Greetings All,
It may seem odd to see me dredging this topic back up from the vault, but I've been "out of action" for quite some time, mainlydue to a rather nasty dose of prolonged illness, hence my absence from the forum. Funnily enough, I've got a couple of things left to say on the topic
, so after a delay of almost two months...
Kaptain Poop said:
Also, a lot of the Polish land that was taken did have higher numbers of Poles than Germans and some land had higher numbers of Germans, but you surely know that since Versailles Poland had a policy of deGermanification.
Anak said:
Hitler wanted to regain the German lands that belonged to Germany before the Versailles Treaty...He also wanted to create "lebensraum" by taking it from the USSR.
Firstly, please take the time to peruse the maps below, outlining:
(A)The three partitions of Poland (1772, 1793, 1795)
(B) Europe after the Congress of Vienna (1815)- N.B. "The Congress Kingdom of Poland" is part of Russia
(C) Central Europe in 1914
(D) German Occupation of Poland (1939)
If Hitler wished to recover the lands which belonged to Germany prior to the Treaty of Versailles, would it also be fair to say that the Poles had wished to recover their pre-partition territories? Or should only the Germans be permitted the luxury of an independent state, with the Poles as an unwanted minority?
It's temptingly easy to look at a situation from an arbitrarily chosen point in time (such as the Treaty of Versailles) and happily progress with one's analysis, but history is not that simple - there are always those often inconvenient events which have preceded and therefore influenced the events one is analysing from the said arbitrary point. For a more balanced account of the Polish / German land disputes under discussion a bit more background than that which has so far been provided is obviously required. Permit me to elaborate...
Kaptain Poop - You of course know that, despite Poland not being an independent state in 1914, this was not always the case. The Prussians helped themselves to the lands in question during the second half of the eighteenth century (see above map).I doubt that you can argue with that. So, I guess that we have established that these territories
were previously part of an independent Poland, have we not?
But what about the Germans living in these areas,I hear you ask? The entire issue is rather complicated but it can be safely distilled to this: they were descended from German
migrants. Thats right -
migrants. German migrants had been arriving in Poland since the thirteenth century. Such migration was encouraged by Polish rulers, as the territories in question were very underpopulated and underdeveloped. These German colonists were granted considerable privileges and autonomy (an exceedingly foolish and myopicmove by the Poles, with endless long-term consequences) and, with the adoption of "Magdeburg Law" as the model for new and existing cities and towns, Germans usually became the dominant element in urban areas. This, in turn, attracted additional German migrants who generally failed to assimilate and retained a seperate identity and language up until the modern day.
Another strand of the story of the German presence in Poland involves the Order of the Teutonic Knights, who were invited to settle in the Chelmno area by Konrad Mazowiecki (Konrad I, Duke of Mazovia) in 1227 (another startling display of short-sightedness which, in my opinion, constituted one of the gravest mistakes in Polish history). Being a bit short of manpower, this clown wished the Knights to defend his eastern borders against the pagan Baltic Prussian tribes which would free him to engage in that most typically Polish of endeavours - fighting his own, equally quarrelsome, Polishrelatives. The Teutonic Knights had previously (1211) been granted lands in Transylvania by King Andrew II of Hungary, who wanted to use them agains the Cumans, but the Knights were expelled in 1225 once it became clear that they wished to carve out thier own independent state. In Poland, however, they were far more successful, due to the Poles' overriding obsession with fighting among themselves. Once they had essentially exterminated the pagan Prussians, the Knights gradually grew in power and expanded into Polish territory, precipitating over two and a half centuries of conflict, in which Poland ultimately gained the upper hand. When the Grand Master of the Knights, Albert of Brandenburg, converted to Lutheranism in 1525, the Knights' Prussian territories were secularized. Albert was granted hereditary rights to the newly-named Duchy of Prussia as a vassal of the Polish Crown. The major legacy of the era of the Knights was the large German ethnic presence in East Pomerania - the Duchy of Prussia entered into personal union with Brandenburg and eventually (1657) gained independence from Poland. In 1701, the lands of Brandenburg-Prussia formed the new Kingdom of Prussia.
