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Оглавление1The German Quest for Polish Land
Anti-Polish Germanization Policy: The Path toward the German Nation-State
Modern German-Polish relations are rooted in the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that took place from 1772 to 1795. These territorial seizures were cemented in 1815 by the Congress of Vienna, making the czar of Russia thenceforth king of the newly created “Congress Poland” in personal union while furthermore reaffirming Austria’s annexation of Galicia as well as Prussia’s annexation of West Prussia and the Grand Duchy of Posen.
It was Prussia that profited most from Poland’s dismemberment. Although West Prussia was immediately assimilated into the kingdom’s administrative structure as a new province, King Frederick William III showed a certain amount of forbearance to the populace in the Grand Duchy of Posen on May 19, 1815, when he declared that they would not need to “deny [their] nationality,” that their “religion is to be preserved,” and also that their “language is to be used, alongside German, in all public proceedings.”1 Attacks against these “supreme sanctities of a nation” aimed at “denationalizing a people” would achieve precisely the opposite of what Prussia’s education minister Karl vom Stein zum Altenstein described as Berlin’s sole desire: “perfectly good subjects.”2
Neither Prussia’s initially conciliatory policy nor Russia’s harsher one could hinder the emergence of a Polish national movement, which soon succeeded in making the Polish question a perennial concern on the European agenda. The partitioning powers came to feel this by 1830 at the latest, when the July Revolution in France also inflamed Poland, ultimately leading to an uprising against the Russian occupation troops. European reactions were divided, the German lands not excepted: while the government in Berlin feared that the disturbances could spread to the Prussian part of Poland, the bourgeois nationalist opposition felt great sympathy for the Polish insurrectionists and saw Poland as a key battleground through which Europe’s entire restorationist order might be overturned.3 In this camp, a potential reestablishment of the Polish state was not considered a threat at all: instead, it was to be welcomed as a positive step forward in their own struggle for German unification.4 Regardless of whether this really reflected “cosmopolitanism” (as Michael G. Müller claims) or was instead more about “pan-nationalism” (as described by Reinhart Koselleck), the Prussian government found both equally suspect.5 Appointed Oberpräsident of Posen Province in December 1830, Eduard von Flottwell was sent there with the mission of nipping feared irredentist aspirations in the bud by intensifying the assimilation of the local populace and marginalizing the Polish aristocracy and the Catholic Church. Flottwell’s measures marked a radical turnaround in Prussia’s Poland policy, putting the Prussian state on an ill-fated collision course with a large part of its own populace in the eastern provinces.6
The sympathy shown by the German bourgeoisie would prove less durable than the uncompromising stance of the Prussian state. Although the former would flare up briefly once more with the arrest and conviction of Polish conspirators in 1846–47, the situation changed fundamentally when the Poles, during the turmoil of the March Revolution (1848), took action by setting up parallel administrations and establishing armed units in parts of the Grand Duchy. Prussia’s liberal “March government” offered the granting of autonomy rights, not to the entire Grand Duchy, but to its eastern part around the city of Gniezno; but Polish nationalists indignantly rejected the concession as inadequate and decided to pursue open struggle.7 The violent suppression of the uprising in Prussian Poland happened simultaneously with the antidemocratic backlash reversing the German revolution. The realization that the fulfillment of Polish ambitions would collide with the political goal of German unification ultimately extinguished even the one last brief flare-up of friendly feelings toward Poland, so that the former image of freedom-loving Poles gave way to an image of brutal rebels against a legitimate order.8
The change in feeling was also apparent in the debates of the Frankfurt Parliament (1848–49). Polish calls to be left out of a German Empire that was to be founded on the principle of a common nationality were dismissed. The idea of a restored Poland that incorporated some Prussian territory was denigrated as “feeble-minded sentimentality” by left-wing nationalist parliamentarian Wilhelm Jordan, who declared the Poles to be “mortal enemies” of a united Germany.9 The German revolutions of 1848–49 were thus derailed by not only social conflicts, but also national ones.10 Forced to choose between liberty and unity, the majority chose unity and ultimately lost both to the counterrevolution.11
The 1871 establishment of the German Empire as a nation-state naturally rekindled the debate over national minorities. Just as they had done in Frankfurt in 1848, Polish parliamentarians protested the incorporation of Polish-majority regions into an entity that was explicitly based on a nation-state concept and that was unwilling to grant minority rights to national groups.12 On April 1, 1871, the Polish parliamentarian Alfred von Zoltowski declared that he and his colleagues would certainly be “the last ones” to fail to rejoice in what the Franco-Prussian war had achieved, namely, “the most powerful reaffirmation of a principle for whose upholding we have always stood up. . . . I mean the nationality principle”—but, in his view, the principle also had to apply to the Polish nation within the German Empire.13 In the newly established Reichstag, such demands met with peremptory rejection, thereby demonstrating how the former bourgeois opposition had now come to identify with the new state. It was with general approval that Zoltowski’s protest was rebutted by Otto von Bismarck himself, who made clear to the Polish faction that in the eyes of the government they belonged “to no other people than the Prussians, among whom I also count myself.” Echoing the ostensible “civilizing mission” of the medieval German eastward expansion that was rediscovered in the late nineteenth century, Bismarck threatened that the Prussian government would “continue in its efforts to spread the blessings of legal security and of civilized behavior, among both the grateful and the ungrateful.”14
Bismarck’s invocation of the old Prussian supranational conception of citizenship pointed to a model that had already become historically obsolete in 1871, no longer authoritative even for the new imperial government that he led. On the contrary: with the achievement of unity on the external stage, it was now time to push for it internally as well. In this context, external war played an important part in the developing of a German national consciousness and the founding of the German Empire, and it was a warlike logic that shaped the imperial government’s integration policy: the internal opponent was “declared an ‘enemy of the Empire’ and put under police supervision” in a policy aimed not only at Catholics, Social Democrats, and Jews, but also at the ethnic minorities, of which the Poles were by far the largest.15
The Catholics were the first group to be labeled enemies of the new nation-state. Although it might be an exaggeration to say that Bismarck targeted Catholics because doing so would hit the Polish Prussians in particular, it nonetheless remains undisputed that the relevant measures had a “clearly anti-Polish edge” and that no part of the German Empire suffered the consequences more dramatically than Prussian Poland did.16
One focus of this conflict was the imperial government’s secularization of schooling. During consultations on school legislation, Bismarck maintained the opinion that the slow progress in assimilating the Polish-speaking populace was due to the obstructionism of the Catholic Church. According to him, “the influence of the local clergy hinders . . . the usage of the German language, because the Slavs and the Romanics, in league with Ultramontanism, are trying to maintain coarseness and ignorance, and are fighting everywhere in Europe against Germanicism, which is trying to spread enlightenment.”17 In March 1872, the churches lost their authoritative role in the running of schools, which in the eastern parts of Prussia became instruments of Germanization policy. That same year, the province of Silesia declared German to be the language of instruction, and the provinces of Posen and Prussia did so in 1873. At that point, Polish was permitted only during religion classes, but soon afterward, they too had to be conducted in German.18 Finally, on August 28, 1876, German was declared the sole official language, thereby abolishing the bilingualism that had existed at least in principle in the province of Posen.19 The path was cleared for a policy of repression that was dressed up as a civilizing mission.20
But even after the state took control of school supervision, its attacks on the Catholic Church did not ease up. With what became known as the “May Laws,” in 1873, the Prussian government started massively intervening in the church’s internal administration for the first time, not only by regulating the training of the clergy, but also by subjecting them to the disciplinary authority of the state. Disobedient clerics were either arrested or exiled, thereby decimating the Catholic clergy over the following decades—in the Archdiocese of Gnesen (Gniezno) alone, the policy removed about one-third of the clergy.21
Even Heinrich Class, however, the head of the radical Pan-German League (Alldeutscher Verband), later believed that “Bismarck, in the heat of the battle, had chosen the wrong instrument.”22 And it was true that from the state’s point of view, the outcome was disappointing, for the domestic political costs of this confrontation with the Catholic Church forced Bismarck into a compromise by the late 1880s. In domestic politics, these attacks had led to an increase in support for political Catholicism and to the founding of the Center Party (Zentrumspartei), and, in Prussian Poland, they had failed to advance the Germanization campaign or to isolate the Catholic Church from the Polish-speaking populace—instead, they consolidated the relationship.
But the failures of the state’s coercive measures against the Polish-speaking populace led not to a revision of the policy course, but instead to its radicalization. No longer trusting solely the assimilative power of German culture, the Prussian government decided to “incorporate eradication measures into governmental policy” and direct them against those who either seemed incapable of assimilating or whose assimilation was not wanted.23 The earlier skepticism that had already been directed toward the idea of assimilating the clergy and aristocracy was now expanded to include other classes as well.
