Germanisation of the Province of Posen
Since the Third Partition of Poland in 1795 the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth had ceased to exist as a state with its territory annexed by the surrounding great powers Austria, Prussia (which in turn became part of the German Empire in 1871) and Russia.
Beginning in the 18th century there were several attempts at German colonisation, the first by the Prussian ruler Frederick the Great, who settled around 300,000 colonists in the Eastern provinces of Prussia, and simultaneously aimed to reduce Polish ownership of land.
[5] By 1815 Germans made up a predominantly Protestant minority of about one third of the total population of the Posen region, while the majority of the inhabitants identified as Catholic ethnic Poles.
Under the agreements, the Polish-speaking population was supposed to enjoy a certain amount of autonomy; the grand duchy was put under the administration of stadtholder Antoni Radziwiłł,[6] who sought to act as a mediator between the central Prussian government and the Polish gentry.
While in 1824 a Provincial Parliament was invoked in Greater Poland, the representation was based on wealth census, meaning that the end result gave most of the power to German minority in the area.
Even when Poles managed to issue calls asking for enforcing of the guarantees formulated in treaties of Congress of Vienna and proclamations of Prussian King in 1815 they were rejected by Prussia.
Radziwiłł, whose brother Michał Gedeon had taken a leading part in the revolt, was dismissed by King Frederick William III and the actual power passed to Oberpräsident Eduard Heinrich von Flottwell, who enacted the first measures enforcing the use of the German language in schools and government agencies to limit the influence of the Polish clergy and nobility (szlachta).
Supported by Karl Grolman, a Prussian general, a program was presented that envisioned removing Poles from all offices, courts, judiciary system, and local administration, controlling the clergy, and making peasants loyal through enforced military service.
[14][15][16] Edward Crankshaw writes that already at that time Bismarcks hostility to Poles bordered on "insanity" and was firmly entrenched in traditions of Prussian mentality and history, while he did not write or talked about it much it pre-occupied his mind vastly, there was little need for discussions in Prussian circles, as most of them including the king agreed with his views on Poles[17] In another letter from 1861 Bismarck stated: Every success of the Polish national movement is Prussia's failure; we can wage war on this element not based on the rules of civil justice but according to the laws of war.
Polishness with all its characteristics should be judged not from the perspective of an objective humanism but as an enemy...There is no possibility of peace between us nor any attempts to resurrect Poland[18] Jerzy Zdrada describes how before 1848 a Prussian program was presented that envisioned removing Poles from all offices, courts, judiciary system, and local administration, controlling the clergy, and making peasants loyal through enforced military service.
[20] In 1861 Otto von Bismarck wrote in a letter to his sister: "Hit the Poles so hard that they despair of their life; I have full sympathy for their condition, but if we want to survive we can only exterminate them.
Especially in the years 1866 to 1869 Bismarck tried to appease the Polish clergy, he even chose to dismiss the President of the Province of Posen, Karl von Horn, in a conflict with Archbishop Ledóchowski.
[23] According to Clark the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71 and the following unification of Germany led to a shift of the government's principles regarding the Polish minority in Prussia[citation needed].
According to Heinrich Tiedemann, the author of the plan, the reason why all earlier attempts at bringing more German settlers to the province failed was that they allegedly felt uncertain and alien there.
By 1904, when the new law on settlement which effectively forbade Polish peasants from construction of new houses, the sense of national identity was strong enough to cause a period of civil unrest in the country.
Among the notable symbols of the era were the children's strike of Września and the struggle of Michał Drzymała who effectively evaded the new law by living in a circus van rather than a newly built house.
Prussia's Germanisation policies in the Province of Posen ended with the fall of the German Empire as most of territories taken from Poland were returned to Polish rule after World War One.
