Goralenvolk w liczbach ‒ mity i fakty
Goralenvolk in numbers – myths and facts

Summary/Abstract: The article addresses the problem of the size of the Goralenvolk – the “highland nation” artificially created by the German occupiers during World War II – as an ethnic group. This was aimed at breaking up the unity of Polish society by singling out this group and persuading it to cooperate with the aggressor. To date, historiography and historical memory have perpetuated false or inaccurate data about its numbers, repeated unreflectively by many historians and journalists. The author presents examples of false historical memory perpetuated in the form of publications in school and academic textbooks and LLM models, confronting them with data from studies and archival sources. In doing so, he uses archival data from the hitherto unpublished results of the March 1, 1943 census of the General Government, on the basis of which he established new counts of those classified as Goralenvolk. Instead of the previously unconfirmed data in the sources, it was determined that in absolute numbers it amounted to 18621 people in the Neumarkt district, or about 10% of the population instead of the 18% previously reported.

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