History of the city of Kalisz
Kalisz ( German Kalisch ) has been emergence of the country Poland is the oldest city in Poland and was one thousand years ago one nominated by many even in Greek and Roman sources settlements east of the Elbe .
prehistory
The city (along with other settlements in present-day Poland) was mentioned as Calisia around 150 AD by the Alexandrian geographer Claudius Ptolemy in his work "Outline of Geography", but the area was already around 1200 BC. Inhabited by the population of the Lusatian culture , which one believes to be able to determine through numerous excavations. But whether the name Calisia really referred to Kalish is questionable nowadays, because many historians believe that Ptolemy's Calisia was mentioned in relation to the Moravian Olomouc.
In the time of Ptolemy, Kalisch was in the Magna Germania area as a junction on one of the most important trade routes in Central Europe, known as the Amber Route, which connected the Roman Empire to the south with the Baltic coast.
Calisia that time was probably Lugiern (Greek: Lygiern) inhabited the German in the opinion of historians a cult Community Vandal , ie Germanic peoples in Silesia and were later in western Poland, while Polish scholars to carry out the Slavic tribes. This ancient Calisia, however, was not in the valley of the Prosna, like today's city center, but a few kilometers further east in the area of today's Old City . Later, in the early Piastic period , this potash consisted of the ducal castle with the Paulskirche, the craftsmen's settlement with the Adalbertkirche, another neighboring settlement with the Gotthard Church and a Jewish town, which was also near the castle.
middle Ages
The earliest mention of Kalisch in the Middle Ages is in 1106 in the Chronicle of Gallus Anonymus , who described the fighting between two sons of Duke Władysław I Herman , Bolesław III. Schiefmund und Zbigniew describes: Kalisch came into the sphere of power Zbigniews, who was lord of the city 1102–1106.
Kalisch is mentioned for the second time in 1136 in the bulla of Pope Innocent II , who speaks of Kalisch as one of the most important castellanias in Poland. According to some historians, Kalisch was then the capital of the Central Polish Province , which included the castellanias of Kalisch, Sieradz and Łęczyca .
Piast time
In the will of Boleslaw III. Kalisch is assigned to the senior duchy of Krakow in 1138 . After the riot of the younger brothers against Władysław II. The expellees in 1146 he was overthrown and Kalisch came to the Duchy of Greater Poland, where Mieszko III. called the old man, ruled. Around 1155 he donated the Romanesque castle church of St. Paul, where his son Mieszko was buried in 1193 and he himself was buried in 1202. The foundations of this church with the Mieszko tombstone were only found around 1960 in the area of the so-called Schwedenschanze. In 1193, Kalisch became the capital of the Piast duchy of the same name, which often changed its borders and where various descendants of Mieszkos III. ruled.
In 1233 the Silesian Duke Henrich I the Bearded waged war against the Wielkopolska cousin Władysław Odon , besieged the Kali Castle, conquered and destroyed it. The Duchy of Kalisch then passed to the Silesian Piasts . Around 1234, Henry I moved the castle and the city to their current location - an island between three arms of Prosna. The old Kalisch, now called the Old City, sank into a farming village. Around 1235 - the exact year is not known - Kalisch received Magdeburg law and was built according to the pattern of the Silesian cities in a strict grid shape with a rectangular market place (ring). The area of the city covered 18 hectares, all buildings except two churches - Nicholas and Franciscan Church - were made of wood. In 1264 the "old town" received village rights .
._Statute_of_Kalisz,_frontispiece_(Casimir_the_Great)_(1927),_Paris.jpg)
Statut kaliski ( German : Statut von Kalisch ), was a letter of protection for Jews issued by Duke Bolesław the Pious ( Polish : Bolesław Pobożny, 1224 / 27–1279) on September 8, 1264 in Kalisch. The statute threatened , among other things, penalties for desecrating Jewish cemeteries and synagogues . The statute contained provisions on the punishment of those who accused Jews of ritual murder . It regulated the principles of trade by the Jews and assured them the inviolability of life and property.
