Neumark
Neumark sat east of the Oder River, known at times as the New March and elsewhere as East Brandenburg. In 1463, Elector Frederick II bought the territory back for 40,000 guilders after it had been pawned away. He then left written instructions for his successors that the land "shall never pass to those who speak not the German tongue." Within a few centuries, though, this same stretch of forest and river frontier became Polish territory. Its German population was expelled and replaced by newcomers from the east. What happened between Frederick's promise and its undoing? And how did a region built on forts, monasteries, and pawned debts change hands so many times along the way?
The Oder River formed the region's western and southern edge, with Pomerania to the north and Greater Poland to the east. That eastern border held until the Partitions of Poland reshaped the map in the late 18th century. After the 1772 First Partition, the frontier shifted to meet the new Prussian Netze District. That district had been carved mostly from northern Greater Poland. The 1793 Second Partition folded the rest of Greater Poland into the Province of South Prussia. By 1807, South Prussia and the southern Netze District had passed to Napoleon's Duchy of Warsaw. The northern part of the Netze District joined the Province of West Prussia instead.
The Congress of Vienna in 1815 dissolved the Neumark as its own administrative unit. Most of its land became part of Regierungsbezirk Frankfurt within the Province of Brandenburg. From there, its eastern edge lined up with the Province of West Prussia through 1878. It also bordered the Grand Duchy, later Province, of Posen.
The Warta and Noteć Rivers, along with their surrounding swamps, shaped daily life across the territory. At its largest, near the close of the 17th century, the region spanned a string of Kreise. These districts were anchored by towns including Arnswalde, Crossen, Friedeberg, Landsberg, and Soldin.
Long before any Brandenburg administrator drew a border here, this same land carried a different name entirely, tied to Poland's earliest rulers.
During the Bronze Age, the future Neumark fell within the reach of the Lusatian culture. In the Iron Age that followed, the Jastorf culture took hold there. Historians link this group at times to Germanic tribes and at times to Celtic ones. As those inhabitants drifted westward during the Migration Period, the region emptied out. West Slavic tribes moved back in after AD 500, turning the land into a forested borderland between Pomerania and Greater Poland. The Bavarian Geographer recorded that a people called the Miloxi lived there. They were spread across 47 settlements between the Oder and Poznań.
Poland's Duke Mieszko I, who died in 992, and his son Bolesław I, who ruled from 992 to 1025, brought the region under Polish sovereignty. Under Polish rule the territory took the name Lubusz Land. By the early 13th century its Polish population still remained thin. Starting in the 1230s, Low German-speaking colonists from the Holy Roman Empire began arriving there. Pomeranian and Polish lords invited them, in a movement known as Ostsiedlung. Those same lords brought in the Knights Templar and Knights Hospitaller to found monasteries, and settlements grew up nearby. Pomeranian and Polish dukes also built castles along the frontier, drawing further settlement around them.
Margrave Albert the Bear, who ruled Brandenburg from 1157 to 1170, was the first Ascanian to look toward the land east of the Oder. His successors held a real foothold there by 1242. In 1252, the Margraviate of Brandenburg and the Archbishopric of Magdeburg purchased the Lubusz Land outright. The following year they founded Frankfurt an der Oder as a crossing point for further expansion. Through land purchases, marriage pacts, and service to Poland's Piast dynasty, the Ascanians kept pushing their border east and north. Duke Przemysł I of Greater Poland once handed over the Santok castellany, a crossing point on the Warta. He gave it as a dowry for his daughter Konstancja's marriage to Margrave Conrad. Margrave John I founded Landsberg an der Warthe, today's Gorzów Wielkopolski, in 1257 to secure the area. The Templars sold Soldin to the Ascanians in 1261, and the town grew into a regional hub.
Most colonists in this new eastern territory came from Magdeburg or the Altmark, Brandenburg's own "Old March." Unlike elsewhere in Brandenburg, the Ascanians built fortified castles here instead of settling knights in open villages. These castles helped hold the line against Poland. Slavic residents gradually adopted German language and customs over the generations that followed. The name Neumark, or New March, only came into use after the middle of the 15th century.
The Ascanian line died out in 1320. Neither the Wittelsbach margraves, who held Brandenburg from 1323 to 1373, nor the Luxembourg dynasty after them paid the frontier much attention. Robber barons terrorized the population while Poland's influence crept back into the vacuum they left behind.
