Pomerania

• 1. Introduction

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  Pomerania sits at one of Europe's most contested crossroads: a strip of land along the southern shore of the Baltic Sea, split today between Poland and Germany, with its largest cities being Gdańsk and Szczecin. The name itself is a clue. In Lechitic languages, "po-" means along, and "morze" means sea. Pomerania is simply Along the Sea. Yet that modest name conceals a region whose identity has been pulled apart by armies, treaties, expulsions, and resettlements across more than a millennium. A region first recorded in an imperial document of 1046 as the territory of one Zemuzil, Duke of the Pomeranians, has since been a duchy, a Swedish province, a Prussian stronghold, a Nazi killing ground, and finally a divided but democratically governed territory. How did a coastal plain with poor, sometimes sandy soil become the site of so much human struggle? And what remains of the people who once called it home?

• 2. Land Between Waters

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  The Recknitz, Trebel, Tollense, and Augraben rivers define Pomerania's western edge; the Vistula marks its eastern boundary. Most of the interior is coastal lowland, part of the Central European Plain. Its southern, hilly reaches belong to the Baltic Ridge, a belt of terminal moraines shaped during the Pleistocene. Within that ridge, a chain of moraine-dammed lakes forms the Pomeranian Lake District. The soil, as one summary puts it, is generally rather poor, sometimes sandy or marshy. The western coastline is jagged, broken by peninsulas such as the Darss-Zingst and islands including Rügen, the largest island in Germany, and Wolin, the largest island in Poland. The eastern coastline is smoother. Lakes like Lebsko were once open bays, gradually cut off from the sea. Jutting into the Baltic at the far east are the Hel Peninsula and the Vistula Peninsula. Settlement in this landscape began some 13,000 years ago, at the close of the Vistula Glacial Stage. Archaeological traces survive from the Stone and Bronze Ages, followed by Baltic peoples, Germanic peoples, Veneti, and then West Slavic tribes and Vikings. The city of Gdańsk was established during the reign of Mieszko I of Poland and has since been Poland's main port, except during periods when Poland lost control of the region.

• 3. Duchies, Crusades, and Griffins

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  In the 12th century, the Duchy of Pomerania entered Christianity under Otto of Bamberg, known as the Apostle of the Pomeranians, while acting as a vassal of Poland. At the same time, the eastern territory of Pomerelia was drawn into the diocese of Włocławek within Poland. From the late 12th century onward, the Griffin dynasty kept the Duchy within the orbit of the Holy Roman Empire, while Denmark held the Principality of Rugia. The expanding Margraviate of Brandenburg pressed along the western flank. In the early 14th century, the Teutonic Knights invaded and annexed Pomerelia from Poland, folding it into their monastic state. German terminology then extended the name of Prussia to what had been Polish-inhabited Gdańsk Pomerania, even though the local population was Lechitic Poles, not Baltic Prussians. Meanwhile, the Ostsiedlung migration was steadily turning the narrower, western Pomerania into an increasingly German-settled area. The remaining Slavic population, often known as Kashubians, continued to live within Pomerelia. In 1325, the line of the princes of Rügen died out, and that principality passed by inheritance to the Griffin dynasty. Then, in 1466, the Teutonic Order's defeat in the Thirteen Years' War returned Pomerelia to the Polish Crown, where it formed the Pomeranian Voivodeship within Royal Prussia.

• 4. Reformation, War, and Division

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  In 1534, the German population of the Duchy of Pomerania adopted the Protestant Reformation, while the Polish and Kashubian population remained Roman Catholic. The region soon faced catastrophe. The Thirty Years' War devastated and depopulated the narrow Duchy of Pomerania, and a few years later the eastern Pomerelia was swept by the period Poles call the Deluge. With the Griffin dynasty dying out in that same era, the Duchy of Pomerania was divided between the Swedish Empire and Brandenburg-Prussia in 1648. Pomerelia, however, remained under the Kingdom of Poland. In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, French Huguenot communities settled in Danzig, Stargard, Prenzlau, Schwedt, Kolberg, Pasewalk, and Stettin, adding yet another layer to the region's already complex demography. Prussia absorbed the southern parts of Swedish Pomerania in 1720, seized Pomerelia from Poland in 1772 and again in 1793, and collected the remaining Swedish Pomeranian territory in 1815 after the Napoleonic Wars. The old Brandenburg-Prussian lands and former Swedish portions were reorganized into the Prussian Province of Pomerania, while Pomerelia became part of the Province of West Prussia. Both provinces entered the newly constituted German Empire in 1871. Under German rule, the Polish minority faced discrimination and measures aimed at suppressing its culture.