After the reunification of Poland, an administrative reform was carried out under King Władysław I. Ellenlang in 1305. New administrative units called voivodships were created. Kalisch became the capital of the voivodeship of the same name, which (with certain border changes) was to exist until 1793, the second partition of Poland . It included southern and eastern Great Poland with Kalisch, Gnesen , Pyzdry / Peisern, Konin and Środa / Schroda and also Nakło nad Notecią / Nakel an der Netze . On September 21, 1331, the army of the Teutonic Order under Colonel Marshal Dietrich von Altenburg besieged the city of Kalisch, but withdrew after a few days without having achieved any success. A few years later, in July 1343, preparations were under way for the " Kalisch Peace " between the Kingdom of Poland and the Teutonic Order, which brought about a large conference in Kalisch at which King Casimir III. the great personally attended. Several important Polish cities at that time, including Kalisch itself, are signatories of the Treaty of Kalisch, which came into force on July 23 and regulated contentious issues. The government of the last Piast king, Casimir III. des Great, 1333 to 1370 signified great progress in the development of the city of Kalisch: around 1361 the city's defensive wall was built from bricks , around 1363 the old castle of Henry the Bearded was expanded. New suburbs emerged, the Breslauer Vorstadt at the Breslauer Tor and the Thorner Vorstadt at the Thorner Tor and a new parish church for the Assumption of Mary. In addition to the old Franciscan monastery, there were now two new brick monasteries in the city, that of the Canons of the Holy Spirit and that of the Canons of the Lateran . In 1353 the first palace of the Gniezno archbishops was built in the city. The first municipal school was established in 1372.
Jagiellonian Age
In 1410 troops from the Kalisch Voivodeship took part under their own banner in the great battle against the Teutonic Order near Tannenberg (known in Polish history as the "Battle of Grunwald"). In 1425 Wladyslaw II Jagiello exempted the town's salt traders from taxes on the territory of Poland and Lithuania. At the same time he received the Danish and Swedish King Erich X. of Pomerania in the Kalisch Castle. The first town hall with a tower was built in Kalisch in 1426. Around this time, the second municipal school was built at the Church of the Assumption, which had certain academic rights and was under the care of the Cracow University . During the Thirteen Years' War of King Casimir IV against the Teutonic Order, 1454 Kalischer troops took part in the siege of Marienburg . In 1461 the Holy Trinity Hospital was built in the Breslau suburb, and in 1489 the wooden St. Bernard Monastery and St. Bernard Church in the Thorner suburb.
Wasa time and Swedish wars
Bishop Stanislaus Karnkowski brought the Jesuits to Kalisch in 1583 , and they began teaching a year later in a temporary school building. (1584: 200 pupils, 1586: already 500 pupils.) The baroque Jesuit Church of St. Stanislaus and St. Adalbert with its monastery and college was built from 1585 to 1591 from Karnkowski's private funds. The architects were Italian Jesuits. In 1592 the Jesuit theater at the college also started its activity. At first only Latin plays were staged, later also Polish ones.
In 1603 the first printing press opened in Kalisch (owner: Master Johann Wohlraab, then Adalbert Gedelius until 1632), but only works of religious content were published. After Gedelius' death (around 1636) the printing house was taken over by the Jesuits, who operated it until 1773. In 1655 the "Polish War" of the Swedish King Karl X. Gustav began , during which Swedish troops under Field Marshal Arvid Wittenberg occupied Posen and reached Kalisch on August 7th. The Kalisch Magistrate paid homage to the King of Sweden and paid a contribution of 6,000 guilders . A great fire devastated the city on August 10th and 11th, 1656. Only the masonry buildings remained: churches, town hall, a ring side and a few houses in the Breslau suburb. In the following year King John II Casimir examined the damage and freed the city and the villages belonging to it from all tax burdens. However, this did not help much, the construction of the city took a long time.
