one) that the first studies in this area were published abroad: for example, Goguel, Über die Mitwirkung deutscher Wissenschaftler; Goguel, “Bedeutung der Reichsuniversität Posen”; Goguel, “Nord-und ostdeutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft” ; Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards. See also Fahlbusch, Wissenschaft im Dienst; Haar, Historiker im Nationalsozialismus; Roth, “Heydrichs Professor”; Mackensen, Reulecke, and Ehmer, Ursprünge, Arten und Folgen.
54. A good example of this are the investigations into the General Plan for the East, particularly into the relationship between its two planning centers, with one run by Dr. Hans Ehlich at the Reich Security Main Office and the other run by Prof. Konrad Meyer at the RKFDV Staff Main Office, as well as their relationship with the criminal practices of the SS units, especially their murder sprees in the Soviet Union. Putting it simply, the unresolved question is: Who led the way in these massacres, the planning groups in Berlin or the murderers on the ground? Did German units follow a plan, be it finished or not, or was it the dynamics of violence on the ground that forced the agenda for Berlin’s geopolitical planners, who in many ways were always one step behind the realities and constantly having to adjust their plans accordingly? On this, see Roth, “Generalplan Ost—Gesamtplan Ost.” On skepticism about the influence of scholarly policy advisers, see also Leniger, Nationalsozialistische Volkstumsarbeit, 13.
55. Aly, Final Solution. Here, Aly was able to build on earlier scholarship, because this link was already described in Broszat’s Nationalsozialistische Polenpolitik and even more exhaustively in Christopher Browning’s research. Nonetheless, Aly’s analysis is a new one, in that Broszat primarily highlights the link between deportation and resettlement policies without discussing the effects it had on the course of anti-Jewish policy; meanwhile, although Browning does underline the radicalizing effects that the former’s failure had on the decision to commit mass murder, he does not explicitly point out that the problems of resettling ethnic Germans may have accelerated or otherwise influenced this process; see Browning, “Nazi Resettlement Policy.”
56. See also the critical counterpoint in Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten, 462.
57. Lumans, Himmler’s Auxiliaries; Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten.
58. Heinemann, Rasse, Siedlung, deutsches Blut, 42 and 10. Also worth mentioning here is Longerich’s biography Heinrich Himmler, which devotes much space to population policy.
59. Łuczak, Pod niemieckim jarzmem, 60.
60. Steinbacher, Musterstadt Auschwitz, 94; see also 118–19.
61. See, for example, Esch, Gesunde Verhältnisse; Kaczmarek, “Zwischen Altreich und Besatzungsgebiet.” See also the biographies written about the Gauleiters (who were simultaneously the Reichsstatthalters) of Danzig–West Prussia and the Wartheland: Schenk, Hitlers Mann; Epstein, Model Nazi.
62. On the invasion of Poland and the population policy aspects of the Reich’s warfare, see, for example, Rossino, Hitler Strikes Poland; Böhler, Auftakt zum Vernichtungskrieg. On economic and labor policy, see Röhr, “Zur Rolle der Schwerindustrie”; Röhr, “Zur Wirtschaftspolitik der deutschen Okkupanten”; Kaczmarek, “Die deutsche wirtschaftliche Penetration”; Stefanski, “Nationalsozialistische Volkstums- und Arbeitseinsatzpolitik.” On educational and cultural policy, see Harten, De-Kulturation und Germanisierung.
63. Röhr, “Reichsgau Wartheland.” See also Kaczmarek, “Niemiecka polityka narodowościowa”; Leniger, Nationalsozialistische Volkstumsarbeit; Lempart, “Deutsche Volksliste”; Strippel, NS-Volkstumspolitik.
64. Alberti, Verfolgung und Vernichtung, 17.
1The German Quest for Polish Land
Anti-Polish Germanization Policy: The Path toward the German Nation-State
Modern German-Polish relations are rooted in the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that took place from 1772 to 1795. These territorial seizures were cemented in 1815 by the Congress of Vienna, making the czar of Russia thenceforth king of the newly created “Congress Poland” in personal union while furthermore reaffirming Austria’s annexation of Galicia as well as Prussia’s annexation of West Prussia and the Grand Duchy of Posen.
It was Prussia that profited most from Poland’s dismemberment. Although West Prussia was immediately assimilated into the kingdom’s administrative structure as a new province, King Frederick William III showed a certain amount of forbearance to the populace in the Grand Duchy of Posen on May 19, 1815, when he declared that they would not need to “deny [their] nationality,” that their “religion is to be preserved,” and also that their “language is to be used, alongside German, in all public proceedings.”1 Attacks against these “supreme sanctities of a nation” aimed at “denationalizing a people” would achieve precisely the opposite of what Prussia’s education minister Karl vom Stein zum Altenstein described as Berlin’s sole desire: “perfectly good subjects.”2
Neither Prussia’s initially conciliatory policy nor Russia’s harsher one could hinder the emergence of a Polish national movement, which soon succeeded in making the Polish question a perennial concern on the European agenda. The partitioning powers came to feel this by 1830 at the latest, when the July Revolution in France also inflamed Poland, ultimately leading to an uprising against the Russian occupation troops. European reactions were divided, the German lands not excepted: while the government in Berlin feared that the disturbances could spread to the Prussian part of Poland, the bourgeois nationalist opposition felt great sympathy for the Polish insurrectionists and saw Poland as a key battleground through which Europe’s entire restorationist order might be overturned.3 In this camp, a potential reestablishment of the Polish state was not considered a threat at all: instead, it was to be welcomed as a positive step forward in their own struggle for German unification.4 Regardless of whether this really reflected “cosmopolitanism” (as Michael G. Müller claims) or was instead more about “pan-nationalism” (as described by Reinhart Koselleck), the Prussian government found both equally suspect.5 Appointed Oberpräsident of Posen Province in December 1830, Eduard von Flottwell was sent there with the mission of nipping feared irredentist aspirations in the bud by intensifying the assimilation of the local populace and marginalizing the Polish aristocracy and the Catholic Church. Flottwell’s measures marked a radical turnaround in Prussia’s Poland policy, putting the Prussian state on an ill-fated collision course with a large part of its own populace in the eastern provinces.6
The sympathy shown by the German bourgeoisie would prove less durable than the uncompromising stance of the Prussian state. Although the former would flare up briefly once more with the arrest and conviction of Polish conspirators in 1846–47, the situation changed fundamentally when the Poles, during the turmoil of the March Revolution (1848), took action by setting up parallel administrations and establishing armed units in parts of the Grand Duchy. Prussia’s liberal “March government” offered the granting of autonomy rights, not to the entire Grand Duchy, but to its eastern part around the city of Gniezno; but Polish nationalists indignantly rejected the concession as inadequate and decided to pursue open struggle.7 The violent suppression of the uprising in Prussian Poland happened simultaneously with the antidemocratic backlash reversing the German revolution. The realization that the fulfillment of Polish ambitions would collide with the political goal of German unification ultimately extinguished even the one last brief flare-up of friendly feelings toward Poland, so that the former image of freedom-loving Poles gave way to an image of brutal rebels against a legitimate order.8
The change in feeling was also apparent in the debates of the Frankfurt Parliament (1848–49). Polish calls
