A Warmian village, known today as Gietrzwałd. In 1877 it lay within Prussia and the German Empire, during Bismarck's Kulturkampf. Two girls from poor, Polish-speaking Catholic families, Justyna Szafryńska, 13, and Barbara Samulowska, 12, stood at the centre of the apparitions there. Dietrichswalde followed in the wake of The Marpingen Apparitions of 1876, one of the copycat visions that spread across the country. The historian David Blackbourn later set it beside Marpingen and The Mettenbuch apparitions and pilgrimage, reading all three against the pressure of the Kulturkampf and the example of Lourdes.
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