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Areas covered by different proposals for the Polish Frontier Strip
The Polish Frontier Strip (German: Polnischer Grenzstreifen; Polish: polski pas graniczny) was an only vaguely defined area within the Kingdom of Poland that served as a potential target envisioned for integration into Prussia between 1915 and 1920, as part of a larger effort to resettle ethnic Germans along the German-Polish border. Even though the strip never became a de jure part of the German Empire, the fact that the area was under full German military and civilian control as part of the German-staffed Government General of Warsaw until the end of the war came quite close to de facto annexation, even though Berlin remained relatively reluctant until the later stages of the conflict to initiate proper integration and Germanisation efforts.
With the fall of the Ludendorff Dictatorship in February 1920, civilian control in the east was fully restored, and the dissolution of the Government General of Warsaw put a sudden, quite disorganised end to all hypothetical annexation plans. Negotiations between the government of Wilhelm Solf and the Royal Polish government later that year led to an agreement in favour of Poland, in which Germany only secured economic privileges and insisted on no significant territorial exchanges. To this day, the abandonment of the border strip project is decried by the nationalist right as one of the biggest misdeeds of the post-1920 parliamentary order, an epitome of the post-war governments' failure to secure Germany's interests in the East properly.
Origins of the Concept[]
Caricature of Otto von Bismarck deporting Poles from Posen Province to Austrian Galicia while shouting "Poland is not yet lost!", 1880s
The idea of large-scale resettlement of Polish citizens in the east to make room for German agrarian settlers that would slowly "germanise" the affected territories has its root in the pre-Weltkrieg Prussian "Ostmarkenpolitik" (Eastern Marches Policy); it first appeared in the 1830s when the administration of Eduard Heinrich von Flottwell began to introduce laws in the then-Grand Duchy of Posen that had the aim to reduce the influence of the local catholic clergy and Polish aristocracy in an effort to strengthen the German element in the province, but only took a coherent form that closely resembled the plans that were set up during the Weltkrieg in the early 1880s, under the Iron Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Bismarck was a proponent of a ruthless policy in regard to the Polish population; he outlawed the use of Polish as an administrative language, initiated the mass expulsion of Poles (with Russian or Austrian citizenship) from Prussia, and established the infamous Prussian Settlement Commission in 1884 to increase land ownership by ethnically German farmers at the expense of the local Polish population in Posen and West Prussia.
Rugi pruskie (Prussian deportations of Poles, or Polenausweisungen), 1909 painting by Wojciech Kossak
After the dismissal of Bismarck and the appointment of Leo von Caprivi as Reichskanzler in 1890, the Eastern Marches Policy became a bit more lenient, but already in 1894, now under Chlodwig zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, it was intensified substantially once again, mostly due to the pressure of the German Eastern Marches Society (Hakatists), a powerful far-right agitation organisation. Until the outbreak of war in 1914, anti-Polish measures began to gradually become more and more radical: Since 1908, Poles could legally be expropriated by the local administration, and since 1909, the Polish language was completely banned from all public events.
A main consequence of this harsh repression was a drastic radicalisation of the Polish Party in the Reichstag and the Prussian House of Representatives: The old guard aristocratic leadership was slowly being sidelined by a generation of younger bourgeoisie deputies that were heavily influenced by the nationalist Narodowa Demokracja movement of Roman Dmowski. In 1912, Dmowski more or less correctly predicted that in case of war with Russia, Germany would attempt to annex parts of Congress Poland to establish a new "Imperial Territory" in the east. Dmowski's prophesy can be considered a logical supposition after observing the increasingly radical anti-Polish measures introduced by the Prussians over the course of the previous decades, and proves that the border strip plans are in essence just a continuation and extension of the Prussian Ostmarkenpolitik, now brought to the utmost extreme and additionally loaded with national-chauvinist wartime rhetoric.
During the Weltkrieg[]
Thus, when the war began, relations between Germans and Poles were not in the best state, something that made it substantially more difficult for Berlin to win the Polish population in Russian Poland over to the Central Powers' cause. By late 1915, the Russians had been driven out of most of their Western territories, including Poland. At this point, the debate on what to do with these territories in the future was set into motion, and tied to that endless months of conflict not only between the plethora of different interest groups, but also between Berlin and Vienna. In late 1915, German Foreign Secretary Gottlieb von Jagow fittingly summarised the Polish dilemma that would dominate the Central Powers’ war aims discussion for the years to come as follows:
| “ | "'There is no ideal solution to the Polish question. We shall have to be content with the least unfavourable." | ” |
Early Stages of the War[]
The first time settlement plans in the east were brought up in government circles during the war was in late 1914, shortly after the successful liberation of East Prussia from the invading Russian forces. These, however, were limited exclusively to rural regions in Masuria, which had suffered greatly under the Russians, and were intended to make the eastern frontier of the empire a German bulwark against the Russians in the future via the resettlement of Germans living in Russia. But that was not to be the end of the story; only a short time later, the vision of the Prussian administrators rapidly radicalised.
