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Poles in Germany (German: Polen) are the second largest Polish diaspora (Polonia) in the world and the biggest in Europe. Estimates of the number of Poles living in Germany vary from 2 million [ 3 ] [ 4 ] [ 5 ] to about 3 million people living that might be of Polish descent.
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.
Polish Matczak family among Poles expelled in 1939 from Sieradz in central Poland. The Expulsion of Poles by Nazi Germany during World War II was a massive operation consisting of the forced resettlement of over 1.7 million Poles from the territories of German-occupied Poland, with the aim of their Germanization (see Lebensraum) between 1939 and 1944.
Another form of Germanisation of Poles was the relation between the German state and Polish coal miners in the Ruhr area. Due to migration within the German Empire , an enormous stream of Polish nationals (as many as 350,000) made their way to the Ruhr in the late 19th century, where they worked in the coal and iron industries.
The Prussian deportations, also known as the Prussian expulsions of Poles (Polish: rugi pruskie; German: Polenausweisungen), were the mass expulsions of Poles from Prussia between 1885 and 1890. More than 30,000 Poles who had immigrated to Prussia from the Polish regions of the Russian Empire and Austria and did not obtain a German citizenship ...
German warning in occupied Poland 1939 – sign "No entrance for Poles!" German Wehrmacht soldiers remove Polish signs in Gdynia, renamed Gotenhafen, September 1939. The segregation of Germans and Poles was achieved by a variety of measures limiting their social interaction. Łuczak described the segregation:
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.
After Germany lost the war, the International Military Tribunal at the Nuremberg Trials and Poland's Supreme National Tribunal concluded that the aim of German policies in Poland – the extermination of Poles and Jews – had "all the characteristics of genocide in the biological meaning of this term."