The proportion of Germans present in western Poland was again increased in the early eighteenth century, after the ravages of plague had depopulated the area and prompted another "immigration drive".
At the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars, according to the Congress of Vienna the Poles were to have autonomy in the Prussian-controlled Polish lands, yet this never occured in Pomerania and West Prussia and was only ostensible and very short-lived in the Grand Duchy of Poznan (from 1849, known as the Duchy of Posen). In term of ethnicity, to use the Grand Duchy as en example, in 1815 circa 80% of the population of approximately 800.000 were Polish, while in the city of Poznan itself the split was roughly even. In West Prussia, the towns were predominantly German, but the total population was numerically about equal.
The settlement of Germans in these former Polish territories was encouraged and facilitated by the Prussians, with limits on the use of the Poilsh language in education and administration gradually filtering in.
Things only got worse after the unification of Germany in 1871. As Bismarck desired the permanent destruction of Polish identity within the German-controlled lands
Kulturkampf took particularly careful aim at Poland. An 1872 ministerial decree made the German language compulsory in all state schools (with the exception of religious instruction). To top things off, Polish was banned as a "foreign language" option and could no longer be used even for teaching Polish children German. German teachers were offered financial inducements, known as the
Ostmarkenzulagen as incentive to work in Polish areas. In 1876 German was made compulsory in all courts and government offices.
In an effort to oust Poles from the land and replace them with German settlers, Bismarck created the Prussian Colonisation Commisssion (
Ansiedlugskommission) in 1886. This was essentially a fund to buy out Polish-owned estates with the aim of distributing the land to"approved" (i.e., German) buyers. In order to combat these state-sponsored anti-Polish initiatives, the Poles formed agricultural cooperatives and founded the Polish Land Purchase Bank (
Bank Parcelacyjny) in 1897. A related story which made news throughout Germany and Europe was that of a bloke by the name of Michal Drzymala who in 1904 purchased a plot of land but discovered that, according to the rules of the Colonisation Commission, he was forbidden as a Pole to build a permanent dwelling upon it. To circumvent this problem, Drzymala bought a circus caravan, parked it on his plot and made it his home. The ensuing legal battles lasted for a decade.
In 1894, the German Society for the Eastern Borders
(Deutscher Ostmarkenverein) was formed in Poznan. Among Poles it was known asthe
Hakata(HKT - an acronym derived from the surnames of the Society's founders: Hansemann, Kenneman, Tiedemann). It's apparent "goal" was to strengthen German national identity and economic power in the Province of Posen, but in reality this meant that it was an anti-Polish organisation whose aim was to dispossess Polish landowners. Elements of theHakata were still present in interwar Poland, while the NSDAP established a successor organization in Germany, the
Bund Deutscher Osten(Union of the German East) in 1934. In a previous post I have already mentioned the eventual imposition of German as the language of religious instruction and the resultant persecution of Polish children and their families which in 1901 led to the Wrzesnia school strikes.
In the final decades before the First World War,
Ostmarkenzulagen-style bonuses were extended to any German official who would serve in Poland. Consequently, Poznan had the highest percentage of government employees of any city in the German Empire. Every measure, no matter how small, was taken to impose a German character upon these areas - place names, street names, signs in cemeteries and even public lavatories were changed. If all of these initiatives had to be taken to sufficiently Germanise the area during the three or four decades prior to 1914,I guess that it could not have been all that overwhelmingly German to begin with, could it?
So, as you can see, there was no shortage of "de-Polonisation" in the Prussian partitiion during the century between the Congress of Vienna and the outbreak of the First World War. The German point of status quo is always conveniently 1914, complete with pre-Versailles borders. So does that naturally negate the right of Poles (and others) to ever possess their own independent states? Or does it mean that Polish territory is only Polish if it was taken by the Russians or Austrians, as opposed to the Prussians?
