[edit]
Middle Ages[edit]
The town charter of Flensburg (1284)
The Nordertor, a town gate, in winter
Flensburg was founded at the latest by 1200 at the innermost end of the Flensburg Firth by Danish settlers, who were soon joined by German merchants. In 1284, its town rights were confirmed and the town quickly became one of the most important in the Duchy of Schleswig. Unlike Holstein, Schleswig did not belong to the German Holy Roman Empire. Therefore, Flensburg was not a member of the Hanseatic League, but did maintain contacts with it.
Historians[who?] presume that there were several reasons this spot was chosen for settlement:
Shelter from heavy winds
A trade route between Holstein and North Jutland (namely the Hærvejen or Ochsenweg, a series of roads between Hamburg, Schleswig-Holstein and Jutland, possibly dating from the Bronze Age)
The Angelnway: a trade route between North Frisia and Angeln
A good herring fishery
Herrings, especially kippered, brought about the blossoming of the town's trade in the Middle Ages. They were sent inland and to almost every European country.
On 28 October 1412, Queen Margaret I of Denmark died of the plague aboard a ship in Flensburg Harbour.
From time to time plagues such as bubonic plague, caused mainly by rat fleas (Xenopsylla cheopis, a parasite found on brown rats), "red" dysentery and other scourges killed much of Flensburg's population. Lepers were strictly isolated at the St.-Jürgen-Hospital (Helligåndshospital, built before 1290), far outside the town's gates, where St. Jürgen Church is now. About 1500, syphilis also appeared. The church hospital "Zum Heiligen Geist" ("To the Holy Ghost") stood in Große Straße, now Flensburg's pedestrian precinct.
A Flensburger's everyday life was very hard, and the old roads and paths were bad. The main streets were neither paved nor lit at night. When the streets became really bad, citizens made the dung-filled streets passable with wooden pathways. Only the few upper-class houses had windows. In 1485, a great fire struck Flensburg. Storm tides also beset the town occasionally. Every household in the town kept livestock in the house and the yard. Townsfolk furthermore had their own cowherds and a swineherd.
Early modern times[edit]
Flensburg, early 17th century
After the fall of the Hanseatic League in the 16th century, Flensburg was said to be one of the most important trading towns in the Scandinavian area. Flensburg merchants were active as far away as the Mediterranean, Greenland, and the Caribbean. The most important commodities, after herring, were sugar and whale oil, the latter from whaling off Greenland. But the Thirty Years' War put an end to this boom time. The town was becoming Protestant and thereby ever more German culturally and linguistically, while the neighbouring countryside remained decidedly Danish.
In the 18th century, thanks to the rum trade, Flensburg had yet another boom. Cane sugar was imported from the Danish West Indies (now the US Virgin Islands) and refined in Flensburg. Only in the 19th century, as a result of industrialization, was the town at last outstripped by the competition from cities such as Copenhagen and Hamburg.
The rum produced in Flensburg was then reintegrated into West Indian trade routes, which as of 1864 moved away from the Danish West Indies to the British colony of Jamaica instead. It was imported from there, blended, and sold all over Europe. There is now only one active rum distillery in Flensburg, "A. H. Johannsen".
Prussian and German rule[edit]
Between 1460 and 1864, Flensburg was, after Copenhagen, the Kingdom of Denmark's second-biggest port, but it passed to the Kingdom of Prussia after the Second Schleswig War in 1864. The Battle of Flensburg was fought on February 6, 1864: near the city a small Hungarian mounted regiment chased a Danish infantry and Dragoon regiment. At the election for the North German Reichstag in 1867, there had still been a Danish majority in Flensburg, and it continued until around 1880. However, thereafter, the majority shifted partly due to immigration of workers from other parts of Germany and because the bureaucracy was largely replaced with Germans from the south. Today, a sizable Danish community remains in the town. Some estimates put the percentage of Flensburgers who belong to it as high as 25%; other estimates put it much lower. The SSW political party representing the minority usually gains 20–25% of the votes in local elections, but not all its voters are Danes. Before 1864, Danes consisted of the vast majority, which belonged to what is now the minority; even today there are many Danish surnames in the Flensburg telephone directory (Asmussen, Claussen, Jacobsen, Jensen, Petersen, etc.). However, the upper classes at that time, comprising merchants, bureaucrats, academics, and the clergy, were predominantly German.
