Commission for the Determination of Place Names

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Areas affected by the decisions of the Committee shown in dark yellow (Former Eastern Territories) and grey (Free City of Danzig)

The Commission for the Determination of Place Names (

Regained Territories).[1]

Background

Territory and population

Main articles: Former eastern territories of Germany and Recovered Territories
new Polish-German border
in 1945

According to the decisions of the

fragmentation of Poland in the Duchy of Silesia, but were also populated by German-speaking inhabitants for many centuries.[2]

According to the 1939 German census, the territories were inhabited by 8,855,000 people, including a Polish minority in the territories' easternmost parts.

autochthons" after the war,[4] and used to prove a "Polishness" of the territories.[1] While the German census placed the number of Polish-speakers and bilinguals below 700,000 people, Polish demographers have estimated that the actual number of Poles in the former German East was between 1.2[3] and 1.3 million.[5] In the 1.2 million figure, approximately 850,000 were estimated for the Upper Silesian regions, 350,000 for southern East Prussia (Masuria) and 50,000 for the rest of the territories.[3]

While the Germans were interned and expelled, close to 5 million settlers[6][7] were either attracted or forced to settle the areas between 1945 and 1950. An additional 1,104,000 people had declared Polish nationality and were allowed to stay (851,000 of those in Upper Silesia), bringing up the number of Poles to 5,894,600 as of 1950.[3] The Polish government aimed to retain as many "autochthons" as possible for propaganda purposes, as their presence on former German soil was used to indicate the intrinsic "Polishness" of the area and justify its incorporation into the Polish state as "recovered" territories.[4]

The Polish authorities often referred to the medieval Polish state to emphasize the validity of the Polish historical claim to these lands and began to call the area the Recovered Territories.[1] The arriving Polish administration and settlers faced the problem of a consistent and unambiguous usage of toponyms.[1]

Former toponyms

When the area was settled by Germans during the medieval

Baltic or West Slavic origin—Baltic Old Prussian and Slavic Pomeranian in the North, and Slavic Silesian and Slavic Polish in the South. In bi- and multi-lingual areas such as Upper Silesia, German and Slavic (including Polish) variants often existed for the same toponym, derived either from a Slavic root (e.g., Opole—Oppeln) or a German root (e.g., Reichenbach—Rychbach).[2]

Beginning with the 19th-century

Old Prussian origin in East Prussia and Silesia were renamed to purely "German" toponyms by the Nazi-German administration.[2][10] These renamings intensified during World War II, when Nazi Germany sought to eradicate Polish culture.[11]

Early Renaming in 1945

Initially there were several ways of naming like continuing to use the German names, pronouncing and spelling the German names in a more Polish way (Zechow→

Rastenburg→Kętrzyn, to commemorate Wojciech Kętrzyński) or adopting the name of the settler's homeland.[1][12] Another purpose was to restore a historical Polish (or Slavic) name that dated to pre-Germanization times.[13]

Spared from the

Polonisation against their will.[1] In other cases the arriving Polish settlers requested not to use the committee's suggestion but e.g. to name a village after the settler's first-born child (Stefanówka for Nieder Giersdorf/Miłochów).[15]

In many cases a single place had three or even four names and even administrative districts (Voivodships) like the area of the former Free City of Danzig had four different names: morskie, kaszubskie, gdańskie and wiślane.[1]

Sometimes even different administrative branches like the municipal office, the local office and the railway administration used different names, e.g. modern

Jan Dzierzon.[citation needed
]

1945 conference

In early April 1945, the Regional Bureau of the National Railway Administration in

Poznań University, which in July 1945 published a bilingual Słowniczek nazw miejscowych (Small Dictionary of Place Names).[citation needed
]

Again on the initiative of the Regional Railway Administration in Poznań, the first

Poznań University, the Western Institute, the Baltic Institute in Gdańsk (which had just moved there from Toruń) and the administrations of Szczecin, Poznań and Gdańsk, as well as members of information and propaganda institutions and the postal service.[citation needed
]

The Conference achieved a general consensus for a systematic method of considering place names:

The Commission

Pursuant to this, in January 1946 a Commission for the Determination of Place Names (Komisja Ustalania Nazw Miejscowości) was founded as a commission of the Department of Public Administration.[15] It comprised a chair and 6 commission members, including three scholars and three officials of the Departments of Transportation, Posts and Defense.[1] The first chairman was the geographer and former director of the

toponyms; and the historian Władysław Semkowicz.[1]

