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The Kingdom of Prussia
The north German kingdom that unified Germany and then vanished from the map
Few states have reshaped Europe and then disappeared as completely as Prussia. It took its name from a Baltic duchy, became a kingdom at a coronation in Königsberg in 1701, and by 1871 had drawn most of the German states into an empire under its own king. Its civil service, its army, its compulsory schooling, and the research university model of Berlin, founded in 1810, were copied far beyond its borders. Yet no country called Prussia exists. The monarchy fell in 1918, the Allies formally abolished the Prussian state in 1947, and much of its eastern heartland, including the city where its kings were crowned, now lies in Poland, Russia, and Lithuania.
At its greatest extent, around 1910, Prussia covered about 348,800 square kilometers, roughly two-thirds of the German Empire, in a broad band from the Rhine to the Neman River. It reached from the Rhine Province and the industrial Ruhr of Westphalia in the west through Hanover, Brandenburg, and Saxony to Silesia in the southeast and to Posen, West Prussia, and East Prussia along the Baltic. Most of it is the North European Plain: sandy Brandenburg heath, the lakes of Masuria, coastal lagoons and dunes, rising to the Harz and the Silesian Sudetes. Its lands are now mainly in Germany and Poland, with East Prussia's north in Russia's Kaliningrad Oblast and smaller pieces in Lithuania, Denmark, Belgium, and Czechia.
The Hohenzollern electors of Brandenburg inherited the Duchy of Prussia in 1618, and in 1701 Elector Frederick III crowned himself Frederick I, King in Prussia. Frederick II seized Silesia from Austria in the 1740s, and the partitions of Poland between 1772 and 1795 added vast territory in the east. Defeated by Napoleon in 1806, Prussia reformed its army and administration, and the Congress of Vienna in 1815 gave it the Rhineland and Westphalia. Wars with Denmark, Austria, and France between 1864 and 1871 ended with King Wilhelm I proclaimed German emperor at Versailles. The last king abdicated in November 1918, and a democratic Free State of Prussia followed until the Nazi era. Allied Control Council Law No. 46 dissolved Prussia on February 25, 1947.