Agitation for annexations and resettlement in Russian-Polish territories had already began as early as September 1914, when both the German agronomist Franz Waterstradt and the chairman of the Pan-German League Heinrich Claß had sent memoranda to the Reichskanzler in which they stressed the importance of acquiring agricultural settlement land via "völkischer Flurbereinigung" (völkisch land consolidation). The real starting signal, however, was given at the beginning of December 1914 with the request of Paul von Hindenburg, at that time newly appointed Supreme Commander of All German Forces in the East, to adjust Germany's eastern border after the war in such a way that the Empire would be in possession of the strategically very important fortress of Osowiec. Only a little later, other border adjustment proposals of all kinds followed, and Reichskanzler Bethmann decided to consult important representatives from the East Elbian civil administration and experts from the Prussian Settlement Commission for advice.
Friedrich Ernst von Schwerin, a pioneer of the Polish Frontier Strip project
The most prominent advisers of the government in regard to settlement questions were Hans von Eisenhart-Rothe (Oberpräsident of Posen), Hugo Ganse (Chairman of the Prussian Settlement Commission), Adolf von Batocki-Friebe (Oberpräsident of East Prussia), Friedrich von Schwerin, and Erich Keup (both high-ranking members of the Society for the Promotion of Internal Colonisation). Especially Schwerin's remarks were to have the greatest influence on the project and would leave a lasting mark on the border strip plans until the end of the war. Schwerin represented an entirely new type of a Prussian administrative official; his ethos was not conservative and particularist in the Old Prussian sense, but völkisch-nationalist in the Pan-German sense, most likely caused by his career in the deep east of the Empire at the height of the Wilhelmine Period. A member of the Pan-German League, close to the Eastern Marches Society, and for many years an assessor in the Prussian Settlement Commission, where he also met his long-time friend & later influential far-right media mogul Alfred Hugenberg during the 1890s, Schwerin counts as one of the first and most vehement representatives of internal colonisation, and can rightly be called the "Father of the German settlement idea".
Friedrich von Schwerin's Memorandum[]
In March 1915, Schwerin presented a 30 page long memorandum to the Imperial Chancellery in which he called for the integration of Lithuania and Courland and the transformation of Congress Poland into a German protectorate which would be subjected to Germany in all matters and from which a large piece would be separated for Germanisation. As a minimum demand, Schwerin named a line running from Suwalki along the Bobr, the Narew and the Vistula to the Warta and then along this river; according to Schwerin’s notes, the border strip would have encompassed almost 33,000 km2 with a population of more than 3.3 million people. On the one hand, the strip should be wide enough to create "a sufficient basis for German settlement for ages to come", but on the other hand it should not be too wide, because otherwise Schwerin's planned resettlement of Poles and Eastern European Jews would no longer be possible in an orderly manner.
Schwerin envisioned the resettlement as follows: From the border strip, the Polish peasant population would be "transplanted village by village beyond our new border into the Polish protectorate", where the new Polish government would have to allocate them new land which was formerly owned by Russian Orthodox peasants. These in return would then be resettled back to Russia proper in the former Volga German colonies; after that, the Volga Germans would then find their new homes in the former Polish villages in the border strip. The Jews, Schwerin hoped, would eventually voluntarily leave for Morocco, Palestine, or the US, and the Polish population in urban areas would at one point entirely assimilate. If everything went according to plan, the entire resettlement project would be completed within 10 years, Schwerin claimed. The Polish border strip "would have to be treated as a new colonial land and equipped with an independent administration not subject to other Prussian provincial authorities'' until Germanisation would have progressed so far that “only purely German points of view are decisive in political life in Prussia and in the Empire”.
Schwerin's proposal was discussed in detail at a conference on 13 July 1915 and approved shortly after. In retrospect, it is only logical that the government fully relied on old Prussian settlement experts like Schwerin on the border strip issue and continued the war aims discussion along the lines of the pre-war Eastern Marches policy. The border strip plan was in fact in the broadest sense only a continuation of the anti-Polish policies that had been introduced throughout the 1900s & 1910s; although flimsy justifications such as a strategic improvement of the eastern border were used as a pretext, the actual aim was to separate the Polish population in Prussia from the Poles in Congress Poland by means of a germanised strip ("Polish islands in the Germanic Sea") in order to prevent any potential future expansion of Poland into Prussian territories.
- Pläne Kries & Beseler
After the Act of 5th November 1916[]
On 5 November 1916, Germany and Austria-Hungary had finally agreed on a common Polish policy after many months of discussion and officially proclaimed the creation of the Regency Kingdom of Poland.
Final Years of the Conflict[]
WIP
Ideologues behind the Frontier Strip Plans[]
For almost the entire duration of the war, deliberations on the border strip took place in government circles in the strictest secrecy. This, however, did not prevent agitation circles at universities and within political societies from vociferously promoting their own vision for the bordering territories in the East in newspapers, magazines and memoranda, of course without knowing the official plans of the government. In the long run, this agitation also had a strong influence on the official German war aim agenda and helped to influence the government's vision, but also especially the opinion of the public and the political parties, which explains why almost no one objected to the settlement plans in the East until the very end of the war - only pacifists and radical leftists actively made a stand against it.
