Around the turn to the 20th century, Graudenz had become an important cultural centre in east Germany with numerous schools, municipal archives and a museum. The city was the site of a military prison for Polish activists. Released prisoners who left Europe formed the Gromada Grudziądz in Portsmouth, England in 1835 as part of the Great Emigration movement. Germanisation of the Poles in the Prussian Partition Frederick had nourished a particular contempt for the Polish state and people. Germanisation was enforced to assimilate residents. He brought in German and Frisian workers and peasants, who in his opinion, were more suitable for building up his new civilization. Frederick settled around 300,000 colonists in the eastern provinces of Prussia. Using state funds for colonization, German craftsmen were placed in all local Polish cities. A second colonization wave of ethnic Germans was pursued by Prussia after 1832. Laws were passed aimed at Germanisation of the Polish inhabited areas and 154,000 colonists were settled by the Prussian Settlement Commission before World War I. Professor Martin Kitchen writes that in areas where the Polish population lived alongside Germans a virtual apartheid existed, with bans on the Polish language and religious discrimination, besides attempts to colonize the areas with Germans. Approximately 16,850 Poles and about 26,000 Germans lived in the district of Graudenz. To resist Germanisation, Polish activists started to publish the newspaper "Gazeta Grudziądzka" in 1894. It advocated the social and economic emancipation of rural society and opposed Germanization – publishing articles critical of Germany. German attempts to repress its editor Wiktor Kulerski only helped to increase its circulation. From 1898 to 1901, a secret society of Polish students seeking to restore Polish independence operated in the city, but the activists were tried by German courts in 1901, frustrating their efforts. In Graudenz, German soldiers were stationed in the local fortress as part of the Germanization measures, and the authorities placed soldiers with the most chauvinistic attitude towards the Poles there. The German government brought in more stationed military, merchants and state officials to influence population figures. In the 1910 census 84% of the population of the town and 58% of the county was recorded as German. Census figures published by the German Empire have been criticised as unreliable. Historians believe they have a high degree of falsification; formal pressure on census takers (predominantly school-teachers) was possible, and a new bilingual category was created to