Historical demography of Poland shows that in the past, Poland's demography was much more diverse then at present. For many centuries, until the end of Second World War, the Polish population was composed of many significant ethnic minorities.

History of Poland
Chronology
Until 966 966–1385 1385–1569 1569–1795 1795–1918 1918–1939 1939–1945 1945–1989 1989–present
Topics
Culture Demography (Jews) Economics Politics (Monarchs and Presidents) Military (Wars) Territorial changes (WWII)

Prehistorical (pre-966)

Polish people were formed from the slow mergers and assimilations of various tribes living on what became Poland's territories in the early Middle Ages.

Kingdom of Poland (966-1569)

Although the Kingdom of Poland in late Middle Ages consisted mostly of Poles, influx of other cultures was significant: particularly notable were Jewish and German settlers, who often formed significant minorities of even majorities in urban centers, but sporadically people from other places (Scotland, Netherlands) settled in Poland as well. At that time notable minorities would include various not-completely assimilated people from Slavic tribes, some of whom would eventually assimilate totally into Polish people, others into neighbouring nations, once Polish influence in some regions ebbed.

In the year 1000, the population of Polish lands is estimated at about 1,250,000.^[1]

Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569-1795)

The population of the Commonwealth of both nations was never overwhelmingly either Roman Catholic or Polish. This resulted from Poland's possession of Ukraine and confederation with Lithuania; in both these countries ethnic Poles were a distinct minority. The Commonwealth comprised primarily four nations: Lithuanians, Poles, Ukrainians and Belarusians (the latter referred usually as the Ruthenians). Shortly after the Union of Lublin (1569), at the turn of the century, the Commonwealth population was around 7 million, with a rough breakdown of 4,5 Poles, 0,75 Lithuanians, 0,7 Jews and 2m Ruthenians.^[2] In 1618, after the Truce of Deulino the Commonwealth population increased together with its territory, reaching 11,5 millions that could be roughly divided into: Poles - 4,5m, Ukrainians - 3,5m, Belarusians - 1,5m, Lithuanians - 0,75m, Prussians - 0,75m, Jews - 0,5m, Livionians - 0,5m; at that time nobility formed 10% and burghers, 15%.^[3] Population losses of 1648-1657 are estimated at 4m.^[3] Coupled with further population and territorial losses, in 1717 Commonwealth population had fallen to 9m, roughly 4,5m Poles, 1,5m Ukrainians, 1,2m Belarusians, 0,8m Lithuanians, 0,5m Jews, 0,5m others^[3]

To be Polish, in the non-Polish lands of the Commonwealth, was then much less an index of ethnicity than of religion and rank; it was a designation largely reserved for the landed noble class (szlachta), which included Poles but also many members of non-Polish origin who converted to Catholicism in increasing numbers with each following generation. For the non-Polish noble such conversion meant a final step of Polonization that followed the adoption of the Polish language and culture.^[4] Poland, as the culturally most advanced part of the Commonwealth, with the royal court, the capital, the largest cities, the second-oldest university in Central Europe (after Prague), and the more liberal and democratic social institutions has proven an irresistible magnet for the non-Polish nobility in the Commonwealth.^[5]

As a result, in the eastern territories a Polish (or Polonized) aristocracy dominated a peasantry whose great majority was neither Polish nor Roman Catholic. Moreover, the decades of peace brought huge colonization efforts to Ukraine, heightening the tensions among nobles, Jews, Cossacks (traditionally Orthodox), Polish and Ruthenian peasants. The latter, deprived of their native protectors among the Ruthenian nobility, turned for protection to cossacks that facilitated violence that in the end broke the Commonwealth. The tensions were aggravated by conflicts between Eastern Orthodoxy and the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church following the Union of Brest, overall discrimination of Orthodox religions by dominant Catholicism^[6], and several Cossack uprisings. In the west and north, many cities had sizable German minorities, often belonging to Reformed churches. The Commonwealth had also one of the largest Jewish diasporas in the world.

