Грудзёндз: История польского города на Висле

Grudziądz (Graudentum, Graudentium, Graudenz) is a city in northern Poland, with 92,552 inhabitants (2021). approximately north east of Świecie, south of Gdańsk and south west of Kaliningrad. It is located in Chełmno Land.

Grudziądz was founded by the Duke of Poland, Bolesław I the Brave of the Piast dynasty. Initially Grudziądz was a defensive stronghold, known as a gord. The fortress and tower were built to protect the Poles from attacks by the Baltic Prussians. The oldest building parts of the Catholic St. Nicholas' Church stem from the end of the 13th century. The Holy Spirit Church, which apparently was founded during the 13th century, is mentioned together with the town's hospital for the first time in 1345. Other documents reveal that in the 14th century the town already had a well developed infrastructure. A document of 1380, as an example, refers to the construction of an aqueduct, a fountain and a town hall cellar. In the 14th century, papal verdicts ordered the restoration of the town and region to Poland, however, the Teutonic Knights did not comply and continued to occupy it. During the era of the Teutonic Knights, Graudenz had become a distinguished trade center in particular for textiles and agricultural products including grain. Around 1454, Graudenz had already reached about the same level of economic development as other towns in the western part of the State of the Teutonic Order, such as Danzig (Gdańsk), Elbing (Elbląg), Thorn (Toruń), Marienburg (Malbork), Kulm (Chełmno), Konitz (Chojnice), Neumark (Nowe Miasto Lubawskie) and Preußisch Stargard (Starogard Gdański).

In 1440, the city co founded the Prussian Confederation which opposed the Monastic State of the Teutonic Knights. At the beginning of the Thirteen Years' War (1454–66), the citizens forced the Teutonic Order to hand over the castle. The confederation asked the King of Poland, Casimir IV Jagiellon to join Poland. The King agreed and signed the act of incorporation in Kraków in March 1454. Although there was support the Knights inside the city walls during the entirety of the war, both the city and the castle remained under Polish control. The 1466 peace treaty confirmed the re incorporation of Grudziądz to Poland. Between 1454 and 1772 the city was part of the Polish Chełmno Voivodeship, which itself was since 1466 part of the Polish province of Royal Prussia, soon included in the larger Greater Poland Province. The Grudziądz Castle was seat of the local starostas (royal administrative officials). It was often visited by Polish kings. After the great depression of the Thirteen Years' War, new economical growth in the town was slow before the middle of the 16th century. Economic progress was hampered by the religious struggles and by the Polish–Swedish wars throughout the 17th century. At the end of 1655, during the Swedish Deluge, the city and its castle were captured by the Swedes and occupied for four years. In 1659, the Swedes had been besieged for several days and retreated. During their departure, part of the town was destroyed by fire. In 1522, Nicolaus Copernicus, who aside from his astronomical work was also an economist, presented his treatise Monetae cudendae ratio in Grudziądz. In it he postulated the principle that "bad money drives out good" which became known as the Gresham's law or the Gresham–Copernicus law. This work included an early version of the quantity theory of money – a key concept in economics. Following Protestant Reformation, in 1569 the local Protestants were given access to the Holy Spirit Church; in 1572 Catholicism seemed to have vanished almost entirely in the town. In 1597 King Sigismund III Vasa gave order that the Protestants had to return all churches taken over by them in the past to the Catholics, including all accessories. The Protestants remained in possession solely of St. George's Church until in 1618 when the base of the building was washed away by the Vistula River and the church was torn down. For a while, they used once more the vacant Holy Spoirit Church, until in 1624 this building together with the hospital had to be handed over to nuns of the Order of Saint Benedict for the purpose of founding an affiliated institution. Since 1622 Jesuits from Toruń had a station in Grudziądz, which in 1640 was already so strong that it was able to form a residence in Grudziądz, despite of objections from the side of the magistrate of the town. In 1648 construction work for building a Jesuit church was taken up. The Jesuits also founded the Jesuit College, which was the first high school in Grudziądz. The town proper was surrounded by town walls, except on the side of river Vistula, where instead of walls there stood huge massive grain silos, from where grain could be transported through wooden pipes to the embankment of the river.

