History / Poland did reasonably well in land terms out of the postwar settlement [270]


You don't need any Allies to tell you this. A visit at the WWII section of the Bundesarchiv in Berlin can help you.
And what happened to the millions of Poles that were alive before 1939 and dead after 1945? What is your explanation if they were not killed by Nazi Germans and Soviets?

History / Poland did reasonably well in land terms out of the postwar settlement [270]


So what about street names? Did you rename street names in Polish cities in order to honor your lost Kresy cities after 1990? I guess it was forbidden under the communists to remember the Kresy territories in public. In West Germany every major city has its Breslauer, Stettiner, Danziger and Königsberger Straße.

History / Poland did reasonably well in land terms out of the postwar settlement [270]


Then please correct me with valuable data if I should be wrong. All the demographical data I find in the net says differently, Ironside. Like this ethnographical map that shows dominant languages within Poland in the year 1937: upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/60/Poland1937linguistic.jpg


When the Nordstream pipeline was planned the Polish-German relations under Schröder and Kaczynski were really bad, so Schröder made that egoistic move. The Polish fears to be encircled and isolated again were underestimated from the German side. Mistake! Probably not the last one in the Polish-German relationship.


Agreed! The problem is, believe it or not, Germans don't want to lead Europe! It was so easy to let the Americans, Brits and French do all the politics and Germans only do business.

History / Poland did reasonably well in land terms out of the postwar settlement [270]


"Germany" can be seen as a metaphore for the German state, the German culture or for certain German regions. You are the one that sees Germany as the state only.


I think it does. The European population is shrinking in comparison with Asia, Africa and Latin America. The European economies are losing ground, too. China, the USA and most other states don't really care about Europe's opinion in world politics. But at least Europe is the only continent in the world that transports a new idea that never was there before: the idea that nations and states that were deadly enemies for centuries co-operate and try to form supra-national structures in order to use synergetic effects, because all states together are more powerful as every state for itself. This idea worked pretty well between Western European states. It is more difficult between Germany and its Eastern neighbours, which understandable after all that happened in the past, but do we have a viable alternative as to co-operate? I know trust needs its time but we need to work on that.

Did Poland really make such a "terrible deal" when its borders were shifted west? Let's be honest: Poles were in the minority in the Kresy territories. The big cities like Wilno and Lwów had Polish majorites, but Belarusians, Ukrainians and Lithuanians formed an abundantly clear majority in most parts of the countryside. Also the former German territories were much more developed.

Don't get me wrong: Like most Germans I wouldn't have shifted the borders of Poland west in 1945, and I would appreciate if Breslau, Stettin, Liegnitz and Kolberg still were German cities. But the reality of the year 2012 is different from that and this has been finally accepted from the German side more than 20 years ago, legally binding! Stalin shifted Poland's border west because he had an evil plan: He wanted to keep half of Poland's interbellum territory for the Soviet Union and he thought that Germans would never accept the Polish border at the rivers Oder and Neisse. Therefore Poland had no other alternative but to stay an ally of Russia eternally. Let's not grant "Uncle Joe" this success.

History / Poland did reasonably well in land terms out of the postwar settlement [270]


I read your post several times because I thought I misread something in the latter part of your post. Do you really wanna say Hitler's intention was to make Poland a Dominion of Germany, just like Ireland was to England or Hawaii to the US? Even if Hitler should have made such an proposal to Churchill in June 1940 it is pretty obvious this was ludicrous attempt to led astray the Brits and the other Western allies, because the Western half of Poland was already annexed to Germany, and I don't mean the frontier of the year 1914 but also Greater Polish cities like Lodz were annexed to Germany. Millions of Poles were deprived of even the simplest human rights and being already expelled from their homes and deported to the "General Gouvernment", hundreds of thousands of members of the Polish elite were already killed. Which frontiers of Poland did Hitler guarantee to Churchill?