Until the Reformation, the szlachta were mostly Catholic or Eastern Orthodox. However, many families quickly adopted the Reformed religion. After the Counter-Reformation, when the Roman Catholic Church regained power in Poland, the szlachta became almost exclusively Roman Catholic, despite the fact that Roman Catholicism was not a majority religion (the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches counted approximately 40% of the population each, while the remaining 20% were Jews and members of various Protestant churches). It should be noted that the Counter-Reformation in Poland, influenced by the Commonwealth tradition of religious tolerance, was based mostly on Jesuit propaganda, and was very peaceful when compared to excesses such as the Thirty Years' War elsewhere in Europe.

Partitions (1795-1918)

In Russian partition, the Pale of Settlement resulted in resettlement of many Russian Jews to the western fringes of Russian Empire, which now included part of Poland. This further increased the sizable community of Polish Jews.

Please help improve this section by expanding it. Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion. (June 2008)

Second Polish Republic (1918-1939)

A personal visual H. Zieliński's opinion about dominant nationalities in Poland and surrounding regions, 1931

Mother tongue in Poland, based on 1931 census

Before World War II the Polish lands were noted for the richness and variety of their ethnic communities. After Poland gained its independence in 1921, a large part of its population was some type of minority or another. The census of that year allocates 30.8% of the population in the minority.^[7]

In 1931 Poland had the second largest Jewish population in the world, and one-fifth of all Jews resided within Poland's borders (approx. 3,136,000, roughly 10% of the entire Polish population).^[7] Norman Davies gives the results of Polish census of 1931 as follows^[8]

• Poles, 68.9% of the population
• Ukrainians, 13.9%
• Jews, 8.7%
• Belarusians, 3.1%
• Germans, 2.3%

In the southeast, Ukrainian settlements were present in the regions east of Chełm and in the Carpathians east of Nowy Sącz. The three main native higlander populations were Łemkowie, Bojkowie and Huculi.

In all the towns and cities there were large concentrations of Yiddish-speaking Jews. The Polish ethnographic area stretched eastward: in Lithuania, Belarus, and western Ukraine, all of which had a mixed population, Poles predominated not only in the cities but also in numerous rural districts. There were significant Polish minorities in Daugavpils (in Latvia), Minsk (in Belarus), and Kiev (in Ukraine) (see Polish minority in the Soviet Union).

Second World War (1939-1945)

See supplements: Treatment of the Polish citizens by the occupants, Nazi crimes against ethnic Poles, Holocaust in Poland

In the beginning of the war (September, 1939) the territory of Poland was divided between the Nazi Germany and the USSR. By the late-1941 the Soviets were overrun by Nazi Germany over entire territory of the former Second Polish Republic but the 1944-1945 the Red Army's offensive drove the Nazi forces out.

After both occupiers divided the territory of Poland between themselves, they conducted a series of actions aimed at suppression of Polish culture and repression of much of the Polish people. Prof. Tadeusz Piotrowski's revised 2005 estimate of Poland's war losses is 5.6 million persons-16% of the population[3] About 90% of Polish Jews were murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust; many others emigrated in the succeeding years.

Poland Human Losses in World War Two

1- Population 12/1931 Per Census -This census data includes 192,000 military personnel who were allocated. Included with the Poles are 984,000 Eastern Orthodox & Greek Catholic adherents who are sometimes classified with the Ukrainian and Belarusian groups.^[9]

2- Population 1/1/1939-Estimated This data is an estimate made by the Polish government in exile in 1941. To derive the statistics they added the official Polish vital statistics data from 1932-38, births, deaths and net migration, to the 1931 census figures.^[9]

3- Natural Increase 1939-1945-After the war Polish demographers calculated the estimated births that occurred during the war. In 1938 the birth rate was 2.4%, natural deaths 1.4%. The birth rate (1938 =100)in 1939=98,1940=93, 1941=88,1942=84,1943=78,1944=80 1945=90. If we take these birth rates and the 1.4% natural death rate of 1938 as being constant we will derive an increase of 1.580 million. The Jewish estimate was lowered because of the Holocaust. ^[9]