This reorientation of Germanization policy reached its first climax with Bismarck’s decree of February 22, 1885, in which he ordered the deportation of Poles residing in Prussia’s eastern provinces who had still not acquired Prussian citizenship.24 The failures of Prussia’s assimilation policy were blamed on migrants from the Russian and Austrian partitions, evoking fears of an “inundation by Slavicdom.”25 Bismarck openly stated that it was necessary to expel those who “are Polonizing the border provinces, the Germanization of which is our governmental task.”26 The first expulsions began in February and March 1885 and sometimes included families who had lived there for generations. Around forty-eight thousand people in total were expelled from Posen, West Prussia, and Upper Silesia, including some nine thousand Jews—a relatively large number, in light of their much lower percentage of the population, thereby underlining the antisemitic undercurrent of the actions.27 Although these expulsions met with heated protests, not only from the Social Democrats and Center Party members in the Reichstag, but also from the Prussian Junkers who were losing farmworkers in a region already short of labor, the expulsions nonetheless continued until 1887, with a few scattered instances thereafter.28
Besides these deportations, the decades leading into World War I would see Germanization policy combining with another concept, one that is commonly associated with Nazi ideology: the “Germanization of the soil.”29 The attacks on the Catholic Church had resulted in particularly harsh measures in Prussian Poland, because the state authorities believed that the lack of progress in assimilating the Polish populace could be explained only by the resistance of the Polish elites. In pursuit of the same goal, attention now turned once again to the Polish aristocracy. After its political power had been broken in the 1830s under Oberpräsident Flottwell, the time had now come to eliminate its economic influence as well and “rid the land of the trichinosis of Polish aristocracy,” as proclaimed by Bismarck in a further biologization of the political discourse.30
Bismarck’s original idea was to push through a legislative package against the Polish aristocracy, which was similar to the 1878 Socialist Laws aimed against the Social Democrats, but the plan was ultimately superseded by a proposal put forward in 1885 by two ministers in the Prussian state government, Robert Lucius and Gustav von Gossler. The proposal provided for the targeted purchasing of Polish estates, which would then be subdivided and allocated to German colonists.31 The relevant legislation was passed by the Reichstag on April 26, 1886. The Prussian government initially put up 100 million Reichsmarks for the land purchases and established the Prussian Settlement Commission (Preußische Ansiedlungskommission), based in the city of Posen (today Poznań), which was to select the properties, subdivide them, prepare them for settlement, and finally sell them cheaply to German farmers.
From the Prussian perspective, satisfactory results were achieved only during the early period. Over time, the Settlement Commission began to face a formidable challenge from the constantly growing number of Polish self-help organizations, which had been pursuing what was called “praca organiczna” (“organic work”) since the mid-1860s as a way to strengthen national self-assertion through intensive educational efforts in culture and scholarship, as well as the development of a modernized “Polish” economy.32 With the foundation of various farmers’ associations, credit cooperatives, and banks during this period, “the tide was basically turned against the Germanization campaign,” so that after 1896, more “German” lands were falling into Polish hands than vice versa.33 The Settlement Commission was starting to lose the “economic turf war over land ownership.”34
The effect of these new setbacks on large swaths of the German Empire’s political elite, particularly on the right wing, can hardly be overestimated. In the political upheavals after Bismarck’s downfall—characterized by the collapse of the ruling right-wing coalition, the politicization of large parts of the populace, the formation of mass-membership parties, the rise of social democracy, and the formation of interest groups and trade unions—these failures accelerated a structural reorientation, within the right wing as well, that expected from the government a decidedly nationalist policy orientation both at home and abroad and strove to achieve it through the establishment of nationalist pressure groups.35 For these radical nationalists, the Polish question quickly became “by far the most important ‘national battleground,’” and it also dominated the first congress of what was probably the most influential of these groups, the Pan-German League, founded in 1891. Its members demanded a radicalization of existing policy, claiming that this would remain unsuccessful as long as it targeted only the Church and aristocracy but not the strengthening Polish middle class, for it was the latter that was enabling Polish tenacity.36 The Pan-Germans then argued above all that the economic ruination of every affluent Pole was essential for a successful Germanization policy, and that long-term success could be achieved only with measures showing the Polish-speaking populace that “voluntary” assimilation into the German majority was in their own interests.37
Pressure groups like the Pan-German League, then, stood at the forefront of a movement that called on the state to wage economic war against the Polish minority. One of its founders, Alfred Hugenberg, already a key player on the Settlement Commission, demanded through an unsigned article in 1899 that the state be given the right to expropriate large Polish landholdings—an idea that was initially taken up only by Ferdinand Hansemann, one of the cofounders of the German Eastern Marches Society (Deutscher Ostmarkenverein), another radical nationalist group.38 The discussion then shifted to a proposal from the Settlement Commission to restrict the construction activities of Polish land purchasers.39 When this discriminatory measure also failed to achieve the desired result, and the Settlement Commission was instead forced to admit in its twentieth annual report that Polish organizations had outpaced it in terms of total land purchases, and that even with its own land acquisitions in the past year, up to 90 percent was bought from Germans, Hugenberg’s demand was taken up once again.40 The Eastern Marches Society brought back his campaign and stated in its mouthpiece publication Die Ostmark: “The weapon for slashing and for attacking, the weapon for regaining at least a part of the soil that has been alienated from us, is offered solely by the right of expropriation.”41 Finally, in late 1907, a bill was introduced in the Prussian legislature that would expand the definition of the “public interest”—a necessary justification for expropriations—to now include the “ideal of national homogeneity.”42 When the law was passed in March 1908, it represented a further erosion of the equality guaranteed by the Prussian constitution—even though this particular law was applied “only” four times and the expropriations were still tied to compensation payments.
Together with the deportations of the late 1880s, these events represented the climax of anti-Polish repressive measures during the nineteenth century, as well as a significant turning point in the Germanization policy of Prussia and Germany. To be sure, the preunification Kingdom of Prussia had already seen a gradual nationalistic shift in its anti-Polish policies, which were increasingly oriented toward the linguistic and cultural assimilation of the Polish populace. There had never been any doubt, however, that the members of this demographic group—although Polish-speaking—were in fact Prussians, individuals whose complete integration into the German-speaking majority was not only desirable, but virtually a necessity.
The radicalization effectively declared the bankruptcy of the existing policy, which had assumed that gradual assimilation was the natural course of history. Certainly, a flurry of increasingly fevered writings had appeared, recalling the German people’s past as a settler folk, highlighting the ostensible superiority of German culture and defending the goal of assimilating the Polish-speaking populace. Pointing to the nine million Germans who had already been lost to emigration, Ernst Hasse (chairman of the Pan-German League from 1893 to 1908) wrote that it was only right and proper to counterbalance “about half of this loss through the Germanization of aliens, as an equivalent.” In this context (and particularly interesting for the present volume’s investigations), Hasse also defended this course of action against a criticism that had newly flared up on the right, that the assimilation of non-German groups might represent a racial threat:
There are fears that the Germanization of the Poles will lead to a deterioration of the German race. We maintain that this does not apply to the Poles who live on the German Empire’s territory. In many cases, these are only linguistically Slavs, and in ethnographic regard, are of no worse a blood mixture than the greater part of western Germandom. The German part of their blood stems from the time of Germanic settlement in the Vistula region before the Migration Period, from the countless German colonists in this region since the year 800. In cultural terms too, the Poles are standing entirely on German shoulders.43
The Polish-speaking Prussians, however, seemed less convinced by such sentiments. The enforcement of the German language laws, as well as cultural and educational policies in general, had to be increasingly delegated to the police, and when student strikes affected half the schools in the province of Posen during the 1906–7 school year, the truant children were beaten and their parents were delivered to the local gendarmerie.44 Results from economic discrimination were no better. Although the Settlement Commission had devoured a billion Reichsmarks by 1913, twice as much as the empire’s entire colonial revenue from overseas, it was just as much a failure.45 Significantly, the Prussian government not only let itself be outmaneuvered by Polish landowners, banks, and cooperatives, it also encountered increasing difficulties in finding any “Germans” at all for its already rather modest number of land parcels.46 The constantly trumpeted “German settler impulse [Siedlungswille]” was ultimately realized on the backs of ethnic Germans from Russia, who had few alternatives as newcomers.47 Meanwhile, the constitutional integrity of both Prussia and the empire had fallen by the wayside. The Polish parliamentarian Anton Sulkowski addressed the fatal dynamic as early as 1908 in the Prussian upper chamber: “Millions upon millions are being sacrificed, but the millions don’t suffice—these power plays are devouring point after point of constitutional law.”48
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As Peter Walkenhorst rightly emphasizes, disillusioning experiences like these were an important factor in causing radical nationalists like Heinrich Class (Hasse’s successor) to hope for war, which would enable measures that were unachievable in peacetime. What Class had in mind was not so much a return to Bismarck’s deportation policy but rather its complete radicalization. An indication can be found in the original version of a pamphlet Class wrote during the 1911 Agadir Crisis, in which he advocated that areas to be annexed after the upcoming war with France be handed over “free of people.”49 The phrase disappeared under governmental pressure but then reappeared a little later in his anonymously published book Wenn ich der Kaiser wär’ (If I were the kaiser), this time also directed against Russia and referring to Eastern European territories that should be ceded to the German Empire.50
With the outbreak of World War I, such ideas flowed seamlessly into discussions of German war goals, lending the debates a distinctly anti-Polish edge. As elucidated in the plans of Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, dated September 9, 1914, the German Empire’s goal in Eastern Europe was to push back “Russia from the German border,” producing a power vacuum that would allow the emergence of a string of states permeated by German capital and politically tied to the German Empire, thereby ensuring long-term German hegemony over Europe.51 Although Berlin and Vienna may have diverged on the concrete details of this vision, the German Empire nonetheless insisted on a “rounding off” of its eastern border through the future annexation of what was euphemistically called a “border strip” (“Grenzstreifen”). Among the German Empire’s political leadership, the concept was found for the first time in meeting notes written by Bavarian state premier Georg von Hertling, who met with Bethmann-Hollweg on December 3, 1914, and recorded that the latter was thinking of a “border adjustment” in the east. In the same sentence, Hertling added that “the narrow territory falling to Prussia should be evacuated by the Russians.”52 Although the phrasing is not entirely unambiguous, in that (as pointed out by Imanuel Geiss) it cannot be said without a doubt whether Bethmann-Hollweg meant the expulsion of only the ethnic Russians or also of Poles holding Russian citizenship, the further course of their discussion pointed to the latter. Two central issues defined subsequent plans prepared by the German Empire’s governing bodies: the preferred width of the Polish zone and how to deal with the Jewish and Polish people living there. Hertling and Bethmann-Hollweg were of one mind, however, in their desire to push the German border as far east as possible and, after the disappointing results of Prussia’s Germanization policy, to also deport as much of the local non-German populace as possible.