In 1700 the Great Northern War began , in which Denmark, Poland, Russia and Saxony against the Swedish king Karl XII. fought, who received subsidies from France. On October 29, 1706 the battle of Kalisch between the Swedes and the Polish supporters of King Stanislaus I Leszczyński (together 15,000 men) and Saxons, Russians and Poles (supporters of August II the Strong - together 35,000 men) was fought. The Swedes lost, their commander Arvid Axel Mardefelt was taken prisoner. After the Swedish occupation in 1707, the city of Kalisch only had 1000 inhabitants. From 1726 the badly damaged Kalischer Schloss was rebuilt (the work lasted until 1730).
The end of the aristocratic republic
Acts of war during the Confederation of Bar devastated the city even more in 1769. The construction of the city under the direction of the "Kalischer commission for good order", which was formed by landowners of the voivodeship, began in 1776 and led to the revival of trade and crafts. The city suffered another setback in 1792, when the great fire of September 13, which began in the Breslau suburbs, destroyed all the houses in the city except for churches and monasteries. The great whirlwind on December 14th completed the downfall of Kalisch.
Prussian and Napoleonic times
On January 23, 1793, Prussia and Russia signed the treaty for the second partition of Poland . The Posen and Kalisch Voivodeships were awarded to Prussia. Until May 1793, Kalisch was therefore under Prussian military administration. On May 7th, the estates of Greater Poland paid homage to the King of Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm II. The annexed areas were named South Prussia , and Kalisch was subordinated to the Posen administrative district. In October of the same year Berlin sent a reconstruction committee to Kalisch under the direction of Major von Schack, which was given the task of converting the old Jesuit college into a cadet school . In the same year came the first wave of German emigrants, especially from the Mark Brandenburg and Lower Silesia . The number of German-speaking residents of Kalisch was 120 in that year. Total number of inhabitants in 1793: 3,832. Since the former Polish officials had no knowledge of German, officials from Berlin and East Prussia began to be imported in 1794 , which led to friction as the new officials did not speak the Polish language and had to use local Jews, whose language Yiddish is a German dialect, as interpreters .
In 1795 Kalisch was raised to the capital of the new South Prussian administrative district Kalisch, which included the districts Kalisch, Sieradz , Łęczyca including Wieluń and Czestochowa . In the same year, the German Protestant community bought the former Jesuit church. It was to serve as a Protestant church until 1945. The dilapidated Kalischer Schloss was demolished in 1796. In the next year, the heavily damaged Gothic town hall was also removed. The Kalischer Kadettenanstalt was ceremoniously opened in 1797. The students were sons of the poorer nobility from the area aged 8 to 10 years (1797: 125 students, 1799 already 200). The lessons included a German course, Prussian history, basics of mathematics and military topics. The institute's graduates were sent to the cadet corps in Berlin for further study.
In 1798 Karl Wilhelm Mehwald († 1824) immigrated from Jauer , settled in Kalisch and opened his printing house, which was to survive until 1914. Mehwalds Verlag began in 1805 to publish the first Kalisch newspaper, the bilingual “ Chronicle of the City of Kalisch / Kronika Miasta Kalisza ”. Later in the same year the bilingual " Kalischer Wochenblatt / Pismo Tygodniowe Kaliskie " began to appear, also with Mehwald. In 1805 the Prussian authorities had the city park and the generously planned " Königin-Luise- Allee" laid out, which runs along the Prosna from the Breslauer Tor to the park. Later it was called " Empress Joséphine Allee" and is still the magnificent boulevard of Kalisch today. In 1806 Kalisch already had about 1,800 German inhabitants, the number of Germans was greater than that of Jews. After the defeat of Prussia at Jena-Auerstedt , the Prussian troops in Kalisch were disarmed by the vigilante group in November 1806 , and most of the Prussian officials fled. On November 14th, Kalisch was occupied by French troops. The Duchy of Warsaw was created through the Peace of Tilsit in 1807 . Kalisch was chosen to be the capital of the department of the same name . The 30-member municipal council replaced the old city council, and the mayor - now known as the city president - was given greater powers.
