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