In all probability, Hertling’s meeting notes represent the end of a political deliberation process that began within the Imperial Chancellery, during which the annexation of Polish territories was decided. The second step was now to discuss matters of practical implementation: for this purpose, various offices were asked to prepare expert opinions on potential cessions of land on the empire’s eastern border. Here it is worth taking a closer look at two of the resulting responses, in an excursus that is important in shedding light on the background of the population shifts that were actually implemented during World War II. In my view, particular importance needs to be attached to these expert opinions in any discussion about the continuities and discontinuities of German imperialist policy in Eastern Europe.
Among the first responses received was that of Adolf von Batocki (Oberpräsident of East Prussia), dated December 20, 1914. In the “interests of world peace,” he called for the annexation of a border strip covering some thirty-six thousand square kilometers, in order to create in Eastern Europe the “maximum possible conformity between state borders and linguistic ones.” He wrote that not only was this border strip of military strategic value, but annexing it would also satisfy the alleged settler impulse of the empire’s German populace and could furthermore serve as a catchment area for the ethnic Germans coming from Eastern Europe, who were to be resettled here in order to rescue the “white” race from the “so massively predominating colored races.”53 The non-German inhabitants of this border strip, whom Batocki calculated to be more than 85 percent of the population and thus almost two million people, were to be removed from the strip through a “generously dimensioned resettlement.” This large-scale plan for the ethnic cleansing of Eastern Europe met with approval (according to Batocki) from the German chancellor.54 Just a few months later, on March 25, 1915, Friedrich von Schwerin, head of the Frankfurt Governmental Region (Regierungsbezirk Frankfurt, a subdivision of Brandenburg Province, with its capital at Frankfurt an der Oder), presented his own no less radical proposal. In the view of Schwerin, who had begun his civil service career at the Settlement Commission and remained a vehement supporter of “internal colonization” his entire life, it was in the east, with the pushing back of Russia and the expansion of territory, that the foundation would be laid for the German Empire to become a world power. The annexed border strip would be resettled through a population exchange, replacing the non-German populace with ethnic Germans from as far away as the Volga colonies.55 The resulting German settlement belt would isolate the Prussian Poles, forcing them to choose complete assimilation or—once again—emigration to Polish territories beyond the border.
The apparent readiness of the German Empire’s leadership to radicalize the Germanization policy of the prewar era, and to make it a goal even in the midst of World War I, was not only shaped and reinforced by the support of Prussian administration heads but also influenced by a particular and at least semipublic debate of the period, one whose participants were often members of the relevant pressure groups and thus had good connections to governmental bodies. One example here was a very early initiative by Ludwig Bernhard, a Berlin professor and member of the Eastern Marches Society, who was one of many who refused to be silenced by an early wartime edict banning public discussion of German war goals; he circulated a memorandum revealingly called Land ohne Menschen (Land without people), which called for the annexation of Polish territory and a replacement of the local population with ethnic Germans from Russia. The memorandum made an impression on the German chancellor.56 Bernhard’s proposals were taken up also in other memoranda, such as the notorious Intellektuellendenkschrift über die Kriegsziele (Intellectuals’ memorandum on war aims), dated July 8, 1915. Friedrich Meinecke’s article of May 6, 1915, also deserves particular attention, for it went further by calling for the Prussian Poles to be expelled even from the provinces of Posen and West Prussia. Meinecke concluded his remarks by writing that “earlier, one would have considered this fantastical, and yet it is not unfeasible after all.”57 With this, Meinecke had casually surpassed the initial positions of even the Pan-German League and the Eastern Marches Society, which had likewise supported a policy of annexation and expulsion but had made an exception for the Prussian Poles.58
When the participants of an interministerial conference gathered at the imperial chancellery on July 13, 1915, in order to evaluate the submitted memoranda and decide on the next course of action, the consensus-building process was already well advanced. The conference endorsed the annexation of a border strip and the envisaged resettlement measures, that is, replacing the local non-German populace primarily with ethnic Germans from Russia. The German civil administration in occupied Congress Poland was instructed to quietly hinder the ethnic German inhabitants of the border strip from moving away and, where possible, to already start expelling the Polish and Jewish populace, in order to create a fait accompli for use in future peace talks.59 Although it seems these instructions were not executed (or not to any great extent), the German Empire had nonetheless shown—at least at the planning level—that it was ready to pursue a policy of large-scale ethnic cleansing.
The enduring importance of the Polish border strip in Germany’s agenda during subsequent stages of the war is shown by the tenacity with which the relevant parts of the German leadership continued holding fast to this ambition, even after it had long since proved to be a clearly dysfunctional policy, since it torpedoed every attempt to win over the Poles beyond the empire’s borders as allies. By 1917, the increasingly hostile mood of the populace in the occupied Polish territories had finally forced a rethinking within the empire’s leadership circles. Although population policy motivations meant they could not bring themselves to entirely abandon the idea of annexing a border strip, there was a call to at least reduce its extent. Thus, while the empire’s leadership had not yet abandoned its plans for a large-scale resettlement project, one that envisaged the resettlement of ethnic Germans from Russia and even from the non-German regions of Austria-Hungary, Bethmann-Hollweg at the same time pushed the Army High Command (Oberste Heeresleitung, or OHL) in April 1917 for a significant reduction of the border strip. This emerging shift in priorities within the German Empire’s civilian leadership quickly led it into an increasingly serious conflict with the OHL. Of course, the government’s shift in priorities was nothing other than a direct reaction to the military’s worsening situation on the eastern front. When this suddenly improved in 1918 with Russia’s military collapse, the new chancellor, Georg von Hertling, immediately let himself be swept up in the OHL’s confident predictions of victory. Besides large-scale expropriations, General Erich Ludendorff also called for a comprehensive resettlement program. And even after the Allies succeeded with their first major breakthroughs and the western front began to falter, the empire’s leadership still stood firm—against the Poles. At a time when the imminent German defeat “was really obvious to every thinking person” (as Geiss wrote), Foreign Minister Paul von Hintze made a fool of himself during a meeting with the Polish representative in Berlin, Count Adam Ronikier, by officially introducing German demands—even as late as September 19, 1918—for the ceding of Polish territories. The subsequent reaction in Polish circles was that “even on their deathbed, the Germans are still thieving.”60
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Knowing what happened during World War II, when Poland played an even bigger role in Germany’s war agenda, it makes sense to search for such lines of continuity. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, for example, sees in the ideas of the Eastern Marches Society an early manifestation of the Nazi “Lebensraum” (“living space”) ideology, and Philip T. Rutherford, in presenting one of the most recent studies of Nazi population policy in Poland, notes that the commonalities are “so striking that a connection seems almost undeniable.”61
But it can be pointed out with at least equal justification that even the Eastern Marches Society, right up to the end, had pushed for an assimilation of the Polish-speaking populace. According to Harry K. Rosenthal, “since the notion of ‘blood’ remained foreign to this group, this view prevented any easy identification of [them] with the later Nazis.”62 And the resettlement plans of the German Empire’s civilian and military leadership, which bore the closest resemblance to the subsequent policy of the Nazis, remained exactly that: plans. Just as state conduct was still subject to legal constraints before the war, so was the German leadership likewise unprepared to actually annex Polish territory during the war or to put into action the already existing deportation plans.
It is certainly true that “Bismarck and Hitler were not interchangeable,” but the radicalization of Prussian and German Germanization policy since the 1890s, with its plans for an ethnic cleansing of Europe, would nonetheless prove to be decisive in influencing later developments: its experiences formed the background against which the Nazis would later formulate their own Germanization policy.63
Poland’s German Minorities as Accomplices and Instruments of German Aggression
Ethnonationalist foreign policy is a modern phenomenon. As late as the German Empire period, ethnic Germans abroad still did not play an appreciable role in foreign-policy considerations.64 This would change with Germany’s defeat in World War I. Greatly weakened and subjected to the restrictions of the Versailles Treaty, it was initially the Weimar Republic and then Nazi Germany that, in the effort to mobilize all available resources, identified the German minorities in the newly created states of eastern central Europe as an extension of their own aggressive interests and found active collaborators within these groups.
Revisionism in the Weimar Republic
The Treaty of Versailles meant that Germany had to bury all hopes of German domination in Eastern Europe. Instead of a greater German economic sphere, Berlin was now confronted by a string of independent states, which France had furthermore drawn into alliances meant to block any subsequent German pushes to the east. This new constellation of Eastern European states drew its legitimation from Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points. In proclaiming the right to national self-determination, the US president believed that a solution had also been found to the many nationalist confrontations that he considered had contributed to the outbreak of war.65 But this was certainly not the case. As recently noted by Eric D. Weitz, the Treaty of Versailles marked a “move from the Vienna system to the Paris system,” in which state sovereignty was no longer defined primarily—let alone solely—in territorial terms but also had to prove itself in terms of the resident populace, or in terms of the resident ethnically or religiously defined demographic groups.66 New states answering the call for national self-determination arose from the liquidation of old empires in Central and Eastern Europe, but at the same time, nationalism was to be held in check by the various minority rights agreements imposed on these states.67 But this policy was unsuccessful in the face of “the genie that would not go back into the bottle.”68 Particularly in a state that derived its legitimacy from its people, or more precisely from its Volk (folk, but variously meaning people, nation, or ethnonation), defined in ethnic terms, it was easy to see the existence of local ethnic minorities as a threat. This is how the ideal of ethnically homogeneous nation-states came to lie “at the heart of inter-war European politics.”69
Revising the Treaty of Versailles became the main foreign-policy goal for each successive government of the Weimar Republic. It was not only about the annulment of treaty limitations on German sovereignty, but also the recovery of lost territories. The latter aspect soon solidified into an anti-Polish policy aimed at retaking formerly Prussian territories.
