for organizing the Polish Silesian Uprisings in Upper Silesia, which after World War I was contested by Germany and Poland.

From 1895 until 1901, he studied philosophy, law, and economics, first at the Technische Hochschule in Charlottenburg (Berlin) (1895) and then at the University of Breslau,[2] where the Marxist Werner Sombart was among his teachers.

In 1901, Korfanty became editor-in-chief of the Polish language paper Górnoslązak (The Upper Silesian), in which he appealed to the national consciousness of the region's Polish-speaking population.

In 1930, Korfanty was arrested and imprisoned in the Brest-Litovsk fortress, together with other leaders of the Centrolew, an alliance of left-wing and centrist parties in opposition to the ruling government.

[17] In 1935, he was forced to leave Poland[18] and emigrated to Czechoslovakia, from where he participated in the centre-right Morges Front group, founded by émigrés Ignacy Paderewski and Władysław Sikorski.

He returned to Poland in the April 1939, after Nazi Germany had cancelled the Polish-German non-aggression pact of 1934, hoping that the renewed threat to Polish independence would help overcome the domestic political cleavage.

In August, he was released as unfit for prison because of his bad health and died shortly afterwards, two weeks before World War II began with the German invasion of Poland.