The cadet institute created by the Prussians was reorganized in 1808 and placed under the military authorities of the Grand Duchy. The ruins of the Gothic town hall tower were demolished in the same year, until 1890 Kalisch had no town hall building. In 1810 the municipal secondary school was built on the foundations of the demolished castle. The renowned school is still working today as the “Adam Asnyk Lyzäum”. In 1811, Napoleon's Great Army rallied on the territory of the Kalish Department, preparing to conquer Russia. Many lootings and contributions were the result. In 1812 the pathetic remnants of the defeated Grande Armée moved back to France through Kalisch. Many French died in the makeshift hospital set up especially for them and were buried in the St. Bernard Church's cemetery. A memorial column erected there reminds of them to this day. Kalisch itself was besieged by Russian troops on February 13, 1813. After just one day of fighting, Polish-Saxon troops withdrew to Silesia and the Russians occupied the city. On February 18, the Prussian-Russian military alliance, the Treaty of Kalisch , was concluded: Prussia won Russia as an ally against France for the war of liberation against Napoléon Bonaparte that was now beginning .
Under the tsar's eagle
As a result of the resolutions of the Congress of Vienna in 1815, most of the former Duchy of Warsaw was given to Russia as the so-called Congress Kingdom of Poland . Kalisch now became the capital of a voivodeship and was surrounded by Prussia on two sides: towards Posen and towards Breslau, the distance from the city limits to the Prussian border was only about 5 kilometers. The smuggling in both directions flourished and so it should do to 1914th Mainly agricultural products were smuggled into Germany; iron goods, salt, gallantry , tobacco products and hunting rifles were obtained from Germany . Kalisch had 7521 inhabitants in that year. The plans of the Warsaw government from 1815 to turn Kalisch into an industrial center were fully implemented. The following factories have been built since 1815:
- Cloth manufacture of the brothers Johann and Benjamin Repphan (from Birnbaum ) -1816, (burned down in 1880) around 2,000 employees, the skilled workers consist exclusively of Silesian immigrants
- Textile manufacture of Wilhelm Meyer (from Brieg ) 1827–1838, around 150 employees
- Textile factory of the WD Przechadzki (later: Eduard Fiedler) 1821, 60 employees
- Wilhelm May's dye works (from Saxony) 1827, 117 employees
- Textile factory Pohl et Co. owned by Johann Heinrich Claassen, Karl Fischer and Friedrich Pohl- (all from Breslau) 1826, 220 employees, even exported cotton products to China
- Canvas weaving of Johann Friedrich Ruderisch (from Saxony) -1817, around 20 journeymen
- Wilhelm Weigt's brewery around 1820, 100 employees
- Haberdashery factory of Franz Krause (from Reichenberg) - 1824 - around 40 employees
- Heinrich Buhle's haberdashery factory, 1818, 80 employees
- David Christoph Schnerr's dye works, 1804, around 100 employees
- Karl Heinrich Fritsche's white tannery (from East Prussia) -1823- around 30 employees
- Gregor Lindemann's piano factory, 1827, annual production of 20–30 instruments
- Karl Grünberg's piano factory, 1840, annual production of around 10 instruments
- Wilhelm Fulde's tannery (from Saxony), 1857, around 100 employees
- Emil Stark's soap factory, around 1860, around 30 employees
- JDMeisner's lace factory - around 1870
- Arnold Fibiger's piano factory (from Saxony, -1878), around 100 employees. This factory is still working today.
- Piano factory of Alexander Fibiger (from Saxony) until 1880, annual production of around 10 instruments
- The Fellner brothers' agricultural equipment factory - 1880.
- Friedrich Gaede's plush and velvet factory - around 1907–1913, around 500 employees, then and for a long time afterwards the largest employer in Kalisch.