In view of the impending referenda in the eastern border regions, as well as the futile attempts by a multitude of paramilitary Selbstschutz (self-defense) and Freikorps (free corps) groups—backed by the German military—to reverse territorial changes by force, the German delight at the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland, while surprising at first glance, also becomes understandable. Unhappy with the eastern border drawn by the victorious Allied powers, the Polish army had invaded the Soviet Union, but only barely escaped a complete military catastrophe after a series of Soviet victories—which were celebrated in Berlin “as if these were German military successes.”70 The unexpected reversal just outside Warsaw in August 1920, however, along with the subsequent peace treaty favoring Poland, did not cause German foreign policymakers to give up on their cherished belief in the Polish state’s imminent collapse. Instead, Berlin turned to reviving the old German-Russian policy of encircling Poland.71 This received a decisive boost with the Treaty of Rapallo, signed in April 1922. Hans von Seeckt, the German army’s commander in chief, who immediately after the war had transferred regular troops into Border Defense East (Grenzschutz Ost) and commanded them in the fight against Polish armed units, expressed German hopes as follows: “Poland’s existence is intolerable, and incompatible with Germany’s living requirements. It must disappear, and will disappear through its own weaknesses and through Russia, with German assistance.”72 Here, von Seeckt was not only reflecting the revanchist mood of the German military, but also describing the core of governmental policy, as was confirmed by Joseph Wirth, a liberal parliamentarian from the Center Party who was chancellor of Germany when he signed the Treaty of Rapallo and declared thereafter that “Poland must be dealt with. It is toward this goal that my policymaking is geared. . . . On this point, I am entirely in agreement with the military, especially with General von Seeckt.”73
It was only with the accession of Gustav Stresemann, who was initially both chancellor and foreign minister before continuing as the Weimar Republic’s longest-serving foreign minister, that a major shift occurred in 1924 in the German attitude toward Poland. As Stresemann made clear during a confidential meeting of all German national-level and Prussian state-level ministries shortly after entering office, he also felt that a revision of the Versailles Treaty was necessary: “The creation of a state whose political borders encompass all parts of the German people, meaning those who live within a contained settlement area in central Europe and desire union with Germany, is the distant goal of German hopes.”74 He was willing, however, to accept the politically feasible as the basic premise of a new German foreign policy. Instead of an undifferentiated course of overall confrontation, he pursued a policy that combined cautious rapprochement with a step-by-step revision of Versailles, a strategy that essentially aimed to create a split in Europe. It was hoped that concessions in Western Europe, particularly in satisfying France’s security needs, would engender sympathy for Germany’s desire to change the status quo—without military force—in Eastern Europe.75 This tactical shift showed great promise, as shown by the signing of the Locarno Treaties in December 1925, through which the Weimar Republic formally recognized its new western border in exchange for (among other things) its acceptance into the League of Nations and the withdrawal of French troops from the Rhineland. In contrast, plans for an “eastern Locarno agreement,” meaning comparable border guarantees for Poland and Czechoslovakia, fell through in the face of German resistance. Speaking to the Reichstag’s Foreign Affairs Committee, Stresemann himself rejected any explicit renunciation of force in amending Germany’s eastern border, for this would have implied a recognition of the existing land possessions.76 Therefore, it would not be an exaggeration to identify Locarno as the starting point for the “decline of the European security framework.”77 After all, the Weimar Republic had thereby taken the “first step on the path toward the desired revision of the Versailles Treaty,” and Poland was forced to accept the subordination of its own security interests to those of its Western allies, thereby downgrading Poland’s western frontier to a “second-class border.”78
The Weimar Republic thoroughly exploited the newfound latitude resulting from the détente on its western border. Having learned from experience that Poland was certainly not just a “one-season state” (“Saisonstaat”), as it had been scornfully called after the war, Berlin now tried to take advantage of Warsaw’s economic difficulties by suspending German-Polish trade.79 According to Stresemann, economic relations were to be suspended until “Poland’s economic and financial emergency has reached the maximum degree and brought the entire Polish state edifice to a condition of powerlessness,” making the country “ready for a settlement of the border question according to our wishes.”80 Although it did not bring the Weimar Republic any closer to its goals, this economic war was nonetheless able to count on widespread support from all political parties, for the “demand for a comprehensive revision of the eastern border” had long since become “one of the few truly national integrating factors.”81
The Weimar Republic tried to establish moral legitimacy for its anti-Polish destabilization policy by pointing to the German minorities. It was argued that these people had not only been forced into the Polish state in direct violation of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, but had also been subjected to an assimilation process that the ratified minorities treaties should have prevented. This invocation of Wilson, however, did not hold water, for his peace program had explicitly provided for the establishment of a sovereign Polish state with access to the sea; furthermore, the minority treaties did not endow collectives of any description with group rights but instead—and in accord with the Western understanding of liberalism—focused on the legal person of the individual, securing the individual’s right to choose his or her own ethnic identity.82 The intention of the treaties was “to prevent the oppression of minorities, not the assimilation of ethnic groups”; in fact, the latter was seen as an unavoidable process by supporters of the League of Nations, one that was even to be welcomed—if it proceeded peacefully—as a solution for the nationalist tensions of the period.83 The interpretation was different at Germany’s Foreign Office. According to a memorandum from July 1928, the German minorities were to be maintained “through all means,” for doing so represented “the prerequisite for a favorable solution to the Corridor Question and Upper Silesia Question.”84 Because of their function as “the living symbol and bridgeheads of revisionist claims,” the German minorities received Berlin’s undivided attention and massive support.85 As Martin Broszat put it, “behind this minorities policy stood the border question, and it was only through the latter that the former also became politically explosive.”86
It is therefore unsurprising that the mass exodus of Poland’s German populace immediately after Germany’s defeat in World War I aroused great concern in Berlin. According to Christian Jansen and Arno Weckbecker, the reasons behind this exodus were once attributed mainly to Polish governmental policy, especially in German historiography immediately after World War II, but more recent research has attributed its causes “primarily to the Germans themselves and their mentality.”87 Even the German military’s transition commissioner back in 1919 who witnessed the German populace fleeing in a near panic could not help but feel that these people had become accustomed to massive state subsidies and were “trained to be dependent” on them.88 On the other hand, Przemysław Hauser places more emphasis on an unwillingness to adapt to a future in which Germans were forced to live “without the status of a master race.”89
The Weimar Republic was not prepared to resign itself to this development. As early as September 1920, the German embassy in Poland sent a status report explaining that the country’s German minorities still had to learn—as Albert Kotowski summarized this missive—that “holding out in Poland is their primary national duty.”90 In order to support such policy goals, Berlin tightened its immigration, passport, and visa requirements in April 1921 and also tied abandoned-property compensation payments to declarations from the local German organizations in Poland, which had to certify that the emigrant had no choice but to leave.91 Berlin soon realized, however, that only with a drastic improvement of the situation in Poland could a final exodus of the remaining Germans be prevented. Achieving such an improvement meant building across Germany and Poland an interconnected network of organizations with multiple components and strong financial backing.
Richard Blanke’s proposition that the developments of Poland’s German minorities should be investigated “apart from the usual foreign policy context” is particularly mistaken in the ways such groups were organized.92 On the contrary, their “opposing fronts,” as Hans-Adolf Jacobsen aptly describes the relations between the frequently feuding organizations of the Germans in Poland, cannot be understood without their foreign-policy dimension and are comprehensible only within the context of German-Polish relations and the close ties and dependencies between the German minorities and Berlin.93
This latter point became particularly apparent even in the early days after the war. In 1919, before the final border was even known, parliamentarians from Prussia’s constitutional convention as well as Germany’s Weimar National Assembly joined forces to create in Berlin a cross-party Parliamentary Action Committee for the East (Parlamentarischer Aktionsausschuss Ost).94 But Allied control of Germany’s budget prevented direct political and financial support of the Germans in the ceded territories; therefore, a front organization called the Konkordia Literarische Gesellschaft (Concordia Literary Society) was founded in January 1920 under Max Winkler.95 At his disposal were considerable financial resources, earmarked for the acquisition of German newspapers abroad in order to secure their continued existence, which enabled Konkordia to become an immense newspaper group within a very short time, one that controlled almost the entire German press abroad.
