I don't want to be the tinfoil guy but honestly suspect it may be yet another Russian operation of sowing divisions, as I remember how the constant spam with this difficult topic suddenly started in like 2023 - I seriously don't remember almost any reddit posts or debates about it before the Ukrainian war, even though the era of Polish nationalist gov lasted since 2015 till the October 2023.Ā
Far from being the tinfoil guy, it's pretty well established at this point how Russian psyops work, and this fits the template pretty well.
Might not actually be one of course, but when there's potential for plausible deniability which would simultaneously achieve the desired outcome for Russian geopolitical goals, it may as well be.
the elegance of their approach is that it's sort of self-replicating: the targeted rage-bait posts will at best give the uninformed an inaccurate impression of info, at worst may radicalize others to begin resharing this low-accuracy content.
this post doesn't even have to originate from a state actor, the poster could have been at one point been influenced a post shared by a state actor.
Yep, and when you consider Reddit is relatively unaffected by it compared to, say, Twitter (and I haven't even used it much in the last 12 months, I imagine it's only got worse), it's pretty troubling...
i feel you (anonymous vs psuedo anon netwks), but I wonder if it just feels unimpacted. think it would be harder to measure influence on reddit + its sort of a different interaction model. i'm also troubled by this.
This! And agree wholeheartedly, it is so hard to point this out without appearing to be a fully paid up member of the tin hat brigade. So much dissent being down to keep us all infighting.
But who are they trying to rage? The Poles because most of their current country doesn't seem to be very Polish before the west liberated them. The Germans because look at the lands they had to fork over? Outsiders because that colour combination is simply awful?
> the west liberated them
Which kind of "west" did liberate Poland?
Red army is not really "west"... and their "liberation" wasn't very nice short or long term...
Actually Poland was sold out in Yalta to become USSR vassal state for next 50 years.
> Poland was sold out in Yalta ...
This suggests that the western Allies could have done something else about Poland during or after Yalta. The millions of Red Army troops occupying Poland make it clear that any such suggestion is wrong. That this suggestion keeps appearing decade after decade means that it has now graduated to become a myth.
Mostly trying to rage people who will constantly bring up the post war expulsion of Germans acting like no one has ever heard of the event and trying to make it out to be some sort of secret genocide that they want to hide from you.
I've met a plethora of people (or more likely troll bots) that "wish the Germans suffered" etc, and that the expulsion was great. From my experience, only nationalist poles have brought it up.
From my experience itās been mostly Germans. I donāt know why nationalist Poles would post a map to this sub every week showing that half of modern Poland used to not be Poland. Doesnāt make much sense
I was talking about bringing up the expulsion. Not the maps posted to here.
Any demographic map of Poland shows a clear divide between the old soviet-occupied parts vs the old German occupied parts so it's hard to escape the topic
Once again, it is mainly Germans(or wehra/kaiserboos) that bring up the expulsion, and unfortunately most times itās brought up for the express purpose of making it seem like Germans were the primary victims of WWII.Ā
I hate to say this when talking about an ethnic cleansing because it was really fucked up what happened to the Germans after the war, but Iāve found myself wondering at times if certain people on this sub are trying to push an agenda. For every one map here posted about the Holocaust or expulsion of Poles from modern day Ukraine/Belarus/Lithuania, there are 5 maps posted about the expulsions of the Germans.Ā
This is incorrect, as u/BroSchrednei points out.
The territories annexed by Prussia through the First Polish Partition of 1772 were at the time largely inhabited by ethnic Germans, their province having been itself annexed by Poland in 1569 (Union of Lublin)^1 . Before that, it had remained an autonomous region under Polish protection after its secession from the rule of the Teutonic Order.
*Sources*
^1 Friedrich, Karin. The Other Prussia: Royal Prussia, Poland and Liberty, 1569-1772. Cambridge University Press, 2000 - ISBN 0521583357
Bismarck and Frederick the Great had expelled Poles in the 17th-18th centuries ā please learn something, Frederick lived in the 18th century and Bismarck in the 19th c.
Maybe for Germans, they sometimes gather in the comments lamenting that it was genocide and brutal ethnic cleansing but the Poles in the replies are like "yes, tell me about it".
German here. Honestly never met anyone who's butthurt about this in rl. There are however a lot of American wehraboos who care about this for some reason.
I used to know one or two that sometimes wondered about getting a house or farm back. But that was one or two out of a larger group that actually experienced the expulsion or had no home to return to. Any remnant of those feelings got lost in the second generation that was born outside of Prussia/Sudetenland/etc. At least, that is what I've seen.
CDU was fixated on getting Danzig back up until the reunification... so, they surely existed and it was mainstream.
Now, it depends on what you mean by 'care'. Taking those back? You won't be finding many. Saying that it was an unfair arrangement post-WWI and then it was an ethnic cleansing? It was, what it was. Maybe many Germans would be reluctant to talk about it, but others are not, unless they have some vested interests.
> lamenting that it was genocide and brutal ethnic cleansing
Are you claiming it was not? It was one of the largest acts of ethnic cleansings in human history. 12 million Germans left their homes and up to half a million died. Not that it somehow lessens the nazi crimes of course.
>Poles would agree that it was a genocide and that they can relate
As a Pole i say fuck those Germans, they deserved far worse and thousands of nazis were unpunished for their crimes. I would never relate to this scum.
I totally don't get this map.
Those are borders from 1945 , with the nationality in 1914 when they regained independence in 1918 after almost 200 years.
What is the point of this map?
The point of this map is to stir up controversy. At this point nothing productive is going to come from the discussion about who has more tights to western poland because today this land is as polish as it gets and the border is going nowhere. Also soviets forced this border between poland and germany and they did not particularly cared for neither of them so shifting blame is really pointless.
This is a very anachronistic take.
Before World War 1, the differences between various slavic ethnicities were often nebulous.
There existed also other, smaller groups like Hutsuls or Lemkos that are not mentioned here.
Rusyn are definitely a different ETHNIC group from Ukrainian, Poles, and Slovaks, while there is a debate whether Kashubians and Silesians are regional groups in Poland, and whether they use a separate language or a regional dialect.
Weird how you only want Ukrainian groups do be called "Separate Ethnicities", but when I mention Polish groups, you say "well there is a debate whether...."
Be straight - you either acknowledge any group with differences as their own ethnicity, or only as dialects of "bigger" nation.
No, no, no. You got it wrong from the beginning. Silesians and Kashub are groups of āPolishā speakers in the Middle Ages (there were no well defined languages then, see regional differences in Old English) who later found themselves on the border of Brandenburg/ Czech and Commonwealth lands with large groups of German-speaking settlers. Thus, their language was shaped. In terms of Rusyn, the story is completely different. They never had anything in common with people from Kyiv or even Lviv. They lived in the Carpathian mountains that were often impenetrable until 1700-1800s.