The monumental courthouse on Josephinenallee was built in 1824, followed a year later by the beautiful stone Alexander Bridge (as a tribute to the city to the “good tsar” Alexander I ) and the Voivodeship Office. In 1835 Kalisch was the venue for the Great Revue of Kalisch , a military maneuver to reinforce the Prussian-Russian alliance with over 60,000 participants. After Congress Poland was incorporated into the Russian Empire after the defeat of the November uprising in Poland in 1830 , the voivodships were dissolved in 1837 and Kalisch became the capital of a Russian governorate . In the spring of 1852 a cholera epidemic broke out. It began in the Jewish quarter with its miserable hygienic conditions and spread all over the city. 60 people died daily. The epidemic only subsided after the great fire in the Jewish quarter on July 18. Another blow hit the city in 1854 when there was a great famine. The city police found the bodies of starving old people and orphaned children every day.
After the dissolution of the governorate in 1855, Kalisch was demoted to a district town for the first time in its history, before the governorate of Kalisch was rebuilt in 1867. Gas lighting was introduced with the construction of the first gas station in 1871 . The coke had to be transported on horse-drawn carts from the neighboring Prussian Ostrowo , as Kalisch did not yet have a railroad. From 1880 to 1890 a new (towerless) town hall ( Wilhelminian style ) was built. At that time Kalisch had about 20,000 inhabitants and owned 3 hotels, 8 restaurants, 92 pubs, 5 pastry shops and 6 coffee houses, as well as about 10 beer gardens in summer. After graduating from the Nikolayev Cavalry School in Saint Petersburg , the later Finnish national hero Gustaf Mannerheim took up his first officer post in the 15th Aleksandrijskij Dragoon Regiment in Kalisch in 1889 . A huge Russian Orthodox church with five onion domes was built in the center of the city in 1890. It should emphasize the Russian character of the city. A new city theater in the style of the Wilhelminian era was also built between 1897 and 1900.
With a long delay and after decades of plans and counterplans, Kalisch finally got a railway connection via Łódź to Warsaw from 1898 to 1902 . Until now, you had to cover the 100 km to Łódź with a horse-drawn carriage. Trips to Breslau (shopping paradise for Kalischaner) or Poznan had to start with a horse-drawn carriage ride to the German border station Skalmerschütz (6 km). However, according to Russian custom, the railroad made a wide berth around the city (for fear of the tsarist authorities of revolutions). The train station was about 4 km from the city center. Kalisch then had 23,882 inhabitants. In 1902 the first, still small, power station was built, but only the center received electricity. During workers' unrest and a school strike in 1905, the demonstrators demanded, among other things, that lessons in Polish (up to now even the mother tongue, Polish, was taught in Russian). The governor declared a state of emergency in Kalisch and the governorate , which was followed by the suppression of the protests by the police and the military. In 1906 the Kalisch - Skalmerschütz railway line was built, so there was finally a permanent connection to the Prussian railway network. In 1909 Gustaf Mannerheim returned to Kalisch, this time as commander of the 15th Dragoon Regiment. Here he received his promotion to major general in 1911. He stayed in Kalisch until 1914. The first telephones in the city were installed in 1910, and in 1912 the first work on the city's canalization began. In 1913 Kalisch already had 65,400 inhabitants, about 70% Poles, 25% Jews and 5% Germans and Russians. The city was called the "city of four cultures". For the Russians, "Russia begins in Kalish and ends in Vladivostok ".
