Łódź, also rendered in English as Lodz, is a city in central Poland and a former industrial center. It is the capital of Łódź Voivodeship and is located approximately 120 km (75 mi) southwest of Warsaw. It first appeared in official records in the 14th century.
The Second Industrial Revolution (from 1870) brought rapid growth in textile manufacturing and in population owing to the inflow of migrants, notably Germans and Jews. The Second Industrial Revolution continued into the 20th century with early factory electrification and the production line, and ended at the beginning of World War I.
When German forces occupied Łódź on 8 September 1939, the city had a population of 672,000 people, about 30% of whom were Jewish. The Nazi authorities established the Łódź Ghetto (Ghetto Litzmannstadt) in the city in the spring of 1940. It was the second-largest ghetto in occupied Europe. As nearly 25 percent of the Jews had fled the city by the time the ghetto was set up, its prisoner population as of May 1940 was 164,000. Over the coming year, Jews from German-occupied Europe as far away as Luxembourg were deported to the ghetto on their way to the extermination camps. A small Romani population was also resettled there. By 1 May 1941, the population of the ghetto was 148,547. It was the last major ghetto to be liquidated, in August 1944.
Łódź experienced a sharp demographic and economic decline after 1989. It was only in the 2010s that the city began to experience revitalization of its neglected downtown area. Łódź is ranked by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network on the “Sufficiency” level of global influence and is internationally known for its National Film School, a cradle for the most renowned Polish actors and directors, including Andrzej Wajda and Roman Polanski. In 2017, the city was inducted into the UNESCO Creative Cities Network and named UNESCO City of Film.
Poland – Lodz represents 1000 unrelated individuals of Polish ancestry living in the Lodz region of Poland.at the Department of Forensic Medicine in Lodz, Poland who were sampled in 2007 by their Medical University.
Source publication: Population genetics of the Identifiler system in Poland, Science Direct, Forensic Science International: Genetics 2 (2008) e1-e3
[Population 406]