The occupation of Poland was something completely different from the Nazi German occupation of France, the Netherlands, Denmark or Norway, which was a rather classical occupation of defeated states during a war, except for the hundreds of thousands of Western and Northern European Jews of course.

What the Nazis did in Poland was not a normal occupation but a systematic program to annihilate the Polish nation and millions of Polish individuals. I don't wanna get too deep into that, but it appears to me you have a lack of knowledge what happened East of the German frontiers in the years 1939 to 1945, so would suggest you read a bit about what happened in the "Generalgouvernement", before you write nonsense like this, which is a slap in the faces of millions of victims and their kinsmen. Wikipedia might be a good start: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Government

-----------------------------------------

I agree with you that Germany is not the sole responsible nation for the outbreak of WWI, and that the inhabitants of Danzig were deprived of their right of self-determination in 1919 when the allies decided to create the Free City of Danzig. Obviously the Danzigers wanted to remain within Germany borders.


Ironside, I would have expected you know that the areas Prussia annexed from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: Greater Poland (Provinz Posen) and most parts of Royal Prussia (Westpreußen) were returned to Poland without a plebiscite. It is debatable if the majority of inhabitants of Westpreußen/Pomorze/Royal Prussia would have voted for Poland in 1919.

I know your opinion that you think injustice - as the destruction of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 18th century definitely was - does not expire and therefore the German inhabitants in these territories did not have the right of self determination.


Every nation if pursuing her own interests. This is not a secret. But the vast majority of Germans have learned that Germany needs to be well integrated into a European framework of co-operating states if Germany wants to be successful. Question is do Poland and Germany have the same interests. In a world where the European influence is shrinking rapidly I think the answer is yes.

History / The story about German- Polish reconciliation [194]


This is utter nonsense! I know this happened once to a non-married Polish father of a child with German citizenship, but this rather proves that fathers in Germany that have no rights except paying money for their children, if the child's mother wants it that way, than a systematic discrimination of Poles. The responsible official at the youth welface office, that ordered that the Polish father is not allowed to speak Polish with his child, is a complete idiot, but this is an individual case and not the basic rule. You are putting it out of proportion. In my post office in Frankfurt there is a Polish woman working and she has a big sign in front of her where you can read in big letters: "Mówię po polsku!" (I hope i wrote it correct).

Regarding Erich Kempka: I once saw it on German TV that he had Polish parents. Doesn't the Wikipedia article acknowledge that?

History / The story about German- Polish reconciliation [194]


I said Germanized Pole. Or more precisely a German with Polish parents. Big difference! He obviously lost the ethnic identity of his parents totally and was Germanized within one generation. Hard to understand someone is able to suppress the provenance and culture of his parents or grand parents in such a radical way.

History / The story about German- Polish reconciliation [194]

I found another example for a Germanized Pole, a rather interesting one.

Erich Kempka, son of Polish immigrants to the Ruhr area. He was Adolf Hitler's chauffeur, member of the SS and the Lebensborn organisation, that esoterical association that tried to create the "aryan super human" by systematically interbreeding "racially precious" folks and steeling blonde and blue-eyed children from Poland and other occupied countries. Polish probably was his first language, learned from his parents, but he refused to speak it. Funilly his wifes maiden name was: Daranowski. He peacefully passed away in lovely Freiberg am Neckar in 1975:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_Kempka

History / The story about German- Polish reconciliation [194]


That's a tough statement and you should bring examples for that. In my opinion (West) Germany's elites did a lot of things right after WWII.


I know too little about Polish home affairs so I better shut up and say nothing.
It appeared to me that Poland under the Kaczynski's was rather isolated in the European Union, while now it seems to be much better integrated now under Tusk. Its economy is booming and was hardly affected by the European financial crisis. I don't know if this is Tusk's achievement.

Poland is a fully independent country since 1990 so you can vote whoever you want and you really don't have to care about what your neighbours think. Of course it is better for your economy and state if you get along well with your neighbours.