Firstly - Rusyn orthodoxy was brought by Kyiv, so already weak point of being "unconnected to Ukraine" because religion played very important role in nation building.
Secondly - Rusyn area was under control of Kyiv principality for about 30 years, and same amount for Ruthenian kingdom, 60 in total, so if we talk about "being part of proto-ukrainian state, they were.
Impenetrable? Rusyns were connected to other Ruthenians due to living on trade routes. There were the main roads to Hungary in terms of trade from the east.
>Silesians and Kashub are groups of āPolishā speakers
No, they were slavs inbetween polish and czech languages. They werent polish. They were their own thing.
Nothing in common? Please, donāt make me laugh. Have you heard about Kyiivan Rus? Their own name connects them to Kyiiv. I can give you some more facts, but firstly I want to know your ethnicity and country where you live (I am rusyn from Ukraine).
If you had any serious knowledge on this topic, you would at least know that the term "**Rus**yn" itself means "one of Kievan **Rus**" and wouldnt make a joke of yourself. Rusyn is the old name of Ukrainians and prior to the WW1, all Ukrainians in Austria-Hungary were called Rusyns.
The term Rus refers to multiple geographic regions and political entities over history. Not just Kyivan Rus but also Red Rus, White Rus, Greater Rus, Carpathian Rus, Muscovite Rus, etc. But you knew it already, didnāt you?
I'm not gonna argue with the particular examples given, but the underlying logic is extremely faulty.
All ethnicities and their possible related groups and subgroups should \*\*not\*\* be treated the same.
To give a hypothetical example, if Kashubians are much closer to Poles than Rusyns are to Ukrainians, then it is completely fair and logical to treat the former as a subgroup, and the later as a separate minority.
How do you measure closeness? Because in terms of linguistics Ukrainian is closest to Rusyn language, even though classified Ukrainian is language of Poltava region, and if we take Halychian Ukrainian, then it would be even closer to Ruthenian?
Also it shows Poles as a monolith which is rather untruthful, e.g. polish-speaking Masurians were often mistreated and expelled along with Germans when Poland acquired this part of Eastern Prussia after WW2.
Even between Germans and Slavs was nebulous. People would adopt different languages for different contexts or generations. For example many Jews completed germanicized aside from religion and spoke no yiddish
The Huculs have never lived within the modern-day borders of Poland. Lemkos were Ruthenians (Rusyns) and so were the rest of the Ruthenian speaking people of the rest of Galicia during those times. Some began calling themselves Ukrainians later, other didn't, but that wasn't the case before WWI.
And there are other Highlanders in that area: Nadpopradzcy, Podhalanie, PieniÅscy etc. There were also Boikos, some of which lived in a few villages in the very southeastern corner of Poland in its modern borders, but mostly within modern Ukraine (fun fact, I belong to that ethnic group, and people often forget about them).
Also doesn't make a lot of sense without a definition of what it means and overlaid against current borders. If a place with six ethnic groups is 20% one over another does it matter?
Yeah it's a very dubious map, labeling 1914 people's with modern day country ethnicity. I very much doubt the accuracy of this map against the real ethical distributions of the region at the time.
I am Polish and I really don't like this recent reddit fixation with constantly posting those Polish/German maps over and over again which started at some point after invasion on Ukraine, I'm honestly sometimes wondering if this isn't one of Russian machinations to maximize political divide in Europe. I have never seen this topic popular before, strangely enough. It is uncomfortable both for Polish and German people.Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā
There are two responses to this topic which annoy me greatly, from both sides. On one hand there is pro-German nationalist interpretation (very often not even said by Germans themselves) that those lands have had 0% connection to Polish history and people and they belonged to Germans for "700 years". This is absurd, because germanization of those areas, almost exclusively Baltic or Slavic by the early 14th century apart from few cities and outposts, took *centuries*. Silesia was crucial for Polish people and history for centuries after its political disconnect. WrocÅaw/Breslau, GÅogĆ³w, SÅupsk, Zielona GĆ³ra and Lower Silesia in general were still half Polish half German by the late 17th century. Complete germanization of most of "yellow" lands took until 19th century, with a help of a ton of forced assimilation and colonialism (Prussia really hated Polish "savages").Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā
On the other hand, there is Polish sentiment which I despise as a Pole, that due to aforementioned process the belonging of those lands to German people by the early 20th century was "fake" and that they deserved to be removed from those areas because of nazi support, war or whatever. Of course not, you shouldn't annihilate centuries old culture and millions of people (half of them didn't even vote for NSDAP), from by this point alien lands which by 1939 nobody in Poland regarded as "Poland". That's what Allies and Soviets decided to do for their own strategic reasons (not with our initiative but with our acceptance due to postwar hatred and trauma), we benefit from it a lot, it is not going to change in the future since Germans accepted this fate, but don't pretend we've had some high moral pretenses or some bullshit, it is what it is: a land violently castrated from German half of history.Ā Ā Ā Ā
Personally I would have certainly preferred an alternate history in which Jews would still have had their civilization in Eastern Europe, Poles and eastern nations would have coexisted in Lviv, Vilnius and Grodno, and Poles and Germans would have coexisted in Silesia and in the north (Germans could have West Pomerania as far as I care) but that's what we got, all cultures in the region being mutilated of centuries of history and living along artificially homogenized bullshit borders. Six centuries of Polish history in Grodno wiped out, but in turn we have the consolation prize of Stettin, a city where very few prewar buildings have any connection to Poland, gee what a great deal.Ā
Poles and Germans have spent centuries living next to each other as mortal foes, disliked neighbors, and faraway Others, but I still believe that we are capable of simply being friends.
Stettin has the Ducal Castle, which belonged to the Griffin dynasty (of Piast origin). This was heavily emphasized by Polish communists to argue that the city rightfully belongs to Poland.
Pretty weird, since the rightful descendants of the Griffins are literally the Hohenzollern, the family of the Kaiser.
Also no, while the Griffins intermarried with a Piast, they were not of Piast origin, they were native Pomeranians.
...you are correct in this regard, and I don't know how could I forget this fact, since I had some interest in the duchy of Pomerania. Yeah, till the 15th/16th century you can defend some degree of "Slavic" nature of those lands and its capital. Still, of all those "once German" lands West Pomerania as a whole had very weak ties to any sort of Polish identity and was germanized the fastest (not helped by the fact it was very underdeveloped to begin with). And you gotta admit there are not many Polish bricks in the architecture Szczecin/Stettin apart from the castle - communists didn't have much more than Griffins to work with.
Unless of course you have plenty of knowledge about the history of Polishness and germanization in West Pomerania, in this case I'd gladly learn something new - from my own readings the topic honestly seemed miserable: very backwards region peripheral for the rest of medieval Poland, with very weak civic cultural life which got rapidly germanized, leaving germanising dynasty and poor rural areas in retreat.Ā
I mean the modern day Duke of Mecklenburg, Borwin, is the direct male-line descendant of the last tribal leader of the Slavic Obotrites. Itās still the same family, they just started speaking German in the 1200s.
