Flensburg, Germany

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.

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 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".

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".

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.