On 1 April 1889, Flensburg became an independent city (kreisfreie Stadt) within the Province of Schleswig-Holstein, and at the same time still kept its status as seat of the Flensburg district. In 1920, the League of Nations decided that the matter of the German–Danish border would be settled by a vote. As a result of the plebiscite, and the way the voting zones were laid out, some of Flensburg's northern neighbourhoods were ceded to Denmark, whereas Flensburg as a whole voted by a large margin to stay in Germany.
In return for this pro-German vote, Flensburg was given a large hall, the "Deutsches Haus", which the government endowed as "thanks for German loyalty".
World War II[edit]
During the Second World War, the town was left almost unscathed by the air raids that devastated other German cities. But in 1943, 20 children died when a nursery school was bombed, and shortly after the war ended, an explosion at a local munitions storage site claimed many victims. Four prisoners of war (two Norwegians, one Australian, and one New Zealander) who took part in the Great Escape from the Stalag Luft III POW camp were captured by the Germans in the city, and later murdered in another location.
The Sportschool in Mürwik, at the Naval Academy Mürwik, where the seat of the Flensburg Government was located in 1945 (photo 2014)
In 1945, Admiral Karl Dönitz, who was briefly President (Reichspräsident) of Nazi Germany after Adolf Hitler appointed him his successor and then killed himself, fled to Flensburg with what was left of his government. The so-called Flensburg Government, led by Dönitz, was in power from 1 May, the announcement of Hitler's death, for one week, until German troops surrendered and the town was occupied by Allied troops. The regime was effectively dissolved on 23 May, when the British Army arrested Dönitz and his ministers in Mürwik and detained them in the Navy School in Mürwik (German: Marineschule Mürwik). The Berlin Declaration promulgated on 5 June formalized the dissolution. Flensburg was therefore, for a few weeks, the seat of the last Third Reich government.
Since the Second World War[edit]
After the Second World War, the town's population broke the 100,000 mark for a short time, making Flensburg a city (Großstadt) under one traditional definition. The population later sank below that mark.
In the years after the Second World War, South Schleswig, and particularly Flensburg, had a strong pro-Danish movement connected with the idea of the "Eider Politics". Its goal was for the town and all or most of Schleswig, the whole area north of the Eider River, to be united with Denmark. After 1945, Flensburg's town council was for years dominated by Danish parties, and the town had a Danish mayor.
The town profited from the planned location of military installations. Since German Reunification, the number of soldiers has dropped to about 8,000. Since Denmark's entry into the European Economic Community (now the European Union), border trade has played an important role in Flensburg's economic life. Some Danish businesses, such as Danfoss, have set up shop just south of the border for tax reasons.
In 1970, the Flensburg district was expanded to include the municipalities in the Amt of Medelby, formerly in the Südtondern district, and in 1974 it was united with the Schleswig district to form the district of Schleswig-Flensburg, whose district seat was the town of Schleswig. Flensburg thereby lost its function as a district seat but remained an independent (district-free) town.
Amalgamations[edit]
Until the middle of the 19th century, Flensburg's municipal area comprised an area of 2 639 ha. Beginning in 1874, the following communities or rural areas (Gemarkungen) were annexed to the town of Flensburg:
Year
Place(s)
Area added in ha
1874
Süder- and Norder-St. Jürgen
36
1874
Fischerhof
3
27 July 1875
Duburg
10.5
1877
Hohlwege and Bredeberg
5.5
1 December 1900
Jürgensgaarde
205
1 April 1909
Klues
19
1 April 1910
Twedt, Twedterholz/Fruerlund and Engelsby
1458
1916
part of Klues Forest (incl. open waters)
146.5
26 April 1970
Adelbylund
132
10 February 1971
demerger of Wassersleben Beach
-147.5
22 March 1974
Sünderup and Tarup
?
Population development[edit]
Population figures are for respective municipal areas through time. Until 1870, figures are mostly estimates, and thereafter census results (¹) or official projections from either statistical offices or the town administration itself.
Population development
Year
Population figure[citation needed]
1436
3000
1600
6000
1760
6842
1835
12,483
1 December 1875 ¹
26,474
1 December 1890 ¹
36,894
1 December 1900 ¹
48,937
1 December 1910 ¹
60,922
16 June 1925 ¹
63,139
16 June 1933 ¹
66,580
17 May 1939 ¹
70,871
13 September 1950 ¹
102,832
6 June 1961 ¹
98,464
27 May 1970 ¹
95,400
30 June 1975
93,900
30 June 1980
88,200
30 June 1985
86,900
27 May 1987 ¹
86,554
30 June 1997
86,100
31 December 2003
85,300
31 December 2012
89,375
¹ Census results
