Ideology and the Rationality of Domination. Gerhard Wolf

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