Sunday, March 2, 2008

Intro to the history of The Teutonic Knights

I found a lot of good information and web sites about The Teutonic Knights and I will gradually post here what I found. It may take some time because I will try to go in chronological order. The sites and other sources that I found so far don’t give a clear picture of the order’s history. Some aspects are omitted, some are barely mentioned and some are misrepresented .

The point I am trying to make is that many websites are by those who are impressed by the Order and they either don’t know about or are trying to hide the dark side of it’s history. Things you won’t find on almost all English language websites is the massacre of thousands of inhabitants of Gdansk in 1308. You may not find that The Teutonic Knights or The Knights of the Cross, as they are known in Poland, have committed the first holocaust in Eastern Europe on Prussians. They killed almost 90% of the population and those who survived were turned into slaves, prohibited to marry and have families. Later the name Prussia, and Prussians, were given to the new state and its new inhabitants, mostly Germans.

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