The registered German minority in Poland (; ) is a group of German people that inhabit Poland, being the largest minority of the country. As of 2021, it had a population of 144,177.
The German language is spoken in certain areas in Opole Voivodeship, where most of the minority resides, and in Silesian Voivodeship. German speakers first came to these regions (present-day Opole and Silesian Voivodeships) during the late Middle Ages. However, there are no localities in either Upper Silesia or Poland as a whole where German could be considered a language of everyday communication.Tomasz Kamusella. 2014. "A Language That Forgot Itself". Journal on Ethnopolitics and Minority Issues in Europe. Vol 13, No 4. pp. 129–138. The predominant home or family language of Poland's German minority in Upper Silesia used to be the Silesian German language (mainly (Upper Silesian dialect), but also (dialect of the land of Brieg-Grottkau) was used west of Opole), but since 1945 Standard German replaced it as these Silesian German dialects went generally out of use except among the oldest generations which have by now completely died off. [Germans in Opole Province in 2010: Questions and Answers: The Sociological Poll Research on the Members of the Social-Cultural Society of Germans in Opole Silesia: The Project Was Carried Out on Behalf of Osaka University, Japan]. Opole and Gliwice: Dom Współpracy Polsko-Niemieckiej [House of Polish–German Cooperation], 2011. The German Minority electoral committee benefits from the provision in Polish election law which exempts national minorities from the 5% national threshold.
In the school year of 2014/15 there were 387 elementary schools in Poland (all in Upper Silesia), with over 37,000 students, in which German was taught as a minority language (that is, at least for three periods of 45 minutes in a week), hence de facto as a subject. [Education in 2014/2015 School Year]. 2015. Warsaw: GUS. p. 101. There were no minority schools with German as the language of instruction, though there were three asymmetrically bilingual (Polish–German) schools, where most subjects were taught through the medium of Polish.Tomasz Kamusella (2014). "A Language That Forgot Itself". Journal on Ethnopolitics and Minority Issues in Europe. Vol 13, No 4. . pp. 129–138 (136). Most members of the German minority are Roman Catholic, while some are Lutheran Protestants (the Evangelical-Augsburg Church).
Germans in Poland today
According to the 2021 census, most of the Germans in Poland (67.2%) live in Silesia: 59,911 in the Opole Voivodeship, i.e. 41.6% of all Germans in Poland and a share of 6.57% of the local population; 27,923 in the Silesian Voivodeship, i.e. 19.4% of all Germans in Poland and 0.66% of the local population; plus 8,978 in the Lower Silesian Voivodeship, i.e. 6.2% of all Germans in Poland, though only 0.31% of the local population.
Towns with particularly high concentrations of German speakers in Opole Voivodeship include: Strzelce Opolskie; Dobrodzien; Prudnik; Głogówek; and Gogolin.
Region Population German % German 911,97159,9116.57 4,204,53627,923 0.66 985,5323,478 0.35 1,371,3804,717 0.34 1,647,5305,222 0.32 2,883,1878,978 0.31 2,332,9287,055 0.30 2,019,6803,939 0.20 3,490,4146,306 0.18985,5321,7370.183,415,1783,4090.10 2,400,8742,378 0.10 5,475,7545,318 0.101,192,9851,1340.102,085,0061,7570.081,133,1379150.0838,036,118144,1770.37 Source (2021, diverging): Główny Urząd Statystyczny, Warsaw; Census results.
Poland was the third most frequent destination for migrant Germans in 2009, after the United States and Switzerland, dropping to 8th most frequent in 2015.
History of Germans in Poland
German migration into areas that form part of present-day Poland began with the medieval (see also in the Subcarpathian region). Regions which subsequently became part of the Kingdom of Prussia – Lower Silesia, East Brandenburg, Pomerania and East Prussia – were predominantly German speaking by the High Middle Ages. In other areas of modern-day Poland there were substantial German populations, most notably in the historical regions of Pomerelia, Upper Silesia, and Posen or Greater Poland. In the 19th century, Germans became actively involved in developing the clothmaking industry in what is now central Poland. Over 3,000 villages and towns within Russian Poland are recorded as having German residents. Many of these Germans remained east of the Curzon line after World War I ended in 1918, including a significant number in Volhynia. In the late 19th century, some Germans moved westward during the , while a Prussian Settlement Commission established others in Central Poland.
According to the 1931 census, around 740,000 German speakers lived in Poland (2.3% of the population). Their minority rights were protected by the Little Treaty of Versailles of 1919. The right to appeal to the League of Nations however was renounced by the League of Nations in 1934, officially due to Germany's withdrawal from the League (September 1933) after Adolf Hitler became German Chancellor in January 1933.
