A History of Gdansk, Poland

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Gdansk was a rich seaport before the Germans turned it into a pile of rubble in 1939.

Nun ja...Danzig was German before....and the polish stubbornness to let Danzig be German and accept a corridor to the Reich was not furthering the peace either.

The german Hanse made Danzig rich...the whole Baltic actually. It would be good of some nationalist Poles to remember how these lands have profited from being german.

Maybe some "german meddling" wouldn't really go amiss now either...:)

Meddling?

Well...I would that call rather a consequence of french, polish, allied and russian meddling...but hey...to each his own.

Perhaps russian but I don't recall the British or Americans destroying Gdansk.

....By 1944 a different picture had emerged; Danzig had become a major transit point, not least with swarms of refugees fleeing from the east, as well as a regular target for bombing raids. By March, 1945, with the Red Army fast approaching, the population had reached 1.5 million and the city stood on the precipice of chaos. Suspected deserters were strung up from the lampposts and trees of al. Zwyciestwa (or Hindenburg Allee as it was then known), and the city descended into a Dantean vision.

Historian Antony Beevor writes of the ensuing siege: 'Fighter bombers strafed the towns and port areas. Soviet Shturmoviks treated civilian and military targets alike. A church was as good as a bunker, especially when it seemed as if the objective was to flatten every building which still protruded conspicuously above the ground... Tens of thousands of women and children, terrified of losing their places in the queues to escape, provided unmissable targets.'

inyourpocket.com/gdansk/World-War-II-in-Gdansk_73591f

It as a German town, full of Germans, besieged and destroyed by the allies...how you want to pin its destruction on the Germans is at least curious.

The Germans started the Second World War when they bombed Westerplatte in Gdansk on 1st September 1939

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Westerplatte

Erm...are you kidding me?


Thats still wrong!

And what about Danzig being a strong, wealthy, influential hotspot as it was connected to Germany and the Hanse? As a direct outcome of german "meddling"?

We did U Boat yards etc, sadly there was no precision bombing capability in those days, fact is that no side cared about civilians, they were seen as potential enemy workers and as such legitimate targets, Dresden was was a prime example of this.

Now you sound like a Putinite (the semi-official Russian line is now that Poland initiated WWII by haughtily refusing to give in to perfectly reasonable German requests).

This is obviously meant both to justify closer relations with Germany (hungry for Russian gas) and to inoculate the population from the kind of post-socialist civic transformation occurring in Poland (and which has now begun in Ukraine as well)


Dresden is actually a better example of berserker rage* than anything

*a kind of trance like fury that some individuals, military units and at times whole armies engage in where wanton destruction becomes the primary goal in and of itself beyond any tactical considerations

You gotta be kidding too...do you think you are telling me the news?? REALLY???


No, that is about nationalist Poles preferring to see Danzig poor than getting better with the help of Germans...

For them the mayor was a traitor because he dared to look out for better economical/political relationships with...oh gawd...GERMANS!!!!

Or course Gdańsk was a German city (Danzig) for most of its history with some Poles and Kaszubians around the margins, but Germany lost it once it lost WWII and it's not getting it back. It will thrive or not as a Polish city where respectful German guests are welcome and expansionist Germans.... are not.

That's all in your mind only...

It's about Danzig a well off, thriving city for centuries under german "meddling" and being destroyed by the allies, not by the Germans.

Not more, not less.

Oh yes, and a mayor who worked hard to bring some of that old wealth and prosperity back, making it thriving again, even if that means good relationships with the neighbouring Germans...for that the nationalists Poles hated him and surely never shed a tear about his murder.

totally unprovoked, I'm sure, those mean old allies!

Wanna re-fight the war again or concentrate on the topic?

Hit the nail on the head. Gdańsk (Dantsic and variants of that in English, though we say Gdansk now) is historically not quite Germany, not quite Poland. It was Hansa, and like several of the Hanseatic Cities and their former outposts/partner cities today, are special cases economically and culturally.

No we certainly don't want to do that , and we do need to concentrate on better economical/political relationships with Germany it is the only way forward if we want peace and joint prosperity between our nations.

If the mayor was an advocate of this policy then bravo.

But Poland will never trade off or be bullied out of its sovereignty and security.

Who demands that?

Has anybody ever mentioned something like that?

Seriously now...that fear must stem from somewhere...who said anything like this? Was that talked about? When? Where? WHO???

huh?


