History
Wschowa was originally a border fortress in a region disputed by the Polish dukes of Silesia and Greater Poland. After German colonists had established a settlement nearby, it received Magdeburg rights around 1250. The Old Polish name Veschow was first mentioned in 1248, while the Middle High German name Frowenstat Civitas first appeared in 1290. After the Silesian Piast dukes had gradually accepted Bohemian suzerainty, King Casimir III the Great in 1343 finally conquered it for Poland. The ziemia Wschowa then was incorporated into the Greater Polish Poznań Voivodeship of the Polish Crown.
Wschowa and its Latin school was one of the centres of the Protestant Reformation in Poland and a retreat for religious refugees in the days of the Counter-Reformation in adjacent Habsburg Silesia.
The Battle of Fraustadt occurred at Wschowa on February 3, 1706 during the Great Northern War, when Swedish forces defeated a joint army of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Saxony and Russia. Within the Second Partition of Poland in 1793, Wschowa was annexed by the Kingdom of Prussia and incorporated into the province of South Prussia, until in 1807 it was awarded to the Duchy of Warsaw according to the Treaty of Tilsit.
A part of the Grand Duchy of Posen from 1815 on, the town was again incorporated into the Prussian Province of Posen in 1848. According to the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, Fraustadt remained under German rule and formed the southernmost district of the Posen-West Prussia border province. Since 1945 the area as a result of the 1945 Potsdam Conference again belongs to Poland.
Wschowa was one of the few areas within Germany attacked by the Polish military during the Polish Defensive War in 1939 (or Polish Campaign'1939). The other notable attack was carried on the same day by one PZL.23B of the 21st Squadron; the factory in Ohlau was the first victim of bomb attack onto the German territory.
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