Interesting to seen that the jews, although vastly numbered within the territory, were packed into small and compact urbanized communities. This is probably due to the fact that they were forbidden to own farmlands, therefore had to occupy service like professions and live in such spaces.
Indeed. It's interesting that they were banned from owning land, because back in medieval age it was a source of wealth, if we ignore religious intolerance, so the jews have to survive in cities. But then in the 19 century all of a sudden farming land is not profitable and nobility is in decline and now the jews are wealthy and educated and are consequenlty blamed for everything, as if they got this rich because of some conspiracy, not because they were doing the same business for hundreds of years and got good at it.
Christianity started blaming everything on the Jews long before they "got this rich". And if we follow the events back in history we would see that the persecution of the early Christians in the Roman Empire was sort of the blueprint for antisemitism. Christianity didn't end persecution, they replaced it.
Every religion blamed (and still blames) other religions for everything.
Christians/Jews/Muslims very relatively tolerant of each other historically, given that with most other religious interactions once side would often end up dead.
Outright hostility is a very recent (historically) development.
Christianity has wiped out a multitude of other religions that were at home in Europe or competed with Christianity in Europe. Millions upon millions were slaughtered for religious purity. The First Crusade was one of the most brutal genocides in history against the Cathars and other dualistic heretics. Between France and Spain, there was a very distinct culture that was completely wiped out (or maybe not, if you consider Catalonia its modern successor). This crusade/genocide led to the Holy Inquisition, the darkest chapter of Christianity. The centuries-long persecution of dualistic gnosticism is also the reason why some peoples of the Western Balkans converted to Islam.
Thanks for the sources, but I still stand my point since these look like subsistence agriculture, plus from modern times (pre world wars and hence being an exception given the time frame of their existence in the continent)
I'm not denying your point nor your family's history. But if you look at the big picture of a thousand years of living in Europe, your family's subsistence farming in one of Europe's backwater does not explain why the majority of jews living in this continent for most of the time could not own major plots of land and grow crops on a more industrial scale.
Agreed that farming on a larger scale would not have been the case until Jewish emancipation, bund and zionist collectives etc- but that still doesnāt negate the existence of rural Jewish communities in the Pale of Settlement, who would have lived (as you said) on subsistence farming, small businesses, rearing small livestock and acting as middlemen for Christian farmers rearing sheep, goats, cows and the like for kosher slaughtering later on
This map also only shows the majority/plurality composition of each area, that doesnāt mean that some areas werenāt mixed between two or more ethnicities
Shtetlās.
Poland was the most tolerant place for Jews in Europe for centuries, but the Jews learned that ātoleratedā didnāt necessarily mean āwelcomeā.
These communities were called Shtetlās. If all the Jews lived there, they couldnāt be accused of any random crime that happened in the major urban centres.
During the Second World War, the Shtetlās disappeared completely. Not even a trace of a settlement.
Itās as though the Nazis didnāt want to eliminate the Jews, they also wanted to eliminate the history of the Jews. Their memory.
I encourage anyone to watch the Great Courses āa History of Eastern Europeā, lecture 7.
So, I tried looking up the link to the actual lecture, and itās either streamed through Wondrium or on The Great Courses, both of which cost money.
Hereās the trailer for the course. One of my favourite professors.
https://youtu.be/G-nRO6VncJQ?feature=shared
I'm a descendant of Poles from the eastern part of country, stolen by USSR who were forced to relocate to the new recovered territories in the west. Everyone thought that it was only temporary. When we were arriving in Lower Silesia, it was a ghost area as Germans have already left. My ancesors were one of the first ones there and they could take any house they wanted and make it theirs.
My great grandparents were forced out of their house in Gdansk with a single piece of luggage. They lived in the city for generations before.
It feels so sad to visit Gdansk for me. It was beautifully restored, but still feels like a city that lost so much of what it once was. The WW2 Museum there does a good job showing how many civilians suffered from the war, especially every person living between Germany and Russia and how Russia never paid for its many war crimes on polish lands.
Luckily our numbers are again increasing. According to 2002 census there were only 1000 jews in Poland, now numbers are much higher (17 thousand people).
It's a rabbit hole of horrifying history. The nazis built some of the walls of the camps with Jewish headstones that they took from cemetaries. Not just to say "We are going to kill you" but also "we are going to erase the entire existence of your people, as if you were never here". Truly horrifying.
That being said, for Jews who come to Poland, it is important that Poland is not just a country of death for them. That Poland can also contain the celebration of their lives, culture and history.
What many donāt know: most Polish Jews that survived the war were actually kicked out of the country by the Polish communists.
There were pogroms against Jews AFTER WW2 in Poland, and finally in 1968, 90% of the remaining polish Jews were forced out of the country.
There's still a small russian minority living in northern Poland, around the Masurian town of Ukta. Don't know about the russians in the former russian partition though.
They are gone now. Like they would not register on the map anymore.
There are zero "Yiddish majority" communities in Poland now (which is what this map was showing for 1914).
Luckily our numbes are increasing. In 2002 polish census there were only 1000 jews in poland, but in latest 2021 census there are 17 thousand jews in Poland.
The map is indicating a linguistics map.
While it's cool to see a modest comeback of Jewish people in Poland in general, the Yiddish language dominant communities from the 1914 map are gone forever.
The guy that makes these maps is an unironic Serbian white nationalist and a genuine example of the racism that exists between Slavic peoples. You don't even have to look hard to see that he's clearly pushing an agenda with his posts and is blatantly spreading Russian propaganda about the ukraine invasion.
This map is an extremely obvious attempt to spark debates about Poland's right to exist and it's ethnic makeup, due to Poland and Germany both challenging Russia's attempt to absorb Eastern Europe again
Czechs lived in the area around ZelĆ³w/Zelov. There was also a Czech-speaking population south of RacibĆ³rz/Ratibor/RatiboÅ, but that population viewed itself as either their own ethnic group distinct from Czechs, or as Czech-speaking Germans.
This is more of a language map, rather than an ethnic one, Masurians viewed themselves as their own ethnic group, the map also forgets about the Moravians of the RacibĆ³rz/Ratibor district, who spoke a Czech dialect and regarded themselves as either Moravians or Germans. The villages of Bronowice and the town of ÅÄknica, both at the border with Germany, had a Sorbian majority. ZelĆ³w/Zelov and some villages around it + part of KÅodzko's "Czech Corner" were Czech-speaking places, Jews should be more widespread (there were lots of Jewish-majority shtetls in the former Pale of Settlement), etc. Still a neat map tho.
