Poznan

Downtown Poznan:

Poznań is rich in monuments, which are mainly in the Old Town and on Ostrow Tumski, the island of the cathedral. There are no less than 25 museums in the city; there is the National Museum with art on Plac Wolnosci. On the old market square there is a military museum (about the uprising of 1956), an archaeological museum, a museum of musical instruments and also the town hall has a museum about the city.

On the site of the current town hall stood the 13th century Gothic town hall that was destroyed during a fire in the 16th century. The building was built by an Italian architect in the 16th century. In 1943 Heinrich Himmler gave his important speech on the Holocaust here. In front of the building is the post where people were punished during the Middle Ages for their criminal acts. 

Other spectacular buildings are the theater on the Plac Wolmosci and the library that is also located on that square. Further along the Marcin street stands the stately Residenzschloss (Imperial castle) that was built by order of the German Emperor Wilhelm II. The construction of the neo-Romanesque castle began in 1905 and was completed in 1910. After WWI, the former Imperial apartments on the first floor were converted into the residence of the Polish president. Also a part was taken by students from the university of the city (these students would later crack the first Enigma machine).

After the capitulation of Poland in 1939, it was decided to make the castle one of the lodgings of Adolf Hitler. The castle was also used by Arthur Greiser, Gauleiter of the Reichsgau Wartheland. The castle was rebuilt during the German occupation on behalf of Albert Speer. The chapel became the personal cabinet of Adolf Hitler (an exact copy of the cabinet in the Reichskanzlei), the throne room became a reception hall and under the castle a bunker was built for 375 people. In 1943 the work was stopped due to the deteriorating situation on the eastern front.

During the Battle of Posen in 1945, the castle was used as a temporary prisoner of war camp for German soldiers. After the war, it would temporarily function as a university again. The Imperial Castle of Poznań is now used for several purposes (cinema, theater and cultural center) and can be visited. In many places, the architectural features of the German Third Reich are still clearly visible. Next to the palace is a new museum that revolves in Poznan in 1956.

Ostrow Tumski and the Citadel:

Archaeological research has shown the importance to the Polish state in the 11th century of Ostrow Tumski. The island is also called one of the possible places where the first Polish king Mieszko I assumed the Christian religion. In the cathedral, especially the Golden Chapel is impressive, which forms a monument and cemetery for the first two kings of Poland.

Also the Polish Pope John Paul II once emphasized during his visit to the cathedral: Poland started here he said. The rest of the cathedral island includes the Episcopal Palace, a museum with religious art and houses of clergy as well as other churches. 

Fort Winiary (also known as the citadel) was the main fort of Poznań fortress and was built between 1828 - 1842 and was used during the German occupation of Poland as a prisoner of war camp for French, British and Soviet soldiers. In January 1945 the German defense of Posen centered in this fort and held out for 5 days against the advancing Red Army, which finally conquered the fort on 23 February.

The fighting was very intense and to this day the fort still bears the scars of that period. There is little left of the old fort; there are 8 war cemeteries, 2 war museums (museum of weapons and of the army of Poznan), an (ammunition) warehouse and some old walls and entrances to tunnels left. There are also many war memorials spread out by the now very large and spacious citadel park, of which the bell tower is the most striking.

Fortress / forts Poznan

Around the city of Poznan a fortress belt was built at the end of the 19th century to defend the city. Some 20 to 25 forts would be built, which together would become one of the largest fortress belts in Europe.

Fort VII, Wielkopolan, was established on 10 October 1939 as a concentration camp and was called Konzentrationslager Posen. In addition to the official function as a concentration camp, KZ Posen was also used as Gestapo prison, transit camp and (mainly) extermination camp.

In 1939 the first Nazi mass murders took place here with poison gas. A small bunker (bunker nr.17) was arranged as a primitive gas chamber. Posen concentration camp Posen was closed in 1944. It is estimated that 15,000 people were killed here. At the end of WWII in early 1945 almost all forts were used during the battle of Posen when the Russians surrounded the city. The battle would take a month. Fort VII is now a museum and can be visited.

