The 'Province of Posen' (DE: Provinz Posen, PL: Prowincja Poznańska) was a province of Prussia from 1848–1898 and as such part of the German Empire from 1871 to 1898. As part of the reorganization of the Empire in 1898, it became the Reichsland of Posen, which later gained territory from Poland to re-form South Prussia. The area was 28,970 km2.
The territory of later province had become Prussian in 1772 (Netze District) and 1793 (South Prussia) during the partitions of Poland. After Prussia's defeat in the Napoleonic Wars, the territory was attached to the Duchy of Warsaw in 1807 during the Treaty of Tilsit. In 1815 during the Congress of Vienna, Prussia gained the western third of the Warsaw duchy, which was about half of former South Prussia. Prussia then administered this province as the semi-autonomous Grand Duchy of Posen, which lost most of its exceptional status in 1830.<ref name=Koebler/> While the the local Poznań Parliament voted 26 to 17 votes against joining German Confederation On 3rd of April 1848<ref name=“Chwalba”>Andrzej Chwalba - Historia Polski 1795-1918 Wydawnictwo Literackie 2000 Kraków</ref> the Frankfurt Parliament ignoring the vote forced status change to a normal Prussian province and its integration in the German Confederation.<ref>Dieter Gosewinkel, Einbürgern und Ausschliessen: die Nationalisierung der Staatsangehörigkeit vom Deutschen Bund bis zur Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 2nd edition, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001, p.116, ISBN 3525351658</ref>
This region was inhabited by Polish majority and German and Jewish minorities and a smattering of other peoples. Almost all the Poles were Roman Catholic, and about 90% of the Germans were Protestant. The small numbers of Jews were primarily to be found in the larger communities, mostly in skilled crafts, local commerce and regional trading. The smaller the community, the more likely it was to be either Polish or German. These “pockets of ethnicity” existed side by side, with German villages being the most dense in the northwestern areas. With Germanization policies, the population became more German until the end of the 19th century, when the trend eased due to the availability of German colonies in Africa. This was despite efforts of the government in Berlin, which established the Settlement Commission to buy land from Poles and make it available only to Germans.
During World War II, Posen was forcibly annexed by Russian Poland as the Voivodeship Poznan, where ethnic Germans and Jews were persecuted, expelled, and executed. Once the war concluded and the atrocities came to light, Germans pressed for the re-annexation of its former territory and the expulsion of the Poles from German land. In 1946 during the Treaty of Paris, Germany regained the territory it had ceded in the Congress of Vienna over a century prior to Congress Poland, and expelled the Polish population from its territory.
Territory of Posen