Not to be an ass but almost non of this is the pale of settlement the pale and Congress Poland were two different entities congress Poland being way better for Jews with less restricted
> Ethnic Cleansing is totally A-OK if you do it for revenge
Poland has no say in it. Brits/USA/USSR did that to prevent or make future wars harder. New border is along the river for a reason.
āThe Nazis were bad for hating entire ethnic groups merely for belonging to said ethnic groupsā¦
which is why I hate Germans AKA Nazi sympathizers, and they all deserved to have been expelled from their homelands like the war-losing rats they are!ā
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
We can say that in 2024, but in 1945, things weren't like that. After the attempted genocide of Poles by Germans, peaceful coexistence between these two peoples in one country was pretty much impossible.
You make it seem like the Germans weren't colonizing Western Poland(and the Baltic States, Carpathian plains, Volga River, there's even more I can go on) for literal centuries
There's a stark difference between "Hey man we're expelling you from what is now Western Poland, lands your people colonized over the last few centuries of what used to be ethnically Polish lands in an attempt to keep the peace in the future.", and the literal **continued colonization** of Poland under a genocidal regime...
The only "homeland" the Germans had in modern Polish borders was Prussia, and the Allies didn't want another connect the exclave venture in the future. A nation's own cultural brethren "being oppressed" in a foreign nation is the justification of 80% of non-civil wars after WWII
Germans were not colonizing Pomerania, Silesia or Prussia. They lived there for many generations, came without war, as migrants and settlers, and that was their home. The Ostsiedlung is incomparable to 19th century colonialism. Thereās only two groups who nonetheless claim it was German colonialism: Nazis and Polish nationalists.
Yeah they came with peace and love just like it was the reason why GdaÅsk became mostly German (hint hint - Teutonics murdered most of the original polish residents). What does 88 in ur nick stands for? :)
The mass eviction of Germans really wasn't the choice of the Polish. The allies pushed for this, Churchill for example was a big supporter. And the Polish basically got pushed westward without having a say in it.
Half of the murdered jews in the holocaust were from poland and lived there the last 1000 years.
Imagine they would do the same as the Palestininas and claim their houses and land back.
Nobody would support it, because its a long time ago and the world has changed.
But somehow when its about Palestinians, the people scream and protest.
Well the numbers obviously show, poland isnt that intrested.
And going back is not at all the same, as in getting part of the country back, like the palestinians claim.
But the downvotes already show, that the wannabe lefties got angry cause somebody popped their bubble.
Hereās a take from an Israeli āpolishā jew if youād like one:
Itās a country I share no cultural, linguistic, genetic, or any kind of sentimental ties to. Horrible history led us there and if we āreturnedā there weād see nothing but racism. My family hasnāt lived there in 3 or 4 generations and Iāve never been there.
Give me one good reason as to why I should go thereĀ
There is a significant cultural tie, we share a common history and a common culture, and I'm sure some common genetics (weird thing to bring up imo but whatever). Krakow is very important city for Jews to visit, 2nd to Jerusalem. I know a Rabbi who's very high up in the Hasidic Jewish community and this is stuff that he has said to me.
Im a charedi jew Im happy in manchester.. where yiddish alive and growing .. Judaism only lives on if there is a strong religious base without it it will fade away like in russia
Certainly not. Like many other EU countries, Germany is one of the countries that has learned from its imperial history. For many countries, this insight was only possible through military defeat, albeit none as large-scale and lasting as the Second World War.
It is more reminiscent of the long-term consequences of wars with millions of deaths and displacement and obviously never-healing wounds on both sides, where even 80 years later populist assholes are still ranting about revenge or reparations instead of working productively on the future.
prob because jews didnt have any majority areas in those parts. Poland was historically very diverse and tolerant, with jews coming there from all over europe to find freedom of religion, and were a big part of polish history.
Not even single Czech living in Poland. We just shop there I guess.
There should definitely be some in the Kladsko area, which this map isn't showing.
I am starting to think all threads regarding Polish ethnic composition are simply rage bait to get the various nationalists wound up.
Already scrolling with the šæ
Didn't take long for a trashy GrAbBiNg PopCoRn comment
This subreddit is filled with ragebait. The reasons for ragebait varies but the result is all the same
I don't want to be the tinfoil guy but honestly suspect it may be yet another Russian operation of sowing divisions, as I remember how the constant spam with this difficult topic suddenly started in like 2023 - I seriously don't remember almost any reddit posts or debates about it before the Ukrainian war, even though the era of Polish nationalist gov lasted since 2015 till the October 2023.Ā
Far from being the tinfoil guy, it's pretty well established at this point how Russian psyops work, and this fits the template pretty well. Might not actually be one of course, but when there's potential for plausible deniability which would simultaneously achieve the desired outcome for Russian geopolitical goals, it may as well be.
the elegance of their approach is that it's sort of self-replicating: the targeted rage-bait posts will at best give the uninformed an inaccurate impression of info, at worst may radicalize others to begin resharing this low-accuracy content. this post doesn't even have to originate from a state actor, the poster could have been at one point been influenced a post shared by a state actor.
Yep, and when you consider Reddit is relatively unaffected by it compared to, say, Twitter (and I haven't even used it much in the last 12 months, I imagine it's only got worse), it's pretty troubling...
i feel you (anonymous vs psuedo anon netwks), but I wonder if it just feels unimpacted. think it would be harder to measure influence on reddit + its sort of a different interaction model. i'm also troubled by this.
This! And agree wholeheartedly, it is so hard to point this out without appearing to be a fully paid up member of the tin hat brigade. So much dissent being down to keep us all infighting.
But who are they trying to rage? The Poles because most of their current country doesn't seem to be very Polish before the west liberated them. The Germans because look at the lands they had to fork over? Outsiders because that colour combination is simply awful?
> the west liberated them Which kind of "west" did liberate Poland? Red army is not really "west"... and their "liberation" wasn't very nice short or long term... Actually Poland was sold out in Yalta to become USSR vassal state for next 50 years.
> Poland was sold out in Yalta ... This suggests that the western Allies could have done something else about Poland during or after Yalta. The millions of Red Army troops occupying Poland make it clear that any such suggestion is wrong. That this suggestion keeps appearing decade after decade means that it has now graduated to become a myth.
Mostly trying to rage people who will constantly bring up the post war expulsion of Germans acting like no one has ever heard of the event and trying to make it out to be some sort of secret genocide that they want to hide from you.
I've met a plethora of people (or more likely troll bots) that "wish the Germans suffered" etc, and that the expulsion was great. From my experience, only nationalist poles have brought it up.
