Bytów (Polish: [ˈbɨtuf] ⓘ; Kashubian: Bëtowò; German: Bütow [ˈbyːtoː]) is a town in the Gdańsk Pomerania region of northern Poland with 16,730 inhabitants as of December 2021.

Eventually, King Casimir IV Jagiellon granted the town to Eric II, Duke of Pomerania, as a perpetual fiefdom.

[2] After the Partitions of Poland, Bytów became part of the Kingdom of Prussia and later also Germany, within which it remained until the end of World War II.

[citation needed] The town alternated between Poland and the monastic state during the Polish-Teutonic Wars, and returned to Polish control after the Second Peace of Thorn (1466).

[7] To gain an ally against Sweden during the Deluge, in 1657 King John II Casimir of Poland gave the Lauenburg and Bütow Land to Margrave Frederick William of Brandenburg-Prussia as a hereditary fief in the Treaty of Bydgoszcz.

[10] After the end of World War I and the re-establishment of independent Poland, the Treaty of Versailles kept the town in the Weimar Republic in 1919.

[13] Months before World War II, in 1939, the Germans carried out arrests of notable local Poles, incl.

[14] During World War II the Polish population was subject to deportations and executions, two of its leaders, Jan Rekowski-Styp [pl] and Józef Rekowski [pl] were imprisoned in Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps,[13] however, the town remained a local center of the Polish resistance movement (Kashubian Griffin).

[9] In January 1945, a German-perpetrated death march of Allied prisoners-of-war from the Stalag XX-B POW camp passed through the town.

Those German inhabitants, which had remained in the town or had returned to it short after the war, were later on forcibly expelled and their property seized in accordance with the Potsdam Agreement.

[16] The indigenous Polish-Kashubian population was joined by Poles displaced from former eastern Poland annexed by the Soviet Union and from the rest of Kashubia.

Many families from Bytów such as the Brezas and the Pehlers emigrated to the area of Winona, Minnesota in the United States, beginning in 1859.