There's a 16-year time gap between 1897 and 1913--so, much less than a century!
Off course, but assimilation is an ongoing and accelerating process. So, if you have a stable émigré population, in each succeeding generation there will be fewer people recognising themselves as ethnically different (for a variety of reasons - intermarriage, loss of cultural identity etc). Each generation further removed will lose more individuals than the previous one unless there are strong factors that counteract this process. The reason I brought up the 100yrs+ history is that after that length of time, the drop-off from one generation to the next would be high, all things being equal.
Quickly - Lodz (then little more than a village with less than 1000 inhabitants) fell to the Prussians in 1793 and this kickstarted the process of colonisation by Germans. When it was awarded to the Russians (to the ‘Polish Kingdom’ to be precise) in the Vienna Congress post-Napoleonic Wars, the process did not abate but in fact accelerated, particularly from 1823, so that in the latter part of the first half of the 19th century the German majority made up as much as 78% of the population. Thanks to the process of industrialisation, undoubtedly initiated and managed by the German immigrants, Lodz grew like Topsy (a >500-fold growth in population in less than 80 years, accelerating rapidly in the second half of the 19th century) by sucking in people from far and wide. These were mainly Poles and Jews, so that although the German population of Lodz continued to grow in the second half of the 19th Century, it was rapidly outgrown by other national groups. It lost the overall majority in 1880, by 1884 it was overtaken by the Poles as the largest group and shortly thereafter beaten into 3rd place by the Jews. Between 1897 and 1913 there may even have been a small decline – one which I would think lies well within the parameters of the assimilation process described above.
WW1 appears to have been fairly catastrophic economically for Lodz. The population of 522,518 in 1913 appears to have dropped to 341,892 by January 1918 (according to Rzepkowski). There is nothing to suppose that the German portion of the population would have been reduced less than the other ones. Indeed, as we discussed earlier, there may have been reasons why it would have been more. However, the reduction in the German population had already started during the run-up to WW1, it would appear. Rzepkowski notes the German population of Lodz to be 75.1 thousand in 1914 (ie 15% of the total) a very significant drop from 1913 if like is being compared with like (a question which, alas, bedevils this debate and all like it!).
The 1921 census shows that approximately half the deficit had been made up either by pre-war inhabitants returning or new ones arriving. However, this was not the case with the German part of the population which showed a marked reduction of approximately 50%.
The most likely explanations underlying these statistics lie in economics and politics, in my opinion. The early German immigrants were attracted to the area by generous contracts, grants and tax cuts first by the Prussian Government keen to Germanise and then the Russian one (and indeed Polish landowners) keen to attract German workmanship and knowhow – a process accelerated by the drive for industrialisation. Industrialisation provided an open field of opportunities initially; for entrepreneurs, managers and technicians. However, over time, these opportunities would dwindle as there was increasing competition from established German dynasties and rising local talent. This would result in a dwindling of net immigration until saturation is reached – in Lodz it appears to have happened just before the turn of the century. Also, I get the impression all was not well with the economy of Lodz even before WW1, adding to the growing pressures against immigration.
Following WW1, the Germans of Lodz, like in the rest of Poland, lost their economic privileges and, perhaps equally importantly, their status as the master race, becoming just another minority in another man’s country. No doubt, as WM suggests, without the incentives they previously enjoyed, Germany with its higher standard of living and population decline (especially in its eastern parts) became a far more attractive option, with over half of the German inhabitants of Western Poland emigrating between December 1918 and September 1921. In this context, the reduction in the number of German citizens of Lodz seems to be in the same ballpark as the rest of the country, and slightly less than average.
In short, yes there is clearly a real phenomenon as Sid says, the result of a number of converging processes, but nothing to suggest a mass forced expulsion of German residents in 1918. Having read a whole bunch of in-depth papers on the national minorities of Lodz in general and the German one in particular (the fathers of the city, bless ‘em, are keen to sponsor and fund historical research into the multicultural heritage of Lodz at ‘their’ university!) I have found not one single, solitary mention of such an event. It is probably time to file this one in the myths and legends section until some reliable evidence appears.
Sorry, not so quick after all
, but hopefully comprehensive.
