The Weimar Republic was not prepared to resign itself to this development. As early as September 1920, the German embassy in Poland sent a status report explaining that the country’s German minorities still had to learn—as Albert Kotowski summarized this missive—that “holding out in Poland is their primary national duty.”90 In order to support such policy goals, Berlin tightened its immigration, passport, and visa requirements in April 1921 and also tied abandoned-property compensation payments to declarations from the local German organizations in Poland, which had to certify that the emigrant had no choice but to leave.91 Berlin soon realized, however, that only with a drastic improvement of the situation in Poland could a final exodus of the remaining Germans be prevented. Achieving such an improvement meant building across Germany and Poland an interconnected network of organizations with multiple components and strong financial backing.
Richard Blanke’s proposition that the developments of Poland’s German minorities should be investigated “apart from the usual foreign policy context” is particularly mistaken in the ways such groups were organized.92 On the contrary, their “opposing fronts,” as Hans-Adolf Jacobsen aptly describes the relations between the frequently feuding organizations of the Germans in Poland, cannot be understood without their foreign-policy dimension and are comprehensible only within the context of German-Polish relations and the close ties and dependencies between the German minorities and Berlin.93
This latter point became particularly apparent even in the early days after the war. In 1919, before the final border was even known, parliamentarians from Prussia’s constitutional convention as well as Germany’s Weimar National Assembly joined forces to create in Berlin a cross-party Parliamentary Action Committee for the East (Parlamentarischer Aktionsausschuss Ost).94 But Allied control of Germany’s budget prevented direct political and financial support of the Germans in the ceded territories; therefore, a front organization called the Konkordia Literarische Gesellschaft (Concordia Literary Society) was founded in January 1920 under Max Winkler.95 At his disposal were considerable financial resources, earmarked for the acquisition of German newspapers abroad in order to secure their continued existence, which enabled Konkordia to become an immense newspaper group within a very short time, one that controlled almost the entire German press abroad.
Even more decisive was the Deutsche Stiftung (German Foundation), founded in November 1920 under Erich Krahmer-Möllenberg, formerly a senior official in the provincial government of Posen at Bromberg and then in the Prussian Interior Ministry and, like Winkler, another gray eminence of ethnopolicy (Volkstumspolitik). In contrast to Konkordia, however, the Deutsche Stiftung had closer ties to governmental authorities and acted—according to a memorandum from 1925—as a “camouflaged agency” of the Foreign Office.96 It was the task of the Deutsche Stiftung to help “the Germans now of Polish citizenship . . . to strengthen them in being German and to maintain the German ethnic group as an independent cultural factor.”97
Discussion of a single German minority in Poland was in itself already misleading, in that it suggests a group whose members felt a mutual bond for historical, religious, or other reasons. Germans in Poland felt such bonds only to a very small extent. According to Valdis O. Lumans, they actually represented “the most diverse of all German minorities.”98 They were scattered across the country in six regions, with the Upper Silesians in particular belonging to the Catholic faith, Protestants in the west following the Evangelical Consistory of Posen, and those in the east the Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession in Poland.99 Beyond their religious and cultural differences, there were also strongly contrasting political preferences: Upper Silesia, strongly marked by heavy industry, remained until 1918 a stronghold of the Center Party, which was then locally succeeded by the German Catholic People’s Party (Deutsche Katholische Volkspartei), while in agrarian Wielkopolska and Pomerelia the German National People’s Party (Deutschnationale Volkspartei) dominated, and in Łódź there was even the founding of a German Workers’ Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei), which played a particularly strong role among the workforce of the textile factories.100
Therefore, except for a short period in the early 1920s, these German minorities were unable to agree on a single nationwide association. In Wielkopolska and Pomerelia, for example, the immediate postwar period saw German parties, ranging from Social Democrats to the radical right, coming together with the free labor unions to form a Central Working Group of German Parties (Zentralarbeitsgemeinschaft deutscher Parteien, or ZAG), a loose alliance with a certain distance to Berlin that was supposed to coordinate a common approach. When the nationalist factions pushed for closer ties to Germany and failed to achieve this inside the ZAG, they withdrew from the alliance and pulled to their side the support of Germany’s Foreign Office, which had since become the leading ministry handling all matters pertaining to the German minorities. The ministerial officials in Berlin torpedoed the mediation efforts of the socialists, who were pleading for a compromise within the ZAG framework, and demanded instead that its member organizations transfer into a new organization before then dissolving the ZAG. All factions except for the left-wing parties complied with these demands, thereby forming in May 1921 the Germandom Federation for the Protection of Minority Rights in Poland (Deutschtumsbund zur Wahrung der Minderheitenrechte in Polen), which became the “sole contact” for all financial transactions with the Foreign Office.101 According to Norbert Krekeler, nothing more clearly demonstrates the idea that the development of the German organizations in Poland was “less an autonomous process among the ethnic Germans and more a development steered largely from Berlin, one whose direction resulted primarily from the needs of Germany’s foreign policy.”102
Although the generous monetary transfers were crucial in stopping the wave of emigration, they also awoke new desires for further assistance among Poland’s German minorities. Poland’s economic situation was in fact quite strained, for the country faced enormous tasks upon its reestablishment. The different administrative, legal, financial, transport, and education systems of the three former partitions now had to be brought together, and the economy’s structural inadequacies and imbalances needed to be overcome.103 The latter aspect was further exacerbated by the fact that, with their incorporation into the new Poland, the country’s major economic centers had lost their old markets in Germany and the former Russian Empire. The loss affected not only the textile factories in Łódź and the mining industry in Upper Silesia, but also the highly productive agricultural sector of the northwest. Therefore, the downward spiral experienced by local German agricultural enterprises was less a product of discriminatory measures by Warsaw and more a symptom of the general crisis affecting Poland’s entire agricultural sector, one that also threatened socially explosive consequences, for most people lived from agriculture. The problem was further compounded by inequality in land ownership. The richest 1 percent of the agricultural populace owned 50 percent of the arable land, and the poorest two-thirds were crowded onto just 15 percent of it. The poorest two-thirds, then, often owned just enough for their subsistence, with no hope of surplus production or capital accumulation.104 German landownership was part of this problem: in 1921, of all farms over 50 hectares (ca. 120 acres) in Wielkopolska, 36 percent belonged to German owners, and in Pomerelia, it was 43.7 percent.105 A land-reform bill was passed on December 28, 1925, but it had been so softened by the dominant conservative forces that it failed to fundamentally change the situation. Nonetheless, its central provision allowing for the subdivision of large estates over 150 hectares (ca. 370 acres) was a very