Even more decisive was the Deutsche Stiftung (German Foundation), founded in November 1920 under Erich Krahmer-Möllenberg, formerly a senior official in the provincial government of Posen at Bromberg and then in the Prussian Interior Ministry and, like Winkler, another gray eminence of ethnopolicy (Volkstumspolitik). In contrast to Konkordia, however, the Deutsche Stiftung had closer ties to governmental authorities and acted—according to a memorandum from 1925—as a “camouflaged agency” of the Foreign Office.96 It was the task of the Deutsche Stiftung to help “the Germans now of Polish citizenship . . . to strengthen them in being German and to maintain the German ethnic group as an independent cultural factor.”97
Discussion of a single German minority in Poland was in itself already misleading, in that it suggests a group whose members felt a mutual bond for historical, religious, or other reasons. Germans in Poland felt such bonds only to a very small extent. According to Valdis O. Lumans, they actually represented “the most diverse of all German minorities.”98 They were scattered across the country in six regions, with the Upper Silesians in particular belonging to the Catholic faith, Protestants in the west following the Evangelical Consistory of Posen, and those in the east the Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession in Poland.99 Beyond their religious and cultural differences, there were also strongly contrasting political preferences: Upper Silesia, strongly marked by heavy industry, remained until 1918 a stronghold of the Center Party, which was then locally succeeded by the German Catholic People’s Party (Deutsche Katholische Volkspartei), while in agrarian Wielkopolska and Pomerelia the German National People’s Party (Deutschnationale Volkspartei) dominated, and in Łódź there was even the founding of a German Workers’ Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei), which played a particularly strong role among the workforce of the textile factories.100
Therefore, except for a short period in the early 1920s, these German minorities were unable to agree on a single nationwide association. In Wielkopolska and Pomerelia, for example, the immediate postwar period saw German parties, ranging from Social Democrats to the radical right, coming together with the free labor unions to form a Central Working Group of German Parties (Zentralarbeitsgemeinschaft deutscher Parteien, or ZAG), a loose alliance with a certain distance to Berlin that was supposed to coordinate a common approach. When the nationalist factions pushed for closer ties to Germany and failed to achieve this inside the ZAG, they withdrew from the alliance and pulled to their side the support of Germany’s Foreign Office, which had since become the leading ministry handling all matters pertaining to the German minorities. The ministerial officials in Berlin torpedoed the mediation efforts of the socialists, who were pleading for a compromise within the ZAG framework, and demanded instead that its member organizations transfer into a new organization before then dissolving the ZAG. All factions except for the left-wing parties complied with these demands, thereby forming in May 1921 the Germandom Federation for the Protection of Minority Rights in Poland (Deutschtumsbund zur Wahrung der Minderheitenrechte in Polen), which became the “sole contact” for all financial transactions with the Foreign Office.101 According to Norbert Krekeler, nothing more clearly demonstrates the idea that the development of the German organizations in Poland was “less an autonomous process among the ethnic Germans and more a development steered largely from Berlin, one whose direction resulted primarily from the needs of Germany’s foreign policy.”102
Although the generous monetary transfers were crucial in stopping the wave of emigration, they also awoke new desires for further assistance among Poland’s German minorities. Poland’s economic situation was in fact quite strained, for the country faced enormous tasks upon its reestablishment. The different administrative, legal, financial, transport, and education systems of the three former partitions now had to be brought together, and the economy’s structural inadequacies and imbalances needed to be overcome.103 The latter aspect was further exacerbated by the fact that, with their incorporation into the new Poland, the country’s major economic centers had lost their old markets in Germany and the former Russian Empire. The loss affected not only the textile factories in Łódź and the mining industry in Upper Silesia, but also the highly productive agricultural sector of the northwest. Therefore, the downward spiral experienced by local German agricultural enterprises was less a product of discriminatory measures by Warsaw and more a symptom of the general crisis affecting Poland’s entire agricultural sector, one that also threatened socially explosive consequences, for most people lived from agriculture. The problem was further compounded by inequality in land ownership. The richest 1 percent of the agricultural populace owned 50 percent of the arable land, and the poorest two-thirds were crowded onto just 15 percent of it. The poorest two-thirds, then, often owned just enough for their subsistence, with no hope of surplus production or capital accumulation.104 German landownership was part of this problem: in 1921, of all farms over 50 hectares (ca. 120 acres) in Wielkopolska, 36 percent belonged to German owners, and in Pomerelia, it was 43.7 percent.105 A land-reform bill was passed on December 28, 1925, but it had been so softened by the dominant conservative forces that it failed to fundamentally change the situation. Nonetheless, its central provision allowing for the subdivision of large estates over 150 hectares (ca. 370 acres) was a very sensitive one in regard to large German landholdings, especially because the reform was basically an invitation to tie the expropriation issue to the minorities one. The reform had little effect, however, on the strong position of the German landholders: although the German share of the population had fallen to 10 percent in both Wielkopolska and Pomerelia by 1931, Germans still controlled 29 percent of the arable land in Wielkopolska, with estate sizes generally exceeding 100 hectares (nearly 250 acres); meanwhile, 22 percent of the arable land in Pomerelia, including 60 percent of the land in large-scale estates exceeding 180 hectares (nearly 445 acres), remained in German hands.106 If the economic situation of the German great estates in Poland nonetheless worsened, the real cause was Poland’s general economic situation, not to mention the economic war unleashed by Germany in 1925, which had led to even more troubles for export-oriented enterprises in particular.
In any case, the new demands of the situation accelerated a shift in Berlin in its treatment of the German minorities. By the time the Locarno Treaties were signed at the latest, all hopes for a quick collapse of the Polish state had to be set aside, and the financial support of the ethnic Germans now had to be adapted to the new realities. If Germans were to be stopped from leaving Poland so that enough still remained to legitimize demands for a treaty revision, then financial support for cultural matters would no longer suffice; emigration would need to be backstopped through massive subsidization of economic livelihoods, which soon became clear to the planners at Germany’s Foreign Office.
The Polish authorities, aware of Berlin’s increasing influence over German minority organizations, had dissolved the German Federation for the Protection of Minority Rights in 1923. Trying to take its place in 1924, but with little success, was the German Union in the Sejm and Senat (Deutsche Vereinigung in Sejm und Senat), a loose umbrella organization of German parliamentarians.107 Germany’s Foreign Office found itself confronted with an array of smaller organizations, which is why it made any further funding contingent on the formation of a central committee. The contingency ultimately led to the founding of the Quintet Committee (Fünfer-Ausschuss), which, as the highest authority of all German economic associations in Wielkopolska and Pomerelia, became the German minority’s most important committee; it followed the guidelines of the Foreign Office in awarding loans exclusively to politically loyal “conscious Germans” (“bewusste Deutsche”).108
To provide even more generous financial support to the ethnic Germans, the Ossa company was founded in 1926, likewise acting as an “auxiliary structure of the Foreign Office” under the management of Krahmer-Möllenberg and Winkler.109 In the beginning, it was mostly big landowners who had profited from Berlin’s generosity, while Upper Silesia’s industrial companies, for example, were still being explicitly excluded from the loan program as late as 1926 by Foreign Minister Stresemann himself, from fears in Berlin of the capital requirements. Even this last reservation fell away, though, with the founding of Ossa: by April 1933, ethnic German industrialists in East Upper Silesia had received some sixty to seventy million Reichsmarks.110 By 1928 at the latest, when Krahmer-Möllenberg admitted that these payments had “lost the character of genuine loans” and had become pure subsidies, the wholly political purpose of the payments became openly apparent.111
If even more proof of this were necessary, one could look toward events of the Great Depression, which brought additional hardships to Poland’s German minorities. As Chancellor Heinrich Brüning’s government radicalized Stresemann’s foreign-policy agenda and completed its transition to a “Grossraumpolitik” (a “wider spatial policy” asserting a hegemonial influence beyond one’s own borders), and heated discussions of the Danzig Corridor broke out in public debate, representatives of the Germans in Pomerelia saw an opportunity to present Brüning with new demands in late 1930: either grant additional cheap loans and an import quota for reduced-tariff wheat shipments, or it would become necessary for their “followers to be told the truth, and given back their complete freedom to act as they wish.”112 After that, the Ossa company was instructed to increase its disbursements in Wielkopolska and Pomerelia.113
Reversed Relations: Reconciliation with Poland as a Prerequisite for Nazi “Lebensraum” Policy
It may seem paradoxical that the Nazi seizure of power, of all things, would be what brought an easing of relations with Poland, if only temporarily. Unlike earlier German chancellors, Hitler felt he could not afford to further aggravate mutual relations and thereby endanger his expansionist foreign-policy goals. The Nazis ended the economic war with Poland and signed a nonaggression pact in January 1934, in which Germany for the first time ruled out a border change by force; it represented a conspicuous break with the foreign policy of the Weimar Republic and was certainly the “most important, the only important turnaround in Germany’s handling of its eastern partner.”114
Although appearing incomprehensible to many contemporaries, the pact fit logically into the Nazi foreign-policy agenda.115 In his long-unpublished “second book,” Hitler outlined the general thrust of Nazi foreign policy: instead of a rigid fixation on restoring the borders of 1914, which he criticized as “insane” because it would preserve the entire victorious coalition as an ongoing enemy, he called for a shift “to a clear, far-seeing spatial policy [Raumpolitik]” and set his sights beyond Pomerelia and Upper Silesia to target the Soviet Union.116 Poland, whose political elite held strongly anticommunist sentiments and had still not given up all hope of expanding at Soviet expense, must have appeared to represent the ideal junior partner in this endeavor.
Of course, the interests of the German minorities became secondary to this strategic reorientation. In order to prevent any inconvenient protests from ethnic German spokespersons, Rudolf Hess strove to subjugate any remaining ethnic German associations not already under direct state control, as Hitler had not only named him Deputy Führer on April 27, 1933, but had also entrusted him with supervising matters of ethnopolicy. The first result was the founding in October 1933 of the Ethnic German Council (Volksdeutscher Rat, or VR), at the suggestion of Karl Haushofer, a theoretician of the “Lebensraum” concept, and Hans Steinacher, head of the Volk Alliance for Germandom Abroad (Volksbund für das Deutschtum im Ausland, or VDA), which was by far the largest private-sector organization in the Reich promoting “Germandom” (“Deutschtum”).117 The great expectations of both Nazi Party figures and ethnopolicy advocates were soon thwarted, however, by the ministerial bureaucracy, which would not let itself be pushed out of this policy field. During an interministerial conference, the representatives of the VR were told to align their actions with the Foreign Office’s policy positions. Their hopes of having a say in the disbursement of state funding were likewise dashed. Steinacher was advised that he had probably interpreted his powers “a bit too optimistically” and that his prospective participation in the allocating of funds would “under no circumstances come into consideration.”118 It was mainly this decision that doomed the newly created VR to powerlessness.