In 1402, a debt-laden Brandenburg handed the Neumark over to the Teutonic Knights as collateral. The Knights gained full control by 1429. Even so, they neglected the region much as previous rulers had. After the Knights' defeat at the Battle of Grunwald in 1410, the future Grand Master Michael Küchmeister von Sternberg used the Neumark as a staging ground. He gathered an army of German and Hungarian mercenaries there. With that force he fought King Władysław II Jagiełło of Poland. That campaign helped the Order hold onto most of its territory under the First Peace of Thorn in 1411.
By 1454 or 1455, mismanagement forced the Knights to pawn the Neumark back to Brandenburg. This happened under the Treaties of Cölln and Mewe. Elector Frederick II of the Hohenzollern dynasty led Brandenburg at the time. He would soon complete the process of winning the territory back for good, the same reclamation he later described in writing to his heirs.
That reclamation returned the Neumark to Brandenburg's hands for centuries to come, apart from one more interruption soon to follow.
In 1535, Elector Joachim I Nestor died, and Brandenburg split between his two sons. Joachim II Hector received the western Kurmark. His younger brother John took charge of the Neumark as a margraviate of its own. John embraced the Protestant Reformation eagerly, converting the territory to Lutheranism and seizing church property along the way. He lived frugally, building his treasury through usury and by hiring out mercenary companies for profit.
Trade rivalry split the brothers apart, as Crossen and Landsberg competed against the Kurmark's Frankfurt for commercial dominance. The two margraves eventually struck a compromise, though the city of Stettin paid the economic price for it. Concern over the Schmalkaldic War of 1546 to 1547 later pushed the brothers toward reconciliation. In 1548, John moved his administration from Soldin to Küstrin.
Both brothers died within ten days of each other in 1571. Their deaths reunited the Neumark with the Kurmark under Joachim II's son, John George.
That reunification meant the Neumark would face Brandenburg's next wars and territorial gains as a single territory, not two competing halves.
In 1618, the Hohenzollern electors inherited the Duchy of Prussia, folding East Brandenburg into the larger state of Brandenburg-Prussia. The Thirty Years' War then engulfed the region from 1618 to 1648. Swedish and Imperial troops plundered, ravaged, and burned the land. Plague epidemics in 1626 and 1631 killed much of the population on top of the war's destruction. Occupying Swedish forces once demanded a tribute of 60,000 thalers and 10,000 Wispel of rye from the region.
Prussia became a kingdom in 1701, and conditions in the Neumark began to improve under King Frederick I. New colonists arrived in waves, including French Huguenots fleeing religious persecution in France. A textile industry took root in the region during this period. The Seven Years' War later reversed much of that progress. Heavy war contributions and battles such as the one fought at Kunersdorf drained the population. Under Frederick II, drainage projects along the Warta and Notec areas expanded farmland and consolidated the local economy.
Agriculture and forestry anchored the regional economy for generations. Most towns functioned as Ackerbürgerstädte, or farmer-citizen towns. By the 19th century, the textile industry had grown prominent across the region. New roads, the Fernverkehrstraße 1 running from Berlin to Königsberg, and the Prussian Eastern Railway brought industrial growth. This development concentrated mainly around Landsberg and Küstrin. Even so, the Neumark never industrialized or grew as densely populated as regions like the Ruhr, Saxony, or Upper Silesia.
This uneven development between town and countryside would shape how the region's population voted once national politics took hold in the decades ahead.
The Prussian-led German Empire absorbed the Neumark, along with the rest of Brandenburg, when it formed in 1871. In the Weimar Republic's National Assembly election on the 1st of November 1919, most of the region's voters backed the Social Democratic Party of Germany. By the Reichstag election on the 20th of May 1928, the German National People's Party had become the leading choice. Only a small pocket of SPD support remained.
In the Reichstag vote of December 1924, the Polish People's Party received 1,900 votes out of a regional population of 570,000. A year later, in 1925, the Neumark counted 3,500 Polish speakers among its residents. On the 6th of November 1932, the Nazi Party won the region outright in the Reichstag election.
Nazi authorities dissolved the province of Posen-West Prussia in 1938. They expanded the Frankfurt Region to absorb the districts of Schwerin and Meseritz. At the same time, the districts around New Marcher territory and Friedeberg were handed over to Pomerania instead. The 1939 census counted 645,000 residents in the Neumark, including 3,000 who were not German. Most people in the region spoke the East Low German Brandenburgisch dialect.
Within six years, the Red Army would cross into this same territory, and the population figures recorded in 1939 would never be repeated.
