| Słońsk | |||
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| — Village — | |||
| Ruins of the Knights Hospitaller castle | |||
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Słońsk
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| Coordinates: | |||
| Country | Poland | ||
| Voivodeship | Lubusz | ||
| County | Sulęcin | ||
| Gmina | Słońsk | ||
| Population | 3,000 | ||
| Website | http://www.slonsk.pl/ | ||
Słońsk [swɔɲsk] (German: Sonnenburg) is a village in Sulęcin County of the Lubusz Voivodeship, in western Poland.
The village borders the Ujście Warty National Park. It had town privileges from 1808 to 1947. During the Second World War, Słońsk was the site of a former Nazi concentration camp (now a museum). The village lies about 25 kilometers (or 16 miles) north-west of Sulęcin and 36 kilometers (22 mi) south-west of Gorzów Wielkopolski.
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Present-day Słońsk was founded in territory, formerly part of the Kingdom of Poland, acquired by the German Margraviate of Brandenburg during the High Middle Ages. The Slavic inhabitants of the region were in the following centuries gradually Germanized.
Then known as Sonnenburg, the settlement first appears in documents in 1295. The Knights Templar held lands and buildings in the town. In 1312, the Margrave of Brandenburg and the Bishop of Lebus were joint overlords of Sonnenburg. Henning and Arnold von Uechtenhagen later received Sonnenberg as a fief and in 1341 built the first castle there. From the fifteenth century, the town maintained a close connection with the Knights Hospitaller, who had purchased it from Margrave Friedrich I of Brandenburg; the castle became the seat of the Bailiwick of Brandenburg and the Order greatly enlarged the town, building a new church between 1474-1522 and a new castle between 1545-1564.
A severe prison was built in the town in 1832. It held such Polish fighters for independence as Karol Libelt and Bronisław Dąbrowski (the son of General Jan Henryk Dąbrowski). During World War II, defenders of the Poznań citadel were held in the prison after capture, and in 1944 some of the soldiers from the Warsaw Uprising were incarcerated there.
In 1933, German authorities created concentration camp Sonnenburg, in which such anti-Nazi activists as Carl von Ossietzky and Hans Litten were held[1].
During the night of January 30-31, 1945, at Sonnenburg, the SS executed 819 political prisoners from many European countries.[2][3]
Sonnenburg was captured by the Soviet Red Army in the Spring of 1945, as the Second World War in Europe drew to its close. The post-war Potsdam Conference later that year severed Sonnenburg from Germany and awarded it to Poland, which renamed it "Słońsk". Most of the former inhabitants were expelled, as throughout the formerly German territories, and replaced by Poles expelled from the former Polish Kresy Wschodnie (taken by the Soviet Union) and by settlers from the central Poland.
In 1947 Słońsk lost its town rights and reverted to the status of a village.[2]
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