* * *
In Eastern Europe, the ethnic Germans greeted Hitler’s coming to power with “panegyric exclamations and loyalty declarations.”119 That they did so is hardly surprising, for Nazi ideology emphasized the importance of the völkisch (the “folkish,” meaning the ethnonationalistic), a concept that legitimized these minorities’ efforts to maintain their ethnic homogeneity and simultaneously affirm their ostensible role as bringers of culture to the east. Coupled with strong resentments against a modernity represented by industry and big cities, along with a hatred of communists and Jews, Nazism could thus be assured of success among rural residents in particular, who happened to make up the bulk of ethnic German minorities, and not only in Poland.120 The success of this ideological expansion among the German minorities can also be read in the new political semantics that was now disseminating a völkisch and racist vocabulary among the ethnic Germans in Poland as well, words that had either gained mass appeal through Nazism or been reshaped by it: the term “Auslandsdeutscher” (a “German abroad”) was replaced by “Volksdeutscher” (a “member of the German ethnonation”), the concept of the “minority” by that of the “Volksgruppe” (“ethnonational group”), which furthermore was involved in a “Volkstumskampf” (“ethnonational struggle”) abroad.121 The message behind this terminological change was clear. It highlighted one’s membership in a “larger whole existing beyond the border,” namely the German “Volksgemeinschaft” (“ethnonational community”), as it was now called.122
This voluntary Nazification process certainly did not lead the German minorities in Poland to an overcoming of their traditional fragmentation. A development like that seen in Czechoslovakia with Konrad Henlein’s Sudeten German Party (Sudetendeutsche Partei) failed to materialize in Poland. Instead, the 1921 founding of the German National Socialist Association for Poland (Deutscher Nationalsozialistischer Verein für Polen) in Bielsko (formerly Bielitz) would prove to be a catalyst for increasingly stormy disputes. Conflicts with the Polish authorities may have forced the organization’s renaming in 1928 to the Young German Party for Poland (Jungdeutsche Partei für Polen, or JdP), but the agenda of the party now led by Rudolf Wiesner had not changed, including its support for the development of a “Volksgemeinschaft,” the pursuit of radical antisemitism, and the struggle against Marxism.123 The party’s expansion beyond its home region led to conflicts with the established—and often fragmented—interest groups of each local German minority. Emboldened by Hitler’s coming to power, Wiesner’s followers acted as if they were “young guns” rebelling against the sclerotic power structures of the “old-timers”—a pretense that was increasingly contrived as the relevant German associations in Wielkopolska and Pomerelia all became less and less different from the JdP in their political agendas, as a result of their self-chosen Nazification. This certainly did nothing to blunt the mutual antipathy, which sometimes even led to bloody skirmishes. For example, a Polish newspaper smugly noted that the local police had to be summoned to break up a brawl at a hall in Sępólno Krajeńskie (formerly Zempelburg), which took place under a banner reading “Wir wollen sein ein einig Volk und Brüder” (We want to be a united people and brothers).124
The VR would prove incapable of ending the general escalation, which from Berlin’s viewpoint was highly undesirable in its threat to paralyze the German minorities and spin them out of Berlin’s control.125 Its inability to assert itself, particularly in the face of Nazi Party agencies like its Foreign Organization (Auslandsorganisation der NSDAP), prompted Hess in October 1935 to transfer the coordination of ethnopolicy from the dissolved VR to party member Otto von Kursell, whose agency, the Kursell Bureau (Dienststelle Kursell), was put at least nominally under Joachim von Ribbentrop, the appointee in charge of foreign-policy matters on Hess’s staff. Thus, what had been an “autonomous, nonpartisan, honorary institution” had now become a “special party agency” to which “only party comrades belonged and which was led by an ‘Alter Kämpfer’ [an ‘old fighter’ from the Nazi Party’s early period].”126 Kursell was now able to threaten recalcitrant representatives of the German minorities with the severance of all contact and the withdrawal of financial grants unless the infighting stopped immediately. Although the change did not open a new era of cooperation (as hoped by Berlin) between groups like the JdP and others, the intensity of their disputes did subsequently lessen to a noticeable degree.127
Kursell was a member of not only the Nazi Party but also the SS, which was a situation that Heinrich Himmler, as head of the SS, wanted to exploit in order to expand his influence into the field of ethnopolicy. From his perspective, the attempt to extend his power over the more than ten million members of German minorities was a logical one as it would not only enhance his position within the Reich but also provide the intelligence arm of the SS with access to a network of informants in countries across Europe. And Himmler must have ultimately recognized an opportunity to give political force to an idea that was also widely anchored in the SS with the founding of RuSHA (Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt, the Race and Settlement Main Office), namely the tying of settlement planning to racial selections, thereby concretizing the Nazi conception of “Lebensraum.”128 During a conflict with the SS about its interference in the ethnopolicy of Czechoslovakia, however, Kursell made it clear that he did not want to take up the role intended for him by Himmler, who then pointedly withdrew his confidence in him.
Hess had already learned during the fight over the VR that ethnopolicy could not be implemented in the face of opposition from the relevant components of the Nazi Party, but only with their support, and so he did not want to make the same mistake twice. Instead of engaging in a confrontation with Himmler, he relieved Kursell of his office and accepted Himmler’s candidate for a successor. In 1937, when SS Senior Group Leader Werner Lorenz took over the former Kursell Bureau, which had since been renamed the Ethnic German Liaison Office (Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle, or VoMi), the handling of ethnopolicy fell completely within Himmler’s sphere of influence. Although the tasks had remained the same, the founding of VoMi signaled a qualitative leap in the ethnopolicy of Nazi Germany. The reason was, first, it dovetailed with a new stance of the German government: on February 20, 1938, Hitler broke his five-year silence on the fate of the “Volksdeutsche” in Eastern Europe, and during a speech to the Reichstag, he made himself a champion for the rights of the “Germans” in Austria and Czechoslovakia. Second, Lorenz—unlike his predecessor—could soon justify the pursuit of his mission by pointing to a direct order from Hitler, dated July 2, 1938: VoMi was tasked with the “unified organizing of all state and party agencies, as well as with the unified deployment of all resources available to these agencies for the handling of ethnopolitical and borderland issues”—meaning that a party organization had been granted authority over state offices.129 For the first time, Lorenz’s agency also had control over extensive financial resources, which had always been the most effective instrument of ethnopolicy.130 In 1938 alone, this meant control over 50–60 million Reichsmarks, a sum that approximated the budget of the Foreign Office.131 A half year later, a decree from Hess completed this “Gleichschaltung” (“enforced conformity”) of ethnopolitically oriented organizations: in accordance with the main focus of their activities, all existing bodies were to be incorporated into either the VDA or the Alliance of the German East (Bund deutscher Osten), both of which were placed under VoMi.132
With the support of the state, the party, and the SS, this “bastard organization” was assured a new level of power that gave Lorenz more freedom of action than either Steinacher or Kursell had before him.133 In place of a “loose collaboration based on the principle of reciprocity,” according to Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, “there appeared the unilateral directive, and the command backed by threat of reprisals.”134 The effects were felt not only by Germandom organizations like the VDA, but also by the German minorities in Poland. As early as April 1937, Lorenz had invited the nine most important groups to Berlin in order to persuade them of the need for a common nationwide committee. After some initial failures, his tone became sharper. In a missive dated May 18, 1938, to the representatives of each organization, Lorenz threatened that this was his “first, but also his last, suggestion,” and that anyone who abstained from this accord was putting himself outside the “Volksgemeinschaft” and must bear the consequences.135 With this, although Lorenz had not yet risen to level of “complete master of the ethnic German organizations in Poland,” the path toward the founding of a loose umbrella organization in August 1938 was now open.136
Kotowski’s observation that Warsaw’s policy stance toward the German minorities was a variable dependent on German-Polish international relations is as true for the second half of the 1930s as it is for the entire preceding period.137 It is therefore unsurprising that as Berlin’s increasingly aggressive foreign policy and the advancing spread of Nazi ideology were matched by an increasingly irredentist stance among Poland’s German inhabitants and that both taken together would ultimately affect Warsaw’s minorities policy. Between March and June 1936 alone, the Polish government banned the National Socialist German Workers’ Federation (Nationalsozialistischer deutscher Arbeiterbund) and dissolved thirty-three local branches of the German Union for Posen and Pomerelia (Deutsche Vereinigung für Posen und Pommerellen), the biggest political organization of the German minorities in Wielkopolska, which Warsaw accused of inciting the Kashubian populace against it.138 Other measures aimed at reducing German influence, especially in the economy, and also at controlling the German-language school system. Beyond efforts to prevent Polish-speaking children from attending German schools, however, the relevant guidelines actually contained little that could cause umbrage: German schools were instructed to observe Polish public holidays, use approved textbooks only, and keep out all Nazi influences. In comparison with Prussia’s Germanization policy, the approved measures proved to be—contrary to Kotowski’s assessment—relatively harmless, and they were ultimately impotent when faced with German minorities that largely supported Nazism and whose leading organizations were already under Berlin’s control.139
