Soon after the German occupation of western Czechoslovakia eliminated one more political buttress for Warsaw, Poland itself fell into Berlin’s sights.140 Ribbentrop’s stance toward his Polish opposites was initially more restrained than the demands that had been presented to Prague: in return for the surrender of Danzig, permission to build an extraterritorial road and rail connection to East Prussia, and Poland’s entry into the Anti-Comintern Pact, Germany would offer—and this was a rather bold move from the German side—definitive recognition of Poland’s western border. Martin Broszat has rightly warned that the border recognition should not be mistaken as “from the outset a false offer from Hitler, one that anticipated rejection to be followed by violence.”141 After all, the anti-Soviet proposition also fit the central goal of Nazi foreign policy, namely the acquisition of new “Lebensraum,” and in previous years had become almost a leitmotif in the discussions that Hitler, Konstantin von Neurath, and Hermann Göring held with Polish representatives.142 Despite repeated overtures, Warsaw had consistently rejected this offer, which would have made Poland completely dependent on Berlin. When Ribbentrop returned “empty-handed” from yet another visit to Warsaw in January 1939, the path to war was laid.143 In late March, Hitler informed the German army’s commander in chief, Walther von Brauchitsch, that if circumstances dictated, he wanted to resolve the “Polish question” through war; in early April, he instructed the Wehrmacht’s High Command to undertake the planning of “Fall Weiss” (“Case White,” the strategic plan for invading Poland), before he subsequently revoked the German-Polish Nonaggression Pact as well as the Anglo-German Naval Agreement.144
If Berlin had still expected in late 1938 that it could build an eastern empire on the rubble of the Soviet Union with Poland’s help, Warsaw’s categorical refusal had now forced a change of German plans. From the role of a potential ally, Poland’s position shifted to that of the next victim of German aggression. But because of the guarantee that the United Kingdom made to Poland on March 31, 1939, German planning first required a nonbelligerence agreement with precisely the power that was the actual target of Nazi expansion efforts: the Soviet Union. As a result, the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact—or “aggression pact,” as Rainer Schmidt calls it—was signed on August 23, 1939.145 This “U-turn of all time” sealed Poland’s fate in two ways at once: whereas the dystopian vision of a “‘living space’ further east dropped for the foreseeable future out of the equation,” an attack on the neighboring Poland had now become a calculable gamble.146 These dreams of carnage were now projected on Poland, as seen in Hitler’s address to the Wehrmacht leadership on the eve of the pact’s ratification: “Accordingly, I have placed my Death’s Head Units [Totenkopfverbände] in readiness . . . with an order to send every man, woman, and child of Polish descent and language to their deaths, mercilessly and without compassion. This is the only way for us to gain the Lebensraum we need.”147
These developments led to immediate consequences for the German minorities in Poland, now that the Polish state was reacting to all provocations with a much shorter temper, and right up until the final weeks before the outbreak of war, it was forcefully dissolving the bulk of German minority organizations.148 The Polish government was wrong in believing that dissolving the minority organizations would ensure its security, for it failed to see that doing so had not interrupted the various intelligence efforts and conspiratorial operations conducted across Poland by a number of German agencies. The German efforts proved useful in projects like the compilation of proscription lists, filled by German units with the names of persons who were later to be arrested and often executed. In August 1939, Rudolf Wiesner even suggested to VoMi that he could take up a role corresponding to the one played by Henlein in Czechoslovakia.149
Meanwhile, Germany’s security agencies had begun arming members of German minorities and bringing them together into paramilitary units known as K-organizations (engaged in Kampf or “combat”) and S-organizations (engaged in sabotage). Although the Polish Interior Ministry still believed it could put away any fears about Germans in Poland forming military groups, the K- and S-organizations in Upper Silesia already had 4,474 members, and the K-organizations in Poznań Voivodeship had 2,324 men under arms in seventy-two localities.150 When the Wehrmacht attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, this fifth column sprang into action by blowing up bridges, blockading streets, occupying industrial zones, and even taking over an entire city before the Wehrmacht’s arrival, as was the case in Katowice, the biggest city in Upper Silesia and known in German as Kattowitz.151
Notes
1. Quoted in Broszat, Zweihundert Jahre, 85.
2. Ibid., 90.
3. Kolb, “Polenbild und Polenfreundschaft,” 113.
4. For example, see the many Pole-friendly references at the 1832 Hambach Festival in Majewski, “Sage nie,” and Asmus, Hambacher Fest. For an overview of the many supportive organizations in Baden, which was particularly liberal at the time, see Brudzyńska-Němec, Polenvereine.
5. M. Müller, “Deutsche und polnische Nation,” 74; see also ibid., 71–72, as well as Kolb, “Polenbild und Polenfreundschaft,” 111–13. On “pan-nationalism,” see Koselleck et al., “Volk, Nation,” 7: 404.
6. Broszat, Zweihundert Jahre, 101–2.
7. Lukowski and Zawadski, Concise History, 142–44; Schmidt-Rösler, Polen, 82–83.
8. Trzeciakowski, “Polnische Frage,” 63–64.
9. Quoted in Wippermann, Ordensstaat, 144–45. Müller and Schönemann, Polen-Debatte, explores the events more comprehensively.
10. Sauer, “Problem,” 422–23.
11. On this, see also Ther, “Beyond the Nation,” 53–54.
12. Hoensch, Geschichte Polens, 231.
13. Zoltowski to the Reichstag on April 1, quoted in Verhandlungen des Reichstages, 1: 97.
14. Ibid., 1: 98. On the rediscovery of the medieval German eastward colonization, see Wippermann, Der deutsche Drang, esp. 82–116; Kopp, “Arguing the Case,” 151.
15. Sauer, “Problem,” 431.
16. Wehler, “Deutsch-polnische Beziehungen,” 204.
17. Trzeciakowski, Kulturkampf, 119.
18. Hoensch, Geschichte Polens, 232. For the effects on Silesia, see Matuschek, “Polnisch der Oberschlesier,” part 1, 110–11, and part 2, 194. For the importance of language in emergent nationalism, see particularly Anderson, Erfindung, 72–87, and Hobsbawm, Nationen, 60–83; for Germany, see, for example, Puschner, Völkische Bewegung, 27–48. For a concise overview of research on the role of language in the assertion of nationalist worldviews, see Day and Thompson, Theorizing Nationalism, 90–92.
19. On this, see Leuschner, “Sprache.”
20. Trzeciakowski, Kulturkampf, 52–53; Broszat, Zweihundert Jahre, 134; Lindemann, “Preußisch-deutsche Reichsgründung,” 30.
21. Trzeciakowski, Kulturkampf, 57–59.
22. Einhart, Deutsche Geschichte, 286.
23. Trzeciakowski, Kulturkampf, 6.
24. Here, Kopp points to an interesting simultaneity, for this escalation of inner colonization policy coincided with the overseas expansion of the German Empire. The existence of a causal relationship, however, is debatable (“Arguing the Case,” 149).
25. Broszat, Zweihundert Jahre, 143.
26. Neubach, Ausweisungen, 32.
27. Lindemann, “Preußisch-deutsche Reichsgründung,” 35.
28. Ibid.; see also Wehler, “Von den ‘Reichsfeinden,’” 187.
29. See, for example, the contemporary argument in Hasse, Das deutsche Reich, 56–58.