The Rhine Province (), also known as Rhenish Prussia () or synonymous with the Rhineland (), was the westernmost province of the Kingdom of Prussia and the Free State of Prussia, within the German Reich, from 1822 to 1946. It was created from the provinces of the Lower Rhine and Jülich-Cleves-Berg. Its capital was Koblenz and in 1939 it had 8 million inhabitants. The Province of Hohenzollern was militarily associated with the Oberpräsident of the Rhine Province. The Rhine Province was bounded on the north by the Netherlands, on the east by the Prussian provinces of Westphalia and Hesse-Nassau, and the grand duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt, on the southeast by the Palatinate (a district of the Kingdom of Bavaria), on the south and southwest by Lorraine, and on the west by Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands. The small exclave district of Wetzlar, wedged between the grand duchy states Hesse-Nassau and Hesse-Darmstadt was also part of the Rhine Province. The principality of Birkenfeld, on the other hand, was an enclave of the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg, a separate state of the German Empire. In 1911, the extent of the province was ; its extreme length, from north to south, was nearly , and its greatest breadth was just under . It included about of the course of the Rhine, which formed the eastern border of the province from Bingen to Koblenz, and then flows in a north-northwesterly direction inside the province, approximately following its eastern border. It is now part of North Rhine-Westphalia, Rhineland-Palatinate, Saarland, and Hesse. Demographics The population of the Rhine Province in 1905 was 6,435,778, including 4,472,058 Roman Catholics, 1,877,582 Protestants and 55,408 Jews. The left bank was predominantly Catholic, while on the right bank about half the population was Protestant. The great bulk of the population was ethnically German, although some villages and towns in the northern part (Province of Jülich-Cleves-Berg) were more oriented toward the Netherlands. On the western and southern frontiers (especially in the Saarland) resided smaller French-speaking communities, while the industrial region of the Ruhr housed recent Polish migrants from the eastern provinces of the Empire. The Rhine Province was the most densely populated part of Prussia, the general average being 617 persons per km2. The province contains a greater number of large towns than any other province in Prussia. Upwards of half, the population were supported by industrial and commercial pursuits, and barely a