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The remaining German minority in Poland (152,897 people were registered in the 2002 census) enjoys minority rights according to Polish minority law. There are German speakers throughout Poland, and most of the Germans live in the Opole Voivodship in Silesia. Bilingual signs are posted in some towns of the region.
The historic German-Polish contact zone, which extended through Upper Silesia, and then roughly along the German-Polish border of 1937 and, in addition, through southern East Prussia, was dissolved in the wake of the Flight and expulsion of Germans from Poland during and after World War II. [36]
The registered German minority in Poland (Polish: Mniejszość niemiecka w Polsce; German: Deutsche Minderheit in Polen) is a group of German people that inhabit Poland, being the largest minority of the country. As of 2021, it had the population of 144,177.
The Germans usually did not learn Polish. When Polish became the only official language in Polish-majority provinces, their situation became difficult. The Poles shunned Germans which contributed to their isolation. [22] Lower standards of living. Poland was a much poorer country than Germany. [22]
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.
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.
The expulsion of Poles by Germany was a prolonged anti-Polish campaign of ethnic cleansing by violent and terror-inspiring means lasting nearly half a century. It began with the concept of Pan-Germanism developed in the early 19th century and culminated in the racial policy of Nazi Germany that asserted the superiority of the Aryan race.
Bloody Sunday (German: Bromberger Blutsonntag; Polish: Krwawa niedziela) was a sequence of violent events that took place in Bydgoszcz (German: Bromberg), a Polish city with a sizable German minority, between 3 and 4 September 1939, during the German invasion of Poland.