Polish: Wielkopolska; Latin: Polonia Maior; English: Greater Poland; French: Grande-Pologne

The term ‘Polonia Maior’, which first appears around the middle of the 13th century in connection with Duke Bolesław the Pious (Bolesław Pobożny; 1224/27–1279), did not refer to the geographical extent of the region in question, but rather to its particular importance for the Polish state. The term ‘Polonia Magna’ was used only very sporadically. The Polish variant ‘Wielkopolska’ first appeared in the mid-15th century.

Greater Poland has few hills but many lakes, which form part of the Greater Poland Lake District (Pojezierze Wielkopolskie), the Leszno Lake District (Leszczyńskie) and, in parts, the Pomeranian Lake District (Zachodniopomorskie). The largest rivers are the Warta, the Netze, the Obra and the Prosna, along which important trade and transport routes developed in an east-west direction. Around a quarter of Greater Poland is forested. The Netze Primeval Forest, also known as the Netzer Heath (Puszcza Notecka), covering approximately 130,000 hectares on the north-western edge of Greater Poland, and the Greater Poland National Park (Wielkopolski Park Narodowy), situated south of Poznań, form the second-largest contiguous forest area in Poland; directly to the east lies the Rogalin Landscape Park (Rogaliński Park Krajobrazowy), home to the largest stand of ancient oak trees in Europe.

From its formation in the Middle Ages until the partitions of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth at the end of the 18th century, the border of Greater Poland to the north, west and south-west also formed the border of the Polish state. From 1320 onwards, Greater Poland was divided into the Poznań Voivodeship – comprising the counties of Poznań and Kosten/Kościan, as well as the Fraustadt and German Kroner regions (ziemia wschowska, ziemia wałęcka) – in its western half – and the Kalisz Voivodeship – comprising the districts of Kalisz, Pyzdry, Konin, Gniezno, Kcynia and Nakło – in its eastern half. In a second, less commonly used description from the 16th century, Greater Poland was understood to mean a territory extended eastwards to include Masovia and Podlasie (szeroka Wielkopolska).

In 1768, the Gniezno Voivodeship was formed from the counties of Gniezno, Kcynia and Nakło. As a result of the First and Second Partitions of Poland–Lithuania (1772 and 1793), Greater Poland came under Prussian rule and was incorporated into the provinces of South Prussia and (to a small extent) West Prussia. From 1807 to 1815, Greater Poland – divided between the departments of Poznań, Kalisz and Brzeg – was fully incorporated into the Duchy of Warsaw. Following the provisions of the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the eastern section, comprising the districts of Kalisch and Konin, fell to the Kingdom of Poland, which was part of Russia; the remaining areas of Greater Poland formed the Prussian Grand Duchy (after 1848: Province) of Posen – only the areas around German Krone/Wałcz and Flatow/Złotów were incorporated into the West Prussian administrative district of Marienwerder. Following the re-establishment of the Polish state in 1918, the two areas around Fraustadt/Wschowa and Meseritz/Międzyrzecz, as well as those around Schönlanke/Trzcianka and Schneidemühl/Piła, together with Deutsch Krone and Flatow, as the Posen-West Prussia border region within the German Empire. On Polish territory, Greater Poland corresponded from then on, with only minor territorial changes, to the Province of Posen (1919–1938); under German occupation, it corresponded to the Reichsgau Posen (1939–1940) or Wartheland (29 January 1940–1945), which extended eastwards as far as Łódź/Łódź, and subsequently to the Reichsgau Posen (1939–1940) or Wartheland (29 January 1940–1945); from 1945, it corresponded to the Poznań Voivodeship (minor border adjustments in 1950), whose territory was divided in 1975, in whole or in part, amongst nine smaller voivodeships, seven of which have since the most recent territorial reform of 1999 once again formed, in whole or in part, the Greater Poland Voivodeship.

The coat of arms of the Greater Poland Voivodeship features an uncrowned white eagle on a red background. This motif dates back to a seal belonging to Przemysław II, Duke of Greater Poland (1257–1296).