+Number of Germans in Poland according to the 1931 censusVoivodeship or cityPopulationGerman-speakers% GermanPoznań Voivodeship186003018669310.0%Poznań City24647063872.6%Pomeranian Voivodeship10801381054009.8%Silesian Voivodeship1295027905457.0%Łódź Voivodeship20273811017535.0%Łódź City604629535628.9%Warsaw Voivodeship2529228735922.9%Warsaw City117189818920.2%Wołyń Voivodeship2085574468832.2%Stanisławów Voivodeship1480285167371.1%Lwów Voivodeship281517896010.3%Lwów City31223124480.8%Lublin Voivodeship2464936158650.6%Białystok Voivodeship164384472900.4%Kraków Voivodeship207851681920.4%Kraków City2192867400.3%Wilno Voivodeship10808687960.1%Wilno City1950715610.3%Kielce Voivodeship 293569779380.3%Tarnopol Voivodeship160040626750.2%Polesie Voivodeship113193910630.1%Nowogródek Voivodeship10571473790.0%Second Polish Republic319157797409922.3%
World War II
After Nazi Germany's invasion of the Second Polish Republic in September 1939, many members of the German minority (around 25%"Kampania Wrześniowa 1939.pl" ) joined the ethnic German paramilitary organisation . When the German occupation of Poland began, the took an active part in Nazi crimes against ethnic Poles. Due to their pre-war interactions with the Polish majority, they were able to prepare lists of Polish intellectuals and civil servants whom the Nazis selected for extermination. The organisation actively participated in and was responsible for the deaths of about 50,000 Poles.
Following the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, the Soviets annexed a massive portion of the eastern part of Poland (November 1939) in the wake of an August 1939 agreement between the Reich and the USSR. During the German occupation of Poland during the war (1939–1945), the Nazis forcibly resettled ethnic Germans from other areas of Central Europe (such as the Baltic states) in the pre-war territory of Poland. At the same time the Nazi authorities expelled, enslaved and killed Poles and Jews.
Cold War
After the Nazis' defeat in 1945, Poland did not regain its Soviet-annexed territory;Watson pp. 695–722 instead, Polish communists, directed by the Soviets, expelled the remaining Germans who had not already been evacuated or fled from the areas of Lower Silesia, Upper Silesia, Farther Pomerania, East Brandenburg, and East Prussia and made Poles take their place, some of whom were expelled from Soviet-occupied areas that had previously formed part of Poland. About half of East Prussia became the newly created Soviet territory of Kaliningrad Oblast (officially established in 1946), where Soviet citizens replaced the former German residents. Claims to a border along the Oder-Neisse line were presented at the Potsdam Conference of August 1945 by a delegation of Polish politicians. However the conference eventually specified or endorsed the shifting of borders pending a later peace treaty. In the following years, the communists and activists inspired by the Myśl zachodnia ("Western thought") strove to "de-Germanize" and to "re-Polonize" the huge land, propagandistically termed "Recovered Territories".
Since the downfall of the Polish Communist regime in 1989, the German minorities' political situation in modern-day Poland has improved, and after Poland joined the European Union in the 2004 enlargement and was incorporated into the Schengen Area, German citizens are now allowed to buy land and property in the areas where they or their ancestors used to live, and can return there if they wish. However, none of their properties have been returned after being confiscated.
A possible demonstration of the ambiguity of the Polish-German minority position can be seen in the life and career of Waldemar Kraft, a minister without portfolio in the West German Bundestag during the 1950s. However, most of the German minority had not been as involved in the Nazi system as Kraft was.Helga Hirsch. . The author mentions the indiscriminate expulsions of most Germans from 1945 until the mid-1950s, regardless of their personal involvement or non-involvement in the Nazi dictatorship.
There is no clear-cut division in Poland between the Germans and some other minorities, whose heritage is similar in some respects due to centuries of assimilation, Germanisation and intermarriage, but differs in other respects due to either ancient regional West Slavic roots or Polonisation. Such minorities include the Slovincians (), the Masurians and the Silesians of Upper Silesia. While in the past these people have been claimed for both Polish and German ethnicity, it really depends on their self-perception which they choose to belong to.
German Poles
The term "German Poles" (, ) may refer to either Poles of German descent or sometimes to Polish citizens whose ancestors held German citizenship before World War II, regardless of their ethnicity.
After the flight and expulsion of Germans from Poland, the largest of a series of flights and expulsions of Germans in Europe during and after World War II, over 1 million former citizens of Germany were naturalized and granted Polish citizenship. Some of them were forced to stay in Poland, while others wanted to stay because these territories were inhabited by their families for hundreds of years. The lowest estimate by West German Schieder commission of 1953, is that 910,000 former German citizens were granted Polish citizenship by 1950.Dokumentation der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ost-Mitteleuropa, Theodor Schieder (compilator) in collaboration with A. Diestelkamp [et al.], Bonn, Bundesministerium für Vertriebene (ed.), 1953, pp. 78 and 155. Higher estimates say that 1,043,550 PDFs by chapter (see contents) or 1,165,000 were naturalized as Polish citizens by 1950.
Post-World War II
After the end of expulsions, Polish sources of 1948–49 report that 125,000 to 160,000 lived on what was now Polish territory, but according to West German information, the number was 430,000 or even 900,000. It can be assumed today that the Polish figures were vastly understated and the West German figures were probably exaggerated, but ultimately closer to reality.
In order to understand the reported numbers it must be borne in mind that many former German citizens were "verified" as Polish, as they were alleged to be of Polish ancestry but subjected to centuries of Germanization. The Polish referred to these people using the propagandistic term “autochthonous”, as opposed to those Germans whose ancestors came to the region in the Middle Ages. In West Germany, and, internally, also for East Germany, these "autochthons" counted as Germans. Also, in 1951 those "autochthons" who had emphatically resisted verification were compulsorily given Polish citizenship; but many “verified autochthons” resisted the Polish assimilation policy, which was often accompanied by discrimination.