, High Duchess consort of Poland The settlement was first mentioned in 1257 by the name of
Grodisze in a document by
Przemysł I of Greater Poland. It was referred to as a village belonging to the
Cistercians. The exact date when the town received its charter is unknown. Documents say that the town definitely had its town charter in 1303. It was a
private town of
Polish noble families of Ostroróg and
Opaliński, administratively located in the Kościan County in the
Poznań Voivodeship in the
Greater Poland Province of the Kingdom of Poland. The first
Jews settled in the town at the beginning of the 16th century. The first document to back this up was in 1505, mentioning the Jew
Abraham of Grodzisk In
Yiddish and
Hebrew, the town is known as גרידץ (Gritz or Gritza) Stanisław Ostroróg as a
Lutheran in 1563 gave the local church to Protestants and he also founded a new school in the town. nevertheless, the
Polish resistance movement was active in the town. Several Poles from Grodzisk, including policemen, doctors, and a co-founder of the local
Dyskobolia Grodzisk Wielkopolski football club, were murdered by the Russians in the large
Katyn massacre in April–May 1940. The Germans operated a Nazi prison in the town, and a subcamp of the
Stalag XXI-C prisoner-of-war camp, which in June 1941 was converted into the Stalag XXI-E POW camp for British, Polish and Serbian POWs, and into the Oflag XXI-C POW camp for
Allied officers in March 1942. Heliodor Jankiewicz, commander of the local unit of the
Narodowa Organizacja Bojowa organization, was arrested by the Germans in September 1941, and then sentenced to death and executed the following year. On January 27, 1945, the city was taken by the
Red Army, and afterwards restored to Poland. After
World War II, beer production declined and was discontinued in 1993. In 1999, Grodzisk again became a powiat seat when the powiats were reintroduced in the
Polish administrative reforms. ==Culture==