John RADZIKOWSKI

ABT 1840 - ____

• BIRTH: ABT 1840, Grudziadz, Poland

• MARRIAGE: BEF 1868, Grudziadz, Poland

1. +Marion RADZIKOWSKI

INDEX

[N8900] Grudziadz (German: Graudenz, Latin: Graudentum or Graudentium or Grudentia is a city of 96 042 inhabitants (2010) on the Vistula River in northern Poland. Situated in the Kuyavian-Pomeranian Voivodeship (since 1999), the city was previously in the Torun' Voivodeship (19751998).

In the 18th and 19th centuries the city was part of the area affected by the Prussian Partition of Poland, where Germanisation was enforced, beginning in 1772. Frederick had nourished a particular contempt for the Polish nation and state. He brought in German and Frisian workers and peasants there, who in his opinion were more suitable for building up his new civilization.[10] Frederick settled around 300,000 colonists in the eastern provinces of Prussia. Using state funds for colonization, German craftsmen were placed in all local Polish cities.[11] A second colonization wave of ethnic Germans was pursued by Prussia after 1832. Laws were passed aimed at Germanisation of the Polish inhabited areas and 154,000 colonists were settled by the Prussian Settlement Commission before World War I. Professor Martin Kitchen writes that in areas where the Polish population lived alongside Germans a virtual apartheid existed, with bans on the Polish language and religious discrimination, besides attempts to colonize the areas with Germans.

In 1890 only about 200 Poles lived in the town of Graudenz, but approximately 16,850 Poles in the rural district of Landkreis Graudenz (as compared to about 26,000 Germans in Landkreis Graudenz).[14] To resist Germanisation,[15] Polish activists started to publish the newspaper "Gazeta Grudzia;dzka" in 1894. It advocated the social and economical emancipation of rural society and opposed Germanization publishing articles critical of Germany. The German attempts to repress its editor Wiktor Kulerski only helped to increase its circulation.[16] From 1898 to 1901, a secret society of Polish students seeking to restore Polish independence operated in the city, but the activists were tried by German courts in 1901, frustrating their efforts.

In Graudenz, German soldiers were stationed in the local fortress as part of the Germanization measures, and the authorities placed soldiers with the most chauvinistic attitude towards the Poles there.[18] The German government brought in more stationed military, merchants and state officials to influence population figures,[19] and in the 1910 census 84% of the population of the town and 58% of the county was recorded as German.

Census figures published by the German Empire have been criticised as unreliable. Historians believe they have a high degree of falsification; formal pressure on census takers (predominantly school-teachers) was possible, and a new bilingual category was created to further complicate the results, as bilingual people(that is those who could speak both German and Polish) wre classified as Germans.[21] Some analysts have asserted that all people registering as bilingual were classified as Germans. The Polish population in this heavily Germanised city has been officially estimated at around 12-15% during this period. Memorial to Wiktor Kulerski in Grudzia;dz, founder of Gazeta Grudzia;dzka

The Polish population numbers rose steadily before the First World War. In the German election of 1912, the National Liberal Party of Germany received 53% of all votes, whilst Polish candidates won 23% of votes. In 1912, Wiktor Kulerski founded the Polish Catholic Peasant Party in the city, which aimed at protecting the local Polish population

In 1913, the Polish Gazeta Grudzia;dzka reached a circulation of 128,000, making it the third largest Polish newspaper in the world.