63. Röhr, “Reichsgau Wartheland.” See also Kaczmarek, “Niemiecka polityka narodowościowa”; Leniger, Nationalsozialistische Volkstumsarbeit; Lempart, “Deutsche Volksliste”; Strippel, NS-Volkstumspolitik.
64. Alberti, Verfolgung und Vernichtung, 17.
1The 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