Minorities in the German Empire: Poles, Danes and Alsatians

The German Empire contained significant national minorities. Roughly 2. 5 to 3. 5 million Poles lived in Prussia's eastern provinces, Danes in northern Schleswig, and French-speaking or French-oriented inhabitants in Alsace-Lorraine. Imperial governments increasingly pursued Germanization. In Prussian Poland, German was made the language of administration and, increasingly, of schooling; in 1885–86 about 30,000 Poles without Prussian citizenship were expelled; and the Settlement Commission, founded in 1886, bought land to settle German farmers.

Polish communities responded by building their own cooperatives, banks and cultural societies, and in 1901 children in Września went on strike against religious instruction in German. In Alsace-Lorraine, the region was governed as an imperial territory rather than as a full state until 1911, and many residents left for France. These policies often strengthened rather than weakened minority national identities, showing the limits of assimilation imposed by the state.