Głowno

Built in 1840, Zabrzeźnia manor was last owned by Count Aleksandra Komorowska

In 1793, the Second Partition of Poland took place, whereby the city was taken over by Prussia. With the resurgence of Polish statehood and establishment of the Duchy of Warsaw in 1806, the area was incorporated therein. In 1815, upon defeat of Napoleon town fell to the Russians and became part of the newly formed Congress Poland.

In 1869, Russian occupying authorities took away Głowno's town rights, a strong punitive measure intended as a humiliation for its citizens' participation in the January Uprising. In 1870, Czar Alexander II of Russia downgraded a large number of Polish towns to villages in all of Polish territories under Russian administration, and Głowno suffered the same fate.

In 1903, the railway connection between Warsaw and Łódź was built through Głowno, therewith representing a positive factor for the economy. The first volunteer fire department was formed in 1908. In 1924, the "Buch and Werner Norblin Brothers" company opened a factory branch in Głowno. Upon resurrection of the Polish Republic in 1918, the new Polish government reestablished the lost city status and rights in 1925.

Mass grave of 24 Poles murdered by the Germans in two mass executions in 1943 and 1944

With the outbreak of World War II on September 1, 1939, the area was a scene of the Battle of Bzura and some fighting occurred in Głowno vicinity. The town was overrun by the German Wehrmacht during the second week of September. Nazi German administration was established and Głowno became part of German administrative unit known as General Government. During the occupation numerous acts of Polish resistance, Armia Krajowa etc., occurred in Głowno including the clandestine execution of a Roman Catholic priest who worked as an informant for the Nazi police. Nazi reprisals took the lives of many citizens, including those murdered in mass executions at the town's cemetery and inside the town's German police headquarters and also in the Nazi occupied Warsaw's infamous prison Pawiak. Many citizens were forced into slave labor for the Germans and some were shipped to various factories and farms across Germany.

The German authorities established a Jewish ghetto in Głowno in May 1940,[2] in order to confine its Jewish population for the purpose of persecution and exploitation.[3] The ghetto was liquidated in March 1941, when all its 5,600 inhabitants were transported in cattle trucks to Łowicz and from there to the Warsaw Ghetto, the largest ghetto in all of Nazi occupied Europe with over 400,000 Jews crammed into an area of 1.3 square miles (3.4 km²), or 7.2 persons per room.[4] By the time Nazi-occupied Poland was liberated, not a single Jewish ghetto remained on Polish lands.[5]

In August 1943 and March 1944, the Germans carried out two massacres of 14 and 10 Poles, respectively. During the Warsaw Uprising, in August 1944, the Germans deported 3,000 Varsovians from the Dulag 121 in Pruszków in Pruszków, where they were initially imprisoned, to Głowno.[6] These Poles were mainly old people and women with children, many were sent to nearby villages, while over 1,000 stayed in the town and gmina as of mid-November 1944.[6]

Soviet Red Army took Głowno in January 1945, and it was then restored to Poland, however with a Soviet-installed communist regime, which then stayed in power until the Fall of Communism in the 1980s.

There was anti-communist resistance, by the cursed soldiers, in and around the town. After the war many factories have been built in town, as the population expanded schools have been built and generally town prospered until the crisis of the 1980s when along with the rest of the country town and its inhabitants suffered serious economic hardships and curtailed civil rights and freedoms, many of the numerous workers being members of the Solidarity Movement. In the 1990s, under the Third Polish Republic, town and the inhabitants at first prospered, however plagued by quality of life crimes, especially its textile and automotive factories and manufactures were expanding, but this boom suffered collapse by the end of the decade, most of the textile manufacturing in bankruptcy and factories facing closures etc. Since the joining of the European Union by Poland, many town inhabitants left in search of better life in nearby capital city of Warsaw and Poznań, and especially large migration has been witnessed to the United Kingdom, since 2010 to Germany and some to Italy, and town's population decreased.

Głowno is surrounded by forests of pine, oak, birch, and fir. They are the remainder of the forests that formerly grew in the region of Łódź. They cover the area of the valley of the village of Olszowa. The northern forested part of Głowno has been declared as the Zabrzeźnia Reserve. The total area is 27.6 hectares. In the field of the reserve grows an oak-hornbeam forest. In Głowno, fir and beech are the main objects of preservation for the Zabrzeźnia Reserve. The northern limit of the occurrence of this tree crosses through here. The forested valley of three rivers form a unique microclimate around the region of Głowno.

The yearly air temperature averages 7.5C, in the summer +10C, in the winter - 2.5C. The annual amount of rainfall varies around 500 millimeters.