from wikipedia
Posted on 06/01/2011 6:47:16 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
In 1280, victorious Teutonic Crusaders began building the world's largest castle on a hill overlooking the River Nogat in what is now northern Poland. Malbork Castle became the hub of a powerful Teutonic state that crushed its pagan enemies and helped remake Medieval Europe. Now, ancient pollen samples show that in addition to converting heathens to Christians, the Crusaders also converted vast swathes of Medieval forests to farmlands.
In the early-13th century, Prussian tribes living in the south-eastern Baltic became a thorn in the side of the Monastic State of Teutonic Knights, which was formed in 1224 in what is now Germany and Poland. To remove the thorn, and protect Christian converts in the region, the Teutonic Order launched a series of crusades. By the 14th century, the conquests had produced a state that ruled over more than 220,000 people, Alex Brown and Aleks Pluskowski of the University of Reading in the United Kingdom report in the Journal of Archeological Science, including new colonists who settled into fortified towns and castles.
To understand how these historic shifts changed Europe's environment, past researchers have relied on hints from old maps and papers, such as those showing how much timber or stone a wealthy Knight used to build his castle. Brown and Pluskowski, however, turned to a different kind of historical record: the pollen grains that become trapped in the layers of mud that line waterbodies. By analyzing shifts in the pollen, researchers can reconstruct everything from past climates to landscape changes.
(Excerpt) Read more at conservationmagazine.org ...
Wow, nice!
LOLOL!
I go away for most of a day, and...
Shermy,..... Baby,
Can you grasp that Gods green earth has been in play and will always remain in play?
Is it somewhere in the old testament that the muscovites are to own eastern Europe and push the little slavs to the west?
This interesting post about the ecological changes brought about by a group pushing civilization eastward OVER CENTURIES should be viewed in the context of the THOUSANDS of German women and children being found executed in mass graves every year in sight of the fortress of Marienburg.
I have little idea what you are trying to say.
The area in question was probably originally (whatever that means, in this case sometime around 1000) settled by non-Slavic pagan Prussian tribes, who were conquered and probably assimilated by the Germanic Teutonic Knights.
The Knights were then conquered and their land taken by the Poles.
Several centuries later (1770s) the Prussians (good Germans by then) took control of the land when they combined with Austria and Russia to dismember Poland.
The Poles eventually got it back when the Germans lost WWII and the Red Army pushed both Poland’s east and west borders west a couple hundred miles.
My original comment was with regard to the claim that the area had never been Polish till recently. This is flatly untrue.
I am well aware of the massacres of Germans in the last days of WWII. I don’t think any of this was a good thing, but many if not probably the vast majority of these Germans had been perfectly happy to follow in the footsteps of the Wehrmacht and move into the houses of evicted or killed Poles and Jews. This was explicit German policy. They were eventually going to exterminate the Poles as they were the Jews. Just keep the Poles around for a generation or so as slaves.
Life bites. When a nation initiates aggressive genocidal warfare and makes the ultimate mistake of losing the war, it tends to get genocided right back. Not right, but that’s what happens.
It’s kind of silly to keep score, but it is well known the Germans killed upwards of 12M innocent civilians during the war. Ethnic Germans killed during the expulsions and revenge attacks are estimated at .5M to 2M. And it is not unfair to point out that the Germans started it.
Old magic trick my grandpa showed me.
Started what?
When?
Very simple words.
During WWII the Germans had an explicit policy of genocide against inferior races.
This, not surprisingly, turned around and bit them at the end of the war when the inferior races conquered them.
That is a ton of bricks.
Apologies for such a late reply, did not notice.
To folks like you “history” begins in the summer of 1939.
Sometimes the really brainy begin in summer of 1914.
It always seems to work in your minds, and therefor I can’t fault you for it I guess.
But it is supremely dishonest.
How many groups fighting aggressive war or driven to war or innocently responding to agression have had an explicit or implicit policy of genocide against their enemies?
Uncountable multitudes is of course the honest answer.
Amongst them English,Amerinds,Belgians,Toltecs,French,Ibo,Russians,Arabs,Japanese,Burmans,Chinese,Turks,Swedes,Aztec,Inca,Dutch,Serbs,Watusi,Scots,Romans,Peshtuns,Mongols,Spartans,Athenians, Trojans,Persians,.........
Not, as Seifeld would say, there is anything wrong with that.
It is truly a stunningly magnificent place, and the Polish have taken it as a national treasure, are respectfully restoring it in a way that frankly the Germans with their wage system simply could never have aspired to do.
It's not exactly true that Germans viewed Poles as inferior. In fact, one of the reasons that Poles were singled out, was because they felt that Poles had too much Germanic influence in them, and thus were a threat to Hitler's dream of a Lebensraum. Which explains why the Nazis moved quickly to eliminate all Polish intellectuals and professional people.
That's precisely why a "Vichy Poland" was not a possibility. Hitler knew Poles would not roll over like the other Slavic countries would, they would fight the Germans tooth and nail for as long as it took, even if it was outside of her borders.
I fail to see why you think my reply was dishonest.
I never said the German policy of genocide was unique or even particularly unusual, except in its “industrial” and modern infrastructure.
I said that those who start such wars had better win them or the blowback can be remarkably unpleasant for them.
As in, “those who strike the king had better kill him.”
Pardon me if I misunderstood the implications of some of your posts, but you seemed to be obsessing about the Soviet massacres of German civilians, an odd obsession given the post I’m responding to here.
If you consider the the German genocide policy no big deal, I’m confused why you consider the considerably less extensive Soviet policy of the same line against ethnic Germans to be a BD.
There is also the fact that a goodly number (but percentage unknown since the killers didn’t particularly care) of the German civilians killed by the Soviets were willing and even enthusiastic participants in the earlier killing of Russian, Ukrainian and Polish civilians, not to mention Jews.
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