Baroque castle, originally built in the Middle Ages as the residence of the Piast dynasty
Lubliniec was established about 1270 by the Piast duke Władysław of Opole on the road leading from his residence Opole to Kraków. It was part of the Duchy of Opole within fragmented Piast-ruled Poland. According to old folk tradition the name comes from the Polish sentence lubi mi się tu kościół i miasto budować, which refers to the erection of the church and the town by Duke Władysław.[2] In medieval Polish documents the town appeared under the names Lubie,[3]Lublin and Lubin, and then morphed to Lubliniec for distinction, as mentioned by 15th-century Polish chronicler Jan Długosz. Under the name Lubliniec it was mentioned in a 1612 Polish poem Officina ferraria, abo huta y warstat z kuźniami szlachetnego dzieła żelaznego by Baroque poet Walenty Roździeński [pl]. By the turn of the 13th to the 14th century it had obtained the status of a town according to Magdeburg Law by Władysław's son and successor Duke Bolko I. He had been one of the first Silesian dukes to become a Bohemian vassal in 1289, however it remained under the rule of the local branch of the Polish Piast dynasty until 1532. The Piast dukes erected a castle in Lubliniec.[4] Duke Jan II the Good granted the citizens many privileges, including brewing and market rights as well as the permit to form guilds.
Franciszek Grotowski's orphanage, today a primary school
The town was an important center of Polish Bar Confederates, and in the 1770s it was visited several times by Kazimierz Pułaski, one of the Confederates' military commanders and soon-to-be hero of the American Revolutionary War.[5] In the late 18th century the town was held by the Polish noble Grotowski family.[3] In 1812 Franciszek Grotowski founded an institute, which purpose was to take care of orphans and provide them with education, and a new orphanage was built in 1848.[3] To this day the facade of the former orphanage is decorated with a relief of the Łodzia coat of arms of the Grotowski family. The town was a center of Polish resistance against Germanisation policies. 19th-century Polish publicist, activist and poet Józef Lompa [pl] printed many of his works in the town.[3] In the 19th century the county's population remained overwhelmingly Polish and Catholic by confession.[3] In 1871 the town became part of Germany. The first railway reached it by 1884. The former castle of Lubliniec was converted into a hospital for the poor in 1893, then altered to a psychiatric hospital in 1895/96.[6]
Again occupied in the 1939 invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany during World War II (and renamed Loben, 1941–45). During the German occupation, the Polish population was subjected to mass arrests, imprisonment, deportations to Nazi concentration camps and executions. On September 8, 1939, the Einsatzgruppe II entered the town to commit various crimes against Poles.[7] 180 civilian defenders were murdered immediately by the invading Germans in September 1939, in accordance with Adolf Hitler's orders to execute Polish "partisans" immediately.[8] Soon after capturing the city, the Germans took over the local psychiatric hospital, and several hundred children were murdered there during the occupation as part of the Aktion T4.[9] There were also cases in which the killed children's brains were used for medical research by the Germans in Wrocław, as mentioned by German doctor Elisabeth Hecker, who was in charge of the hospital since 1941.[9] The Germans also established and operated a Nazi prison in the town,[10] and the E609 forced labour subcamp of the Stalag VIII-B/344prisoner-of-war camp in the present-day district of Kokotek.[11] Teachers from Lubliniec were among Polish teachers imprisoned and murdered in concentration camps.[12] The area was conquered by the Red Army in January 1945 in the course of the Vistula–Oder Offensive, and then restored to Poland.
Richard Courant (1888–1972), mathematician; his cousin Edith Stein often visited the house of her maternal grandparents Courant near the rynek, today the site of a small museum.