• 5. The Nazi Years

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  Following Germany's defeat in World War I, eastern Pomerania and Pomerelia returned to the rebuilt Polish state, while German-majority Gdańsk was made an independent Free City of Danzig. In the years between the wars, German propaganda branded the border zone the "Polish Corridor," and irredentist claims toward Poland fed the rise of the Nazi Party. In 1938, Germany's Province of Pomerania was expanded to absorb northern parts of the former Province of Posen-West Prussia. In January 1939, Germany resumed expulsions of Poles, and organizations including the Sturmabteilung, the Schutzstaffel, the Hitler Youth, and the Bund Deutscher Osten attacked Polish institutions, schools, and activists. From May to August 1939, the Gestapo arrested Polish leaders, entrepreneurs, and activists, along with some staff of the Consulate of Poland in Szczecin. When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the first battle of the war was fought at Westerplatte, in the region. The Polish area of Pomerania was annexed and incorporated into the Reichsgau Danzig-West Prussia. The Nazis deported Pomeranian Jews to a reservation near Lublin. More than 40,000 Polish people died in executions, death camps, prisons, and forced labour, with teachers, priests, politicians, and former officers particularly targeted. Thousands more were expelled, replaced by German military and civil servants and Baltic Germans resettled under the Lebensraum policy between 1940 and 1943. The Stutthof concentration camp and its subcamps operated in the region, as did multiple prisoner-of-war camps including the large Stalag II-B and Stalag II-D, holding Polish, French, Belgian, Dutch, Serbian, Italian, American, Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand prisoners. Połczyn-Zdrój served as the location of a Germanisation camp for kidnapped Polish children.

• 6. Expulsion and Resettlement

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  After World War II ended, the German-Polish border shifted west to the Oder-Neisse line. What followed was one of the largest forced population movements in European history. Between 1945 and 1948, millions of ethnic Germans and German citizens were removed from former German territory now governed by Poland. Many were sent to internment and labor camps where they were used as forced labor as part of German reparations. The death toll from the flight and expulsions is disputed; low-range estimates run into the hundreds of thousands. The emptied land was resettled primarily by Poles of Polish ethnicity, some themselves expelled from former eastern Poland, along with some Poles of Ukrainian ethnicity resettled under Operation Vistula, and a small number of Polish Jews. Most of Hither Pomerania, the westernmost strip, remained in Germany, and many expelled Pomeranians found refuge there before dispersing to other German regions and abroad. The remaining Polish portions were divided between the West Pomeranian and Pomeranian voivodeships, headquartered in Szczecin and Gdańsk. During the 1980s, the Solidarity movement in Poland and the Die Wende ("the change") movement in East Germany dismantled the Communist regimes installed after the war. Pomeranian culture did not vanish entirely from beyond Europe: the city of Pomerode in the Brazilian state of Santa Catarina was founded by Pomeranian Germans in 1861 and is described as the most typically German of all German towns in southern Brazil.

• 7. Languages, Learning, and Living Memory

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  Kashubian, the language of descendants of the medieval West Slavic Pomeranians, is still spoken in rural Pomerelia, and Kashubian dialects are also maintained by descendants of emigrants in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Canada. Slovincian, spoken at the Farther Pomeranian-Pomerelian frontier, is now extinct. The historical German dialects of the region were Low German, divided into Mecklenburgisch-Vorpommersch in the west, Central Pomeranian around Szczecin, and East Pomeranian in the east. The University of Greifswald, founded when Greifswald still belonged to the Duchy of Pomerania, ranks among the oldest universities in the world. Three other traditional universities serve the region today: the University of Szczecin, the University of Gdańsk, and the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. Among the region's more unusual repositories of memory is the Diocesan Museum in Pelplin, which holds one of the finest collections of medieval art in Poland, including the country's only copy of the Gutenberg Bible. In Toruń, the Copernicus House marks the birthplace of the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus. The Museum of the National Anthem in Będomin occupies the birthplace of Józef Wybicki, who wrote the lyrics of the Polish national anthem. In Wejherowo, the Piaśnica Museum serves as a branch of the Stutthof Museum, connecting the wartime killing sites of the region to its present-day commemorative landscape.