Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
The history of Germans in Poland dates back almost a millennium. Poland was at one point Europe's most multiethnic state during the medieval period. Its territory covered an immense plain with no natural boundaries, with a thinly scattered population of many ethnic groups, including the Poles themselves, Germans in the cities of West Prussia ...
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.
German historians have portrayed this resistance as a national conflict in which the large cities of Danzig, Elbing and Thorn in the struggle against the suppression of their German nationality. [34] In the 16th century, Danzig was the largest and one of the most influential cities of Poland and had a preponderantly German-speaking population. [35]
During World War II, expulsions were initiated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland. The Germans deported 2.478 million Polish citizens from the Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany, [30] murdered 1.8 to 2.77 million ethnic Poles, [31] another 2.7 to 3 million Polish Jews and resettled 1.3 million ethnic Germans in their place. [32]
The remaining German minority in Poland (152,897 people according to the 2002 census) has minority rights on the basis of the Polish–German treaty and minority law. German parties are not subject to the 5% threshold during the Sejm elections so Germans are able to obtain two seats. There are German speakers throughout Poland, but only the ...
The Polish historian Bernadetta Nitschke has provided a summary of the research in Poland on the calculation of German losses due to the flight and resettlement of the Germans from Poland only, not including other Central and Eastern European countries. Nitschke contrasted the estimate of 1.6 million deaths in Poland reported in 1958 by the ...
[215] [216] About 1% (100,000) of the German civilian population east of the Oder–Neisse line perished in the fighting prior to the surrender in May 1945, [217] and afterwards some 200,000 Germans in Poland were employed as forced labor prior to being expelled. [218] Many Germans died in labor camps such as the Zgoda labour camp and the ...
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.