4- Natural Increase 1946-1950 All were Poles because ethnic groups or religion were not listed in communist Poland. This is the official Polish government data for births and natural deaths from Jan 1946 until the census of Dec 1950. ^[10]

5- Population gain Recovered Territories Former German citizens reclassified as Poles after the war in the Recovered Territories. This group was mostly bi-lingual Polish-German who declared their allegiance to Poland after the war. ^[10]

6- Immigration 1946-50 Poles resident in western Europe before the war, primarily in Germany and France, who re-immigrated after the war. ^[10]

7- Emigration to the West UN refugee data listed Poles(419,000) and Jews (140,000) who remained in the west.^[9] The number of Ukrainians and Belarusians from Poland remaining in the west is also per UN data ^[11] The number of ethnic Germans who were deported or fled from pre-war Poland is from German official sources. ^[12]

8-Population Remaining in the USSR The 1959 Soviet census data for the former Polish regions listed 8.6 million inhabitants, in addition there were 230,000 Poles who were allowed to leave the USSR in 1955-58. If we take this total of about 8.8 million and subtract the estimated natural increase from 1946-58 of 1.4 million we arrive at a total population of 7.4 million surviving the war in the former Polish territories. ^[13] To this we must add the 500,000 ethnic Ukrainians and Belrussians who were deported from Poland into the interior of the USSR during 1945-46. The number of Poles and Jews who remained in the USSR after the war was estimated at 1.4 million by Polish scholar and historian Krystyna Kersten^[14] Included with the Poles remaining in the USSR are about 600,000 Eastern Orthodox & Greek Catholic adherents who are sometimes classified with the Ukrainian and Belarusian groups.

9- War losses The estimate for war losses was made by Prof. Tadeusz Piotrowski of the University of New Hampshire [4]His estimated population of 35.1 million is for 9/1/1939. Polish war dead include 5,150,000 victims of Nazi crimes against ethnic Poles and the Holocaust, 350,000 deaths during the Soviet occupation in 1940-41 and about 100,000 Poles killed in 1943-44 during the massacres of Poles in Volhynia
The official Polish government report prepared in 1947 claimed 6,028,000 war victims, but today scholars of independent Poland believe that 3.0 million Jews and 1.8 to 1.9 million Poles were victims of German occupation policies and the war. This revision of estimated war losses was the topic of an article in the Polish academic journal The Polish Quarterly of International Affairs ^[15] Ethnic German losses were primarily of men in German military service^[12]

10- Population 12/1950 Per Census The total population per the Dec. 1950 census was 25 million. A breakdown by ethnic group was not given. However, we can estimate the Jewish population based on the postwar census taken by the Jewish community.^[10] Data for the Germans and others who remained in Poland after the war can be estimated using the 1946 Polish census ^[9]

Post-Second World War (1945-present)

Early post-war period

Before World War II, a third of Poland's population was composed of ethnic minorities. After the war, however, Poland's minorities were all but gone, due to the 1945 revision of borders, and the Holocaust that resulted in the extermination of the vast majority of Poland's Jews. Under the National Repatriation Office (Państwowy Urząd Repatriacyjny), millions of Poles were forced to leave their homes in the eastern Kresy region and settle in the western former German territories. At the same time approximately 5 million remaining Germans (about 8 million had already fled or had been expelled and about 1 million had been killed in 1944-46) were similarly expelled from those territories into the Allied occupation zones. Ukrainian and Belarusian minorities found themselves now mostly within the borders of the Soviet Union; those who opposed this new policy (like the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in the Bieszczady Mountains region) were suppressed by the end of 1947 in the "Wisła" Action.

