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 Eastern Europe. Instead of a greater German economic sphere, Berlin was now confronted by a string of independent states, which France had furthermore drawn into alliances meant to block any subsequent German pushes to the east. This new constellation of Eastern European states drew its legitimation from Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points. In proclaiming the right to national self-determination, the US president believed that a solution had also been found to the many nationalist confrontations that he considered had contributed to the outbreak of war.65 But this was certainly not the case. As recently noted by Eric D. Weitz, the Treaty of Versailles marked a “move from the Vienna system to the Paris system,” in which state sovereignty was no longer defined primarily—let alone solely—in territorial terms but also had to prove itself in terms of the resident populace, or in terms of the resident ethnically or religiously defined demographic groups.66 New states answering the call for national self-determination arose from the liquidation of old empires in Central and Eastern Europe, but at the same time, nationalism was to be held in check by the various minority rights agreements imposed on these states.67 But this policy was unsuccessful in the face of “the genie that would not go back into the bottle.”68 Particularly in a state that derived its legitimacy from its people, or more precisely from its Volk (folk, but variously meaning people, nation, or ethnonation), defined in ethnic terms, it was easy to see the existence of local ethnic minorities as a threat. This is how the ideal of ethnically homogeneous nation-states came to lie “at the heart of inter-war European politics.”69
Revising the Treaty of Versailles became the main foreign-policy goal for each successive government of the Weimar Republic. It was not only about the annulment of treaty limitations on German sovereignty, but also the recovery of lost territories. The latter aspect soon solidified into an anti-Polish policy aimed at retaking formerly Prussian territories.
In view of the impending referenda in the eastern border regions, as well as the futile attempts by a multitude of paramilitary Selbstschutz (self-defense) and Freikorps (free corps) groups—backed by the German military—to reverse territorial changes by force, the German delight at the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland, while surprising at first glance, also becomes understandable. Unhappy with the eastern border drawn by the victorious Allied powers, the Polish army had invaded the Soviet Union, but only barely escaped a complete military catastrophe after a series of Soviet victories—which were celebrated in Berlin “as if these were German military successes.”70 The unexpected reversal just outside Warsaw in August 1920, however, along with the subsequent peace treaty favoring Poland, did not cause German foreign policymakers to give up on their cherished belief in the Polish state’s imminent collapse. Instead, Berlin turned to reviving the old German-Russian policy of encircling Poland.71 This received a decisive boost with the Treaty of Rapallo, signed in April 1922. Hans von Seeckt, the German army’s commander in chief, who immediately after the war had transferred regular troops into Border Defense East (Grenzschutz Ost) and commanded them in the fight against Polish armed units, expressed German hopes as follows: “Poland’s existence is intolerable, and incompatible with Germany’s living requirements. It must disappear, and will disappear through its own weaknesses and through Russia, with German assistance.”72 Here, von Seeckt was not only reflecting the revanchist mood of the German military, but also describing the core of governmental policy, as was confirmed by Joseph Wirth, a liberal parliamentarian from the Center Party who was chancellor of Germany when he signed the Treaty of Rapallo and declared thereafter that “Poland must be dealt with. It is toward this goal that my policymaking is geared. . . . On this point, I am entirely in agreement with the military, especially with General von Seeckt.”73
It was only with the accession of Gustav Stresemann, who was initially both chancellor and foreign minister before continuing as the Weimar Republic’s longest-serving foreign minister, that a major shift occurred in 1924 in the German attitude toward Poland. As Stresemann made clear during a confidential meeting of all German national-level and Prussian state-level ministries shortly after entering office, he also felt that a revision of the Versailles Treaty was necessary: “The creation of a state whose political borders encompass all parts of the German people, meaning those who live within a contained settlement area in central Europe and desire union with Germany, is the distant goal of German hopes.”74 He was willing, however,