Is she? Her family roots go back to the cities of Danzig/Gdansk and Elbing/Elblag. She was born in West German Hamburg and her father was a protestant priest, so they moved to East German Brandenburg in 1954 because the Protestant church sent her father there. Her family wasn't influental at all, because, like in all communist regimes, church members were constantly discriminated.

She wasn't actively opposing the East German communist regime, but she also did not endorse it more as she had to do in order to get along well. Some of you probably remember the Polish communist regime and I bet not all of you were resistance fighters, too.

I didn't vote for her, but again (!) I can't see why she should be a worse leader than other heads of states worldwide.

History / The story about German- Polish reconciliation [194]


The German elite definitely was flawed four generations ago, but I really can't see why you think the current German political elite, Angela Merkel for instance, should be more flawed than the Kaczynski brothers for example.

History / The story about German- Polish reconciliation [194]


At least we were able to Germanize this guy:

youtube.com/watch?v=nXyDfbzyOcM

born as: Klaus Günter Karl Nakszynski in 1926 in Zoppot (Sopot), Free City of Danzig ;-)

History / The story about German- Polish reconciliation [194]


We had this discussion before and you said it yourself: there even was a time when Kraków had a German speaking majority in the Medieval ages, and other Polish cities had, too. These Germans did not disappear into thin air but they all got Polonized over the centuries.

The same way as the German population has a large Slavic element - at least 20 per cent - the Poles are far away from being purely Slavic by origin, because they have a large Germanic element in their ethnic mix-up, not only from Germans, Dutchs and Scandinavians but also from Germanic tribes that lived there before the West Slavic tribes arrived in central Europe in the 5th or 6th century.

So let's face it: In nationalistic times we learned to see each other as strangers and enemies, but the truth is: in the end we are brothers and sisters, or at least first grade cousins. ;-)

History / The story about German- Polish reconciliation [194]


I really don't know how many innocent Germans were oppressed by Poles, and this Forum here is the wrong place to answer such a question. It should be left for historians and cultural anthropologists to analyze that.

When does innocence comes to end and personal guilt begins? Are you guilty when you voted for the Nazi party in March 1933 because you hoped your life would improve? Are you guilty when you looked away when injustice happened next to you because you were afraid to raise your voice in a brutal dictatorship? Hundred Thousands of Germans were locked away in jails for raising their voices, others left the county. Are you personally guilty when you got drafted in the Wehrmacht and then be forced to invade Poland and other countries because you did not have the guts to desert, because you feared the Nazis would go not only after you but also after your family? It is not easy to draw the line between innocence and personal guilt.

I am more than glad I wasn't born in the year 1922 or 1923 because it probably would have been inevitable for me to be involved in things that can only be described as brutal and uncivilized. Let's face it: most human beings are bendable, shapeable and influenceable. It very much is the environment and the zeitgeist that decides if your good elements or the bad ones come to the fore.

It was the Nazis that created an environment and situation all over Europe where inhumanity and collective madness was the standard. In 1945, after six years of total war and 55 million casualties, people all over the world were so brutalized and dulled, nobody really cared if a couple of million German civilians got injured or killed because in the big scope of the picture this was just a rather minor detail and even more than that a logic consequence of human behaviour in large groups: in times of chaos the loser has to pay the price.

Therefore I surely don't blame the Polish collective identity for crimes that happened to German civilians after the war. Of course I would blame any Polish individual if I knew he was a rapist or murderer of civilians, because not tolerating such crimes should be one of the basic laws of civilization.

History / The story about German- Polish reconciliation [194]


Surely the majority of German civilians got killed by the Red Army. German officials collected eye-witness-accounts of abused German civilians after the war. These accounts can be found at the Bundesarchiv in Berlin. Most atrocities that are documented there can be linked to Red Army members.

Of course there are also accounts of Poles mistreating Germans but it seems to be it was not the general rule.

Did any Poles go to jail for mistreating German civilians in 1945? I don't know that. I know that thousands of Czechs that injured or even killed Sudeten German civilians in 1945 were not prosecuted according to the Czechoslovakian Beneš-decrees that guaranteed a general pardon.

