In any case, the new demands of the situation accelerated a shift in Berlin in its treatment of the German minorities. By the time the Locarno Treaties were signed at the latest, all hopes for a quick collapse of the Polish state had to be set aside, and the financial support of the ethnic Germans now had to be adapted to the new realities. If Germans were to be stopped from leaving Poland so that enough still remained to legitimize demands for a treaty revision, then financial support for cultural matters would no longer suffice; emigration would need to be backstopped through massive subsidization of economic livelihoods, which soon became clear to the planners at Germany’s Foreign Office.
The Polish authorities, aware of Berlin’s increasing influence over German minority organizations, had dissolved the German Federation for the Protection of Minority Rights in 1923. Trying to take its place in 1924, but with little success, was the German Union in the Sejm and Senat (Deutsche Vereinigung in Sejm und Senat), a loose umbrella organization of German parliamentarians.107 Germany’s Foreign Office found itself confronted with an array of smaller organizations, which is why it made any further funding contingent on the formation of a central committee. The contingency ultimately led to the founding of the Quintet Committee (Fünfer-Ausschuss), which, as the highest authority of all German economic associations in Wielkopolska and Pomerelia, became the German minority’s most important committee; it followed the guidelines of the Foreign Office in awarding loans exclusively to politically loyal “conscious Germans” (“bewusste Deutsche”).108
To provide even more generous financial support to the ethnic Germans, the Ossa company was founded in 1926, likewise acting as an “auxiliary structure of the Foreign Office” under the management of Krahmer-Möllenberg and Winkler.109 In the beginning, it was mostly big landowners who had profited from Berlin’s generosity, while Upper Silesia’s industrial companies, for example, were still being explicitly excluded from the loan program as late as 1926 by Foreign Minister Stresemann himself, from fears in Berlin of the capital requirements. Even this last reservation fell away, though, with the founding of Ossa: by April 1933, ethnic German industrialists in East Upper Silesia had received some sixty to seventy million Reichsmarks.110 By 1928 at the latest, when Krahmer-Möllenberg admitted that these payments had “lost the character of genuine loans” and had become pure subsidies, the wholly political purpose of the payments became openly apparent.111
If even more proof of this were necessary, one could look toward events of the Great Depression, which brought additional hardships to Poland’s German minorities. As Chancellor Heinrich Brüning’s government radicalized Stresemann’s foreign-policy agenda and completed its transition to a “Grossraumpolitik” (a “wider spatial policy” asserting a hegemonial influence beyond one’s own borders), and heated discussions of the Danzig Corridor broke out in public debate, representatives of the Germans in Pomerelia saw an opportunity to present Brüning with new demands in late 1930: either grant additional cheap loans and an import quota for reduced-tariff wheat shipments, or it would become necessary for their “followers to be told the truth, and given back their complete freedom to act as they wish.”112 After that, the Ossa company was instructed to increase its disbursements in Wielkopolska and Pomerelia.113
Reversed Relations: Reconciliation with Poland as a Prerequisite for Nazi “Lebensraum” Policy
It may seem paradoxical that the Nazi seizure of power, of all things, would be what brought an easing of relations with Poland, if only temporarily. Unlike earlier German chancellors, Hitler felt he could not afford to further aggravate mutual relations and thereby endanger his expansionist foreign-policy goals. The Nazis ended the economic war with Poland and signed a nonaggression pact in January 1934, in which Germany for the first time ruled out a border change by force; it represented a conspicuous break with the foreign policy of the Weimar Republic and was certainly the “most important, the only important turnaround in Germany’s handling of its eastern partner.”114
Although appearing incomprehensible to many contemporaries, the pact fit logically into the Nazi foreign-policy agenda.115 In his long-unpublished “second book,” Hitler outlined the general thrust of Nazi foreign policy: instead of a rigid fixation on restoring the borders of 1914, which he criticized as “insane” because it would preserve the entire victorious coalition as an ongoing enemy, he called for a shift “to a clear, far-seeing spatial policy [Raumpolitik]” and set his sights beyond Pomerelia and Upper Silesia to target the Soviet Union.116 Poland, whose political elite held strongly anticommunist sentiments and had still not given up all hope of expanding at Soviet expense, must have appeared to represent the ideal junior partner in this endeavor.
Of course, the interests of the German minorities became secondary to this strategic reorientation. In order to prevent any inconvenient protests from ethnic German spokespersons, Rudolf Hess strove to subjugate any remaining ethnic German associations not already under direct state control, as Hitler had not only named him Deputy Führer on April 27, 1933, but had also entrusted him with supervising matters of ethnopolicy. The first result was the founding in October 1933 of the Ethnic German Council (Volksdeutscher Rat, or VR), at the suggestion of Karl Haushofer, a theoretician of the “Lebensraum” concept, and Hans Steinacher, head of the Volk Alliance for Germandom Abroad (Volksbund für das Deutschtum im Ausland, or VDA), which was by far the largest private-sector organization in the Reich promoting “Germandom” (“Deutschtum”).117 The great expectations of both Nazi Party figures and ethnopolicy advocates were soon thwarted, however, by the ministerial bureaucracy, which would not let itself be pushed out of this policy field. During an interministerial conference, the representatives of the VR were told to align their actions with the Foreign Office’s policy positions. Their hopes of having a say in the disbursement of state funding were likewise dashed. Steinacher was advised that he had probably interpreted his powers “a bit too optimistically” and that his prospective participation in the allocating of funds would “under no circumstances come into consideration.”118 It was mainly this decision that doomed the newly created VR to powerlessness.
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In Eastern Europe, the ethnic Germans greeted Hitler’s coming to power with “panegyric exclamations and loyalty declarations.”119 That they did so is hardly surprising, for Nazi ideology emphasized the importance of the völkisch (the “folkish,” meaning the ethnonationalistic), a concept that legitimized these minorities’ efforts to maintain their ethnic homogeneity and simultaneously affirm their ostensible role as bringers of culture to the east. Coupled with strong resentments against a modernity represented by industry and big cities, along with a hatred of communists and Jews, Nazism could thus be assured of success among rural residents in particular, who happened to make up the bulk of ethnic German minorities, and not only in Poland.120 The success of this ideological expansion among the German minorities can also be read in the new political semantics that was now disseminating a völkisch and racist vocabulary among the ethnic Germans in Poland as well, words that had either gained mass appeal through Nazism or been reshaped by it: the term “Auslandsdeutscher” (a “German abroad”) was replaced by “Volksdeutscher” (a “member of the German ethnonation”), the concept of the “minority” by that of the “Volksgruppe” (“ethnonational group”), which furthermore was involved in a “Volkstumskampf” (“ethnonational struggle”) abroad.121 The message behind this terminological change was clear. It highlighted one’s membership in a “larger whole existing beyond the border,” namely the German “Volksgemeinschaft”