The population of Jews in Poland, which formed the largest Jewish community in pre-war Europe at about 3.5 million people, was all but destroyed by 1945. Approximately 3 million Jews (all but about 300,000 to 500,000 of the Jewish population) died of starvation in ghettos and labor camps, were slaughtered at the German Nazi extermination camps or by the Einsatzgruppen death squads. Between 40,000 and 100,000 Polish Jews survived the Holocaust in Poland, and another 50,000 to 170,000 were repatriated from the Soviet Union, and 20,000 to 40,000 from Germany and other countries. At its postwar peak, there were 180,000 to 240,000 Jews in Poland, settled mostly in Warsaw, Łódź, Kraków and Wrocław.^[16]

Jewish Holocaust survivors leave Poland for the Mandate of Palestine after the Kielce pogrom in 1946.

The position of Jews in postwar Poland was precarious. Many of the Holocaust survivors shared the common fate of other people in post-war Communist Poland, and were not able to reclaim their property upon return. There were incidents of Jews who were returning to their old homes being attacked by people who had moved into their homes during the war. Jews were also sometimes associated with the Communists, as some Jews who returned from the Soviet Union, including Hilary Minc and Party security and ideological chief Jakub Berman, assumed prominent positions in Communist leadership and were as a result held responsible for the regime's repressions by many Poles. These issues fed into existing anti-Semitism, culminating in the Kielce pogrom of July 1946. Sparked by falsified rumors of Jewish blood libel, a crowd attacked a building housing Jews preparing to emigrate to Palestine while the police stood by and watched—even assisting in some cases—killing over 40 and wounding approximately 50. Afterwards, the Communists, anti-Communists and Catholic Church all blamed each other for this outbreak of violence. Kielce became a turning point for the Jews in post-war Poland. Until the pogrom, large numbers of Polish Jews had intended to stay in the country, despite the general Zionist feeling after the war. After the pogrom, the majority of Jews wanted to leave. The number of Jews crossing the border illegally skyrocketed — going from an average of 1,000 per month before July 1946 to over 20,000 per month for the three months afterwards.^[17] In total, 100,000 to 120,000 Jews left Poland between 1945 and 1948. Their departure was largely organized by the Zionist activists in Poland, such as Adolf Berman and Yitzhak Zuckerman, under the umbrella of a semi-clandestine organization, Berihah ("Flight"). A second wave of Jewish emigration (50,000) took place during the liberalization of the Communist regime between 1957 and 1959.

Current situation

For more details on this topic, see Demographics of Poland.

Most Germans were expelled from Poland and the annexed east German territories at the end of the war, while many Ukrainians, Rusyns and Belarusians lived in territories incorporated into the USSR. Small Ukrainian, Belarusian, Slovak, and Lithuanian minorities reside along the borders, and a German minority is concentrated near the southwestern city of Opole and in Masuria. Groups of Ukrainians and Polish Ruthenians also live in western Poland, where they were forcefully resettled by communists.

As a result of the migrations and the Soviet Unions radically altered borders under the rule of Joseph Stalin, the population of Poland became one of the most ethnically homogeneous in the world. Virtually all people in Poland claim Polish nationality, with Polish as their native tongue. Ukrainians resp. Rusyns, the largest minority group, are scattered in various northern districts. Lesser numbers of Belarusians and Lithuanians live in areas adjoining Belarus and Lithuania. The Jewish community, almost entirely Polonized, has been greatly reduced. In Silesia a significant segment of the population, of mixed Polish and German ancestry, tends to declare itself as Polish or German according to political circumstances.

Minorities of Germans remain in their little homeland of Pomerania, Silesia, East Prussia, and Lubus.

Small populations of Polish Tartars still exist and still practice Islam. Some Polish towns, mainly in northeastern Poland have mosques. Tartars arrived as mercenary soldiers beginning in the late 1300s. The Tartar population reached approximately 100,000 in 1630 but is less than 5,000 in 2000. See also Islam in Poland.

Urban demographics

Table based on Tertius Chandler, 1987, Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth: An Historical Census^[19], except of data for Poznań.^[20][21]

Note that this table contains information on some cities that are not currently within the borders of Poland, and others that have not been in Poland's borders for many centuries. See Territorial changes of Poland after World War II for more details on that issue.

References

External links

• Commonwealth of Diverse Cultures: Poland's Heritage
• historical demographical data for Poland - 19th and 20th centuries