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East Prussia (German: Ostpreußen; Polish: Prusy Wschodnie; Russian: Восточная Пруссия — Vostochnaya Prussiya) was a province of Kingdom of Prussia, situated on the territory of former Ducal Prussia. The northern part of East Prussia corresponds today to Russia's Kaliningrad Oblast, the southern parts form Poland's Warminsko-Mazurskie Voivodship.
In 1772, after the First Partition of Poland, Warmia (a part of former province of Royal Prussia) was included into East Prussia. On January 31, 1773 King Friedrich II announced that the newly annexed lands were to be known as "Westpreußen" (West Prussia) and the old Duchy of Prussia were to be known as "Ostpreußen" (East Prussia).
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2 Weimar Republic 3 Nazi reign 4 WW2 5 Further reading |
Along with the rest of Prussia, East Prussia, became part of the German Empire at its creation in 1871. After World War I until World War II, East Prussia became an exclave of Germany, created as a result of the Treaty of Versailles, when parts of the province of West Prussia (former Royal Prussia) were ceded to Poland creating the Pomeranian Voivodship or so called Polish Corridor.
East Prussia was located along the south-east corner of the Baltic Sea.
Its capital was Königsberg (now Kaliningrad).
In 1875 the ethnic make up of East Prussia was 73.48% German, 18.39% Polish, and 8.11% Lithuanian (according to "Slownik geograficzny Krolestwa Polskiego"). The population of the province in 1900 was 1,996,626 people, with a religious make up of 1,698,465 Protestants, 269,196 Roman Catholics, and 13,877 Jews.German Empire
| Inhabitants | non-German citizens* | |
|---|---|---|
| East Prussia | 1,958,663 | 2,189 |
| West Prussia | 1,433,681 | 1,976 |
| City of Berlin | 1,578,794 | 17,704 |
| Brandenburg | 2,541,783 | 5,213 |
| Pomerania | 1,520,889 | 1,405 |
| Posen | 1,751,642 | 1,438 |
| Silesia | 4,224,458 | 24,811 |
| Saxony | 2,580,010 | 4,642 | 1,217,437 | 37,821 |
| Hannover | 2,278,361 | 8,089 |
| Westphalia | 2,428,661 | 9,879 |
| Hessen-Nassau | 1,664,426 | 9,801 |
| Rhineland | 4,710,391 | 39,669 |
| Hohenzollern | 66,720 | 161 |
The German Empire ended in 1918. During the inter-war years Prussia briefly attained a form the province of "East Prussia" but was soon overrun by Nazis, as Hitler built up to the invasion of Eastern Europe.
Appealing to the spirit of ancient heritage in the area, "Baltic Germans" were sucked in by Hitler's speeches (as were Germans across Europe), and as the many other ethnicities (most notably Jews, Poles, and Lithuanians) in Prussia were not allowed to vote, Hitler apparently gained quite a few supporters winning a good majority of the "ethnic German" votes in this multi-ethnic and historically richly Yiddish region. Historically Jews had played an important role in the region; although the Jewish religious perspective on Christ was not popular, anti-Semitism seems to have been non-existent there up to 1918. Not coincidentally Hitler formed his Gestapo there to counter Communist revolutionary propaganda.
The Nazis altered about 1/3 of the toponymy of the area, to clean up all Polish names.
The Polish minority (see Mazurs) was brutally suppressed, with activists being sent to concentration camps. Parents stoped sharing their thoughts with their children, since children were encoraged to spy on their parents. Gradually, all men were conscripted to Wehrmacht, where they either were killed in action or taken prisoners of war.
During the World War II, the province was extended (see Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany). In 1939, East Prussia had 2.49 million inhabitants. Many were killed in the war. Jews were murdered during Holocaust, Polish minority activists were killed in concentration camps. However, most of the victims of war were young people conscripted to German army and killed in action.
The Red Army had entered the eastern-most tip of Prussia by August 29 1944. The massacre of civilians commited by Soviet troops in revenge for German crimes in the Soviet Union spread panic in the province. Many inhabitants of Prussia were encouraged to evacaute through fear of the Soviets
(a piece of propaganda which was not especially exaggerated) who completed the conquest of the area by the end of autumn of 1944. Independent figures for Prussians are not recorded but some 350,000 "Volksdeutschen" from across Eastern Europe had been evacuated in covered wagons to the Warthegau in Western Poland where they were temporarily settled. They later fled before the Red Army advance, to the interior of Germany. In the process, hundreds of thousands lost their lives. To replace the removed population, Russians, Belorussians and Ukrainians were settled in the northern part and Sambia and Polish expatriates from eastern parts of Poland taken over by Soviet Union over were settled in Warmia i Mazury.
Weimar Republic
Nazi reign
WW2
Further reading
Publications in German
Publications in Polish
External links