The earliest evidence of human settlement in Greater Poland dates back to the 13th millennium BC. During the Neolithic period, the fertile areas of the Pałuki region, situated north of Poznań, were in particular permanently settled. In Bruszczewo, situated in the middle Obra Valley, the remains of a significant Bronze Age settlement have been excavated. From the Bronze Age onwards, cultural influences from the north-west – manifested in the Single Grave and Bell Beaker cultures – predominated over the waning influences from the Danube region. From the Early Iron Age, the remains of a fortified settlement of the Lusatian culture (550–400 BC) have been preserved in Biskupin, north-east of Gniezno, and have been reconstructed as an open-air museum.

From the mid-9th century onwards, the settlement pattern and the degree of organisation amongst the West Slavic tribes living in Greater Poland had become so consolidated that hierarchical patterns of rule began to emerge. At this time, the Polans, a tribe settled along the Vistula, succeeded in repelling attacks by the Prussians coming from the Baltic coast and in extending their own political power. The Piast dynasty, based in Gniezno, stood at the head of the early medieval state. Under the leadership of Mieszko I, who adopted the Christian faith in 966 and established a missionary diocese in Poznań in 968, the neighbouring Goplan tribe was subjugated. With the ‘Act of Gniezno’ in the year 1000, to which Emperor Otto III (980–1002) consented to the establishment of the Archdiocese of Gniezno, and with the coronation of Mieszko’s son, Bolesław the Brave (Bolesław Chrobry, 965/67–1025) as King of Poland—which was proclaimed in Gniezno but not carried out until 1025—Greater Poland became the cradle of the Polish state. During the period of the divided principalities (1138–1320), the political centre of the Polish state shifted to Lesser Poland, and the Duchy of Greater Poland fragmented into several territories centred on Poznań, Gniezno and Kalisz. Although Duke Przemysław II managed to reunite these territories under his rule—and in doing so likely inspired the *Chronicle of Greater Poland* (*Kronika Wielkopolska*), written at the end of the 13th or in the 14th century— however, with his death in 1296, the line of the Greater Polish Piasts came to an end. The unified state, which was reunited as the Kingdom of Poland in 1320 through the coronation of the Piast Władysław Ellenlang (Władysław Łokietek, 1260–1333) as King of Poland in 1320, the Duchy of Greater Poland ceased to exist, being replaced by the Voivodeships of Poznań and Kalisz. From the 14th century onwards – an exception in the medieval and early modern noble republic – the two voivodeships formed a joint regional assembly (sejmik), which met in Schroda/Środa Wielkopolska and Kolo/Koło, and were governed by a joint general starost as the king’s governor. Against the backdrop of the territorial expansion of the Polish state under Casimir the Great (Kazimierz III Wielki, 1310–1370), the Greater Poland regions were repeatedly the scene of military conflicts with the German Order in the 14th century and again in the 15th century.

In the early modern period, oligarchic tendencies were countered by the ideal of the widest possible participation of the nobility in power. Greater Poland was affected more severely than any other region of Poland by the devastation wrought by the Polish–Swedish War of 1655–1660 (also known as the Potop, or ‘Wars of the Bloody Deluge’), in which around a third of its population perished. The population of Greater Poland also suffered particularly severely during the Silesian Wars and the Seven Years’ War, though in these instances the suffering took the form of requisitioning and quartering. These experiences of powerlessness contributed to the fact that the Greater Polish participants in the Confederation of Bar in 1768 – including, more frequently than elsewhere in Poland, townspeople – held moderate reformist views rather than radical ones.

As a result of the First Partition of Poland–Lithuania, which in the case of Prussia dragged on from 1773 to 1776, the north-eastern parts of the Gniezno Voivodeship, initially on the right bank and later also on the left bank of the Netze, passed under Prussian rule; this affected around 20 per cent of the Greater Poland population. With the Second Partition of Poland, the remainder of Greater Poland (apart from the adjustments in favour of Russia in 1815) fell entirely to Prussia, which from then on until 1918 had to contend with a large Polish-speaking minority within its borders.

The military defeat of the German Empire in the First World War did not immediately result in the reintegration of the Greater Poland territories into the Polish state proclaimed on 11 November 1918, which initially comprised only Congress Poland and Western Galicia. It was only the Greater Poland Uprising, which broke out on 27 December and was fought between Polish units and German border guard units, ending on 16 February 1919 with the Trier Armistice, that sealed the transfer of nine-tenths of the territory of the former Province of Posen to Poland. The National Democracy (Endecja) became the dominant political force and fostered a Greater Polish regional identity in opposition to the central government in Warsaw; however, it was permanently weakened by Józef Piłsudski’s coup d’état in 1926.