Nah, Gdansk was Polish with various immigrant communities thriving there. Including Scots. Only after Poland lost it to Prussia during partitions it became German.

ought to remember that in 1308 Teutonic Order wiped out Polish residents of Gdansk and in 1945 those who didn't run from the Red Army were gradually resettled.

In historical terms Gdansk was integral part of the Polish Kingdom.

Gdańsk (/ɡəˈdænsk, ɡəˈdɑːnsk/; Polish: [ˈɡdaɲsk]; Kashubian: Gduńsk; German: Danzig) is one of the oldest cities in Poland. Founded by the Polish ruler Mieszko I in the 10th century, the city was for a long time part of Piast state either directly or as a fief.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Gda%C5%84sk

Correct...one of the oldest cities in (actual) Poland...but not one of the oldest polish cities! Small but important difference! :)

You don't seem to know much about it's history at all..

There was a Buzzfeed 'bombshell' which all the other MSM outlets repeated over the last week which turned out to be Fake News

buzzfeednews.com/article/jasonleopold/trump-russia-cohen-moscow-tower-mueller-investigation

Also it was Buzzfeed's Fake News which initially led to the Mueller investigation over two years ago when it published leaked information from the Steele Dossier which John Brennan and John McCain had provided it with.

The Hanseatic league had a stronghold there; like so many port cities, it has always been different to its hinterland.

One of the few words in English comes from Gdansk, back in the days when it was Danzig. That word is 'spruce' (świerk). It came from Danzig, so it was sold in London as 'z Prus'.

The concept of the post-Westphalia nation state is relatively recent (and far from permanent). It doesn't do to try and view a place's history through the (very recent and temporary) lens of natioanlism and statism. History (like human geography) is more complicated.

Not that this has much to do with the tragic politically-motivated murder of the immensely popular Mayor Adamowicz.


An important document, however there are other threads to discuss the repellant booby donald trump.

Over the last 1000 years, how many years has it not been a Polish city?

I will help you out here...

Kingdom of Poland 997-1227
Duchy of Pomerelia 1227-1294
Kingdom of Poland 1294-1308
Teutonic Order 1308-1454
Kingdom of Poland 1466-1569
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth 1569-1793
Prussia 1793-1807
Free City of Danzig 1807-1814
Prussia 1814-1871
German Empire 1871-1918
Weimar Germany 1918-1920
Free City of Danzig 1920-1939
Third Reich 1939-1945
People's Republic of Poland 1945-1989
Republic of Poland 1989-present

...do you really think the partitions have been made Poles to Germans, Austrians and Russians in anything but name?

Even 1945 Danzig was full of Germans, Kashubians and others, as it has been for centuries...you silly, silly plastic...

Who the effin' woodchuck cares? What's relevant to present discussions is the aftermath of WWII anything else is mastvrbatory fantasy

Spend all your time obsessing about the past and you'll miss the present and the future...

Nonsense. You're splitting hairs here to sell that old Chesnutt. Poland hasn't been a kingdom of a one pure ethnicity as defined by the 19th century mystics, there were lost of subject with different origins yet all of them were subjects to the Polish Crown i.e. they were Polish.

looking at the past with a modern perspective distorts the truth.

In 1454 residents of Gdansk well Dazing rebelled against monks with swords and swore allegiance to the Polish Crown - them and their progeny had been a loyal Polish subjects for many generations, they were against being incorporated into Prussia in 1794. I guess 100 years of Prussia rule and brainwiping changed it.

Yet to say that in circa 1550 Gdansk wasn't a polish city is a pure garbage. How many Turkish cities are there in Germany?

What I said...:)

Actually..no....I'm sure you know the history better than I do BB but Gdansk was actually destroyed by the Soviets. Anybody from Gdansk will tell you that. The allies destroyed Konigsberg, but the Russians destroyed Danzig, by deliberate desecration.

And now the Russkis have Kalinigrad, a post socialist concrete hell-hole, whilst Poland has Gdansk, and Adamowicz was quite right to build ties with the cities' German past. The city needs any help it can get. Any business and inward investment is good; if you look at Gdansk from the air, and go behind the facades, the city will still be a big mess in 50 years; a young man in his early thirties had a vision and was elected city mayor at what was, on the face of it, a ridiculously young age, with the remit to create something from nothing. And he succeeded and then some.

Only the Poles could denigrate such achievement and this constantly moves me to despair how ******* lame those people are.

A list of famous Danziger personalities from between the 12. and 17. century (also at about 1550):

de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_Pers%C3%B6nlichkeiten_der_Stadt_Danzig#12._%E2%80%93_17._Jahrhundert


Okay...the Soviets had been no allies then...