Brusy was a royal village of the
Polish Crown, administratively located in the Tuchola County in the
Pomeranian Voivodeship. Since the 19th century Brusy was an important center of the
Kashub movement, although a fair amount of Kashubians from Brusy emigrated to Winona, Minnesota in the late 1900s. In 2007, the ninth Congress of Kashubians was held here, and in 2012, the annual
Kashubian Unity Day celebration was conducted here. A Kashubian secondary school is also located in the town. In the
interwar period, it was administratively located in the Chojnice County in the
Pomeranian Voivodeship of Poland. According to the
1921 census, Brusy had a population of 2,260, 98.2%
Polish. During the
German occupation of Poland (
World War II), inhabitants of Brusy were among over 450 Poles massacred by the Germans in autumn of 1939 in the Igielska Valley. In November 1939 the
SS,
Gestapo and
Selbstschutz murdered local Polish teachers in a large massacre of Polish teachers near
Skarszewy. Further executions of local Poles were carried out in January 1940 in the Igielska Valley and in the fields near
Chojnice. In May 1942, the Germans
expelled dozens of Poles, whose farms were handed over to
Germans as part of the
Lebensraum policy. The secret
Polish resistance organization
Pomeranian Griffin (Gryf Pomorski) operated in the Brusy area under the leadership of Colonel Józef Wrycza, who was also a Roman Catholic priest. In April 1944, the Polish resistance liberated several Polish prisoners from German custody. The Germans set up a
Waffen-SS training ground in the vicinity, and located its administration in Brusy. Brusy was also the location of the Nazi German Bruss subcamp of the
Stutthof concentration camp, in which around 500 female prisoners were held as
forced labour. It has obtained town rights on 1 January 1988. == Notable people ==