Just two weeks after the German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, which marked the start of the Second World War, Greater Poland was completely occupied by German troops. From October 1939, Arthur Greiser (1897–1946) served as Gauleiter and Reich Governor of the Reichsgau of Posen, also known as Wartheland. As a result of his Germanisation and punitive measures, the brutality of which exceeded even that seen in the rest of the German-occupied territories, Greiser envisaged a ‘model Gau’ that would serve as a paragon for the German Reich. Around half a million people were resettled from the Wartheland, and 70,000 Christian Poles were murdered; of the 435,000 Jews living in the territory of what would later become the Warthegau in 1939, only a few thousand survived the Nazi policy of extermination.

On 20 January 1945, the German authorities issued the official order to evacuate the Warthegau. The vast majority of the German population fled.

Between the 10th and the 14th centuries, the population rose from 170,000–180,000 to 300,000–320,000,^[1] with the eastern and southern parts of the country having a higher population density than the western regions, and the area around Gniezno being the most densely populated. Whilst Gniezno was initially the capital of the Piast Kingdom, Poznań – first mentioned in a document in 1253 – took over this role around the middle of the 13th century. From the mid-13th century onwards, towns founded under German law began to spread throughout Greater Poland, with the Magdeburg Law and the Neumarkt Law —derived from it—being applied in particular. Whilst it was initially predominantly German settlers who heeded the calls of the local rulers to settle in the newly founded towns, over the course of the 14th century Polish settlers increasingly took the lead in founding towns under German law. Over the course of the Middle Ages, Greater Poland developed into the most urbanised region of Poland; by the mid-15th century, there were around 120 towns here. By the end of the 15th century, a third of the population lived in towns, including a growing number of religious refugees from Bohemia and Silesia. The urban population was overwhelmingly Polish. Immigrants from German-speaking regions and their descendants, including those in leading urban positions, became largely Polonised by the late Middle Ages. By the mid-15th century, German immigration had come to a complete standstill.

Compared with the rest of Poland, the minor nobility was very strong in early modern Greater Poland, whilst the magnates were only weakly represented. Another characteristic feature was the large number of smaller towns. Between the early 16th and the mid-17th centuries, a further 28 towns were founded, including Schneidemühl (1513) and Lissa/Leszno (1547). Around 1660, 28 per cent of the population lived in towns, whilst this figure stood at 15 per cent in Lesser Poland and 12 per cent in Masovia.^[2] From the mid-16th century onwards, this development was accompanied by a renewed wave of peasant settlement from the German territories, which took place on the initiative of Polish landowners and, in the 17th century, also as a result of Counter-Reformation pressure from Habsburg Silesia. Alongside these mostly Protestant settlers, who included numerous merchants and craftsmen, between 1719 and 1750, some 400 Catholics from the Diocese of Bamberg settled in the areas around Poznań, which had been depopulated by the Great Northern War and the plague. Over the course of the 18th century, the population rose from 640,000 to around 800,000,^[3] with the German population estimated to have accounted for around ten per cent during the period of the Partitions from 1772 to 1795.

The very slow pace of industrialisation in Greater Poland during the 19th century was also reflected in a low proportion of workers within the population, with the result that the proportion of the urban population remained at 28 per cent (i.e. the figure from the early modern period) for almost the entire century. It was not until 1910 that this figure reached 35 per cent. Despite some positive impetus provided by the ‘Organische Arbeit’ movement, the Polish middle classes had scarcely any opportunities for advancement in a society dominated by German administrative and military personnel well into the 19th century.