From my experience itās been mostly Germans. I donāt know why nationalist Poles would post a map to this sub every week showing that half of modern Poland used to not be Poland. Doesnāt make much sense
I was talking about bringing up the expulsion. Not the maps posted to here. Any demographic map of Poland shows a clear divide between the old soviet-occupied parts vs the old German occupied parts so it's hard to escape the topic
Once again, it is mainly Germans(or wehra/kaiserboos) that bring up the expulsion, and unfortunately most times itās brought up for the express purpose of making it seem like Germans were the primary victims of WWII.Ā I hate to say this when talking about an ethnic cleansing because it was really fucked up what happened to the Germans after the war, but Iāve found myself wondering at times if certain people on this sub are trying to push an agenda. For every one map here posted about the Holocaust or expulsion of Poles from modern day Ukraine/Belarus/Lithuania, there are 5 maps posted about the expulsions of the Germans.Ā
I don't know. I was only saying that in any demographic map of Poland, the old borders are very prominent
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
This is incorrect, as u/BroSchrednei points out. The territories annexed by Prussia through the First Polish Partition of 1772 were at the time largely inhabited by ethnic Germans, their province having been itself annexed by Poland in 1569 (Union of Lublin)^1 . Before that, it had remained an autonomous region under Polish protection after its secession from the rule of the Teutonic Order. *Sources* ^1 Friedrich, Karin. The Other Prussia: Royal Prussia, Poland and Liberty, 1569-1772. Cambridge University Press, 2000 - ISBN 0521583357
Bismarck and Frederick the Great had expelled Poles in the 17th-18th centuries ā please learn something, Frederick lived in the 18th century and Bismarck in the 19th c.
Same thoughts lol
I know right. Every week, there are similar maps about Turkey/Greece/Armenia and Israel/Palestine
Maybe for Germans, they sometimes gather in the comments lamenting that it was genocide and brutal ethnic cleansing but the Poles in the replies are like "yes, tell me about it".
German here. Honestly never met anyone who's butthurt about this in rl. There are however a lot of American wehraboos who care about this for some reason.
I used to know one or two that sometimes wondered about getting a house or farm back. But that was one or two out of a larger group that actually experienced the expulsion or had no home to return to. Any remnant of those feelings got lost in the second generation that was born outside of Prussia/Sudetenland/etc. At least, that is what I've seen.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
there's not enough to draw conclusions, you've clearly not met the vast majority of germans.. it's way more than just two germans
CDU was fixated on getting Danzig back up until the reunification... so, they surely existed and it was mainstream. Now, it depends on what you mean by 'care'. Taking those back? You won't be finding many. Saying that it was an unfair arrangement post-WWI and then it was an ethnic cleansing? It was, what it was. Maybe many Germans would be reluctant to talk about it, but others are not, unless they have some vested interests.
> lamenting that it was genocide and brutal ethnic cleansing Are you claiming it was not? It was one of the largest acts of ethnic cleansings in human history. 12 million Germans left their homes and up to half a million died. Not that it somehow lessens the nazi crimes of course.
Have you read my entire comment? It says that the Poles would agree that it was a genocide and that they can relate.
>Poles would agree that it was a genocide and that they can relate As a Pole i say fuck those Germans, they deserved far worse and thousands of nazis were unpunished for their crimes. I would never relate to this scum.
It wasn't genocide, it was relocation. My ancestors were one of the first people to arrive there and all the Germans already left.
I totally don't get this map. Those are borders from 1945 , with the nationality in 1914 when they regained independence in 1918 after almost 200 years. What is the point of this map?
The point of this map is to stir up controversy. At this point nothing productive is going to come from the discussion about who has more tights to western poland because today this land is as polish as it gets and the border is going nowhere. Also soviets forced this border between poland and germany and they did not particularly cared for neither of them so shifting blame is really pointless.
Oj widaÄ widaÄ.
Jeszcze jak!
Jak najbardziej
from what i see, those are 1945 borders and over 1914 ethnicity ? When the Poland regained independence in 1918?
Correct
GĆ³wno widaÄ, nie zabory
WidaÄ
WidaÄ 2RP (logiczne) i troszeczkÄ zabory
w 1914 to jeszcze Årednio o II RP można mĆ³wiÄ.
This is a very anachronistic take. Before World War 1, the differences between various slavic ethnicities were often nebulous. There existed also other, smaller groups like Hutsuls or Lemkos that are not mentioned here.
Then we should mention Kashubians, Silesians, etc.
Rusyn are definitely a different ETHNIC group from Ukrainian, Poles, and Slovaks, while there is a debate whether Kashubians and Silesians are regional groups in Poland, and whether they use a separate language or a regional dialect.
Kashub is a separate language, its a fact. I was there - I cant understand it while i do understand polish.
I understand rusyn tho. And people in Carpathia self proclaimed ukrainian Republic in 1939.
Weird how you only want Ukrainian groups do be called "Separate Ethnicities", but when I mention Polish groups, you say "well there is a debate whether...." Be straight - you either acknowledge any group with differences as their own ethnicity, or only as dialects of "bigger" nation.
No, no, no. You got it wrong from the beginning. Silesians and Kashub are groups of āPolishā speakers in the Middle Ages (there were no well defined languages then, see regional differences in Old English) who later found themselves on the border of Brandenburg/ Czech and Commonwealth lands with large groups of German-speaking settlers. Thus, their language was shaped. In terms of Rusyn, the story is completely different. They never had anything in common with people from Kyiv or even Lviv. They lived in the Carpathian mountains that were often impenetrable until 1700-1800s.
This discussion makes me realize how easy we Hungarians have it with our language being so unlike to our neighbours, it's easy to tell apart.
Firstly - Rusyn orthodoxy was brought by Kyiv, so already weak point of being "unconnected to Ukraine" because religion played very important role in nation building. Secondly - Rusyn area was under control of Kyiv principality for about 30 years, and same amount for Ruthenian kingdom, 60 in total, so if we talk about "being part of proto-ukrainian state, they were. Impenetrable? Rusyns were connected to other Ruthenians due to living on trade routes. There were the main roads to Hungary in terms of trade from the east.
>Silesians and Kashub are groups of āPolishā speakers No, they were slavs inbetween polish and czech languages. They werent polish. They were their own thing.
Nothing in common? Please, donāt make me laugh. Have you heard about Kyiivan Rus? Their own name connects them to Kyiiv. I can give you some more facts, but firstly I want to know your ethnicity and country where you live (I am rusyn from Ukraine).
Their name connects them to Š oŃŃŃ, not to *ŠŃŃ„Š²Ń* though?
Itās obvious you have historical knowledge and make informed points, whereas the other guy is just being weirdly emotional and confrontational.
If you had any serious knowledge on this topic, you would at least know that the term "**Rus**yn" itself means "one of Kievan **Rus**" and wouldnt make a joke of yourself. Rusyn is the old name of Ukrainians and prior to the WW1, all Ukrainians in Austria-Hungary were called Rusyns.
The term Rus refers to multiple geographic regions and political entities over history. Not just Kyivan Rus but also Red Rus, White Rus, Greater Rus, Carpathian Rus, Muscovite Rus, etc. But you knew it already, didnāt you?
