Southern Schleswig

With Prussia's modern weapons and the help from both the Austrians and General Moltke, the Danish army was destroyed and forced to make a disorderly retreat.

The Schleswig lands north of the Eider river and the Bay of Kiel had been a fief of the Danish Crown since the Early Middle Ages.

The southern Holstein region belonged to Francia and later to the Holy Roman Empire, but it was held as an imperial fief by the Danish kings since the 1460 Treaty of Ribe.

[8] After the German defeat in World War I, the Schleswig Plebiscites were decreed by the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, in which the present-day German-Danish border was drawn.

The border took effect on 15 June 1920, dividing Schleswig into a southern and northern part and leaving a considerable Danish and German minority on both sides.

This notion is disputed by those defining themselves as Danes, South Schleswigans or Schleswigans, particularly historians and people organised in the institutions of the Danish minority of Southern Schleswig, such as the South Schleswig Voter Federation, a political party representing the Danish and North Frisian minorities in the Landtag of Schleswig-Holstein and exempted from the 5% electoral threshold.