During World War I, Poles in Bydgoszcz formed secret organizations, preparing to regain control of the city in the event of Poland regaining independence. After the war, despite the town's German majority, Bromberg was assigned to the recreated Polish state by the 1919 Versailles Treaty. The handover of the city to Poland by Germany in 1920 was smooth, as German officials and military came from Germany and did not identify with the city, the soldiers were not willing to fight, and there were no ethnic conflicts among the inhabitants, who were focused on the hardships of life, including large unemployment and poverty, during the war. Now officially Bydgoszcz again, the city belonged to the Poznań Voivodeship. The local populace was required to acquire Polish citizenship or leave the country. This led to a drastic decline in ethnically German residents (German minority in Poland), whose number within the town decreased to 11,016 in 1926. In 1938, it was made part of the Polish Greater Pomerania.