the Austrian Habsburg Monarchy and incorporated into the crownland of Galicia. The Protestant citizens received the right to establish parishes according to the 1781 Patent of Toleration by Emperor Joseph II. Biala was head of the district with the same name, one of the 78 Bezirkshauptmannschaften in the Galicia crownland. Modern times Although separate, the two cities effectively functioned as one urban area known as Bielsko-Biała since the 19th century. With the dissolution of Austria-Hungary in 1918 according to the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, both cities became part of the reconstituted Polish state, although the majority of the population was German, forming a German language island. Some ethnic German citizens formed an anti-Polish, anti-Jewish Jungdeutsche Partei, supported financially by the Foreign Ministry of Nazi Germany. Its members smuggled weapons and waged a campaign of intimidating other German residents to leave for Germany. A considerable number of young Germans joined this Party during the mid-1930s. During the German invasion of Poland, which started World War II, the Einsatzgruppe I entered Bielsko-Biała in the first half of September 1939 to torture, plunder, and murder Jews. During the war Bielsko-Biała was annexed and occupied by Nazi Germany. In 1939 Germans arrested several Polish teachers and principals who were then deported to Nazi concentration camps and murdered there. A prison for Poles was operated by the Germans in Bielsko-Biała. Many of its Jewish residents were murdered at the nearby Auschwitz extermination camp. Less than 1000 of Bielsko-Biała's Jewish community of nearly 8000 survived the war. After the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, the remaining German population fled westward or were expelled. The town was polonized and gradually repopulated by Polish settlers. Several widely known Holocaust survivors from Bielsko-Biała were Roman Frister, Gerda Weissmann Klein and Kitty Hart-Moxon, all of whom wrote accounts of their experiences during World War II. The combined city of Bielsko-Biała was created administratively on 1 January 1951 when the two cities of Bielsko, and Biała (known until 1951 as Biała Krakowska), were unified. Geography The city is situated on the border of historic Upper Silesia and Lesser Poland at the eastern rim of the smaller Cieszyn Silesia region, about south of Katowice. Administrated within Silesian Voivodeship since 1999, the city was previously capital of Bielsko-Biała Voivodeship (1975–1998). Bielsko-Biała is one of the most important cities of the Beskidy Euroregion and the main city of the Bielsko Industrial Region (), part