he pursued a policy that combined cautious rapprochement with a step-by-step revision of Versailles, a strategy that essentially aimed to create a split in Europe. It was hoped that concessions in Western Europe, particularly in satisfying France’s security needs, would engender sympathy for Germany’s desire to change the status quo—without military force—in Eastern Europe.75 This tactical shift showed great promise, as shown by the signing of the Locarno Treaties in December 1925, through which the Weimar Republic formally recognized its new western border in exchange for (among other things) its acceptance into the League of Nations and the withdrawal of French troops from the Rhineland. In contrast, plans for an “eastern Locarno agreement,” meaning comparable border guarantees for Poland and Czechoslovakia, fell through in the face of German resistance. Speaking to the Reichstag’s Foreign Affairs Committee, Stresemann himself rejected any explicit renunciation of force in amending Germany’s eastern border, for this would have implied a recognition of the existing land possessions.76 Therefore, it would not be an exaggeration to identify Locarno as the starting point for the “decline of the European security framework.”77 After all, the Weimar Republic had thereby taken the “first step on the path toward the desired revision of the Versailles Treaty,” and Poland was forced to accept the subordination of its own security interests to those of its Western allies, thereby downgrading Poland’s western frontier to a “second-class border.”78
The Weimar Republic thoroughly exploited the newfound latitude resulting from the détente on its western border. Having learned from experience that Poland was certainly not just a “one-season state” (“Saisonstaat”), as it had been scornfully called after the war, Berlin now tried to take advantage of Warsaw’s economic difficulties by suspending German-Polish trade.79 According to Stresemann, economic relations were to be suspended until “Poland’s economic and financial emergency has reached the maximum degree and brought the entire Polish state edifice to a condition of powerlessness,” making the country “ready for a settlement of the border question according to our wishes.”80 Although it did not bring the Weimar Republic any closer to its goals, this economic war was nonetheless able to count on widespread support from all political parties, for the “demand for a comprehensive revision of the eastern border” had long since become “one of the few truly national integrating factors.”81
The Weimar Republic tried to establish moral legitimacy for its anti-Polish destabilization policy by pointing to the German minorities. It was argued that these people had not only been forced into the Polish state in direct violation of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, but had also been subjected to an assimilation process that the ratified minorities treaties should have prevented. This invocation of Wilson, however, did not hold water, for his peace program had explicitly provided for the establishment of a sovereign Polish state with access to the sea; furthermore, the minority treaties did not endow collectives of any description with group rights but instead—and in accord with the Western understanding of liberalism—focused on the legal person of the individual, securing the individual’s right to choose his or her own ethnic identity.82 The intention of the treaties was “to prevent the oppression of minorities, not the assimilation of ethnic groups”; in fact, the latter was seen as an unavoidable process by supporters of the League of Nations, one that was even to be welcomed—if it proceeded peacefully—as a solution for the nationalist tensions of the period.83 The interpretation was different at Germany’s Foreign Office. According to a memorandum from July 1928, the German minorities were to be maintained “through all means,” for doing so represented “the prerequisite for a favorable solution to the Corridor Question and Upper Silesia Question.”84 Because of their function as “the living symbol and bridgeheads of revisionist claims,” the German minorities received Berlin’s undivided attention and massive support.85 As Martin Broszat put it, “behind this minorities policy stood the border question, and it was only through the latter that the former also became politically explosive.”86
It is therefore unsurprising that the mass exodus of Poland’s German populace immediately after Germany’s defeat in World War I aroused great concern in Berlin. According to Christian Jansen and Arno Weckbecker, the reasons behind this exodus were once attributed mainly to Polish governmental policy, especially in German historiography immediately after World War II, but more recent research has attributed its causes “primarily to the Germans themselves and their mentality.”87 Even the German military’s transition commissioner back in 1919 who witnessed the German populace fleeing in a near panic could not help but feel that these people had become accustomed to massive state subsidies and were “trained to be dependent” on them.88 On the other hand, Przemysław Hauser places more emphasis on an unwillingness to adapt to a future in which Germans were forced to live “without the status of a master race.”89
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