History / The story about German- Polish reconciliation [194]


Mona, where did I try to shift responsibility for crimes committed by Red Army soldiers on German civilians to Poles? Where do you think I left perspective in my posts?

History / The story about German- Polish reconciliation [194]


There are indeed no reliable sources.
The "Bund der Vertriebenen" always stated two to three million Germans died in the process. They just took statistical data from pre-war Germany and then looked how many of these people are registered in East and West Germany. And they also counted people as victims of expulsions you can count only indirectly at most, like Nazis that commited suicide before the Russians could take them, woman that killed themselves in order not to get raped, refugees that died of starvation in East or West Germany in the months and years after WWII. Sometimes even Wehrmacht soldiers that got killed in action were counted as "Vertreibungsopfer".

The actual number of casualties probably is much lower, about a couple of hundred thousands sounds realistic.

The English Wikipedia delivers a good summary about this topic:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_Germans_after_World_War_II#Casualties

History / The story about German- Polish reconciliation [194]


No offense, but yes, I think this "scribble" is much more informative to me than what I read from you so far.
Please check this link about the number of Germans with a Polish ethnic background: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polonia#Germany

It's about three million people or more than two percent of the German population, the second largest Polonia in the world. And this is only the number of Poles.

If you take all Germans who have ancestors that once spoke a Slavic language the number will increase up to 20 million easily.


Well, well, well, it was an area of conflict during the nationalisitc era, let's say from the late 18th century to 1945 but it wasn't in the centuries before, at least not most of the time. And it is likely that it wouldn't be an area of conflict now.

You know, if you take the German-French language border for example, an area that also was a zone of conflict in nationalistic times, the situation is completely different from the present day German-Polish language border: You have an area stretching from Switzerland, over Baden and Alsace, Saarland, Lorraine, Luxembourg and Belgium where both languages gradually merge. Many people that live close to the border speak both languages on a native level -- and this is one of the secrets why Germany and France get along pretty well since 1945. Because we have millions of cultural mediators: Alsatians that can explain the French soul on German TV, Saarlanders and German speaking Belgians that can explain the German soul to French speakers, you have Luxembourgers that took the best from both cultures. German Saarlanders that are influenced by French culture, French Lorrainers that are influenced by German culture.

Germans and Poles don't have this any longer. The language border is as sharp as sharp can be and you will hardly find a German that speaks Polish or has deep interest for the Polish nation and state. And in post-national times this is a disadvantage for Germans and Poles. It would be different and better if the mass expulsions of Poles and Germans between the years 1939 and 1948 had never happened.


This is a disputable statement. On the meta-level I surely have to agree. The German nation in total came off pretty well for what Nazi Germany did to the world.

But if you take a magnifier and enhance, the situation is a bit more complicated: Austrians, Bavarians, Rhinelanders, Swabians, people from Lower Saxony got away pretty well -- in 1955 their standard of life was much higher than the life standard of an average Pole in communist Poland.

But East Prussians, German Silesians and Pomeranians and people from Eastern Brandenburg (present day Lubusz) had to take pay the price for Nazi Germany's crimes. Up to 15 percent of them died between 1939 and 1947, millions of women got raped, they got expelled and lost everything the possessed and therefore their culture and dialects will get extinct soon. After the millions of crimes that happened to Polish citizens from Nazi Germany's side I don't expect you to be sorry about that, but it would be nice if it was respected from the Polish side they payed a big price for their wrongs between 1933 and 1945.

Again on the big meta-level the situation is clear: Nazi Germany started a war, tried to conquer the world, tried to destroy the Polish state, nation and culture and therefore Germany had to pay a price after they lost the war.