First World War
On August 1, 1914, Germany declared war on Russia. The Russian associations then withdrew from Kalisch. On August 2, the city was occupied by the German 155th Infantry Regiment from Ostrowo under the command of Major Preusker. The city had to pay a contribution of 50,000 rubles and host 20 hostages. Five days later, apart from the fire of 1792, the biggest catastrophe in the history of Kalisch occurred. For reasons that have not been fully clarified to this day, the German artillery began bombarding the defenseless city on Preusker's orders, which lasted until August 22nd and resulted in many deaths. At the time, German propaganda spoke of "irregulars" who roamed the city at night. The German commission, which was supposed to explain the causes of the mutual bombardment and of German patrols in 1915 and 1916, however, found that this was wrong. The investigation revealed that the patrols had only accidentally shot at each other because they had not recognized each other in the dark. The lighting in the city was very low and poor at that time. The German commander Preusker wanted to cover up his mistake as commander and officially stated that the responsibility for the bombardment lay with the residents of Kalisz. In the end, only a few churches and the governor's palace remained, the new town hall and theater and almost all of the city's residential buildings perished: 426 residential buildings, 9 factories and 6 public buildings were no longer there. The destruction of Kalisch became known all over Europe at that time and did no minor damage to the cause of the Central Powers - from now on one spoke of "German barbarians". In December 1914, only 5,000 people lived in the city of Kalisch. At the same time the city (what has remained of it) was the seat of the “Imperial German civil administration for Poland on the left of the Vistula ”. In 1916, Kaiser Wilhelm II visited Kalisz.
In 1916/17 the Prussian administration of the city presented a construction plan for the city based on the German architectural style. Because of the resistance of the residents' representatives who wanted to build the city in the traditional Polish style, it could no longer be realized. The later authorities of Kalisz, already in independent Poland, accepted the Polish style of construction and tried to restore the city to its former beauty. In 1919 the place had 29,227 inhabitants.
2. Polish Republic
After the end of the war, the vigilantes and the Piłsudski- loyal secret Polish Military Organization ( POW , Polish Polska Organizacja Wojskowa ) formed the military staff of the "Kalischer Land" on November 10, 1918 under the command of the POW Lieutenant Julius Ulrych . A day later, Poland's independence was proclaimed. In Kalisch, the German soldiers were disarmed with the active cooperation of the soldiers' councils .
In 1919 the Polish administrative reform took place, in which German administrative districts, Austrian crown lands / districts and Russian governorates were abolished and the voivodships and counties were reintroduced. Kalisch has now been demoted to a district town for the second time in its history. Historically the region belonged to Wielkopolska, but the mentality differences between Poles from the former Congress Kingdom and Poles from the Prussian province of Posen were too great - it was feared that the two groups would not be able to live in harmony. Kalisch came to Łódź Voivodeship , not Poznan. The German border was moved and was now where it was for centuries until 1793 - 60 km southwest of the city - but the smuggling business continued: this time mainly spirits, clothing, saccharine and tobacco products were smuggled from Germany to Poland and only little in the opposite direction.
In the following years up to 1936 the city was intensively rebuilt. 6800 new apartments were built, of which 6405 were privately funded, 307 by the magistrate and 68 by the state. The funds came from private capital, but also from generous loans from the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Public Works. Unfortunately, due to the ownership structure of the land, they stuck to the old grid-shaped city map with narrow streets, where the air was heavy and sticky in summer. The more important buildings erected during this period are the new town hall (with tower) in the style of epigonal classicism (built 1920–1925), the Polish National Bank on Josephinenallee ( modern style ) (1926), the sports stadium (1927) and the new one District hospital (modern style) (1937). In addition, the massive Russian Orthodox Church was demolished in 1925 and a smaller one was built at the entrance to the city park. The valuable interior was transferred from the old church to the new one. In 1932, the new, large power station was built, which now ensured the entire city was supplied with electricity.
On January 1, 1939, Kalisch (raised to the municipal district in 1929, attached to the Poznan Voivodeship in 1938) counted 81,052 inhabitants from 1934 after numerous suburbs were incorporated, of which around 20,000 were Jews and 2000 Germans. Around 50% of the population were employed in industry and around 25% in trade. The city had 19 primary schools with 10 039 pupils and eight high schools, including three vocational schools. The Jewish community had six elementary schools and one high school. In the Brockhaus from the Nazi era (1937 edition) we find the remark “the town of K. has a Western European character”. The Second World War began on September 1, 1939 : Without a previous declaration of war , the Wehrmacht marched into the western part of the Second Polish Republic (" Attack on Poland "; then called the "Polish Campaign"). On October 6, the last Polish field troops surrendered , but not the Polish government in exile .