The region of Poznań was occupied before the 7th century AD by the Germanic tribes of the Burgundians and Vandals. Then the West Slavic tribe of the Polans settled there, next to their settlements in the area around Gniezno. From this tribe the duchy of Poland would come of the lineage of the Piasts.

The city of Poznan is one of the oldest cities in Poland and was founded on the easy defendable island of "Ostrow Tumski". In the 10th century the first Polish cathedral was built in Poznań and the first princes of the Piasten dynasty were buried here. German merchants settled there and in the 16th century the city experienced its greatest prosperity. The Thirty Years' War and the Nordic War dis-populated the city again.

Between 1719 and 1753, many German farmers and artisans from Bamberg diocese settled around and in the city and its immediate surroundings. The city became, due to the the Third Polish Division (1793) part of South Prussia and was part of the Napoleonic Duchy of Warsaw from 1807 to 1813/1815. Since then the city came back to Prussia as an official and military center and capital of the Posen county. And after that, from 1871 to 1919 Poasen became a province of the German Empire. Meanwhile, the population of the city had become German-speaking for almost half (45% in 1910).

Initially the Jews formed an important part of the German speakers, but their number fell sharply by one-tenth of the population due to emigration. In accordance with the Treaty of Versailles, the city became Polish again in 1919 (after an uprising), when it came to the Republic of Poland as Poznań, along with most of the eponymous Prussian province. Most of the German speakers left and most Roman Catholic Germans, as a rule two-lingual, now called themselves Polish. In 1930 only 5% registered as German. 

During WW2

During the national-socialist occupation of Poland between 1939 and 1945, the province was annexed under the name Gau Wartheland and a number of those who had been German citizens before 1919, took on the status of 'German' in various rankings. Together with the “real” Germans, who were seconded to the occupation authority in the "Wartheland", they came together to 28.3% (1 April 1944) of the whole population of the city. Meanwhile, the National Socialist terror killed many Poles. The Polish social upper class, insofar as not murdered or interned, was expelled to the Warsaw General Government.

On 4 and 6 October, Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler held two important secret speeches in the town hall of the city. The recordings are (until now) the only evidence that a high-ranking Nazi spoke about the destruction of the Jewish race in the concentration camps. In the beginning of 1945 the fortress Posen was surrounded and the Nazis kept it for another month. Large parts of the city were destroyed during the fierce battle. The Germans were expelled after the war, insofar as they had not yet fled already.

Under Russian Rule

The riots, protests and/or (workers) uprising in Poznań in June 1956, also known as the June of Poznań (Polish: Poznański Czerwiec), were the first of several mass protests in Poland against the communist dictatorial regime of the People's Republic of Poland. Demonstrations of workers who asked for better conditions began on June 28, 1956 with a strike in the Cegielski factory (at that time called the Joseph Stalin factory) in Poznań and were in the end answered by force by the government.

A mass of about 100,000 people gathered in the center of the city close to the Ministry of Public Security building. Then the headquarters of the secret police was stormed and about 257 prisoners were released. Approximately 400 tanks and 10,000 soldiers from the Polish Army and the Domestic Security Corps (KBW) were ordered to stop the demonstration with the right to shoot. The death toll was estimated between 57 and over a hundred, including the 13-year-old boy Romek Strzałkowski. Hundreds of people were wounded.

Nevertheless, the demonstrations in Poznań marked an important milestone to the so-called Polish October, in which a regime was installed in Poland in the autumn of 1956, led by Gomułka, which was less subject to Soviet control. In Hungary, after the protests of June, demonstrations were held at the monument of Józef Bem, the Polish general who fought for Hungarian independence, in support of the Polish insurgents. These demonstrations marked the beginning of the Hungarian uprising of 1956. In June 2006, 50 years later, June 28 was proclaimed Poland's national holiday.

Poznan is today known as a very open, commercial city that has the advantage of being close to Germany and having a lot of trade with his German neighbour.