Category:Prussians

These people are nationals of Prussia.

Prussia was a historic state in what is now Germany, founded in 1525 when Grandmaster Albert of Brandenburg-Ansbach converted to Lutheranism and secularized the Monastic State of the Teutonic Knights. Albert proclaimed himself Duke of Prussia and, since Lutheran clergy were not required to remain celibate, founded the Hohenzollern Dynasty.

Prussia (known for a time as Brandenburg-Prussia) emerged as one of the most powerful German states, and in 1701, Prussia's ruling class upgraded their state from a duchy to a kingdom, with Frederick I taking the crown as King in Prussia (not King of Prussia, as it was feared this would be taken as a provocation against Poland, which maintained an uneasy peace with Prussia at this time despite a running border dispute). Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Prussia emerged as one of the great powers of Europe, playing critical and decisive roles in many continental conflicts, such as the Napoleonic Wars and the Revolutions of 1848.

In the mid-1860s, Count Otto von Bismarck's aggressive foreign policy positioned Prussia as the leader of emerging German nationalist movements, upstaging its only real rival for that role, Austria. With the support of the rulers of most small and mid-sized German states, Prussia formed the nucleus of German unification in 1870, creating the new nation-state of Germany and elevating King William I to his imperial office of Wilhelm I, German Emperor. Prussia continued to exist as an entity within the German Empire, with Hohenzollern emperors retaining the Prussian kingship. This ended in 1918 with the abdication of Wilhelm II, German Emperor following the end of World War I.

Following Wilhelm's abdication, Prussia proclaimed itself a Free State (ie, a democratic republic) within the Weimar Republic. Despite its long history of relative authoritarianism, Prussia was actually an exemplar of democracy in interwar Germany, with its state government being the only German legislature of any significant size in which pro-democracy parties enjoyed comfortable majorities throughout the period of the Weimar Republic's existence.

However, following the election of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor in 1933, Prussia was quickly converted into a totalitarian state, with a highly centralized Nazi government led by its unelected federal commissioner, Hermann Göring. This would be the final government in Prussia's 400-year history; following Germany's defeat in World War II and subsequent Allied occupation, Prussia was divided among three of the four occupation zones as well as Poland. Thus, it was not possible for Prussia to exist as a state in either East or West Germany. Following German reunification in 1990, the state was not reconstituted; today, what was once Prussian territory is divided among nine German states.