ercentage much lower. The SSW political party representing the minority usually gains 20-25% of the votes in local elections, but by no means all of its voters are Danes. Before 1864, more than 70% belonged to what is now the minority, witnessed even today by the great number of Danish surnames in the Flensburg telephone directory (Asmussen, Claussen, Jacobsen, Jensen, Petersen, etc.). The upper classes and the learned at that time, however, were German, and since 1864, the German language has prevailed in the town.
On 1 April 1889, Flensburg became an independent city (kreisfreie Stadt) within the Province of Schleswig-Holstein, and at the same time still kept its status as seat of the Flensburg district. In 1920, the League of Nations decided that the matter of the German-Danish border would be settled by a vote. As a result of the plebiscite, and the way the voting zones were laid out, some of Flensburg's northern neighbourhoods were ceded to Denmark, whereas Flensburg as a whole voted with a great majority to stay in Germany.
In return for this great pro-German majority, the town of Flensburg was given a large hall, the "Deutsches Haus", which was endowed by the government as "thanks for German loyalty".
During the Second World War, the town was left almost unscathed by the air raids that devastated other German cities. However, in 1943, 20 children died when their nursery school was bombed, and shortly after the war ended, an explosion at a local munitions storage site claimed many victims.
In 1945, Admiral Karl D�nitz, who was briefly President (Reichspr�sident) of Nazi Germany once Adolf Hitler had appointed him his successor and then killed himself, fled to Flensburg with what was left of his government where they were arrested and deposed at the Navy School in M�rwik (German: Marineschule M�rwik) by British troops. Flensburg was thereby, for a few weeks, the seat of the last Third Reich government, and also Germany's capital