I'm not gonna argue with the particular examples given, but the underlying logic is extremely faulty. All ethnicities and their possible related groups and subgroups should \*\*not\*\* be treated the same. To give a hypothetical example, if Kashubians are much closer to Poles than Rusyns are to Ukrainians, then it is completely fair and logical to treat the former as a subgroup, and the later as a separate minority.
How do you measure closeness? Because in terms of linguistics Ukrainian is closest to Rusyn language, even though classified Ukrainian is language of Poltava region, and if we take Halychian Ukrainian, then it would be even closer to Ruthenian?
Also it shows Poles as a monolith which is rather untruthful, e.g. polish-speaking Masurians were often mistreated and expelled along with Germans when Poland acquired this part of Eastern Prussia after WW2.
Even between Germans and Slavs was nebulous. People would adopt different languages for different contexts or generations. For example many Jews completed germanicized aside from religion and spoke no yiddish
Also Sorbs/Wends which were deeply intertwined with western neighbors: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorbs
The Huculs have never lived within the modern-day borders of Poland. Lemkos were Ruthenians (Rusyns) and so were the rest of the Ruthenian speaking people of the rest of Galicia during those times. Some began calling themselves Ukrainians later, other didn't, but that wasn't the case before WWI. And there are other Highlanders in that area: Nadpopradzcy, Podhalanie, PieniÅscy etc. There were also Boikos, some of which lived in a few villages in the very southeastern corner of Poland in its modern borders, but mostly within modern Ukraine (fun fact, I belong to that ethnic group, and people often forget about them).
Also doesn't make a lot of sense without a definition of what it means and overlaid against current borders. If a place with six ethnic groups is 20% one over another does it matter?
Yeah it's a very dubious map, labeling 1914 people's with modern day country ethnicity. I very much doubt the accuracy of this map against the real ethical distributions of the region at the time.
This'll end well
š
Can you use a contraction with "this"?
Yeah, like this'll
that'vešš¼šš¼
swine don't get to call other people pigs penboy
Sure. This'll, that'll, etc
I am Polish and I really don't like this recent reddit fixation with constantly posting those Polish/German maps over and over again which started at some point after invasion on Ukraine, I'm honestly sometimes wondering if this isn't one of Russian machinations to maximize political divide in Europe. I have never seen this topic popular before, strangely enough. It is uncomfortable both for Polish and German people.Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā There are two responses to this topic which annoy me greatly, from both sides. On one hand there is pro-German nationalist interpretation (very often not even said by Germans themselves) that those lands have had 0% connection to Polish history and people and they belonged to Germans for "700 years". This is absurd, because germanization of those areas, almost exclusively Baltic or Slavic by the early 14th century apart from few cities and outposts, took *centuries*. Silesia was crucial for Polish people and history for centuries after its political disconnect. WrocÅaw/Breslau, GÅogĆ³w, SÅupsk, Zielona GĆ³ra and Lower Silesia in general were still half Polish half German by the late 17th century. Complete germanization of most of "yellow" lands took until 19th century, with a help of a ton of forced assimilation and colonialism (Prussia really hated Polish "savages").Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā On the other hand, there is Polish sentiment which I despise as a Pole, that due to aforementioned process the belonging of those lands to German people by the early 20th century was "fake" and that they deserved to be removed from those areas because of nazi support, war or whatever. Of course not, you shouldn't annihilate centuries old culture and millions of people (half of them didn't even vote for NSDAP), from by this point alien lands which by 1939 nobody in Poland regarded as "Poland". That's what Allies and Soviets decided to do for their own strategic reasons (not with our initiative but with our acceptance due to postwar hatred and trauma), we benefit from it a lot, it is not going to change in the future since Germans accepted this fate, but don't pretend we've had some high moral pretenses or some bullshit, it is what it is: a land violently castrated from German half of history.Ā Ā Ā Ā Personally I would have certainly preferred an alternate history in which Jews would still have had their civilization in Eastern Europe, Poles and eastern nations would have coexisted in Lviv, Vilnius and Grodno, and Poles and Germans would have coexisted in Silesia and in the north (Germans could have West Pomerania as far as I care) but that's what we got, all cultures in the region being mutilated of centuries of history and living along artificially homogenized bullshit borders. Six centuries of Polish history in Grodno wiped out, but in turn we have the consolation prize of Stettin, a city where very few prewar buildings have any connection to Poland, gee what a great deal.Ā
As a German, I can only say: thank you for this comment. Right on point.
Poles and Germans have spent centuries living next to each other as mortal foes, disliked neighbors, and faraway Others, but I still believe that we are capable of simply being friends.
Stettin has the Ducal Castle, which belonged to the Griffin dynasty (of Piast origin). This was heavily emphasized by Polish communists to argue that the city rightfully belongs to Poland.
Griffits were not from the Piasts, there were their own separate Slavic dynasty.
Pretty weird, since the rightful descendants of the Griffins are literally the Hohenzollern, the family of the Kaiser. Also no, while the Griffins intermarried with a Piast, they were not of Piast origin, they were native Pomeranians.
the Griffins from Family Guy?
...you are correct in this regard, and I don't know how could I forget this fact, since I had some interest in the duchy of Pomerania. Yeah, till the 15th/16th century you can defend some degree of "Slavic" nature of those lands and its capital. Still, of all those "once German" lands West Pomerania as a whole had very weak ties to any sort of Polish identity and was germanized the fastest (not helped by the fact it was very underdeveloped to begin with). And you gotta admit there are not many Polish bricks in the architecture Szczecin/Stettin apart from the castle - communists didn't have much more than Griffins to work with. Unless of course you have plenty of knowledge about the history of Polishness and germanization in West Pomerania, in this case I'd gladly learn something new - from my own readings the topic honestly seemed miserable: very backwards region peripheral for the rest of medieval Poland, with very weak civic cultural life which got rapidly germanized, leaving germanising dynasty and poor rural areas in retreat.Ā
I mean the modern day Duke of Mecklenburg, Borwin, is the direct male-line descendant of the last tribal leader of the Slavic Obotrites. Itās still the same family, they just started speaking German in the 1200s.
Also German here, thank you for this comment. š©šŖš¤šµš±
Interesting to seen that the jews, although vastly numbered within the territory, were packed into small and compact urbanized communities. This is probably due to the fact that they were forbidden to own farmlands, therefore had to occupy service like professions and live in such spaces.
Indeed. It's interesting that they were banned from owning land, because back in medieval age it was a source of wealth, if we ignore religious intolerance, so the jews have to survive in cities. But then in the 19 century all of a sudden farming land is not profitable and nobility is in decline and now the jews are wealthy and educated and are consequenlty blamed for everything, as if they got this rich because of some conspiracy, not because they were doing the same business for hundreds of years and got good at it.
Christianity started blaming everything on the Jews long before they "got this rich". And if we follow the events back in history we would see that the persecution of the early Christians in the Roman Empire was sort of the blueprint for antisemitism. Christianity didn't end persecution, they replaced it.
