It's out! 80 years ago, in 1945, when WW II ended, East Prussia was wiped out. Historically the area was German but with sizable Lithuanian, Polish, and Masurian minorities. I have digitized the *entire* East Prussian census of 1905. Read more for never before seen maps:🧵
Overall, the province was quite rural - Konigsberg was the only city of any size, with Tilsit, Memel, and Allenstein to a lesser extent. But cut-off and isolated, the province was thoroughly agrarian and under-developed. Most land was held by conservative noble Junkers.
Economically, the region was overwhelmingly poor - especially so in more minority-heavy areas. This combination of poor, agrarian, and Protestant led the region to be a hotbed of far-right politics in the Weimar era, both with the DNVP and NSDAP.
Un-rigging the census numbers required tons of research to figure out what the motivations were for the German authorities in terms of fudging numbers for nationalistic purposes. Particularly with the case of bilingual Masurians, there was quite a lot of un-fudging we did.
Most importantly, if East Prussia survived until today, how would it vote? That is what all the parliament diagrams have been for. Assuming it shared the same fate as other Eastern German areas that stayed in the GDR, very strongly far-right and pro-AfD.
Next tweet has the full research link - please read - there are more maps there. It's over 10,000 words - a ton of work has gone into putting together this piece of history that was lost 80 years ago. Special thanks to @AOPolPR for helping with the data and with countless convos
Link to the full research - DM for data. https://tinyurl.com/yzpha6ev
Please subscribe if you can as well - I know what the overlord of this site does to links like that.