The Red Army reached the Neumark at the end of January 1945, advancing so fast that many civilians had no time to flee. More than 40,000 New Marchers died in action as soldiers during the war. Under the Potsdam Agreement, reached at the Potsdam Conference, the Soviet Union placed the region under Polish administration. It soon became part of Poland outright. Germans still living there were expelled. Poles resettled the land, including some who had themselves been expelled from Polish areas the Soviet Union had annexed. A small number of Germans, mostly technicians for the water supply system, stayed behind for compulsory labor. They were later allowed to emigrate to Germany in the 1950s. Of the region's entire pre-war population, only about 5,000 people remained by 1950.
River regulation work on the Oder during the 18th century left the New March's old western border out of step with the river's newer course. As a result, a cluster of New Marcher villages, including Hohenwutzen and Neurüdnitz, ended up west of the river. They remain part of Germany today. The Oder-Neisse line also cut straight through several towns. It split Küstrin into German Küstrin-Kietz and Polish Kostrzyn nad Odrą. It divided Frankfurt an der Oder into German Frankfurt (Oder) and Polish Słubice. And it separated Görlitz into German Görlitz and Polish Zgorzelec.
A section of land near Cottbus, grouped administratively with the Neumark inside the Government Region of Frankfurt since 1815, took a different path. It became part of East Germany during the 1940s. It only rejoined a unified Germany after reunification in 1990. Most of the Polish-administered territory today falls within the Lubusz Voivodeship. The northern towns of Choszczno, Myślibórz, and Chojna, once known as Arnswalde, Soldin, and Königsberg in der Neumark, belong to the West Pomeranian Voivodeship instead.
Soviet authorities resettled the region with Poles and Ukrainians drawn from Polish territory the Soviet Union had annexed. From 1975 to 1998, the former Neumark lay split between the Gorzów and Zielona Góra voivodeships. A small area near Chojna fell under the Szczecin Voivodeship. Since Poland's voivodeship reorganization on the 1st of January 1999, nearly all of the former Neumark has belonged to the Lubusz Voivodeship.
A Polish census taken in December 1950 traced every resident back to their place of residence as of August 1939. For children born between September 1939 and December 1950, officials used the mother's pre-war residence instead. The count found 444,929 people living in the former East Brandenburg that December. Just 14,809 of them, about 3.3 percent, were autochthons. These were people who had held German citizenship before the war and were granted Polish citizenship afterward. The largest group, 187,298 people or 42.1 percent, were Polish expellees from the Kresy region the Soviet Union had annexed. The second-largest group, 88,427 people or 19.9 percent, had come from the neighboring pre-war Poznań Voivodeship, in the historical region of Greater Poland.
That same 1950 census still lets researchers trace individual families back to a specific hometown, down to the 13,147 resettlers who arrived from the Rzeszów region alone.
Common questions
What was the Neumark region in the Margraviate of Brandenburg?
The Neumark, also called the New March or East Brandenburg, was a region east of the Oder River that belonged to the Margraviate of Brandenburg and its successor states. It became part of Poland in 1945, except for some villages west of the Oder that remained in Germany.
When did the Neumark become part of Poland?
The Neumark became part of Poland after the Potsdam Conference following World War II, when the majority of the region was assigned to Polish administration starting in 1945.
Who ruled the Neumark as an independent state under Brandenburg-Küstrin?
Margrave John, a younger son of Joachim I Nestor, ruled the Neumark as the independent state of Brandenburg-Küstrin from 1535 to 1571. It then returned to his nephew, Elector John George.
Why was the Neumark pawned to the Teutonic Knights?
Brandenburg pawned the Neumark to the Teutonic Knights in 1402 after losing interest in the territory once the Ascanian dynasty died out in 1320. The Knights gained full control by 1429, and Frederick II of the Hohenzollern dynasty eventually reacquired the territory in 1463 for 40,000 guilders.
How did the Neumark get its name?
The name Neumark, meaning New March, came into use after the middle of the 15th century, describing the territory as a new eastern extension of the Margraviate of Brandenburg across the Oder.
How many people lived in the Neumark before World War II, and what happened to them?
The 1939 census counted 645,000 residents in the Neumark, including 3,000 non-Germans. After the war, Germans were expelled under the Potsdam Agreement, and only about 5,000 of the pre-war inhabitants remained in the region by 1950.
Where is the former Neumark located today?
Most of the former Neumark lies within Poland's Lubusz Voivodeship, with the northern towns of Choszczno, Myślibórz, and Chojna in the West Pomeranian Voivodeship. A small area near Cottbus became part of Germany after reunification in 1990.
All sources
3 references cited across the entry
- 3JournalPochodzenie terytorialne ludności Ziem Zachodnich w 1950 r. Territorial origins of inhabitants of the Western Lands in year 1950Leszek Kosiński — PAN (Polish Academy of Sciences), Institute of Geography — 1960