The Decision for War
Soon after the German occupation of western Czechoslovakia eliminated one more political buttress for Warsaw, Poland itself fell into Berlin’s sights.140 Ribbentrop’s stance toward his Polish opposites was initially more restrained than the demands that had been presented to Prague: in return for the surrender of Danzig, permission to build an extraterritorial road and rail connection to East Prussia, and Poland’s entry into the Anti-Comintern Pact, Germany would offer—and this was a rather bold move from the German side—definitive recognition of Poland’s western border. Martin Broszat has rightly warned that the border recognition should not be mistaken as “from the outset a false offer from Hitler, one that anticipated rejection to be followed by violence.”141 After all, the anti-Soviet proposition also fit the central goal of Nazi foreign policy, namely the acquisition of new “Lebensraum,” and in previous years had become almost a leitmotif in the discussions that Hitler, Konstantin von Neurath, and Hermann Göring held with Polish representatives.142 Despite repeated overtures, Warsaw had consistently rejected this offer, which would have made Poland completely dependent on Berlin. When Ribbentrop returned “empty-handed” from yet another visit to Warsaw in January 1939, the path to war was laid.143 In late March, Hitler informed the German army’s commander in chief, Walther von Brauchitsch, that if circumstances dictated, he wanted to resolve the “Polish question” through war; in early April, he instructed the Wehrmacht’s High Command to undertake the planning of “Fall Weiss” (“Case White,” the strategic plan for invading Poland), before he subsequently revoked the German-Polish Nonaggression Pact as well as the Anglo-German Naval Agreement.144
If Berlin had still expected in late 1938 that it could build an eastern empire on the rubble of the Soviet Union with Poland’s help, Warsaw’s categorical refusal had now forced a change of German plans. From the role of a potential ally, Poland’s position shifted to that of the next victim of German aggression. But because of the guarantee that the United Kingdom made to Poland on March 31, 1939, German planning first required a nonbelligerence agreement with precisely the power that was the actual target of Nazi expansion efforts: the Soviet Union. As a result, the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact—or “aggression pact,” as Rainer Schmidt calls it—was signed on August 23, 1939.145 This “U-turn of all time” sealed Poland’s fate in two ways at once: whereas the dystopian vision of a “‘living space’ further east dropped for the foreseeable future out of the equation,” an attack on the neighboring Poland had now become a calculable gamble.146 These dreams of carnage were now projected on Poland, as seen in Hitler’s address to the Wehrmacht leadership on the eve of the pact’s ratification: “Accordingly, I have placed my Death’s Head Units [Totenkopfverbände] in readiness . . . with an order to send every man, woman, and child of Polish descent and language to their deaths, mercilessly and without compassion. This is the only way for us to gain the Lebensraum we need.”147
These developments led to immediate consequences for the German minorities in Poland, now that the Polish state was reacting to all provocations with a much shorter temper, and right up until the final weeks before the outbreak of war, it was forcefully dissolving the bulk of German minority organizations.148 The Polish government was wrong in believing that dissolving the minority organizations would ensure its security, for it failed to see that doing so had not interrupted the various intelligence efforts and conspiratorial operations conducted across Poland by a number of German agencies. The German efforts proved useful in projects like the compilation of proscription lists, filled by German units with the names of persons who were later to be arrested and often executed. In August 1939, Rudolf Wiesner even suggested to VoMi that he could take up a role corresponding to the one played by Henlein in Czechoslovakia.149
Meanwhile, Germany’s security agencies had begun arming members of German minorities and bringing them together into paramilitary units known as K-organizations (engaged in Kampf or “combat”) and S-organizations (engaged in sabotage). Although the Polish Interior Ministry still believed it could put away any fears about Germans in Poland forming military groups, the K- and S-organizations in Upper Silesia already had 4,474 members, and the K-organizations in Poznań Voivodeship had 2,324 men under arms in seventy-two localities.150 When the Wehrmacht attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, this fifth column sprang into action by blowing up bridges, blockading streets, occupying industrial zones, and even taking over an entire city before the Wehrmacht’s arrival, as was the case in Katowice, the biggest city in Upper Silesia and known in German as Kattowitz.151
Notes
1. Quoted in Broszat, Zweihundert Jahre, 85.
2. Ibid., 90.
3. Kolb, “Polenbild und Polenfreundschaft,” 113.
4. For example, see the many Pole-friendly references at the 1832 Hambach Festival in Majewski, “Sage nie,” and Asmus, Hambacher Fest. For an overview of the many supportive organizations in Baden, which was particularly liberal at the time, see Brudzyńska-Němec, Polenvereine.
5. M. Müller, “Deutsche und polnische Nation,” 74; see also ibid., 71–72, as well as Kolb, “Polenbild und Polenfreundschaft,” 111–13. On “pan-nationalism,” see Koselleck et al., “Volk, Nation,” 7: 404.
6. Broszat, Zweihundert Jahre, 101–2.
7. Lukowski and Zawadski, Concise History, 142–44; Schmidt-Rösler, Polen, 82–83.
8. Trzeciakowski, “Polnische Frage,” 63–64.
9. Quoted in Wippermann, Ordensstaat, 144–45. Müller and Schönemann, Polen-Debatte, explores the events more comprehensively.
10. Sauer, “Problem,” 422–23.
11. On this, see also Ther, “Beyond the Nation,” 53–54.
12. Hoensch, Geschichte Polens, 231.
13. Zoltowski to the Reichstag on April 1, quoted in Verhandlungen des Reichstages, 1: 97.
14. Ibid., 1: 98. On the rediscovery of the medieval German eastward colonization, see Wippermann, Der deutsche Drang, esp. 82–116; Kopp, “Arguing the Case,” 151.
15. Sauer, “Problem,” 431.
16. Wehler, “Deutsch-polnische Beziehungen,” 204.
17. Trzeciakowski, Kulturkampf, 119.
18. Hoensch, Geschichte Polens, 232. For the effects on Silesia, see Matuschek, “Polnisch der Oberschlesier,” part 1, 110–11, and part 2, 194. For the importance of language in emergent nationalism, see particularly Anderson, Erfindung, 72–87, and Hobsbawm, Nationen, 60–83; for Germany, see, for example, Puschner, Völkische Bewegung, 27–48. For a concise overview of research on the role of language in the assertion of nationalist worldviews, see Day and Thompson, Theorizing Nationalism, 90–92.
19. On this, see Leuschner, “Sprache.”
20. Trzeciakowski, Kulturkampf, 52–53; Broszat, Zweihundert Jahre, 134; Lindemann, “Preußisch-deutsche Reichsgründung,” 30.
21. Trzeciakowski, Kulturkampf, 57–59.
22. Einhart, Deutsche Geschichte, 286.
23. Trzeciakowski, Kulturkampf, 6.
24. Here, Kopp points to an interesting simultaneity, for this escalation of inner colonization policy coincided with the overseas expansion of the German Empire. The existence of a causal relationship, however, is debatable (“Arguing the Case,” 149).
25. Broszat, Zweihundert Jahre, 143.
26. Neubach, Ausweisungen, 32.
27. Lindemann, “Preußisch-deutsche Reichsgründung,” 35.
28. Ibid.; see also Wehler, “Von den ‘Reichsfeinden,’” 187.
29. See, for example, the contemporary argument in Hasse, Das deutsche Reich, 56–58.
30. Wehler, Das deutsche Kaiserreich, 116.
31. Broszat, Zweihundert Jahre, 148.
32. Hagen, “National Solidarity,” 42–43.
33. Berghahn, Kaiserreich, 186; see also Davies, God’s Playground, 130; Broszat, Zweihundert Jahre, 141–42 and 152–53.
34. Broszat, Zweihundert Jahre, 153.
35. Eley, Reshaping, 41–48; Walkenhorst, Nation—Volk—Rasse, 68–69.
36. Alldeutscher Verband, Zwanzig Jahre, 13–22.
37. Ibid., 114–25.
38. Walkenhorst, Nation—Volk—Rasse, 264. Hansemann’s support appears in the January 1900 issue of Die Ostmark, cited in Oldenburg, Der deutsche Ostmarkenverein, 136.
39. The relevant legislation was passed by Prussia’s House of Lords on June 28, 1904, specifying that the construction of residential buildings in the provinces of East Prussia, West Prussia, and Posen, as well as parts of Silesia, Brandenburg, and Pomerania, required permission from the local Regierungspräsident—which, of course, was not granted to Polish applicants. More comprehensively in Hofmann, “Ansiedlungsgesetz.”
40. Tims, Germanizing Prussian Poland, 152–55; Wehler, “Von den ‘Reichsfeinden,’” 188.
41. From page 62 of the August 1907 issue, quoted in Oldenburg, Der deutsche Ostmarkenverein, 137.
42. Wehler, “Von den ‘Reichsfeinden,’” 191. See also Walkenhorst, Nation—Volk—Rasse, 273–74.
43. Hasse, Das Deutsche Reich, 57.
44. Davies, God’s Playground, 135. The events are examined more comprehensively in Kulczycki, School Strikes. The Alldeutscher Verband even called for Polish children to be released from compulsory education, arguing that strike participants should be “permanently excluded from school attendance” (Alldeutscher Verband, Zwanzig Jahre, 299).
45. Laak, Über alles, 86.
46. Boysen, “Geist des Grenzlands,” 109.
47. Broszat, Zweihundert Jahre, 166.
48. Oldenburg, Der deutsche Ostmarkenverein, 140.
49. Quoted in Walkenhorst, Nation—Volk—Rasse, 222.
50. Frymann, Wenn ich der Kaiser.
51. Quoted in Fischer, Griff nach der Weltmacht, 93. According to Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson, Bettmann-Hollweg’s September program was a “terrifying document uncannily foreshadowing the policy of conquest on which Adolf Hitler embarked twenty years later” (Prior and Wilson, “Review Article,” 325). On the topicality of Fischer and the “Hamburg school” of historiography, see Berghahn, “Ostimperium und Weltpolitik.” For an overview of the various scholarly interpretations of the September program, see Mombauer, Origins, 132–33, a book that also provides a concise survey of the general state of research into the causes of World War I.
52. Geiss, Der polnische Grenzstreifen, 72.
53. Ibid., 75.
54. Ibid., 77.
55. Ibid., 83.
56. Hagen, Germans, Poles, and Jews, 286.
57. Wehler, “Von den ‘Reichsfeinden,’” 197.
58. See, for example, Geiss, Der polnische Grenzstreifen, 49; Fischer, Griff nach der Weltmacht, 141; Oldenburg, Der deutsche Ostmarkenverein, 225–27.
