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 ...
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 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 fighting continued until June 28, 1919, when the Treaty of Versailles was signed, which recreated the nation of Poland. From the defeated German Empire, Poland received the following: Most of the Prussian province of Posen was granted to Poland. This territory had already been taken over by local Polish insurgents during the Great Poland ...
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.
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.
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 ...