Gąsawa
Gąsawa (, 1939–1945 ) is a village in Żnin County, Kuyavian-Pomeranian Voivodeship, in north-central Poland. It is the seat of the gmina (administrative district) called Gmina Gąsawa. It lies approximately south of Żnin and south-west of Bydgoszcz. The village has a population of 1,400. History. The oldest known mention of the village comes from the Bull of Gniezno from 1136, when it was part of Piast-ruled Poland. It is famous as the place of the assassination of Leszek I the White, High Duke of Poland (November 23, 1227). Gąsawa received town rights in 1388 from King Władysław  II Jagiełło and lost them in 1934. The town name was spelled "Gonzawa", "Gonsawa", "Gassawa", etc. in some old documents. It was a private church town, administratively located in the Gniezno County in the Kalisz Voivodeship in the Greater Poland Province of the Kingdom of Poland. In 1600 Gąsawa hosted the Lubrański Academy () which temporarily moved out of plague-stricken Poznań. In the late 18th-century Partitions of Poland it was annexed by Prussia. In 1807 it was regained by Poles and included within the short-lived Polish Duchy of Warsaw. Following the duchy's dissolution in 1815, it was  reannexed by Prussia, and from 1871 it also formed part of Germany. Following World War I, in 1918, Poland regained independence and the Greater Poland uprising against Germany broke out, during which the Poles regained control of Gąsawa. Following the joint German-Soviet invasion of Poland, which started World War II in September 1939, it was occupied by Germany until 1945. The Germans renamed it to "Gerlingen" to erase traces of Polish origin. In 1940, the occupiers carried out expulsions of Poles, particularly owners of larger farms, which were then handed over to German colonists as part of the "Lebensraum