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