But if you go down on the personal level it's like "Classical" and Quantum physics -- it does not fit together! The grandmother of my girlfriend was raped by 15 red army soldiers in front of her three kids in April 1945, her husband died in a Soviet mining plant in Siberia in 1952 and she was chased away by Poles from her Lower Silesian home in October 1945, having two hours time to leave her house, on the way to the railway station somebody beat her in the face and stole her last belongings, then she was plugged into a freight train with her three children and got deported to West Germany, were she never has been before. Would you tell her she was treated fairly?

Don't get me wrong I don't blame Poland or the Polish people for what happened after the war. In times of anarchy and turmoil the scum of every nation: Rapists, Thieves and Sadists comes to the light. In general Germans were treated relatively fairly by Poles in contrary to the Russians that were much more brutal to German civilians.

History / The story about German- Polish reconciliation [194]


Please check out this: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruhrpolen

/the-riddle-of-polish-speaking-germans-a-short-history-of-the-mazurians/

Not to forget the hundred thousands of Poles that moved to Berlin. Take a telephone book of Berlin and check the surnames.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_of_Eastern_European_children_by_Nazi_Germany

I know very well what atrocities were committed by Nazi Germany, but thanks for reminding me again. ;-)

History / The story about German- Polish reconciliation [194]

I do know Adam Mickiewicz, but to be honest I never heard about his poem Konrad Wallenrod. Thanks for the hint. Too much of my countrymen, including me, know too little about our Polish neighbours.

There are plenty of examples of Germanized Slavs that re-discovered their Slavic roots in the past, inspired by Johann Gottfried Herder's romantic language based nationalistic ideas like: Josef Jungmann, Christoph Mrongovius and Josip Juraj Strossmayer.

But I won't hold back the negative examples like: Odilo Globocnik, Otto Skorzeny or Michael Swierczek.

History / The story about German- Polish reconciliation [194]


You still haven't understood what our discussion was about, have you, Monia? Please read the last posts! It is pretty simple...

We were talking about people from the Szczecin metropolitan area moving to the German side of the border that is gradually depopulating because East Germans keep on moving to the West of Germany. I thought it may be funny to call this "Drang nach Westen". (If you don't get this please read this article: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drang_nach_Osten. The pawian "reminded" me that in the year 950 the language border between "Germans" and "Western Slavs" was about here:

upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bb/West_slavs_9th-10th_c..png
Then I made a joke about that Germans did a "good job" in Germanizing about 50 Slavic tribes and millions of ethnic Poles and Czechs over the centuries.

You may not find this funny but I did. If you really seek reconciliation between our two people then start laughing about the sad parts of our pasts might help.

History / The story about German- Polish reconciliation [194]


Don't underestimate our power to Germanize Slavs. We are masters in that art. It will only take two generations and you will find perfect Germans there, and for a good German it's totally normal to have surnames like Kowalski, Wischnewski, Nowak, Kaminski, Schimanski, Nowitzki and so on :) :) :)

History / The story about German- Polish reconciliation [194]


Drang nach Westen! ;-)

History / The story about German- Polish reconciliation [194]


You couldn't be more right with that.

Unfortunately Poles and Germans lost their traditional area of contact, which was one of the biggest areas of mixed populace in Europe, due to the consequences of WWII.

Here is a map how the situation was in 1925: upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Historical_German_l inguistical_area.PNG. A vast area stretched from Silesia via Greater Poland to Pomerania. The dominant language could be different from village to village. Somethimes even language and nationality did not fit together. The Polish speaking Mazurians (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masurians) for instance had no problem voting in absolute majority for the Nazi party in the 1930s, while some German speakers in Poznan, descendants 18th century immigrants from Bamberg (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bambrzy), desclared themselves as member of the Polish nation to completely perplexed Nazi invaders in 1939.

As we all know since 1945 the situation is like this: upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/German_standard_var ieties.png. Poles and Germans now live along the smallest border possible. Neighbours along the Oder Neisse border don't know one another but there are some rays of hope.

