Prussia: Encyclopedia II - Prussia - The end of Prussia

Prussia - The end of Prussia

The Prussian junkers and generals dominated the conduct of World War I, so when it ended in defeat in 1918 they had to accept responsibility. The Prussian monarchy was overthrown along with all other German monarchies, and Germany became a republic. The Great Poland Uprising, and the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, recreated the Polish state and forced Germany to return territories annexed by Prussia during the Partitions of Poland, as well as parts of Upper Silesia inhabited by Poles. East Prussia found itself again cut off from the rest of Germany by the Polish Corridor.

The idea of breaking up Prussia into smaller states was considered by the German Government, but eventually traditionalist sentiment prevailed and Prussia became the "Prussian Free State" (Freistaat Preußen), by far the largest state of the Weimar Republic, comprising 60% of its territory. Since it included the industrial Ruhr and "Red Berlin", it became a stronghold of the left, being governed by a coalition of the Social Democrats and the Catholic Centre for most of the 1920s. Most historians regard the Prussian government during this time as far more capable and successful than that of Germany as a whole.

Prussia's democratic constitution was suspended in 1932 as a result of a coup by Germany's conservative Chancellor Franz von Papen, marking the effective end of German democracy. In 1933 Hermann Göring became Interior Minister of Prussia, a position he used to suppress all democratic opposition. In 1934 the Nazi regime abolished the autonomy of all the German states. De jure, Prussia continued to exist as a territorial unit until the end of World War II, but in practice the "Gaue" of the Nazi Party organization were the building blocks of the Nazi state.

In 1945 the armed forces of the Soviet Union occupied all of eastern and central Germany (including Berlin). Everything east of the Oder-Neisse line, including Silesia, Pomerania, eastern Brandenburg and East Prussia, was included within the new borders of Poland (with the northern third of East Prussia, including Königsberg, now Kaliningrad, going to the Soviet Union; today it is a Russian exclave between Lithuania and Poland). An estimated ten million Germans fled or were expelled from these territories as a part of the German exodus from Eastern Europe. These expulsions, together with the nationalisation of land by the Communist regime in East Germany, destroyed the junkers as a class and marked the effective end of Prussia as a social and political entity; the East German bureaucracy is seen by many as a "Red" continuation of the Prussian tradition, however.

Prussia was formally abolished by a proclamation of the four occupying powers in Germany in 1947. In the Soviet Zone of Occupation, which became East Germany in 1949, the former Prussian territories were reorganised into the states of Brandenburg and Saxony-Anhalt, with the remaining parts of Pomerainia going to Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. These states were abolished in 1952 in favor of districts, but recreated after the fall of communism in 1990. In the western zones of occupation, which became West Germany in 1949, they were divided up among North Rhine-Westphalia, Lower Saxony, Hesse, Rhineland-Palatinate and Schleswig-Holstein (with Baden-Württemberg taking the territory of Hohenzollern).

The idea of Prussia is not entirely dead in Germany. Since the reunification of Germany in 1990, suggestions to amalgamate the states of Brandenburg, Mecklenburg and Berlin into one identified as Prussia have arisen though without much enthusiasm, even among German conservatives. The left-wing parties, who govern both nationally and in these three states at present, are firmly opposed to it. However some grassroots groups have sought to encourage a celebration of Prussian history and culture. In 1996 a proposal to merge Berlin and Brandenburg was rejected by Brandenburg voters, even though this was not seen as a decision relating to the revival of Prussia as a state but rather as an attempt to restore the old Brandenburg, since Berlin had never been a city-state before 1945.

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, a small number of ethnic Germans from Kazakhstan have begun to settle in the Kaliningrad exclave of the Russian Federation, once northern East Prussia, as part of the migration influx into the area, which was previously a restricted area (see "closed city"). As of 2005, about 6,000 (0.6% of population) ethnic Germans, mostly from other parts of Russia, live there. Most Russian Germans preferred to leave for Germany, see History of Germans in Russia and the Soviet Union.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "The end of Prussia", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki