Wielkopolska spent the years 1793-1919 under the partitions except for a short interregnum in the Duchy of Warsaw. Once the German Empire was created in January 1871, Berlin embarked on a process of unifying the dozens of federated entities (länder) that made up the country, at the behest of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. This soon led to “Kulturkampf” (culture war), a wave of persecution intended to subjugate the Catholic Church to the Empire over the authority of the Pope.
The rapidly approaching international conflict and the confrontation between Germany and Russia forced both sides to integrate their Polish populations with the dominant power more quickly. While this led Russia to escalate its Russification campaign at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, Germany set about passing extraordinary acts of parliament designed to Germanise its Polish population as quickly as possible. The Royal Settlement Commission (read “colonisation”) was set up in April 1886. Its main task was to purchase real estate from Poles. The campaign was initially successful and effective mechanisms to counteract the activities of the Settlement Commission were not brought into play until Polish economic activists, centred around Fr. Piotr Wawrzyniak and the Central Economic Society began to implement counter-measures.
The German Eastern Marches Society, a chauvinistic organisation whose propaganda sought to substantiate the German nature of the territory seized from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, was formed in 1894. This association was colloquially known by the acronym “Hakata” (H-K-T) after the names of its founders - Ferdinand von Hansemann, Hermann Kennemann and Ferdinand von Tiedemann. It was very active and aggressive, and eventually came to epitomise the methods employed by German nationalist circles in the Prussian Partition.