National Socialism
On September 4, 1939, the 8th Jäger Division (8th Infantry Division of the Wehrmacht ) under Lieutenant General Rudolf Koch-Erpach occupied the city of Kalisch without fighting. On October 26, 1939, among other things, the Posen and Kalisch areas were annexed and incorporated into the German Empire as part of the new Posen Reichsgau , later Wartheland . Kalisch became the seat of the regional president of the administrative district of the same name . All businesses in the city were given German " trustees ". The streets were given new German names - for example, Josephinenallee was now called “ Hermann-Göring- Allee”. (After 1945 it was called Stalinallee .) On January 1, 1940, Kalisch was formally confirmed as a city district . The city was granted the right of the German municipal code of January 30, 1935 with the result that it was no longer administered by a city commissioner, but by a mayor according to the same principles as in the old Reich . The seat of the district president was moved from Kalisch to "Litzmannstadt" (NS name, Polish Łódź ) on April 1, 1940 . This city with its adjacent area was subsequently incorporated into the Wartheland on November 9, 1939. The district administrator for the district of Kalisch had its seat in Kalisch , as well as the official commissioner for the district of Kalisch-Land. In the same year the ghetto created for the Kalischer Jews was dissolved and the inmates were deported to Łódź. In addition, two Polish resistance organizations came into being in 1940, but the Gestapo discovered them the following year . 65 underground fighters were sent to concentration camps, many of them to Buchenwald .
The year 1941 marked the beginning of the relentless and ruthless policy of Germanization . All Polish residents had to leave the city center in order to clear the apartments for the Germans to be settled. These were mainly Baltic Germans , Germans from Transylvania and Germans from Bukovina , who had been persuaded by the Nazi authorities to leave their old homeland and go to Wartheland. In 1945 this would lead to a great tragedy for this population group. Since Łódź has been called Litzmannstadt since April 11, 1940, the Kalisch administrative district was also renamed Litzmannstadt on February 15, 1941.
Further deportations of the Polish population from Kalisch followed in 1942–1944: a total of 30,000 people were expelled. During these years the Nazi authorities created the “Gaukinderheim” in the building of the former convent of the Nazaret Sisters. Polish children who conformed to the racial ideals of the Nazis stayed in the Gaukinderheim. Torn from their parents, they were slated for adoption in Germany, were given new German first and last names and were only allowed to speak German. The home accommodated an average of around 200 children a year. The fate of many of these children is still unclear today.
In 1942 a division of the Polish Home Army ( Armia Krajowa ) - the largest Polish resistance organization - was established in Kalisch . In 1943 a party cell of the Polish CP was brought into being, but it did not succeed in founding a fighting organization of the CP in the city, which was strongly bourgeois or social-democratic. The Kalischer Home Army was discovered by the Gestapo in March 1944 and most of its members were arrested. On January 19, 1945, the Soviet Army was 50 km east of Kalisch. Four days before the liberation, 56 Home Army soldiers were shot dead by the SS. The battle for Kalish began in the early morning of January 23, and in the evening the city was occupied by the Soviet Army. The damage in the city was minor this time - the spire of the Josephskirche was shot down and a house in the city center burned down.
People's Republic of Poland
On January 24, 1945, the communist “people's power” was formed. There were other parties (until 1948) besides the Polish Workers' Party (KP), which sent their representatives to the city council (now and until 1990 called the “City National Council”), but all important posts - city president, police commander, etc. - were occupied by communists , a party that before 1939 had about 20 members in Kalisch. Kalisch now came to the Poznan Voivodeship, which for the reasons given above (2nd Polish Republic) did not prove to be a good solution. The old Prussian-Russian border still haunted people's minds. At that time Kalisch had about 50,000 inhabitants, including about 400 old Kalischans of German origin and a maximum of 100 Jews.
In 1945 the Evangelical Church was removed from the community and used as a Catholic garrison church. Later attempts by the evangelical community to get the church back failed because the corresponding land register entry for the purchase of the church from the state (1795) had been destroyed. From 1945 to 1948 the city was overpopulated because the undestroyed Kalisch had to accommodate many homeless families from Warsaw, for example. A communist "billing office" now administered all apartments in the city and carried out many forced billeting. Several families lived in one apartment until the 1980s.