We should intensify cross national cooperation at the divided cities Görlitz/Zgorzelec, Guben/Gubin, Frankfurt (Oder)/Słubice, Küstriner Vorland/Kostrzyn nad Odrą. We need much more bilingual kindergartens and stuff like that. Szczecin should intensify contacts towards Berlin and the East of Vorpommern should reestablish contacts to its old capital. Did you know that some inhabitants of Scczecin now move to the German side of the Border because the prices for housing and stuff like that are cheaper than at the Polish side of the border? The city of Löcknitz is one good example for that: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%B6cknitz.

History / Mulitlingual town signs LT, BY, UA [5]

I agree with you that it should be an ornament for every European city or village to have more than just one name. My problem is that I think it's very difficult to impose bilingual town signs if the local populace does not cooperate.

Otherwise street signs look very fast like this example in Belgium:

Some people don't want to be remembered on the town sign that other nations have another name for their home city.

Besides that some towns have four or five different names, like the city of Lwów (Polish), L'viv - Львів (Ukrainian), L'vov - Львов (Russian), Lemberg (German), Lemberik (Yiddish). All these nations had significant minorities in the past of the city. Do you want to see all there different names on the official town sign?

History / Poland did reasonably well in land terms out of the postwar settlement [270]

But even the "Bund der Vertriebenen" does not challenge the Oder-Neisse border any longer since the year 1990.

I haven't seen this exhibition yet, but I know it does not concentrate on German expellees only, but tries to put a focus on the 20th century as the "century of ethnic cleansing and mass expulsions", beginning with the genocide on the Armenians in 1915, the expulsion of Greeks from Anatolia in 1922... ending with the expulsions of Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs in former Yugoslavia 1992 to 1995 and the Kosovo war of 1999.

Did you see the exhibition? Is the current German-Polish border questioned there? Does the exhibition misappropriate that the Nazis started to move millions of people around Europe if they didn't kill them in the first place. Doesn't the exhibition inform the auditors that the Nazis and their terror regime are the reason for the German exodus from Central and Eastern Europe in the years from 1944 to 1948? If not then I don't see a big problem in that exhibition.

It's gonna serve nobody if the agony of Germans east of Oder-Neisse in 1945 is tabooed, as long as it's made clear this mischief did not fall from the sky on Germans but was a reaction of mischiefs that occurred before.

History / Poland did reasonably well in land terms out of the postwar settlement [270]


I was talking about the situation of 1920 and just pretended WWII would have never happened, pal!
Please read my posts properly. I never doubted the Polishness of Gdansk, Wroclaw or Szczecin since 1945 in any of my posts!
Besides that: Yes! The Polish inhabitants of Gdansk would benefit a great deal, if Gdansk would be an independet state, embedded within the EU. But this in never going to happen because the EU has too many states already.


One more thing: And there no longer is a logical basis for making Gdansk an independent city. The situation was much different in 1920. At that time there really was a chance for Danzig/Gdansk to become an independent state between Germany and Poland.

I see nobody in Germany, besides a few bumblebrains in the far right, that seriously challenges the current border to Poland. Even most of the refugees and their decendents have made their peace with the past a long time ago. Also, at least this is my impression, most of them have understood it was only logical and fair in the big scale of the picture, that the attempt of Nazi Germany not only to destroy the Polish state but also the Polish nation and culture would take a tribute or a payback from Germany. Some of them are still sorry it was them that payed the price and not others and this is just comprehensible.

History / Poland did reasonably well in land terms out of the postwar settlement [270]


A state cannot be murdered because it is not a living being, besides that the violent European history is full of "conspiracies" and "murders", but surely the partition of Poland-Lithuania was one of the biggest legal wrongs of the 18th century, I won't argue that.

Look how many times the German states were attacked and raped from foreign forces in the recent Millenium. Existing as a state in Central Europe is just dangerous because you simply have too many neighbours that look jealously what you have on your table.

This is why the European Union is so important!


