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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 ...
Poland received former German territory east of the Oder–Neisse line, which it previously lost in the Partitions of Poland or earlier, consisting of the southern two thirds of East Prussia, most of Pomerania and Silesia, right-bank Lubusz Land and Lusatia, and northern and western outskirts of Greater Poland.
In present-day Germany, the former eastern territories of Germany (German: ehemalige deutsche Ostgebiete) refer to those territories east of the current eastern border of Germany, i.e. the Oder–Neisse line, which historically had been considered German and which were annexed by Poland and the Soviet Union after World War II.
Lower standards of living. Poland was a much poorer country than Germany. [22] Former Nazi politician and later opponent Hermann Rauschning wrote that 10% of Germans were unwilling to remain in Poland regardless of their treatment, and another 10% were workers from other parts of the German Empire with no roots in the region. [22]
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 ...
A German–Polish customs war began in 1925, but in 1934 Nazi Germany and Poland signed the German–Polish declaration of non-aggression. A trade agreement followed. Two conferences addressed the matter of the school history-books used in Poland and in Germany: [32] Warsaw, 28–9 August 1937; Berlin, 27–9 June 1938
The Free City of Danzig (now the Polish cities of Gdańsk, Sopot and the surrounding areas), situated to the east of the corridor, was a semi-independent German speaking city-state forming part of neither Germany nor Poland, though united with the latter through an imposed union covering customs, mail, foreign policy, railways as well as defence.
The First Partition of Poland in 1772 included the annexation of the formerly Polish Prussia by Frederick II who quickly implanted over 57,000 German families there in order to solidify his new acquisitions. [3] In the first partition, Frederick sought to exploit and develop Poland economically as part of his wider aim of enriching Prussia.