Poles in Germany (German: Polen) are the second largest Polish diaspora (Polonia) in the world and the biggest in Europe.

[citation needed] Contacts between the Poles and Sorbs in Lusatia, since 1635 ruled by Saxony, and previously also ruled by Poland in the Middle Ages, resumed, coincidentally at a time when the Sorbian national revival began and resistance to Germanization emerged, and Poles influenced the Sorbs' national and cultural activities.

[10] Many Poles fled to Saxony from the Russian Partition of Poland after unsuccessful Polish uprisings, including the artistic and political elite, such as composer Frédéric Chopin (1835 and 1836), war hero Józef Bem (1832) and writer Adam Mickiewicz (c.1829).

[16][17][18][19] The main center of the Polish community of the Ruhr area was Bochum, and since 1905, many organizations and enterprises were based at Am Kortländer Street,[18] which was hence nicknamed "Little Warsaw".

[23] In 1909, the Central Office for Monitoring the Polish Movement in the Rhine-Westphalian Industrial Districts (Zentralstelle fur Uberwachung der Polenbewegung im Rheinisch-Westfalischen Industriebezirke) was established by the Germans in Bochum.

[24][25] The policy of forced cultural Germanisation alienated large parts of the Polish-speaking population against the German authorities and produced nationalistic sentiments on both sides.

However, in August 1939, the leadership of the Polish community was arrested and interned in the Nazi concentration camps of Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald.

On 7 September 1939, shortly after the outbreak of World War II, the Nazi government of the Third Reich stripped the Polish community in Germany of its minority status.

In September 1939, the Gestapo carried out arrests of prominent Poles in Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig, Bremen, Hamburg, Hanover and the Ruhr.

[32] Germany also closed Polish organizations, newspapers, printing shops, schools, libraries and enterprises, and seized their properties, which was formally sanctioned post factum by Nazi decrees of 1940.

[35] As the result of the implementation of the Oder-Neisse border, the most important centers of Polishness in Germany, Upper Silesia and parts of East Prussia, fell within west-shifted Poland.

[38] After Poland joined the European Union, several organisations of Poles in Germany attempted to restore the pre-war official minority status, particularly claiming that the Nazi decree is void.

While the initial memorandum to the Bundestag remained unanswered, in December 2009 the Minority Commission of the Council of Europe obliged the German government to formally respond to the demands within four months.

[39] About 10,000 Polish citizens have recently moved to German localities along the Polish-German border, depopulated after the unification of Germany.