59. Geiss, Der polnische Grenzstreifen, 91–96.
60. Quoted in ibid., 147.
61. Wehler, “Von den ‘Reichsfeinden,’” 191; Rutherford, “Race, Space, and the Polish Question,” 51.
62. Rosenthal, German and Pole, 41.
63. Forgus, “German Nationality Policies,” 107.
64. Seckendorf, “Kulturelle Deutschtumspflege,” 116.
65. Sharp, “Genie That Would Not Go Back,” 10–11. Similarly Zimmer, Nationalism in Europe, 60; Hobsbawm, Nationen, 132–33.
66. Weitz, “From the Vienna to the Paris System,” 1314.
67. On the minorities agreements, see, for example, Riga and Kennedy, “Tolerant Majorities”; on Poland, see Fink, “Minorities Question.” For a contemporaneous view, see Woolsey, “Rights of Minorities.”
68. Sharp, “Genie That Would Not Go Back,” 9.
69. Mazower, Dark Continent, 41.
70. Kotowski, Polens Politik, 197.
71. Peukert, Weimarer Republik, 201.
72. Broszat, Zweihundert Jahre, 218.
73. Quoted in Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, Deutsche und Polen, 28.
74. Quoted in Haar, “Leipziger Stiftung,” 379.
75. Wright, Gustav Stresemann, 269–71, 314–15, and 409–12. On Stresemann’s past in the Pan-German League, see ibid., 52–54.
76. Wagner, “Weimarer Republik,” 41.
77. Schramm, “Kurswechsel,” 31.
78. Hoensch, “Deutschland, Polen und die Großmächte,” 20 and 10.
79. See Puchert, Wirtschaftskrieg.
80. Quoted in Zorn, Nach Ostland, 48.
81. Hoensch, “Deutschland, Polen und die Großmächte,” 23.
82. This rather narrowly defined limitation of the minority treaties did not prevent post-1945 Polish historians from also sharing the interwar Polish government’s view that these treaties offered the great powers an opportunity “to interfere in the internal affairs of new states . . . under the pretext of acting in the interest of minorities residing in those states” (Czapliński, “Protection of Minorities,” 126).
83. Komjathy and Stockwell, German Minorities, x. See also Mazower, Dark Continent, 53–54, and 57; Sharp, “Genie That Would Not Go Back,” 25.
84. Quoted in Broszat, Zweihundert Jahre, 228.
85. Zimmer, Nationalism in Europe, 62.
86. Broszat, Zweihundert Jahre, 228.
87. Jansen and Weckbecker, Volksdeutsche Selbstschutz, 22.
88. Quoted in Broszat, Zweihundert Jahre, 212.
89. Hauser, “Deutsche Minderheit,” 68.
90. Kotowski, Polens Politik, 197.
91. Krekeler, Revisionsanspruch, 50–53. See also Trevisiol, Einbürgerungspraxis, 187–88.
92. Blanke, “German Minority,” 88.
93. Jacobsen, Nationalsozialistische Außenpolitik, 580. See also Hauser, “Deutsche Minderheit,” 67.
94. Fiedor, “Attitude of German Right-Wing Organizations,” 248; Hauser, “Deutsche Minderheit,” 69; Krekeler, Revisionsanspruch, 13.
95. Winkler soon became one of the central figures in ethnopolicy circles and would implement the economic plundering of Poland during the Nazi occupation as head of the Main Trust Office for the East (Haupttreuhandstelle Ost, see Rosenkötter, Treuhandpolitik; Dingell, Zur Tätigkeit).
96. Krekeler, Revisionsanspruch, 16.
97. Ibid., 21.
98. Lumans, Himmler’s Auxiliaries, 93.
99. These six regions were Posen and Pomerelia (ca. 342,000 Germans in 1926), Upper Silesia (ca. 300,000), Bielsko-Biała (ca. 30,000), Central Poland (ca. 350,000), Volhynia (47,000–60,000), and Galicia (ca. 60,000)—Jacobsen, Nationalsozialistische Außenpolitik, 582. Such figures were highly contested. For example, in Poland’s official census of 1931, persons counting toward the German minority were numbered at only 254,522 for Central Poland and 91,207 for Upper Silesia combined with Cieszyn Silesia (Hauser, “Deutsche Minderheit in Polen,” 87).
100. For an overview of German minority associations in Upper Silesia, see Greiner and Kaczmarek, “Vereinsaktivitäten”; on the ethnic conflicts in Łódź, see, for example, Kossert, “Protestantismus in Lodz,” 89; on the German Workers’ Party, see Kotowski, Polens Politik, 16–17; Hauser, “Deutsche Minderheit,” 73.
101. Krekeler, Revisionsanspruch, 27.
102. Ibid.
103. Hoensch, “Deutschland, Polen und die Großmächte,” 20.
104. Jansen and Weckbecker, Der Volksdeutsche Selbstschutz, 14.
105. Wynot, “Polish Germans,” 30.
106. Ibid. The ownership situation was similar in the part of Upper Silesia that fell to Poland, with more than 55 percent of heavy industry still in German hands by 1939 (Kaczmarek, “Deutsche wirtschaftliche Penetration,” 260).
107. Wynot, “Polish Germans,” 51.
108. Krekeler, Revisionsanspruch, 67.
109. Ibid., 96.
110. Ibid., 96 and 104.
111. Ibid., 120.
112. Krekeler, Revisionsanspruch, 132. See also Peukert, Die Weimarer Republik, 202.
113. Funding for this region totaling 37.5 million Reichsmarks from 1925 to 1931, it increased to 13 million for 1932, and to 16 million for 1933 (Krekeler, Revisionsanspruch, 145).
114. Schramm, “Kurswechsel,” 23.
115. Wollstein, “Politik des nationalsozialistischen Deutschlands,” 795.
116. Quotations are from Hitler, Zweites Buch, 163. For the impact of “Lebensraum” ideology on Hitler’s worldview, see Jäckel, Hitlers Herrschaft, 29–54; Kershaw, Hitler: Hubris, 149–51 and 240–50; Smith, Ideological Origins, 83–111; Walkenhorst, Nation—Volk—Rasse, 166–72; Puschner, Völkische Bewegung, 151–55, which also looks at the importance of this thinking for ethnonational rights during the German Empire period.
117. On Haushofer and his influence on Hitler’s conception of “Lebensraum,” see H. Herwig, “Geopolitik.” For a comprehensive survey of the VDA’s history from its beginning to the 1990s, see Goldendach and Minow, Deutschtum erwache!
118. Jacobsen, Nationalsozialistische Außenpolitik, 182.
119. Ibid., 167.
120. Lumans, Himmler’s Auxiliaries, 28–29.
121. Seckendorf, “Kulturelle Deutschtumspflege,” 115; also Kotowski, Polens Politik, 17.
122. Jansen and Weckbecker, Der Volksdeutsche Selbstschutz, 25. For a brief description of the Nazification of Upper Silesia’s German associations, see, for example, Greiner und Kaczmarek, “Vereinsaktivitäten,” 235.
123. Jacobsen, Nationalsozialistische Außenpolitik, 585.
124. Niendorf, Minderheiten, 211.
125. Jacobsen, Nationalsozialistische Außenpolitik, 586.
126. Ibid., 230.
127. Ibid., 593–94.
128. Lumans, Himmler’s Auxiliaries, 38–39.
129. Jacobsen, Nationalsozialistische Außenpolitik, 243. See also Brown, “Third Reich’s Mobilization,” 133. Lorenz actually had even greater ambitions, originally pushing for the establishment of a dedicated Reich Commissariat and later wanting to become a state secretary for ethnopolitical issues (Staatssekretär für Volkstumsfragen). Therefore, Hitler’s decree (see NG-972) was actually only a partial success for him; see also Stuhlpfarrer, Umsiedlung Südtirol, 238–40.
130. Lumans, Himmler’s Auxiliaries, 67–68.
131. Jacobsen, Nationalsozialistische Außenpolitik, 243–44.
132. BArch NS 19/2307, 7–9, directive from Hess, February 3, 1939.
133. Koehl, RKFDV, 97.
134. Jacobsen, Nationalsozialistische Außenpolitik, 237.
135. Ibid., 241.
136. Koehl, “Deutsche Volksliste,” 354. See also Lumans, Himmler’s Auxiliaries, 97.
137. Kotowski, Polens Politik, 348.
138. Ibid., 242–44.
139. Ibid., 247–54.
140. Leitz, Nazi Foreign Policy, 73–74.
141. Broszat, Zweihundert Jahre, 255.
142. Ibid., 247; see also Wollstein, “Politik des nationalsozialistischen Deutschlands,” 806.
143. Kershaw, Hitler: Nemesis, 166. In those same weeks, Hitler gave three speeches to Wehrmacht officers during which he clearly expressed his desire for war (ibid., 166–67). See also Czubiński, “Poland’s Place in Nazi Plans,” 31 and 37–38.
144. Hillgruber, “Deutschland und Polen,” 54.
145. Schmidt, Außenpolitik, 341.
146. Kershaw, Hitler: Nemesis, 206 and 238.
147. Hitler’s second speech to Wehrmacht heads, August 22, 1930, L-3, reprinted in Akten zur deutschen auswärtigen Politik, ser. D, 7: 171–72.
148. Kotowski, Polens Politik, 313 and 336.
149. Ibid., 338–39; also Seckendorf, “Kulturelle Deutschtumspflege,” 132.
150. Kotowski, Polens Politik, 341. See also Szefer, “Dywersyjno-sabotażowa działalność,” 297–308 and 310–24.
151. Szefer, “Dywersyjno-sabotażowa działalność,” 335. See also Pospieszalski, “Nazi Attacks,” 111–12.
