German minority in Poland

Germans in Poland today

According to the 2002 census, most of the Germans in Poland (92.9%) live in Silesia: 104,399 in the Opole Voivodeship, i.e. 71.0% of all Germans in Poland and a share of 9.9% of the local population; 30,531 in the Silesian Voivodeship, i.e. 20.8% of all Germans in Poland and 0.6% of the local population; plus 1,792 in the Lower Silesian Voivodeship, i.e. 1.2% of all Germans in Poland, though only 0.06% of the local population. A second region with a notable German minority is Masuria, with 4,311 living in the Warmian-Masurian Voivodeship, corresponding to 2.9% of all Germans in Poland, and 0.3% of the local population.

Towns with particularly high concentrations of German speakers in Opole Voivodeship include: Strzelce Opolskie; Dobrodzien; Prudnik; Głogówek; and Gogolin.

In the remaining 12 voivodeships of Poland, the percentage of Germans in the population does not exceed 0.09%:

Poland is also the third most frequent destination for migrant Germans searching for work, after the United States and Switzerland.

History of Germans in Poland

German migration into the area that is part of modern Poland began with the medieval Ostsiedlung (see also Walddeutsche in the Subcarpathian region). The historically Prussian regions of Lower Silesia, East Brandenburg, Pomerania and East Prussia were almost completely German by the High Middle Ages. In other areas of modern-day Poland there were substantial German populations, most notably in the historical regions of Pomerelia, Upper Silesia, and Posen or Greater Poland. Lutheran Germans settled numerous "Olęder" villages along the Vistula River and its tributaries during the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. In the 19th century, Germans were actively involved in developing the clothmaking industry in what is now central Poland. Over 3,000 villages and towns within Russian Poland are recorded as having German residents. Many of these Germans remained east of the Curzon line after World War I, including a significant number in Volhynia. In the late 19th century, some Germans moved westward during the Ostflucht, while others were settled in Central Poland by a Prussian Settlement Commission. After the creation of the Second Polish Republic, large numbers of ethnic Germans were forced to leave, especially in the Polish Corridor area.

According to the 1931 census there were around 740,000 German speakers living in Poland (2.3% of the population). Their minority rights were protected by the Little Treaty of Versailles. The right to appeal to the League of Nations however was renounced in 1934, officially due to Germany's withdrawal from the League after Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933.

After Nazi Germany's invasion of the Second Polish Republic in 1939, many members of the German minority (around 25%) joined the ethnic German paramilitary organisation Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz. When the German occupation of Poland began, the Selbstschutz took an active part in Nazi crimes against ethnic Poles. Due to their pre-war interactions with the Polish majority, they were able to prepare lists of Polish intellectuals and civil servants whom the Nazis selected for extermination. The organisation actively participated and was responsible for the deaths of about 50,000 Poles.

During the Nazi occupation of Poland during World War II, ethnic Germans from other areas of Central Europe such as the Baltic States were forcibly resettled in the pre-war territory of Poland by the Nazis, who at the same time expelled, enslaved and killed Poles and Jews.

Before the Nazis' defeat, the Soviets annexed a massive portion of the eastern part of Poland as part of an agreement between the two powers. However, after the Nazis defeat, Poland was not given back its Soviet annexed territory, so instead Germans from the historically Prussian areas of Lower Silesia, Upper Silesia, Pommerania, East Brandenburg and East Prussia were ethnically cleansed from their homelands and sent to refugee camps west of the new border in order to give Poles who were expelled from Sovet occupied Poland living space. In the areas annexed from Germany, Germans had formed the vast majority of the population.

Of the Germans who were expelled, the vast majority were Protestants, and came from all the annexed Germans regions, but many were from Pommerania or East Prussia in particular. Only a fraction of the Germans of Poland were not ethnically cleansed, and therefore were reduced to a small minority. Germans who were allowed to stay were only allowed to for certain reasons. For example, in Silesia, the population was more mixed, as in they had intermarried with other ethnicities or were half Germans themselves. Many were also Roman Catholic, and spoke a Slavic dialect with only some German influence known as Wasserpolnisch. Many of them chose to remain, but would later emigrate to West Germany in order to flee the Communist government.

With the downfall of the Communist regime, the German minorities' political situation in modern-day Poland has improved, and German citizens are now allowed to buy land and property in the areas where they or their ancestors used to live, and can return there if they wish. However, none of their properties have been returned after being confiscated.

A possible demonstration of the ambiguity of the Polish German minority position can be seen in the life and career of Waldemar Kraft, a Minister without Portfolio in the West German Bundestag during the 1950s. However, most of the German minority had not been as involved in the Nazi system as Kraft was.

There is no clear-cut division between the Germans and some other minorities, whose heritage is similar in some respects due to centuries of assimilation, Germanisation and intermarriage, but differs in other respects due to either ancient regional West Slavic roots or Polonisation. Examples of these minorities are the Slovincians (Lebakaschuben), the Masurians and the Silesians of Upper Silesia. While in the past these people have been claimed for both Polish and German ethnicity, it really depends on their self-perception which they choose to belong to.

German Poles

German Poles (German: Deutsche Polen, Polish: Polacy pochodzenia niemieckiego) may refer to either Poles of German descent or sometimes to Polish citizens whose ancestors held German citizenship before World War II, regardless of their ethnicity.

After the flight and expulsion of Germans from Poland, the largest of a series of flights and expulsions of Germans in Europe during and after World War II, approximately 1,000,000 former citizens of Germany were naturalized and granted Polish citizenship. Some of them were forced to stay in Poland and some wanted to stay there, as it was their native territory. The lowest estimate by West German Schieder commission of 1953, is that 910,000 former German citizens were granted Polish citizenship by 1950. The highest estimate is that 1,043,550 were naturalized as Polish citizens by 1950.

However the vast majority of those people were the so-called "autochthons" who were allowed to stay in post-war Poland after declaring Polish ethnicity in a special verification process. Therefore, most of them were inhabitants of Polish descent of the pre-war border regions of Upper Silesia and Warmia-Masuria. Sometimes they were called Wasserpolnisch or Wasserpolak. Despite their ethnic background, they were allowed to reclaim their former German citizenship on application and under German Basic Law were "considered as not having been deprived of their German citizenship if they have established their domicile in Germany after May 8, 1945 and have not expressed a contrary intention." Because of this fact many of them left People's Republic of Poland due to its undemocratic political system and constant economic problems.

It is estimated that, in the Cold War era, hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens decided to emigrate to West Germany and, to a lesser extent, to East Germany. Despite that, hundreds or tens of thousands of former German citizens remained in Poland. Some of them created a family with other Poles, who, in the vast majority, were settlers from central Poland or were resettled from the former eastern territories of Poland by the Soviets to the Recovered Territories (Former eastern territories of Germany).

Education

There is one German international school in Poland, Willy-Brandt-Schule in Warsaw.

Notable Poles of German descent

German media in Poland