The population figures for the part of Greater Poland belonging to Prussia developed as follows:

For the districts of Kalisz and Konin, the following figures are available for the period after 1815: 283,461 (1850), 432,237 (1880) and 536,498 (1895).^[6] The population growth of 39 per cent between 1849 and 1910 was, partly due to large-scale emigration overseas and to other parts of Prussia or the German Empire, significantly lower than in Upper Silesia (193 per cent), which was undergoing more rapid industrialisation, or in Galicia (160 per cent), where the rural regions were overpopulated.^[7]

The proportion of the exclusively German-speaking population rose steadily, albeit slightly, over the course of the 19th century. According to the official nationality statistics based on religious affiliation – which, from the 1880s onwards, grouped ‘Germans’ and ‘Jews’ together – the ratio of Poles to Germans developed as follows:

In some towns in the border region, such as Rawitsch/Rawicz, Meseritz, Bromberg and Schönlanke, the German population was in the majority.

The tensions that grew in the second half of the 19th century between those sections of the population who identified as ‘German’ and those who identified as ‘Polish’ also intensified as a result of state measures and regulations, such as the increasingly firm establishment of German as the language of instruction in the school system from 1871 onwards, the forced deportation of around 30,000 Poles to Russia and Austria between 1885 and 1890; and, in 1908, on the one hand, the Associations Act, which stipulated the use of the German language at public gatherings, and, on the other hand, the Expropriation Act, which was scarcely ever applied but had a devastating impact on the Prussian government’s reputation. This policy was flanked by the ‘Association for the Promotion of German Culture in the Eastern Marches’, founded privately in Posen in 1894 (renamed the ‘German Eastern Marches Association’ in 1899, also known as the ‘Hakatists’). The association’s headquarters, which operated mainly in the provinces of Posen and Upper Silesia, were moved to Berlin in 1896.

In the re-established Poland, the proportion of the population that was German fell rapidly and stood at just 9.6 per cent by 1936.^[9] This trend was most evident in the major cities: between 1910 and 1931, the proportion of the German population in Posen fell from around 42 per cent to around two per cent; in Bromberg, it fell from 77.5 per cent to 8.5 per cent.^[10] The total population of the Poznań Voivodeship rose from around two million to just over 2.5 million between 1921 and 1939.^[11]

In the Reichsgau of Posen, or Wartheland, just under 5 million people lived during the early years of the war, including around 325,000 Germans and 4.2 million Christian Poles.^[12] A total of 625,000 Poles were affected by forced resettlements by 1944, 160,000 of whom were resettled from the territory of the former Poznań Voivodeship to the General Government. 540,000 so-called ‘ethnic Germans’ were resettled in the Reichsgau Wartheland.^[13] Among them were around 51,000 (other sources cite 56,000^[14]) Baltic Germans, 125,000 Germans from Volhynia and Galicia, and 50,000 Germans from the Black Sea region. By January 1945, the number of Germans in the Warthegau had risen to approximately 1 million.^[15] The 1950 Federal Republic census revealed that a particularly large number of Poznań Germans had settled in Lower Saxony and North Rhine-Westphalia (38,000 each) as well as in Bavaria and Hesse (11,000 each).^[16] Within the Federation of Expellees, the Weichsel-Warthe Regional Association, founded in 1949, is responsible for the areas belonging to Greater Poland. According to estimates by the Socio-Cultural Society of the German Minority of the Wartheland (Towarzystwo Społeczno-Kulturalne Mniejszości Niemieckiej Ziemi Wielkopolskiej), founded in 1990, approximately 2,000 people who identified as belonging to the German minority were living within the historical borders of Greater Poland in the early 1990s.^[17]

During the Middle Ages and the early modern period, the regions of Greater Poland were, by national standards, economically more developed than average. One reason for this was the strong demand from the German territories further to the west, which was particularly evident in the flourishing maritime trade via Danzig/Gdańsk. The minor nobility, which was particularly well represented in Greater Poland, was more reliant on its own economic activities than the magnate families that dominated elsewhere. In the second half of the 18th century, a thriving textile industry (particularly in Rawicz, Lissa and Fraustadt) and the food industry developed.

