Frankfurt (Oder), Germany

In April 1631, during the Thirty Years' War, Frankfurt was the site of the Battle of Frankfurt an der Oder between the Swedish Empire and the Holy Roman Empire. After a two-day siege, Swedish forces, supported by Scottish auxiliaries, stormed the town and destroyed many buildings, e.g. the Georgen Hospital. The result was a Swedish victory. By the end of the Thirty Years' War, the town's population had decreased from 12,000 inhabitants to 2,366 inhabitants.

In the 16th century the oldest church of the town (today's Friedenskirche) was secularized and was even used as a granary, and from the 17th century it served as the church of the French Huguenots.

The city was briefly occupied by the Russian Imperial Army during the Seven Years' War, in August 1759, in the prelude to the battle of Kunersdorf.

With the dissolution of the Margraviate of Brandenburg during the Napoleonic Wars, Frankfurt became part of the Province of Brandenburg in 1815. In the 19th century, Frankfurt played an important role in trade. Centrally positioned in the Kingdom of Prussia between Berlin and Posen (Poznań), on the river Oder with its heavy traffic, the town housed the second-largest annual trade fair (Messe) of the German Reich, surpassed only by that in Leipzig. One of the main escape routes for insurgents of the unsuccessful Polish November Uprising from partitioned Poland to the Great Emigration led through the city. In 1842, the Berlin–Frankfurt (Oder) railway was opened.

The SS Einsatzgruppe VI was formed in the town before it entered several Polish cities, including Poznań, Kalisz and Leszno, to commit various crimes against Poles during the German invasion of Poland, which started World War II. During World War II the Germans brought numerous forced laborers, both men and women, from Poland and the Soviet Union to the town. In early 1945, death marches of prisoners of various nationalities from the dissolved camps in Żabikowo and Świecko to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp passed through the city. There was no fighting for the town in 1945 during World War II even though the town was declared a fortress (Festung) in an attempt to block the Red Army's route to Berlin. The nearly empty town was burned down by the Red Army. The postwar East German–Polish border ran along the Oder, separating the Dammvorstadt on the eastern bank – which became the Polish town of Słubice – from the rest of Frankfurt. While part of communist East Germany, Frankfurt was administered within Bezirk Frankfurt (Oder). It became part of the reconstituted state of Brandenburg with German reunification in 1990.

In the post-communist era, following the collapse of its main employer VEB Halbleiterwerk, Frankfurt has suffered from high unemployment and low economic growth. Its population has fallen significantly from around 87,000 at the time of German reunification in 1990. The only remnant of semiconductor technology industries in Frankfurt by 2003 was the Innovations for High Performance Microelectronics (IHPM) institute.

Today, the towns of Frankfurt and Słubice have friendly relations and run several common projects and facilities. Poland joined the European Union on 1 May 2004, and implemented the Schengen Agreement on 21 December 2007 leading to the removal of permanent border controls.

In March 2008, the Jewish community of Frankfurt celebrated its first Torah dedication since the Holocaust. The procession of the new Torah scroll began from the spot where the town's Frankfurter Synagogue stood prior to World War II, 500 meters from Germany's current border with Poland. Celebrants marched with the scroll into the town's Chabad-Lubavitch centre, where they danced with the Torah, which had been donated by members of the Chabad-Lubavitch community in Berlin.