In 1948 the Iron Curtain came down. The result was increased terror by the UB secret police against dissenters. This spring, at 10 p.m. on a weekend evening, the secret police and city officials dragged all private business owners out of their beds. All shops were socialized with immediate effect, all goods had to be handed over to the new municipal HO without compensation . From the following Monday, the Kalischer merchants were only employees in their former shops. Due to the currency reform of 1949 (around 20 old zlotys for a new one), which was also carried out over a weekend, a large part of the population lost its savings, because only savings deposits at banks and savings banks were exchanged at full rate, for cash you got a lot worse course. The flight to the dollar and old gold rubles began, although possession of them was a criminal offense.
The Stalinist authorities timidly began building housing in 1952. The new houses were not yet prefabricated and were built on empty lots in the city center. During the Poznan workers' uprising in 1955, Kalisch remained calm. Even when the Hungarian uprising broke out a year later, it was no different. Funds, clothes, etc. for aid to Hungary were collected all over the city. At the same time, in the autumn before Gomułka October, Soviet tanks rolled from Silesia towards Warsaw for three days and nights in order to intimidate the capital's politicians. After 11 years of communism, the population of Kalisch, already seriously obscured by propaganda, received them with flowers. The Gomułka rule 1956-1970 brought complete lethargy and impoverishment of society.
1970 to 1980, during the Gierek rule, the Communist Party succeeded in stimulating the economy through large loans in Western Europe. Five new factories and large new districts (prefabricated buildings) in the suburbs were built in Kalisz. As a result of the administrative reform in 1975, Kalisch became the capital of a voivodeship again (against violent protests from Ostrowo), but it was quite mixed: a few communities came from the old Poznan voivodeship, others from the Łódź area and a few others from Lower Silesia. It didn't really fit together. In 1980 the mass movement of Solidarność also flourished in Kalisch . The following years from 1981 to 1989 were marked by the agony of "real existing socialism". An economy of scarcity, impoverishment and emigration to western Europe moved the population. In 1990 the 3rd Polish Republic finally began . A highlight for the residents of Kalisz was the visit of Pope John Paul II on June 4, 1997 as part of one of his numerous trips abroad . On the occasion of his visit, the facades were freshly painted.
literature
- K. Dobak-Splitt, JA Split : Kalisz poprzez wieki. Kalisz 1988.
- G. von Fock: Kalisch - a German city. Kalisch 1941.
- A. Gieysztor (Ed.): Osiemnascie Wiekow Kalisza. I-II, Kalisz 1960.
- G. Hansen: When Kalisch was German ... A daughter on the trail of the occupiers. A documentary novel. Oldenburg 2005.
- Bogdan von Hutten-Czapski : Sixty Years of Politics and Society. I-II, Berlin 1936.
- S. Lemmerhirt: Sikamü. Kalisch 1939–1944. A youth in occupied Poland. Frankfurt a. M. 2006.
- G. Mannerheim: Minnen. I-II, Stockholm 1950–1951.
- T. Pniewski: Kalisz z oddali. Kalisz 1976.
- E. Polanowski: W dawnym Kaliszu. Poznań 1979.
- J. Sibmacher: Large General Book of Arms. Volume 15: City arms. Nuremberg 1885.
See also: Partitions of Poland
Individual evidence
- ↑ Sofia Kowalska, The Wielkopolska and Silesian Jewish Protection Letters of the 13th Century in Relation to the Privileges of Emperor Frederick II (1238) and Duke Frederick II of Austria (1244) , Journal for Research on East Central Europe , Vol. 47, No. 1 ( 1998). Retrieved November 3, 2016.
- ↑ Laura Engelstein: "A Belgium of our own": the sack of Russian Kalisz, August 1914. ( Memento from July 11, 2012 in the web archive archive.today )