The Partitions of Poland had an extremely negative impact on trade and the textile industry. Agriculture, on the other hand, was able to benefit insofar as a comprehensive agrarian reform had already been implemented in the Grand Duchy of Posen in 1823, which contributed to the establishment of larger farms. Between 1882 and 1912, agricultural production there rose by around 200 per cent, whereas in the Russian-occupied territory it increased by only about 70 per cent. The Settlement Commission for Posen and West Prussia, established in 1886, purchased 461,000 ha of land for German settlers by 1914; however, 334,000 ha of this was acquired from German owners, meaning that no significant increase in the German rural population could be achieved. In the 19th century, crafts and trade were predominantly in German hands. Agriculture and small-scale trade also remained predominant in the first half of the 20th century. Thus, alongside Hipolit Cegielski’s metalworking works – which had originated as a hardware shop in Poznań in 1846 – the chemical and artificial fertiliser factory in Luban/Luboń – now operating under the name Luvena S.A. – one of the few significant industrial enterprises in Greater Poland right up until the 1920s.

As regards mineral resources, only a lignite deposit near Konin is of significance today. The main crops grown are cereals (including rye, wheat and barley), sugar beet, rapeseed and, above all, potatoes. In addition, the importance of high-tech sectors and the service industry is growing.

With the establishment of the Archdiocese of Gniezno in the year 1000, Greater Poland remained the spiritual centre of Poland even during the period of the divided principalities (1138–1320), preserving the cohesion of the individual Polish duchies. With the exception of a brief period at the beginning of the 21st century, the Archbishop of Gniezno has always also been the Primate of the Catholic Church in Poland. Having already gained a comparatively large following in Greater Poland during the 15th century, the Hussite movement was soon followed by the Lutheran Reformation, which rapidly spread into the western regions of Greater Poland. In the mid-16th century, numerous followers of the Bohemian Brethren also settled in Greater Poland; their most prominent representative was the Czech theologian and educator Jan Amos Comenius (Komenský, 1592–1670), who was active in Lissa in the 1630s.

Of the nearly 410,000 Protestants living in the Grand Duchy of Posen in 1848, only 8,500 (two per cent) were Poles, whilst of the nearly 848,000 Catholics, as many as 52,000 (6.1 per cent) were Germans.^[18] In 1910, less than one per cent of the Polish-speaking population of Greater Poland were Protestant, whereas 17.5 per cent of the German-speaking population were Catholic.^[19] The constant migration in and out of the German population reinforced the impression amongst the few Protestant Christians who remained permanently in the area that they were living in a diaspora.

The proportion of Jews in the total population fell from 6.4 per cent (51,959) in 1816 to just 1.3 per cent in 1910 due to heavy emigration to the western Prussian provinces^[20] , a decline attributable not least to the ever-increasing anti-Semitism arising from the intensifying German-Polish conflict.

In the Second Polish Republic, too, Protestants – who in 1931 accounted for 9.4 per cent of the total population of the Poznań Voivodeship –^[21] predominantly identified as German. The Jews who remained in Greater Poland mostly felt they belonged to German culture, and the majority sought to leave the country. By 1930, their share of the population had fallen to just 0.2 per cent.^[22]

The absence of a university in Greater Poland – the Lubrański Academy (founded in 1519) and the Jesuit College (founded in 1573) had sought the relevant royal privileges in vain – was lamented in the 19th century by both the German and Polish populations; Posen remained the only Prussian province without a university until 1918. The Prussian authorities merely authorised the establishment of the Royal Academy, which existed in Posen from 1903 to 1919. It was feared that a full university would have benefited the Polish population more than the German one. On the Polish side, the Poznań Society of Friends of the Sciences (Poznańskie Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Nauk) was founded in 1857. The Historical Society for the Province of Posen, founded in Posen in 1885, developed into the historical society with the largest membership in the German Empire by the time of the First World War. In the new Polish state, it was initially called the Historical Society for Posen, then, from 1935, the Historical Society for Poland; in 1939 it was renamed the Historical Society for the Wartheland. In 1950, it was re-established in Marburg as the Historical and Regional Studies Commission for Poznań and the German Community in Poland, which renamed itself the Commission for the History of Germans in Poland in 1997.

On 7 May 1919, the Polish authorities opened the University of Poznań (Uniwersytet Poznański), which operated until 1920 under the name Piast University (Wszechnica Piastowska); under German occupation, it had to make way for the Reich University, which existed from 1940 to 1944, and was renamed Adam Mickiewicz University (Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza). Today, the majority of Greater Poland’s research institutions and higher education establishments are concentrated in Poznań.