Vast areas of western Poland were instantly annexed by Germany in 1939. If one compares Germany's pre-Versailles borders with the extent of the annexed territories, one can easily see that the "Reich's" borders now blatantly extended past those of 1914, with the city of Lodz and its environs, for example, already conveniently "German". As I pointed out in an earlier post, Lodz was equally conveniently renamed as Litzmannstadt - so much for the theory that Hitler simply wished to re-establish the equitable frontiers of 1914.
The occupied population had to register with the German authorities, who designated people according to four categories, namely:
(a)
Reichsdeutsch, or Germans born within the old territory of Germany
(b)
Volksdeutsch, or German Nationals, who could claim German ancestry in their family within three generations
(c)
Nichtdeutsch, or non-Germans, who could prove that they were not Jews
(d)
Juden - no explanation required
Each person was issued with an identity card and ration card - a
Reichsdeutscher obtained coupons for 4,000 calories per day, whereas a Polish worker only received 900 calories per day.
Several hundred thousand Poles were expelled from the Polish Corridor during
Aktion Tannenberg in order to accomodate German settlers. Many Poles were driven from the annexed areas to the
General Gouvernement. Poles were thrown out of desirable residences in middle-class suburbs in all occupied territories to house the influx of German officials and their families. Segregation between Germans and non-Germans was strictly enforced - the '
Nur Fur Deutsche' (Germans Only) signs were all over the place. Universities, secondary schools and libraries were shut down. Even the public playing of Chopin's music was forbidden.
A large proportion of the Polish intelligentsia and professional classes perished as a result of mass executions or confinement within concentration camps - examples of the former were the murders in the Palmiry forest and the various
Intelligenzaktion and
Sonderaktion operations by
Einsatzgruppen and local German
Selbstschutz auxiliary units. The Gestapo eagerly collaborated with the soviet NKVD in order to facilitate the destruction of all Polish resistance and the liquidation of the Polish upper classes in particular.
The rest of the Polish population was treated as a potential slave labour force,
ein Arbeitvolk - between 1939 and 1944, circa 2.8 million Poles were sent to Germany as compulsory labourers. Something in the vicinity of 200,000 "racially appropriate" children (i.e., blond "Aryan") were taken from their parents or from orphanages to be brought up as nice Germans in respectable German households. This isn't "propaganda". As a small kid I recall my father and myself speaking to "old" Polish men who had been forced to work in Germany or who had been incarcerated in concentration camps. I remember them showing me the numbers tattooed into their arms and even at that early ageIcould see that these were harrowed men, who were still effected by the utter dehumanisation of their experiences during the German occupation.
Anak - you mentioned that Hitler wished to create
lebensraum from Russian territory and that these were the only lands that Germany would not have relinquished at the end of the war. The latter, of course, is pure idealistic speculation. The measures being taken in occupied Poland, for example, indicate that Hitler did not intend to relinquish any Polish land. In 1942, "Greater Germany" included Lwow and Bialystok, while HansFrank referred to Krakow as the "ancient German city of Krakau". Another thing - what if the Russians or Poles had voiced policies to establish their own versions of
lebensraum from German territories? I guess
that would be unacceptable and rather barbaric, eh?
One thing is certain - from the early Middle Ages to the partitions which marked the end of the Commonwealth of Two Nations, Poland was a land which (naively) accepted Germans, who weren't persecuted, were often granted generous privileges and were permitted to retain their language and religion. This was a colossal error which greatly contributed to Poland as a nation disappearing from the map for over a century. Following the Partitions, the Prussians / Germans were in turn far less than tolerant and instituted discriminatory policies
vis-a-vis the Polish population - that much is abundantly clear to any
neutral student of history. When, in the aftermath of the First World War,
the boot was briefly on the other foot, so to speak, those Germans who had happily supported trans-generational anti-Polish policies just a few years earlier now magically expected the Poles to forget all of this and to automatically treat them as respected peers. That is a point well worth musing upon...