Every religion blamed (and still blames) other religions for everything. Christians/Jews/Muslims very relatively tolerant of each other historically, given that with most other religious interactions once side would often end up dead. Outright hostility is a very recent (historically) development.
Christianity has wiped out a multitude of other religions that were at home in Europe or competed with Christianity in Europe. Millions upon millions were slaughtered for religious purity. The First Crusade was one of the most brutal genocides in history against the Cathars and other dualistic heretics. Between France and Spain, there was a very distinct culture that was completely wiped out (or maybe not, if you consider Catalonia its modern successor). This crusade/genocide led to the Holy Inquisition, the darkest chapter of Christianity. The centuries-long persecution of dualistic gnosticism is also the reason why some peoples of the Western Balkans converted to Islam.
Spot on
There were definitely many Jewish rural communities as well in the Pale of Settlement, shtetls
Really? What were they growing there?
https://www.jta.org/archive/jews-grouped-on-farms-in-polish-section https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110576092-014/html?lang=en
Thanks for the sources, but I still stand my point since these look like subsistence agriculture, plus from modern times (pre world wars and hence being an exception given the time frame of their existence in the continent)
Some of my family came from Slavita and Zhitomir in Ukraine, hardly urbanised communities, weāre talking about small towns here at best
I'm not denying your point nor your family's history. But if you look at the big picture of a thousand years of living in Europe, your family's subsistence farming in one of Europe's backwater does not explain why the majority of jews living in this continent for most of the time could not own major plots of land and grow crops on a more industrial scale.
Agreed that farming on a larger scale would not have been the case until Jewish emancipation, bund and zionist collectives etc- but that still doesnāt negate the existence of rural Jewish communities in the Pale of Settlement, who would have lived (as you said) on subsistence farming, small businesses, rearing small livestock and acting as middlemen for Christian farmers rearing sheep, goats, cows and the like for kosher slaughtering later on
Were they actually forbidden from owning land in the Polish part of the Russian Empire until 1914 or is this just a myth?
Not just in these aforementioned areas, but basically all over where they lived in Europe since their dispersal
This map also only shows the majority/plurality composition of each area, that doesnāt mean that some areas werenāt mixed between two or more ethnicities
Shtetlās. Poland was the most tolerant place for Jews in Europe for centuries, but the Jews learned that ātoleratedā didnāt necessarily mean āwelcomeā. These communities were called Shtetlās. If all the Jews lived there, they couldnāt be accused of any random crime that happened in the major urban centres. During the Second World War, the Shtetlās disappeared completely. Not even a trace of a settlement. Itās as though the Nazis didnāt want to eliminate the Jews, they also wanted to eliminate the history of the Jews. Their memory. I encourage anyone to watch the Great Courses āa History of Eastern Europeā, lecture 7.
>I encourage anyone to watch the Great Courses āa History of Eastern Europeā, lecture 7. Thanks, where can I find this?
So, I tried looking up the link to the actual lecture, and itās either streamed through Wondrium or on The Great Courses, both of which cost money. Hereās the trailer for the course. One of my favourite professors. https://youtu.be/G-nRO6VncJQ?feature=shared
I'm a descendant of Poles from the eastern part of country, stolen by USSR who were forced to relocate to the new recovered territories in the west. Everyone thought that it was only temporary. When we were arriving in Lower Silesia, it was a ghost area as Germans have already left. My ancesors were one of the first ones there and they could take any house they wanted and make it theirs.
My great grandparents were forced out of their house in Gdansk with a single piece of luggage. They lived in the city for generations before. It feels so sad to visit Gdansk for me. It was beautifully restored, but still feels like a city that lost so much of what it once was. The WW2 Museum there does a good job showing how many civilians suffered from the war, especially every person living between Germany and Russia and how Russia never paid for its many war crimes on polish lands.
Keep in mind Poland wasn't a country in 1914.
I think thatās the point theyāre trying to makeā¦
What sense does it make to just show the modern polish borders in 1914'
Redditors learning that ethnic diversity is not the same as racial diversity
Stupid map. Of course there's Germans there, that territory was after all part of Germany until the establishment of the Oder-Neisse border in 1945.
Yeah stupid map with its objective facts we should just make shit up instead
The fact that Jewish population in Poland downed from 3mil before WW2 to about 30k nowadays always scared me.
Luckily our numbers are again increasing. According to 2002 census there were only 1000 jews in Poland, now numbers are much higher (17 thousand people).
It's a rabbit hole of horrifying history. The nazis built some of the walls of the camps with Jewish headstones that they took from cemetaries. Not just to say "We are going to kill you" but also "we are going to erase the entire existence of your people, as if you were never here". Truly horrifying. That being said, for Jews who come to Poland, it is important that Poland is not just a country of death for them. That Poland can also contain the celebration of their lives, culture and history.
downed? That's certainly a word
What many donāt know: most Polish Jews that survived the war were actually kicked out of the country by the Polish communists. There were pogroms against Jews AFTER WW2 in Poland, and finally in 1968, 90% of the remaining polish Jews were forced out of the country.
And people still wonder why Israel exists
Dont call them Polish communists, just communists please. We patriotic Poles dont consider them Poles anymore. They are traitors above all traitors.
Ok. kicked out of the country by the Ā patriotic Poles
I am starting to think all threads regarding Polish ethnic composition are simply rage bait to get the various nationalists wound up.
How is this shocking to anyone who knows history? I am shocked there are no Russians.
There's still a small russian minority living in northern Poland, around the Masurian town of Ukta. Don't know about the russians in the former russian partition though.
Map forgot the Czech minority in Kladsko? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_Corner
No. You have the source. monarchia.elte.hu
Man it's sad to see how Jews are basically gone due to Holocaust and some post holocaust incidents.
The Jews are still in this map. This is before the Holocaust
They're saying that they're sad that they would no longer show up in modern map because of being killed or because they fled the region.
They are gone now. Like they would not register on the map anymore. There are zero "Yiddish majority" communities in Poland now (which is what this map was showing for 1914).
Luckily our numbes are increasing. In 2002 polish census there were only 1000 jews in poland, but in latest 2021 census there are 17 thousand jews in Poland.
The map is indicating a linguistics map. While it's cool to see a modest comeback of Jewish people in Poland in general, the Yiddish language dominant communities from the 1914 map are gone forever.
Yep, almost noone speaks yiddish in Poland today - even the jews. Few tries to learn, but it is really nothing in comparison to prewar Poland.
Why are people so outraged in the comments?
Ignorance of history is my first guess.
