be implemented in the face of opposition from the relevant components of the Nazi Party, but only with their support, and so he did not want to make the same mistake twice. Instead of engaging in a confrontation with Himmler, he relieved Kursell of his office and accepted Himmler’s candidate for a successor. In 1937, when SS Senior Group Leader Werner Lorenz took over the former Kursell Bureau, which had since been renamed the Ethnic German Liaison Office (Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle, or VoMi), the handling of ethnopolicy fell completely within Himmler’s sphere of influence. Although the tasks had remained the same, the founding of VoMi signaled a qualitative leap in the ethnopolicy of Nazi Germany. The reason was, first, it dovetailed with a new stance of the German government: on February 20, 1938, Hitler broke his five-year silence on the fate of the “Volksdeutsche” in Eastern Europe, and during a speech to the Reichstag, he made himself a champion for the rights of the “Germans” in Austria and Czechoslovakia. Second, Lorenz—unlike his predecessor—could soon justify the pursuit of his mission by pointing to a direct order from Hitler, dated July 2, 1938: VoMi was tasked with the “unified organizing of all state and party agencies, as well as with the unified deployment of all resources available to these agencies for the handling of ethnopolitical and borderland issues”—meaning that a party organization had been granted authority over state offices.129 For the first time, Lorenz’s agency also had control over extensive financial resources, which had always been the most effective instrument of ethnopolicy.130 In 1938 alone, this meant control over 50–60 million Reichsmarks, a sum that approximated the budget of the Foreign Office.131 A half year later, a decree from Hess completed this “Gleichschaltung” (“enforced conformity”) of ethnopolitically oriented organizations: in accordance with the main focus of their activities, all existing bodies were to be incorporated into either the VDA or the Alliance of the German East (Bund deutscher Osten), both of which were placed under VoMi.132
With the support of the state, the party, and the SS, this “bastard organization” was assured a new level of power that gave Lorenz more freedom of action than either Steinacher or Kursell had before him.133 In place of a “loose collaboration based on the principle of reciprocity,” according to Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, “there appeared the unilateral directive, and the command backed by threat of reprisals.”134 The effects were felt not only by Germandom organizations like the VDA, but also by the German minorities in Poland. As early as April 1937, Lorenz had invited the nine most important groups to Berlin in order to persuade them of the need for a common nationwide committee. After some initial failures, his tone became sharper. In a missive dated May 18, 1938, to the representatives of each organization, Lorenz threatened that this was his “first, but also his last, suggestion,” and that anyone who abstained from this accord was putting himself outside the “Volksgemeinschaft” and must bear the consequences.135 With this, although Lorenz had not yet risen to level of “complete master of the ethnic German organizations in Poland,” the path toward the founding of a loose umbrella organization in August 1938 was now open.136
Kotowski’s observation that Warsaw’s policy stance toward the German minorities was a variable dependent on German-Polish international relations is as true for the second half of the 1930s as it is for the entire preceding period.137 It is therefore unsurprising that as Berlin’s increasingly aggressive foreign policy and the advancing spread of Nazi ideology were matched by an increasingly irredentist stance among Poland’s German inhabitants and that both taken together would ultimately affect Warsaw’s minorities policy. Between March and June 1936 alone, the Polish government banned the National Socialist German Workers’ Federation (Nationalsozialistischer deutscher Arbeiterbund) and dissolved thirty-three local branches of the German Union for Posen and Pomerelia (Deutsche Vereinigung für Posen und Pommerellen), the biggest political organization of the German minorities in Wielkopolska, which Warsaw accused of inciting the Kashubian populace against it.138 Other measures aimed at reducing German influence, especially in the economy, and also at controlling the German-language school system. Beyond efforts to prevent Polish-speaking children from attending German schools, however, the relevant guidelines actually contained little that could cause umbrage: German schools were instructed to observe Polish public holidays, use approved textbooks only, and keep out all Nazi influences. In comparison with Prussia’s Germanization policy, the approved measures proved to be—contrary to Kotowski’s assessment—relatively harmless, and they were ultimately impotent when faced with German minorities that largely supported Nazism and whose leading organizations were already under Berlin’s control.139
The Decision for War
Soon after the German occupation of western Czechoslovakia eliminated one more political buttress for Warsaw, Poland itself fell into Berlin’s sights.140 Ribbentrop’s stance toward his Polish opposites was initially more restrained than the demands that had been presented to Prague: in return for the surrender of Danzig, permission to build an extraterritorial road and rail connection to East Prussia, and Poland’s entry into the Anti-Comintern Pact, Germany would offer—and this was a rather bold move from the German side—definitive recognition of Poland’s western border. Martin Broszat has rightly warned that the border recognition should not be mistaken as “from the outset a false offer from Hitler, one that anticipated rejection to be followed by violence.”141 After all, the anti-Soviet proposition also fit the central goal of Nazi foreign policy, namely the acquisition of new “Lebensraum,” and in previous years had become almost a leitmotif in the discussions that Hitler, Konstantin von Neurath, and Hermann Göring held with Polish representatives.142 Despite repeated overtures, Warsaw had consistently rejected this offer, which would have made Poland completely dependent on Berlin. When Ribbentrop returned “empty-handed” from yet another visit to Warsaw in January 1939, the path to war was laid.143 In late March, Hitler informed the German army’s commander in chief, Walther von Brauchitsch, that if circumstances dictated, he wanted to resolve the “Polish question” through war; in early April, he instructed the Wehrmacht’s High Command to undertake the planning of “Fall Weiss” (“Case White,” the strategic plan for invading Poland), before he subsequently revoked the German-Polish Nonaggression Pact as well as the Anglo-German Naval Agreement.144
If Berlin had still expected in late 1938 that it could build an eastern empire on the rubble of the Soviet Union with Poland’s help, Warsaw’s categorical refusal had now forced a change of German plans. From the role of a potential ally, Poland’s position shifted to that of the next victim of German aggression. But because of the guarantee that the United Kingdom made to Poland on March 31, 1939, German planning first required a nonbelligerence agreement with precisely the power that was the actual target of Nazi expansion efforts: the Soviet Union. As a result, the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact—or “aggression pact,” as Rainer Schmidt calls it—was signed on August 23, 1939.145 This “U-turn of all time” sealed Poland’s fate in two ways at once: whereas the dystopian vision of a “‘living space’ further east dropped for the foreseeable future out of the equation,” an attack on the neighboring Poland had now become a calculable gamble.146 These dreams of carnage were now projected on Poland, as seen in Hitler’s address to the Wehrmacht leadership on the eve of the pact’s ratification: “Accordingly, I have placed my Death’s Head Units [Totenkopfverbände] in readiness . . . with an order to send every man, woman, and child of Polish descent and language to their deaths, mercilessly and without compassion. This is the only way for us to gain the Lebensraum we need.”147
These developments led to immediate consequences for the German minorities in Poland, now that the Polish state was reacting to all provocations with a much shorter temper, and right up until the final weeks before the outbreak of war, it was forcefully dissolving the bulk of German minority organizations.148 The Polish government was wrong in believing that dissolving the minority organizations would ensure its security, for it failed to see that doing so had not interrupted the various intelligence efforts and conspiratorial operations conducted across Poland by a number of German agencies. The German efforts proved useful in projects like the compilation of proscription lists, filled by German units with the names of persons
