District of Bielitz

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The German district of Bielitz existed between 1939 and 1945 in Germany-occupied Poland . After the annexation in 1939 on January 1, 1945 it comprised :

Map of the district of Bielitz

history

Poland

At the beginning of the Second World War , the districts of Biała , Bielsko and Wadowice belonged to Poland , namely:

After the German occupation of Poland in September 1939, before its incorporation into the German Reich in violation of international law , the district of Bielsko, renamed Bielitz , and the part of the district of Biala west of the Soła River (excluding Auschwitz, Kęty , Wilkowice ; with Auschwitz train station) already jointly administered by a German land commissioner.

German Empire

The Bielitz synagogue was completely destroyed on September 13, 1939 and the Jewish population was ghettoized, and later deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in the district area .

On October 26, 1939, this previously Polish district became part of the newly formed administrative district of Katowice in the Prussian province of Silesia . The seat of the district office became the city of Bielitz .

On November 20, 1939, the border to the newly formed Generalgouvernement for the occupied Polish territories was finally determined. The remaining part of the Biala district east of the Sola and the part of the Wadowice district west of the Spytkowice , Bachowice , Woźniki and Skawa line to the German Empire were defeated. These parts were also temporarily managed by the district administrator in Bielitz.

According to the police census (fingerprint) on December 23rd to 27th, 1939, the district of Bielitz had 231,533 inhabitants; Of these, 148,273 (64%) declared themselves Poles, 44,320 Germans (around 19% of the population), 30,451 Silesians ( Schlonsaken , 13%), 7,854 Jews, 191 Ukrainians, 94 Czechs. The declaration of the Silesian nationality was introduced through the influence of the Kożdoń movement .

After it was established in the spring of 1940 that the borders should no longer be changed, the German district of Bielitz was formed from the former district areas of Biala, Bielitz and parts of Wadowitz , with over 300,000 inhabitants in 1942.

The number of Germans increased after the introduction of the German People's List . In 1943 the district counted 319,000 people and the people's list counted around 85,000, of which 9,557 ethnic Germans (DVL I), 20,669 people of German origin (DVL II), 42,781 in the third category (DVL III, mainly Schlonsaken ), 1,253 in IV. Category. Other figures from that year showed 15,600 Germans from the Reich, 13,900 were German settlers, 85,400 were on the people's list, there were also around 202,700 Poles and 875 Czechs. The enlarged city of Bielitz (including Biala) had around 55,000 inhabitants, of which 29,335 were on the people's list and 14,490 were Poles. By May 1941, 8,619 Poles, mostly in the former Galician part of the district, were forcibly evacuated. In their place came German settlers from the eastern countries (see Heim ins Reich ) - in 1943 13,572.

The results of the consumer group statistics , which were obtained from the data on the food allocations and published by the Federal Statistical Office in 1953, provide a further assessment . According to the small consumer group statistics, the civilian population served in the Bielitz district at the beginning of February 1943 comprised 293,911 people (including 9,847 group caterers), at the end of August 1943 319,598 (including 36,618 group caterers), beginning of February 1944 319,301 (including 38,231 group caterers), at the end of August 1944 325,061 people (including 43,088 people Communal caterers) and in mid-December 1944 327,876 people (including 41,411 communal caterers). For the beginning of May 1944, 51,764 Germans and 230,821 Poles are given as "civilian population not catered for together".

On January 18, 1941, the province of Silesia was dissolved. The new province of Upper Silesia was formed from the previous administrative districts of Katowice and Opole.

In the spring of 1945, the district was occupied by the Red Army and then became part of Poland again.

politics

Land Commissioner

  • 1939 -9999: Grothjan

District administrators

  • 1939-1940: Grothjan
  • 1940–1943: Siegfried Schmidt (* 1905 in Allenstein , † 1944)
  • 1943 -9999: Friedrich Lohmann (by order)
  • 1943–1945: Bernhard Nienaber (* 1885)
  • 1945 -9999: Ferdinand Hütteroth (substitute)

Local constitution

After the attack on Poland in 1939, the following municipalities were subject to the German municipal code of January 30, 1935, valid in the Altreich , which provided for the implementation of the Führer principle at municipality level:

All other cities and municipalities were grouped together in administrative districts and were administered by office commissioners.

Place names

Due to an unpublished decree of December 29, 1939, the Austrian place names valid until 1918 were provisionally valid with regard to the previously Polish place names. This global renaming was possible because the entire German map series for the areas ceded to Poland in 1920 (also) continued to use the earlier German and Austrian place names. As early as 1939, names of German origin that had been abandoned centuries ago were restored in modern spelling, e.g. B. Dankendorf ( Dankowice ) and some new creations such as Draschendorf ( Drogomyśl ) introduced.

There was no final assignment of purely German place names until the end of the war. But it was already prepared in detail. This involved phonetic adjustments ( Bujakau : Bückau, Grojetz : Grötzen), translations ( Bestwina : Oberwildenau, Grodzisko : Schauenburg), new creations ( Jaszczorowa : Natterngrund) or improvements to the names that have been in effect since 1939 ( Fröhlichau : Fröhlichhof). Many of the proposed names were based on the work of some German folklorists, such as Kurt Lück and Walter Kuhn , who found names of German origin that had long since been abandoned shortly before the war ( Wadowice : Frauenstadt, Przeciszow : Hartmannsdorf), unique mentions provisionally identified with specific villages ( Osiek : Brettmannsdorf) or speculated for no reason ( Bulowice : Buldorf).

literature

  • Walther Hubatsch (Hrsg.): Outline of the German administrative history 1815-1945. Johann Gottfried Herder Institute, Marburg / Lahn; Series A: Prussia , Volume 4: Silesia , edited by Dieter Stüttgen, Helmut Neubach and Walther Hubatsch, 1976, ISBN 3-87969-116-9 .
  • Statistics of the German Reich. Volume 550: Official directory of municipalities for the German Reich. Berlin 1940.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Krzysztof Nowak: Śląsk Cieszyński w latach 1918–1945 [Cieszyn Silesia from 1918 to 1945] . Starostwo Powiatowe w Cieszynie, Cieszyn 2015, ISBN 978-83-935147-5-5 , p. 448 (Polish).
  2. ↑ a b K. Nowak: W latach II… 2015, p. 451.
  3. ^ Ryszard Kaczmarek: Bielsko-Biała. Monografia miasta . Bielsko-Biała w latach 1918–2009. 2nd Edition. tape IV. . Wydział Kultury i Sztuki Urzędu Miejskiego w Bielsku-Białej, Bielsko-Biała 2011, ISBN 978-83-60136-46-1 , p. 357 (Polish).
  4. ↑ K. Nowak: W latach II ... 2015, p. 452.
  5. ↑ Federal Statistical Office (Ed.): Statistical Reports, Work No. VIII / 19/1, The civilian population of the German Empire 1940–1945. Results of the consumer group statistics. Wiesbaden 1953, p. 43
  6. ↑ ibid., P. 52. Here, a distinction is made for Upper Silesia between districts with a summary view and those with a subdivision into Germans and Poles, which in principle comply with the provisions of Section 7 of the First Ordinance for the Implementation of the Ordinance on the Collection of a Social Compensation Tax from August 10, 1940, ( Reichsgesetzblatt 1940, Part I, p. 1095 ; digitized by the Austrian National Library, ALEX) so subdivided, but also undifferentiated the Bielitz district assigned to this group.