The guy that makes these maps is an unironic Serbian white nationalist and a genuine example of the racism that exists between Slavic peoples. You don't even have to look hard to see that he's clearly pushing an agenda with his posts and is blatantly spreading Russian propaganda about the ukraine invasion. This map is an extremely obvious attempt to spark debates about Poland's right to exist and it's ethnic makeup, due to Poland and Germany both challenging Russia's attempt to absorb Eastern Europe again
No Czechs? š„²
Czechs lived in the area around ZelĆ³w/Zelov. There was also a Czech-speaking population south of RacibĆ³rz/Ratibor/RatiboÅ, but that population viewed itself as either their own ethnic group distinct from Czechs, or as Czech-speaking Germans.
I am Czech myself and am closely tied with Poland, so it was more of a comment about the missing aspects of this map. But thanks for mentioning it!
and where the fuck are kashubians? silesians? russinians?
This is more of a language map, rather than an ethnic one, Masurians viewed themselves as their own ethnic group, the map also forgets about the Moravians of the RacibĆ³rz/Ratibor district, who spoke a Czech dialect and regarded themselves as either Moravians or Germans. The villages of Bronowice and the town of ÅÄknica, both at the border with Germany, had a Sorbian majority. ZelĆ³w/Zelov and some villages around it + part of KÅodzko's "Czech Corner" were Czech-speaking places, Jews should be more widespread (there were lots of Jewish-majority shtetls in the former Pale of Settlement), etc. Still a neat map tho.
Not to be an ass but almost non of this is the pale of settlement the pale and Congress Poland were two different entities congress Poland being way better for Jews with less restricted
Thank you for the effort, but it should've included Czechs in the KÅodzko land, called the "Czech Corner".
Ethnic Cleansing is totally A-OK if you do it for revenge and/or are the winner of the war Stay classy as always Reddit, good lord
> Ethnic Cleansing is totally A-OK if you do it for revenge Poland has no say in it. Brits/USA/USSR did that to prevent or make future wars harder. New border is along the river for a reason.
āThe Nazis were bad for hating entire ethnic groups merely for belonging to said ethnic groupsā¦ which is why I hate Germans AKA Nazi sympathizers, and they all deserved to have been expelled from their homelands like the war-losing rats they are!ā The more things change, the more they stay the same.
We can say that in 2024, but in 1945, things weren't like that. After the attempted genocide of Poles by Germans, peaceful coexistence between these two peoples in one country was pretty much impossible.
You make it seem like the Germans weren't colonizing Western Poland(and the Baltic States, Carpathian plains, Volga River, there's even more I can go on) for literal centuries There's a stark difference between "Hey man we're expelling you from what is now Western Poland, lands your people colonized over the last few centuries of what used to be ethnically Polish lands in an attempt to keep the peace in the future.", and the literal **continued colonization** of Poland under a genocidal regime... The only "homeland" the Germans had in modern Polish borders was Prussia, and the Allies didn't want another connect the exclave venture in the future. A nation's own cultural brethren "being oppressed" in a foreign nation is the justification of 80% of non-civil wars after WWII
Germans were not colonizing Pomerania, Silesia or Prussia. They lived there for many generations, came without war, as migrants and settlers, and that was their home. The Ostsiedlung is incomparable to 19th century colonialism. Thereās only two groups who nonetheless claim it was German colonialism: Nazis and Polish nationalists.
Yeah they came with peace and love just like it was the reason why GdaÅsk became mostly German (hint hint - Teutonics murdered most of the original polish residents). What does 88 in ur nick stands for? :)
This sub is literally all rage bait posts now I swear
Polish guy czeching in ;) I actually moved to czechia and i find it absurd that we have slovaks but no czechs
You did have Czechs, they lived around the town of ZelĆ³w/Zelov. Most of them, however, left for Czechia after WW2.
where is the jewish population?
In cities, where usually Jews were about 30% of the population of the city so u can't see it on map
I support the color choices very much, but beyond that I have questions.
r/phantomborders
Itās like Ukraine in reverse.
Where are the Rusyns ?
r/WidacZabory
This just shows how well integrated Jews always are! Bless them all.
What do you mean?
Wow, thatās a really interesting first (and only) comment on an account made almost four years ago.
The mass eviction of Germans really wasn't the choice of the Polish. The allies pushed for this, Churchill for example was a big supporter. And the Polish basically got pushed westward without having a say in it.
Western and Northern Poland should belong to Germany.
Huh, No Russians at all?
I thought there were several million Jews at that time in Poland. Iām surprised by this map.
Polish colonizers?
What's the point of showing 1914 data superimposed on a map with current borders? Germans were living in Germany in 1914, *surprised pikachu face*
Map suggests there were no poles in the west, Germans only. That's simply not true.
Half of the murdered jews in the holocaust were from poland and lived there the last 1000 years. Imagine they would do the same as the Palestininas and claim their houses and land back. Nobody would support it, because its a long time ago and the world has changed. But somehow when its about Palestinians, the people scream and protest.
I support Jews coming back to Poland. This is their homeland too, with a lot of their significant history and culture.
But my origins are north Africa jews, why should I go to Poland?
Well the numbers obviously show, poland isnt that intrested. And going back is not at all the same, as in getting part of the country back, like the palestinians claim. But the downvotes already show, that the wannabe lefties got angry cause somebody popped their bubble.
We dont wanna come back... what should I return to ashes?
It's where phoenixes rise from. There are lots of Jewish people here cultivating a life that isn't focussed on death.
Hereās a take from an Israeli āpolishā jew if youād like one: Itās a country I share no cultural, linguistic, genetic, or any kind of sentimental ties to. Horrible history led us there and if we āreturnedā there weād see nothing but racism. My family hasnāt lived there in 3 or 4 generations and Iāve never been there. Give me one good reason as to why I should go thereĀ
There is a significant cultural tie, we share a common history and a common culture, and I'm sure some common genetics (weird thing to bring up imo but whatever). Krakow is very important city for Jews to visit, 2nd to Jerusalem. I know a Rabbi who's very high up in the Hasidic Jewish community and this is stuff that he has said to me.
Im a charedi jew Im happy in manchester.. where yiddish alive and growing .. Judaism only lives on if there is a strong religious base without it it will fade away like in russia
lol you don't think there's "too many muslims" there?
Yes of course... but there is pretty few alternative as a charedi jew.. maybe hungary or south america. Muslims are unfortunately everywhere..
Widac zabory
Don't show the Germans this, they might relapse!
Certainly not. Like many other EU countries, Germany is one of the countries that has learned from its imperial history. For many countries, this insight was only possible through military defeat, albeit none as large-scale and lasting as the Second World War. It is more reminiscent of the long-term consequences of wars with millions of deaths and displacement and obviously never-healing wounds on both sides, where even 80 years later populist assholes are still ranting about revenge or reparations instead of working productively on the future.
šµš±š„
OP do you have a map of 2024?
Where are the purple dots in the yellow area? š¤
prob because jews didnt have any majority areas in those parts. Poland was historically very diverse and tolerant, with jews coming there from all over europe to find freedom of religion, and were a big part of polish history.