in six regions, with the Upper Silesians in particular belonging to the Catholic faith, Protestants in the west following the Evangelical Consistory of Posen, and those in the east the Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession in Poland.99 Beyond their religious and cultural differences, there were also strongly contrasting political preferences: Upper Silesia, strongly marked by heavy industry, remained until 1918 a stronghold of the Center Party, which was then locally succeeded by the German Catholic People’s Party (Deutsche Katholische Volkspartei), while in agrarian Wielkopolska and Pomerelia the German National People’s Party (Deutschnationale Volkspartei) dominated, and in Łódź there was even the founding of a German Workers’ Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei), which played a particularly strong role among the workforce of the textile factories.100
Therefore, except for a short period in the early 1920s, these German minorities were unable to agree on a single nationwide association. In Wielkopolska and Pomerelia, for example, the immediate postwar period saw German parties, ranging from Social Democrats to the radical right, coming together with the free labor unions to form a Central Working Group of German Parties (Zentralarbeitsgemeinschaft deutscher Parteien, or ZAG), a loose alliance with a certain distance to Berlin that was supposed to coordinate a common approach. When the nationalist factions pushed for closer ties to Germany and failed to achieve this inside the ZAG, they withdrew from the alliance and pulled to their side the support of Germany’s Foreign Office, which had since become the leading ministry handling all matters pertaining to the German minorities. The ministerial officials in Berlin torpedoed the mediation efforts of the socialists, who were pleading for a compromise within the ZAG framework, and demanded instead that its member organizations transfer into a new organization before then dissolving the ZAG. All factions except for the left-wing parties complied with these demands, thereby forming in May 1921 the Germandom Federation for the Protection of Minority Rights in Poland (Deutschtumsbund zur Wahrung der Minderheitenrechte in Polen), which became the “sole contact” for all financial transactions with the Foreign Office.101 According to Norbert Krekeler, nothing more clearly demonstrates the idea that the development of the German organizations in Poland was “less an autonomous process among the ethnic Germans and more a development steered largely from Berlin, one whose direction resulted primarily from the needs of Germany’s foreign policy.”102
Although the generous monetary transfers were crucial in stopping the wave of emigration, they also awoke new desires for further assistance among Poland’s German minorities. Poland’s economic situation was in fact quite strained, for the country faced enormous tasks upon its reestablishment. The different administrative, legal, financial, transport, and education systems of the three former partitions now had to be brought together, and the economy’s structural inadequacies and imbalances needed to be overcome.103 The latter aspect was further exacerbated by the fact that, with their incorporation into the new Poland, the country’s major economic centers had lost their old markets in Germany and the former Russian Empire. The loss affected not only the textile factories in Łódź and the mining industry in Upper Silesia, but also the highly productive agricultural sector of the northwest. Therefore, the downward spiral experienced by local German agricultural enterprises was less a product of discriminatory measures by Warsaw and more a symptom of the general crisis affecting Poland’s entire agricultural sector, one that also threatened socially explosive consequences, for most people lived from agriculture. The problem was further compounded by inequality in land ownership. The richest 1 percent of the agricultural populace owned 50 percent of the arable land, and the poorest two-thirds were crowded onto just 15 percent of it. The poorest two-thirds, then, often owned just enough for their subsistence, with no hope of surplus production or capital accumulation.104 German landownership was part of this problem: in 1921, of all farms over 50 hectares (ca. 120 acres) in Wielkopolska, 36 percent belonged to German owners, and in Pomerelia, it was 43.7 percent.105 A land-reform bill was passed on December 28, 1925, but it had been so softened by the dominant conservative forces that it failed to fundamentally change the situation. Nonetheless, its central provision allowing for the subdivision of large estates over 150 hectares (ca. 370 acres) was a very sensitive one in regard to large German landholdings, especially because the reform was basically an invitation to tie the expropriation issue to the minorities one. The reform had little effect, however, on the strong position of the German landholders: although the German share of the population had fallen to 10 percent in both Wielkopolska and Pomerelia by 1931, Germans still controlled 29 percent of the arable land in Wielkopolska, with estate sizes generally exceeding 100 hectares (nearly 250 acres); meanwhile, 22 percent of the arable land in Pomerelia, including 60 percent of the land in large-scale estates exceeding 180 hectares (nearly 445 acres), remained in German hands.106 If the economic situation of the German great estates in Poland nonetheless worsened, the real cause was Poland’s general economic situation, not to mention the economic war unleashed by Germany in 1925, which had led to even more troubles for export-oriented enterprises in particular.
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