Apart from a handful of printers, booksellers and artisans, the German population in Greater Poland took little part in artistic and literary endeavours until well into the 19th century. From 1890 onwards, the genre of the ‘Ostmark novel’ developed, which combined elements of popular fiction and regional literature and mostly centred on the fortunes of Germans who had recently moved to the Poznań region, as well as their encounters with the Polish population, who were portrayed in negative stereotypes; at least 60 such works were published by 1918.

From an art-historical perspective, Greater Poland had been characterised since the Middle Ages particularly by its sacred architecture. Of outstanding importance are the two early-Gothic cathedrals in Poznań and Gniezno, whose present form dates essentially from the 13th and 14th centuries. The 12th-century bronze doors on the south portal of Gniezno Cathedral, depicting the life of St Adalbert, are arguably the most significant work of art in Polish Romanesque art. As in the rest of Poland, the Renaissance and Baroque periods were strongly influenced by Italian artists, as is particularly evident in the Town Hall in Poznań, built between 1550 and 1560 by Giovanni Battista di Quadro (1510–1590/91). The Age of Enlightenment was characterised by the construction of Neoclassical aristocratic residences, for example in Rogalin, Pawłowice and Czerniejew for the Raczyński, Mielżyński and Lipski families.

• Paweł Anders, Włodzimierz Łęcki, Piotr Maluśkiewicz (eds.): Słownik krajoznawczy Wielkopolski [Encyclopaedia of Greater Poland]. Warsaw, Poznań 1992.
• Antoni Gąsiorowski: The Territory and Administrative Divisions of Greater Poland in Historical Development. In: Przegląd Wielkopolski (1999), 1–2, pp. 13–23.
• Walther Hubatsch (ed.): An Outline of German Administrative History. Series A: Prussia. Vol. 2, Part I: Province (Grand Duchy) of Posen. Edited by Dieter Stüttgen. Part II: Province of Posen-West Prussia. Edited by Walther Hubatsch. Marburg/L. 1975.
• Witold Jakóbczyk (ed.): Dzieje Wielkopolski [History of Greater Poland]. Vol. 2: 1793–1918. Poznań 1973.
• Michał Kobusiewicz (ed.): Pradzieje Wielkopolski. Od epoki kamienia do średniowiecza [Prehistory of Greater Poland. From the Stone Age to the Middle Ages]. Poznań 2008.
• Jacek Kowalski: Gotyk wielkopolski. Architektura sakralna XIII–XVI w. [Gothic Architecture in Greater Poland: 13th–16th Centuries]. Poznań 2010.
• Dariusz Matelski: The German Minority in Greater Poland, 1919–1939. Poznań 1997.
• Joachim Rogall: The Germans in the Poznań Region and in Central Poland. Munich 1993 (Study Series of the East German Cultural Council Foundation 4).
• Jerzy Topolski: The Role of Greater Poland in the History of Poland. In: Jerzy Strzelczyk (ed.): Slavs, Germans and Danes in Two Historical Border Regions (Schleswig-Holstein and Greater Poland). Papers from a joint conference organised by the Institute of History at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań and the Department of History at Christian Albrecht University in Kiel. Poznań, 23–25 October 1997. Poznań 2001 (Publications of the Institute of History, Adam Mickiewicz University, Vol. 38), pp. 223–230.
• Jerzy Topolski (ed.): Dzieje Wielkopolski. Vol. 1: Do 1793 roku [History of Greater Poland. Vol. 1: Up to 1793]. Poznań 1969.
• Jerzy Topolski: Wielkopolska through the Centuries. Poznań 1999.

• Regional Bibliography of Greater Poland, Poznań 1962 onwards.
• Vistula-Warta Yearbook, Wiesbaden 1955 onwards.
• Kronika Wielkopolski [Chronicle of Greater Poland], Poznań 1973 onwards.
• *Przegląd Wielkopolski* [Overview of Greater Poland], Poznań 1987 onwards.

• www.ptpn.poznan.pl/BHW/BHW_main.htm (Bibliography of the History of Greater Poland for the Years 1939–2000/Bibliografia historii Wielkopolski za lata 1939–2000)
• www.wbc.poznan.pl/dlibra (Greater Poland Digital Library/Wielkopolska Biblioteka Cyfrowa)
• www.deutsche-polen.de (Commission for the History of Germans in Poland)

[1] Topolski: Wielkopolska, p. 57.

