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Pomerania
The Baltic "land by the sea," divided at the Oder between Germany and Poland
Pomerania takes its name from Slavic words meaning "land by the sea," and for a thousand years this southern Baltic shore of dunes, lagoons, and Hanseatic brick towns was contested by Poles, Danes, Swedes, Brandenburgers, and Prussians. Its last great redrawing came in 1945, when the German–Polish border moved west to the Oder, leaving a small German Western Pomerania around Stralsund and Greifswald and a far larger Polish Pomerania around Szczecin and Gdańsk. Millions of Germans fled or were expelled, and Poles settled in their place. Today the region is known for its beach resorts, the chalk cliffs of Rügen, and port cities whose histories are written in two languages.
Historic Pomerania stretches about 500 kilometers along the Baltic, from the Recknitz River west of Stralsund to the Vistula delta at Gdańsk, and covers roughly 61,500 square kilometers with about 5.65 million people. The land is a young glacial plain of moraine hills, lakes, and forests, edged by sandbars that enclose lagoons such as the Szczecin Lagoon at the mouth of the Oder. The islands of Rügen, Usedom, and Wolin lie off its coast, and Usedom is shared by both countries. More than four-fifths of Pomerania lies in Poland, in the West Pomeranian and Pomeranian voivodeships. The rest, Western Pomerania (Vorpommern), forms the eastern part of the German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Szczecin, on the Oder's west bank, was placed in Poland in 1945 along with a strip around it.
Slavic Pomeranians were converted to Christianity in the 1120s, and their native Griffin dukes ruled the Duchy of Pomerania, increasingly German in speech and settlement, until the line died out in 1637. Pomerelia in the east, around Gdańsk, went its own way, passing from the Teutonic Order to Poland in 1466 and to Prussia in the partitions of 1772 and 1793. The 1648 Peace of Westphalia split the duchy between Sweden and Brandenburg-Prussia, and Prussia gained the last Swedish part in 1815, forming the Province of Pomerania. After the First World War the Polish Corridor and the Free City of Danzig were carved out of Pomerelia. The 1945 Potsdam settlement placed the lands east of the Oder–Neisse line, plus Szczecin, under Poland, a border Germany confirmed in 1990.