Following the First Partition of Poland declared on August 5, 1772, the city was annexed by the Kingdom of Prussia. In 1773, it had a population of only 2,172 persons. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, it was part of the area affected by the Partitions of Poland. To stimulate municipal trade, Frederick the Great brought in 44 colonist families. Grain trade flourished. Among the most successful grain traders were the Schönborn family. In 1776, a decision was made to build a fortress in the town. Between 1796 and 1804, by decision of the King of Prussia, the Grudziądz Castle was demolished. During the Napoleonic invasion in Prussia in 1806–1807, the fortress was successfully defended by General of Infantry Wilhelm René de l'Homme de Courbière against attacks by French troops. In 1871, Graudenz became part of the unified German Empire. Administratively it belonged to the administrative district of Regierungsbezirk Marienwerder in the Province of West Prussia. With the improvement of the railway network in Germany, Graudenz transiently lost its meaning as an important trading place for grain. In 1878, the railway line to Jabłonowo Pomorskie (then Germanized as Goßlershausen) opened. After the construction of a railroad bridge across the Vistula in 1878, a railway line to Laskowice (Laskowitz) opened. Graudenz became a rapidly growing industrialized city. In 1883 also the Thorn (Toruń) Graudenz Marienburg (Malbork) railway line went into operation. In 1899, the Chamber of Commerce was established in Graudenz. The Imperial German Navy named a light cruiser class and its lead ship, the SMS Graudenz, after the city. The newspaper Der Gesellige, founded by book seller Rothe in 1826, belonged up to the end of World War I to the most widely spread newspapers of east Germany. Around the turn to the 20th century, Graudenz had become an important cultural centre in east Germany with numerous schools, municipal archives and a museum. The city was the site of a military prison for Polish activists. In 1832, also 249 Polish insurgents the November Uprising were imprisoned by the Prussians in the local fortress and subjected to forced labour, malnutrition, beatings and insults. Released prisoners who left Europe formed the Gromada Grudziądz in Portsmouth, England in 1835 as part of the Great Emigration movement.

Frederick had nourished a particular contempt for the Polish state and people. Germanisation was enforced to assimilate residents. He brought in German and Frisian workers and peasants, who in his opinion, were more suitable for building up his new civilization. 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. 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. Approximately 16,850 Poles and about 26,000 Germans lived in the district of Graudenz. To resist Germanisation, Polish activists started to publish the newspaper "Gazeta Grudziądzka" in 1894. It advocated the social and economic emancipation of rural society and opposed Germanization – publishing articles critical of Germany. German attempts to repress its editor Wiktor Kulerski only helped to increase its circulation. 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. The German government brought in more stationed military, merchants and state officials to influence population figures. 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) were classified as Germans. 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. 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 Grudziądzka reached a circulation of 128,000, making it the third largest Polish newspaper in the world.

Alongside the military and Einsatzgruppen administration, the first structures of Selbstschutz were established – a paramilitary formation of members of the German minority in the region. The head of Selbstschutz in Grudziądz was Doctor Joachim Gramse. In October 1939, Selbstschutz created an internment camp for Poles seeking to restore Polish independence, whose commandant was a local German Kurt Gotze. Other arrested Poles were held in the cellars of the Grudziądz Fortress. Based on their decisions, some of the prisoners were sent to concentration camps, 300 were murdered en masse; only a few were released. Those sentenced to death were mostly executed through shooting by the Selbstschutz in Księże Góry near Grudziądz; in October and November 1939 several hundred people were murdered there and their bodies buried in five mass graves. The victims were usually shot at the edges of already dug out graves. Further executions were carried out in desolate areas of Grudziądz: on 11 November 1939 near Grudziądz Fortress, the Selbstschutz executed ten Polish teachers, four Polish priests and four women. Additionally, 37 people were murdered in Grudziądz city park. The city became home to Poles who had emigrated from Polish areas annexed by the Soviet Union east of the Curzon line, where they had been asked by the Soviet authorities to either accept incorporation into the U. S. S. R. or to leave what had been their former homeland.

In 2018, it was populated by 95,045 inhabitants.

Grudziądz has two professional sports teams. The largest following has the popular speedway team GKM Grudziądz, who race at the Grudziądz Speedway Stadium and compete in the Ekstraliga (Poland's top division), whereas the local football team Olimpia Grudziądz has a slightly more modest following, playing in the lower leagues (as of 2022). GKS Olimpia Grudziądz is also a multi sports club with athletics and judo sections.