[2] Jerzy Topolski: The Role of Greater Poland in the History of Poland, p. 227.

[3] Jerzy Topolski: Settlement and Urbanisation Processes. The Demographic Balance of Greater Poland in the 18th Century. In: Ibid. (ed.): The History of Greater Poland. Volume I: Up to 1793, pp. 795–814, here pp. 811ff.

[4] S[tanisław] Borowski: The period 1815–1870. Population. In: Witold Jakóbczyk (ed.): Dzieje Wielkopolski. Volume II: Up to the Summer of 1793–1918, pp. 67–78, here p. 67.

[5] S[tanisław] Borowski: The period 1871–1918. Population. In: Witold Jakóbczyk (ed.): Dzieje Wielkopolski. Volume II: Up to the Years 1793–1918, pp. 361–373, here p. 361.

[6] Bolesław Szczepański: The Eastern Part of Greater Poland in the Years 1815–1918. Population. In: Witold Jakóbczyk (ed.): The History of Greater Poland. Volume II: Up to the Year 1793–1918, pp. 773–781, here pp. 778ff.

[7] Topolski: Wielkopolska, p. 199.

[8] Jerzy Kozłowski: Germans in Greater Poland in the 19th Century. In: Strzelczyk (ed.), pp. 121–140, here p. 129.

[9] Matelski: The German Minority in Greater Poland, p. 30.

[10] Rogall: The Germans in the Poznań Region, p. 130.

[11] Topolski: Wielkopolska, p. 255; Matelski: The German Minority in Greater Poland, p. 36.

[12] Michael Alberti: The Persecution and Extermination of the Jews in the Reichsgau Wartheland 1939–1945. Wiesbaden 2006 (German Historical Institute, Warsaw. Sources and Studies 17), p. 34; Markus Roth: Nazi Resettlement Policy in Occupied Poland – Objectives, Institutions Involved, Methods and Results. In: Eckhart Neander, Andrzej Sakson (eds.): Resettled – Displaced. German Balts and Poles 1939–1945 in the Warthegau. Marburg 2010 (Conferences on East Central European Research 29), pp. 9–20, here p. 14.

[13] Topolski: Wielkopolska, p. 304.

[14] Andrzej Sakson: Introduction. In: Neander, Sakson (as in note 12), p. 4.

[15] Joachim Rogall: The Evacuation of the ‘Reichsgau Wartheland’ from 16 to 26 January 1945 as Reflected in Official Reports. Sigmaringen 1993, p. 26.

[16] Rogall: The Germans in the Poznań Region, p. 180.

[17] Andrzej Sakson: A Sociological Characterisation of the German Minority in Poland, with Particular Reference to Greater Poland in the Years 1945/89–1993 [A Sociological Characterisation of the German Minority in Poland, with Particular Reference to Greater Poland in the Years 1945/89–1993]. In: Ibid. (ed.): Poland – Germany – The German Minority in Greater Poland. Past and Present. Poznań 1994, pp. 141–155, here p. 150.

[18] Zygmunt Zieliński: Kościół katolicki w Wielkim Księstwie Poznańskim w latach 1848–1856 [The Catholic Church in the Grand Duchy of Posen in the years 1848–1856]. Lublin 1973, p. 33.

[19] Witold Matwiejczyk: Nation and Denomination in Greater Poland during the ‘Nationality Dispute’ (1871–1914). Remarks on German- and Polish-language historiography. In: Rainer Bendel (ed.): Writing the History of Churches and Culture in North-Eastern and Eastern Central Europe. Initiatives, Methods, Theories. Berlin 2006, pp. 113–138, here p. 114.

[20] Rogall: The Germans in the Poznań Region, pp. 68ff.

[21] Olgierd Kiec: The Protestant Churches in the Poznań Voivodeship 1918–1939. Wiesbaden 1998 (German Historical Institute, Warsaw: Sources and Studies 8), p. 15.

[22] Alberti (as in note 12), p. 28.

Christoph Schutte: Greater Poland. In: Online Encyclopaedia on the Culture and History of Germans in Eastern Europe, 2013. URL: ome-lexikon.uni-oldenburg.de/54146.html (as at 5 October 2021).