The Commission coordinated the work of local institutions such as the Western Institute in Poznań, the Silesian Institute in Katowice, and the Baltic Institute in Gdańsk. Three regional subcommissions were founded, each responsible for a given area:

The subcommissions prepared recommendations for the commission, which ultimately endorsed up to 98 per cent of their proposals, which were often based on prewar publications of the Western Institute, such as Stanisław Kozierowski's Atlas nazw geograficznych Słowiańszczyzny Zachodniej (Atlas of Geographical Names of Western Slavdom).[1]

Following approval by the commission, a place name had to be accepted by the Departments of Public Administration and of the Recovered Territories, and finally was published in the Monitor Polski (Polish Monitor).[15]

The commission's first conference took place on 2–4 March 1946. It decided the names of

voivodships and 220 cities, counties, transportation crossroads, and towns with populations over 5,000.[1]

The second conference, on 1–3 June 1946, dealt with towns with populations between 1,000 and 5,000; and the third, on 26 September 8 October 1946 decided the names of villages with a population between 500 and 1,000. By the end of 1946, the commission had adopted about 4,400 place names; and by June 1947, nearly all names of stations and settlements with a population of over 500. By the end of 1950, a total of 32,138 place names had been determined by the commission.[1]

After the commission's chairman, Stanisław Srokowski, died in 1950, the village of Drengfurt, which had initially been renamed "Dryfort", was changed to "Srokowo".[17]

At present

Currently there are two commissions in Poland, tasked with standardization of

toponyms: Komisja Nazw Miejscowości i Obiektów Fizjograficznych (the Commission for Names of Places and Physiographic Objects)[18] and Komisja Standaryzacji Nazw Geograficznych (the Commission for Standardization of Geographic Names).[19]

See also

Notes

  1. ^
    ISBN 978-4-938637-43-9
    ..
  2. ^ a b c d Choroś, Monika; Jarczak, Łucja. "Relacje polsko niemieckie w nazwach miejscowych" (in Polish). Państwowy Instytut Naukowy Instytut Śląski. Archived from the original (ppt) on 13 July 2011. Retrieved 25 August 2009.
  3. ^
    ISBN 0-7656-0665-8
    .
  4. ^ a b Kamusella, Tomasz (January 2004). "The Expulsion of the German communities from Eastern Europe". In Prauser; Reeds (eds.). EUI HEC (PDF). p. 28. Archived from the original (PDF) on 1 October 2009. Retrieved 20 August 2009.
  5. ^ Roszkowski, Wojciech. Historia Polski 1918-1997. p. 157.
  6. ISBN 0-415-23885-4
    . -- 4.55 million in the first years
  7. ISBN 0-7656-0665-8
    . -- 4,79 million as of 1950
  8. ISBN 978-3-8305-0378-1
    . Retrieved 25 August 2009.
  9. ISBN 3-11-007895-3
    .
  10. ISBN 978-83-923991-6-2
    .
  11. ISBN 83-02-05500-X
    .
  12. ^ Białecki, Tadeusz. Pierwszy Zjazd onomastyczny w Szczecinie [The First Onomastic Conference at Szczecin] (in Polish).[page needed]
  13. ^ Miodek, Jan. "Stanisław Rospond". Archived from the original on 26 February 2012.
  14. ISBN 3-525-35790-7
    .
  15. ^
    ISBN 3-570-55017-6
    .
  16. ^ Wagińska-Marzec, Maria (1997). "Ustalenie nazw miejscowości na Ziemiach Zachodnich i Północnych" [The Confirmation of Place Names in the Western and Northern Territories)]. In Mazur, Zbigniew (ed.). Wokół niemieckiego dziedzictwa kulturowego na Ziemiach Zachodnich i Północnych [Around German Cultural Heritages in the Western and Northern territories] (in Polish). Poznań.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)[page needed]
  17. ^ "mazury.info" (in Polish). Archived from the original on 21 July 2011. Retrieved 20 August 2009.
  18. ^ Nowakowski, Adam. "Komisja Nazw Miejscowości I Obiektów Fizjograficznych – Ministerstwo Spraw Wewnętrznych I Administracji – Portal Gov.pl". Ministerstwo Spraw Wewnętrznych i Administracji, 14 Dec. 2018, https://www.gov.pl/web/mswia/komisja-nazw-miejscowosci-i-obiektow-fizjograficznych.
  19. ^ "Komisja Standaryzacji Nazw Geograficznych Poza Granicami Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej (KSNG) – Główny Urząd Geodezji I Kartografii – Portal Gov.pl". Główny Urząd Geodezji i Kartografii, https://www.gov.pl/web/gugik/ksng.

External links

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