Policy
It may seem paradoxical that the Nazi seizure of power, of all things, would be what brought an easing of relations with Poland, if only temporarily. Unlike earlier German chancellors, Hitler felt he could not afford to further aggravate mutual relations and thereby endanger his expansionist foreign-policy goals. The Nazis ended the economic war with Poland and signed a nonaggression pact in January 1934, in which Germany for the first time ruled out a border change by force; it represented a conspicuous break with the foreign policy of the Weimar Republic and was certainly the “most important, the only important turnaround in Germany’s handling of its eastern partner.”114
Although appearing incomprehensible to many contemporaries, the pact fit logically into the Nazi foreign-policy agenda.115 In his long-unpublished “second book,” Hitler outlined the general thrust of Nazi foreign policy: instead of a rigid fixation on restoring the borders of 1914, which he criticized as “insane” because it would preserve the entire victorious coalition as an ongoing enemy, he called for a shift “to a clear, far-seeing spatial policy [Raumpolitik]” and set his sights beyond Pomerelia and Upper Silesia to target the Soviet Union.116 Poland, whose political elite held strongly anticommunist sentiments and had still not given up all hope of expanding at Soviet expense, must have appeared to represent the ideal junior partner in this endeavor.
Of course, the interests of the German minorities became secondary to this strategic reorientation. In order to prevent any inconvenient protests from ethnic German spokespersons, Rudolf Hess strove to subjugate any remaining ethnic German associations not already under direct state control, as Hitler had not only named him Deputy Führer on April 27, 1933, but had also entrusted him with supervising matters of ethnopolicy. The first result was the founding in October 1933 of the Ethnic German Council (Volksdeutscher Rat, or VR), at the suggestion of Karl Haushofer, a theoretician of the “Lebensraum” concept, and Hans Steinacher, head of the Volk Alliance for Germandom Abroad (Volksbund für das Deutschtum im Ausland, or VDA), which was by far the largest private-sector organization in the Reich promoting “Germandom” (“Deutschtum”).117 The great expectations of both Nazi Party figures and ethnopolicy advocates were soon thwarted, however, by the ministerial bureaucracy, which would not let itself be pushed out of this policy field. During an interministerial conference, the representatives of the VR were told to align their actions with the Foreign Office’s policy positions. Their hopes of having a say in the disbursement of state funding were likewise dashed. Steinacher was advised that he had probably interpreted his powers “a bit too optimistically” and that his prospective participation in the allocating of funds would “under no circumstances come into consideration.”118 It was mainly this decision that doomed the newly created VR to powerlessness.
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In Eastern Europe, the ethnic Germans greeted Hitler’s coming to power with “panegyric exclamations and loyalty declarations.”119 That they did so is hardly surprising, for Nazi ideology emphasized the importance of the völkisch (the “folkish,” meaning the ethnonationalistic), a concept that legitimized these minorities’ efforts to maintain their ethnic homogeneity and simultaneously affirm their ostensible role as bringers of culture to the east. Coupled with strong resentments against a modernity represented by industry and big cities, along with a hatred of communists and Jews, Nazism could thus be assured of success among rural residents in particular, who happened to make up the bulk of ethnic German minorities, and not only in Poland.120 The success of this ideological expansion among the German minorities can also be read in the new political semantics that was now disseminating a völkisch and racist vocabulary among the ethnic Germans in Poland as well, words that had either gained mass appeal through Nazism or been reshaped by it: the term “Auslandsdeutscher” (a “German abroad”) was replaced by “Volksdeutscher” (a “member of the German ethnonation”), the concept of the “minority” by that of the “Volksgruppe” (“ethnonational group”), which furthermore was involved in a “Volkstumskampf” (“ethnonational struggle”) abroad.121 The message behind this terminological change was clear. It highlighted one’s membership in a “larger whole existing beyond the border,” namely the German “Volksgemeinschaft” (“ethnonational community”), as it was now called.122
This voluntary Nazification process certainly did not lead the German minorities in Poland to an overcoming of their traditional fragmentation. A development like that seen in Czechoslovakia with Konrad Henlein’s Sudeten German Party (Sudetendeutsche Partei) failed to materialize in Poland. Instead, the 1921 founding of the German National Socialist Association for Poland (Deutscher Nationalsozialistischer Verein für Polen) in Bielsko (formerly Bielitz) would prove to be a catalyst for increasingly stormy disputes. Conflicts with the Polish authorities may have forced the organization’s renaming in 1928 to the Young German Party for Poland (Jungdeutsche Partei für Polen, or JdP), but the agenda of the party now led by Rudolf Wiesner had not changed, including its support for the development of a “Volksgemeinschaft,” the pursuit of radical antisemitism, and the struggle against Marxism.123 The party’s expansion beyond its home region led to conflicts with the established—and often fragmented—interest groups of each local German minority. Emboldened by Hitler’s coming to power, Wiesner’s followers acted as if they were “young guns” rebelling against the sclerotic power structures of the “old-timers”—a pretense that was increasingly contrived as the relevant German associations in Wielkopolska and Pomerelia all became less and less different from the JdP in their political agendas, as a result of their self-chosen Nazification. This certainly did nothing to blunt the mutual antipathy, which sometimes even led to bloody skirmishes. For example, a Polish newspaper smugly noted that the local police had to be summoned to break up a brawl at a hall in Sępólno Krajeńskie (formerly Zempelburg), which took place under a banner reading “Wir wollen sein ein einig Volk und Brüder” (We want to be a united people and brothers).124
The VR would prove incapable of ending the general escalation, which from Berlin’s viewpoint was highly undesirable in its threat to paralyze the German minorities and spin them out of Berlin’s control.125 Its inability to assert itself, particularly in the face of Nazi Party agencies like its Foreign Organization (Auslandsorganisation der NSDAP), prompted Hess in October 1935 to transfer the coordination of ethnopolicy from the dissolved VR to party member Otto von Kursell, whose agency, the Kursell Bureau (Dienststelle Kursell), was put at least nominally under Joachim von Ribbentrop, the appointee in charge of foreign-policy matters on Hess’s staff. Thus, what had been an “autonomous, nonpartisan, honorary institution” had now become a “special party agency” to which “only party comrades belonged and which was led by an ‘Alter Kämpfer’ [an ‘old fighter’ from the Nazi Party’s early period].”126 Kursell was now able to threaten recalcitrant representatives of the German minorities with the severance of all contact and the withdrawal of financial grants unless the infighting stopped immediately. Although the change did not open a new era of cooperation (as hoped by Berlin) between groups like the JdP and others, the intensity of their disputes did subsequently lessen to a noticeable degree.127
Kursell was a member of not only the Nazi Party but also the SS, which was a situation that Heinrich Himmler, as head of the SS, wanted to exploit in order to expand his influence into the field of ethnopolicy. From his perspective, the attempt to extend his power over the more than ten million members of German minorities was a logical one as it would not only enhance his position within the Reich but also provide the intelligence arm of the SS with access to a network of informants in countries across Europe. And Himmler must have ultimately recognized an opportunity to give political force to an idea that was also widely anchored in the SS with the founding of RuSHA (Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt, the Race and Settlement Main Office), namely the tying of settlement planning to racial selections, thereby concretizing the Nazi conception of “Lebensraum.”128 During a conflict with the SS about its interference in the ethnopolicy of Czechoslovakia, however, Kursell made it clear that he did not want to take up the role intended for him by Himmler, who then pointedly withdrew his confidence
