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Lower Silesia remained German until after the Second World War, when it became part of Poland. Breslau, the principal Silesian city, became Wrocław. [20] Today, according to the Polish-German good-neighbor treaty, the two countries are obliged to assume joint responsibility for goods representing cultural heritage. [21] [clarification needed]
Following the partitions, the Prussian authorities started the policy of settling German speaking ethnic groups in these areas. Frederick the Great, in an effort to populate his sparsely populated kingdom, settled around 300,000 colonists in all provinces of Prussia, most of which were of a German ethnic background, and aimed at a removal of the Polish nobility, which he treated with contempt.
The Austrians wanted to incorporate Congress Poland into their territory of Galicia, so even before the war they allowed nationalist organisations to form there (for example, Związek Strzelecki). The Russians recognized the Polish right to autonomy and allowed formation of the Polish National Committee , which supported the Russian side.
The formerly good relations between Germany and Russia worsened in the 1880s due to growing nationalist trends in Russian politics. German minorities in the Russian Empire, including Baltic and Russian-born Germans as well as recent German immigrants, faced negative sentiments among both the government and the public supporting the ideas of Pan ...
In the course of the Ostsiedlung in the medieval period, Germans had settled in the region, especially in the western parts. Beginning in the 18th century there were several attempts at German colonisation, the first by the Prussian ruler Frederick the Great, who settled around 300,000 colonists in the Eastern provinces of Prussia, and simultaneously aimed to reduce Polish ownership of land.
In the 16th century, after the Counter-Reformation was launched and the Thirty Years War broke out in the German lands, Poland became a Roman Catholic stronghold. In 1683, the Polish army commanded by Polish king John III Sobieski helped to relieve the siege of Vienna and along with the Holy Roman Empire, ended the growing expansion of the Ottoman Empire into Europe.
Duiker and Spielvogel note that up to two million Germans had been settled in pre-war Poland by 1942. [69] Eberhardt gives a total of two million Germans present in the area of all pre-war Poland by the end of the war, 1.3 million of whom moved in during the war, adding to a pre-war population of 700,000. [68]
German language islands in the middle of Austrian Galicia (1880). The Galician Germans (German: Galiziendeutsche) were an ethnic German population living in the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria in the Austrian Empire, established in 1772 as a result of the First Partition of Poland, and after World War I in the four voivodeships of interwar Poland: Kraków, Lwów, Tarnopol, and Stanisławów.