Looks like we are never going to find an amicable arrangement here, because it's my opinion that you cannot nullify injustice that happened six or seven generations before. Injustice expires after a couple of generations otherwise no American of European descent would be rightfully live in the Americas. Good thing is we don't have to find an agreement here, so let's just leave it.


Except for the latter part "that wasn't rightfully yours" that I don't accept in regard of Danzig, I agree with you in that point!

The German government was pretty stupid not to accept the Polish-German border of 1923. Exept for the special case of Upper Silesia the historic border between the Holy Roman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonweath was never violated from the Polish side. Even former Greater Polish cities like Fraustadt/Wschowa, Schneidemühl/Piła, Deutsch Krone/Wałcz and Meseritz/Międzyrzecz remained in the Weimar Republic.

The creation of the Free City of Danzig could have been a great gift for the inhabitants of Danzig, if they had used their possibilites wisely, but the Danzigers refused to accept this great chance. Now in the European Union a small statelet like the Free City of Danzig would bring only pros to its inhabitants. Look what influence Luxembourg has in the EU, a former bone of contention between Germany and France with less than 500.000 residents.

History / Poland did reasonably well in land terms out of the postwar settlement [270]


It took me quite a while to get back to this, but I still want to answer that.

Do I understand you right? Because of a massacre that occured in the 14th century, the inhabitants of Danzig did not have the right of self-determintation in the year 1918, 600 years after that tragic event, and you would have made them subject of forcefully implied Polonization?

Does this also mean that the inhabitants of Berlin live there "illegally", because the area was once taken by Brandenburg's Albrecht the Bear from the Slavic Sorbs and Polabians and their defender Jacza de Copnic?

I never denied that Gdansk was a multicultural city until 1939, you forgot to add Kashubians, Russians and Jews in your list of minorities, but also Cracow and Warsaw were multicultural cities in earlier times. Does this multiculturalism make these cities less Polish?

Also what you call "Prussian state school's propaganda" was simply the spirit of the age: the age of nationalism. And this romantic nationalism was based on language. When the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth went to the dogs in the late 18th century, the Europeans still lived in the age of big transnational realms and empires, the allegiance of the subjects went to a King or Emperor. When Poland revived in 1918 nothing was left from this old Europe that vanished during the Napoleonic era. Wasn't it Polish state school propaganda in 1920 to tell all the inhabitants of Poland that they were Poles and nothing else? It's just the nature of nationalism to use schools to make "proper citizens" out of their pupils, you can't just blame the Prussians for that.

Even if Poland had survived the turbulent 19th century as a state it is highly unlikely that it would have had the demographic power to Polonize all its ethnic minorities, so it would have lost Gdansk/Danzig anyway.

Since Gdansk is Polish city since 1945 in any event - the same as cities like Wroclaw or Szczecin, which have an even clearer German past - our discussion here is purely academic anyway.

History / Mulitlingual town signs LT, BY, UA [5]


Bilingual town signs for city populations that lived their before WWII? Would you also grant bilinugal town signs in Poland for Germans?

History / Borders during the 1800's - Was crossing borders easy or difficult? [4]


I read that in the 1880s the Prussian government deported all Poles that did not have German citizenship to "Congress Poland", in order to reduce the number of Poles in Westpreußen (Royal Prussia or Pomorze), Provinz Posen (Greater Poland) and Oberschlesien (Upper Silesia). This was pretty harsh because many Poles lived for decades in the above mentioned provinces, they just never cared about getting the German citizenship.

After this procedure crossing the border between the German and the Russian Empire wasn't so easy at all without further ado. As a German citizen you needed a Passport that was rather expensive and wasn't given to politically "unreliable" people, likes patriotic Poles. Relocating from "Russian Poland" to the German Empire was almost impossible for people with Polish ethnicity. Ethnic Germans from Russia in contrast could relocate whenever they wanted.

Of course the frontier was not fortified, so it might have been possible to cross the border by foot illegally and make a visit to the neighbouring village on the other side of the border line. Perhaps some of the German Border Patrol men even tolerated that, but it surely was better not to get caught.