How did Prussia disappear?
For two hundred years Prussia was one of the great powers of Europe. It built the German Empire. Then, in 1947, four foreign powers signed a law, and it simply stopped existing.
The 60-second version, from my channel. Watch it on YouTube.
The name came from someone else
The original Prussians were not Germans at all. They were a Baltic people living on the south-east coast of the Baltic Sea. In the 13th century the Teutonic Knights, a German crusading order, conquered them, and over time the conquerors took the name of the conquered.
In 1525 the last Grand Master of the Knights in Prussia, Albert of Hohenzollern, became a Lutheran and turned the order's lands into a duchy of his own. In 1618 the Duchy of Prussia passed to his relatives, the Hohenzollern rulers of Brandenburg, around Berlin. Two scattered territories, one family.
From duchy to great power
In 1701 the Elector of Brandenburg crowned himself Frederick I, King in Prussia, in Königsberg. From then on, "Prussia" was the name for the whole Hohenzollern state.
Frederick the Great, who ruled from 1740 to 1786, turned it into a great power, seizing rich Silesia from Austria and surviving wars against half of Europe. Prussia became famous for its army, so much so that a line often attributed to the French writer Mirabeau said Prussia was not a state with an army, but an army with a state.
Prussia builds Germany
In the 1860s the Prussian chief minister Otto von Bismarck united the German states through three short wars. On 18 January 1871, in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, the King of Prussia was proclaimed German Emperor. Prussia made up about two-thirds of the new empire's territory. For the next half century, Germany was in large part Prussia with extra provinces.
The slow end
After the First World War the kings were gone, and Prussia became the Free State of Prussia inside the Weimar Republic, still the biggest German state. In 1932 Chancellor Franz von Papen removed its government by decree, and after 1933 the Nazis hollowed out what was left.
Then came 1945. East Prussia was split between the Soviet Union and Poland, and the Prussian lands east of the Oder and Neisse rivers were handed to Poland. Millions of Germans fled or were expelled. What remained of Prussia lay in the four occupation zones.
Abolished by law
On 25 February 1947 the Allied Control Council, the body through which the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain and France governed Germany, passed Law No. 46. It declared that the Prussian state, which it said had been from early days a bearer of militarism and reaction in Germany, was abolished. By then its remaining provinces had already been turned into new German states such as Brandenburg, Saxony-Anhalt and North Rhine-Westphalia. The law made it final.
No war ended Prussia. A piece of paper did.
- 1200s Teutonic Knights conquer the Old Prussians
- 1525 The Duchy of Prussia is created
- 1701 Kingdom of Prussia
- 1871 The King of Prussia becomes German Emperor
- 1918 Free State of Prussia
- 25 February 1947 Allied Control Council Law No. 46 abolishes Prussia