Szubin

History

The first record of a settlement next to the castle of the Pałuka family was noted in 1365. It became a town in 1434. Szubin was a private town of Polish nobility, including the Mycielski and Opaliński families, administratively located in the Kcynia County in the Kalisz Voivodeship in the Greater Poland Province of the Kingdom of Poland. It was granted new privileges in 1645 and 1750. On January 8, 1919, Polish insurgents unsuccessfully attempted to recapture the town, Szubin was one of the sites of executions of Poles, carried out by the Germans as part of the Intelligenzaktion. In December 1939 and January 1940, the Germans expelled 1,280 and 780 Poles respectively, including activists, veterans of the Greater Poland Uprising, families of teachers, local officials and owners of shops, workshops and better houses, which were then handed over to German colonists as part of the Lebensraum policy. The Polish resistance movement was active in Szubin, including a local unit of the Wielkopolska Organizacja Wojskowa, later merged into the Wojskowa Organizacja Ziem Zachodnich. In 1940, the boys' school in the town was surrounded by barbed wire fences and additional concrete huts were added, so that it could become a prisoner-of-war camp for captured Polish, French, British, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand and Soviet officers as Oflag XXI-B, while the Stalag XXI-B POW camp was relocated to the nearby village of Tur. The town reverted to Poland after being liberated by Soviet troops on 21 January 1945.