Two political groups were of special importance in this wartime debate:
The "Pan-German Clique"[]
| “ | "The present war offers the opportunity - perhaps for the last time in world history - for Germany to resume her colonising mission to the East in a decisive manner. Just as the new German Empire is built not on the old German cultural lands in the south and west, but on East Elbian Prussia, so a fountain of youth for Germany may well spring up for later centuries on the vast territories beyond our present eastern frontiers.
~ Friedrich von Schwerin |
” |
Heinrich Claß, Reinhold Seeberg, Theodor Schiemann, Otto Hoetzsch
The Pan-Germans were a large group of academics especially, but not exclusively from national-liberal circles who had been carried away by the Spirit of 1914 and were henceforth demanding far-reaching territorial expansion into all directions; not all of them, however, were members of the eponymous Pan-German League, some had been relatively moderate prior to the war an just radicalised from mid-1914 onwards. Prominent representatives included Heinrich Claß (Chairman of the Pan-German League), Reinhold Seeberg (Baltic German theologian), Theodor Schiemann (Baltic German historian), and Otto Hoetzsch (historian & Ostforschung expert).
Seeberg's group in particular came to prominence in late June 1915 when they published a declaration in which they argued for a peace with far-reaching annexations in the East and West. The paper was signed by more than 1300 people and demanded that Germany must expand in the East in order to massively expand her agricultural and settlement land so that "Germany's economic independence from foreign countries through her own food possibilities" and a necessary "counterbalance against the advancing industrialisation and urbanisation of our people" would be given, which on the one hand would combat birth decline, emigration and housing shortages, but on the other hand would also guarantee that Germany would never fall into "English one-sidedness" (i.e. an economy that was too trade-oriented).
From the beginning, these plans enjoyed the full support from industrial and financial circles, especially as many German companies had already invested into Polish businesses before the war. Representatives of the heavy industry such as Alfred Hugenberg, Emil Kirdorf and Hugo Stinnes had demanded the acquisition of land near the Silesian border since 1915 due to enormous ore and coal deposits, and the Deutsche Bank, one of the contry's most powerful financial institutions, promised to provide the necessary fundings.
The "Mitteleuropa Clique"[]
| “ | "German policy, however, must be driven by the principle that a good relationship with the Poles is a better protective defence for our border than a mere geographical-strategic shift, which would have to make all Poles eternal mortal enemies of us."
~ Hans Delbrück |
” |
Hans Delbrück, Friedrich Naumann, Ernst Jäckh, Paul Rohrbach
The so-called "Mitteleuropa Clique" was a group of liberal intellectuals close to Reichskanzler Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg around Hans Delbrück (historian and editor of the prestigious national liberal magazine Preußische Jahrbücher), Friedrich Naumann (important leader of the social liberal Progressive People's Party), Ernst Jäckh, and Paul Rohrbach (both social liberal newspaper editors and professors) who promoted a liberal-imperialist foreign-political course during the war that was entirely built around Naumann's famous Mitteleuropa concept.
While the Pan-Germans often called for the direct annexation of numerous Eastern territories, often with such utopian demands as an extension deep into Ukraine, the Mitteleuropa adherents supported the so-called "Randstaatenpolitik" (Peripheral State Policy) which had the aim to establish several German-aligned "puppet" states in Eastern Europe that would be economically and militarily very closely tied to Germany. This concept already appeared in a rough form in Bethmann's famous Septemberprogramm.
Disappointment and End[]
From the very beginning, the border strip project was doomed to fail by fundamental misjudgements. The often mentioned "living space argument" was completely groundless because the area of pre-war Germany had not even been fully utilised for settlement and, due to the stagnating population growth caused by ongoing industrialisation, would also never have been fully utilised in the future. A drastic expansion in the east would instead only have strengthened separatist movements in Germany's periphery to a much greater extent than before 1914, especially in the Polish-speaking areas, because despite other indications by the Prussian "settlement experts", Congress Poland was much more densely populated than all the neighbouring German Eastern provinces (with the exception of Silesia); forced Germanisation would never have been possible without more drastic and violent measures, something that the local administration shied away from.
WIP
The German Empire would not be able to focus any efforts on the frontier strip until after the end of the Weltkrieg in 1919. Neighbouring East Prussia was still reeling from the Russian incursion in 1914, with the numerous Junker estates now facing financial ruin. Ludendorff, now by this time the dictator of Germany, re-engineered the original concept into one to shore up East Prussia.
Using language that conjured up an idealized medieval Germany - namely the term Grenzmark (German: Frontier March), calling back to the Empire of Charlemagne - Ludendorff called for patriotic Germans to move to West Prussia and the Polish Frontier Strip. He focused particularly on veterans of the Weltkrieg to relocate, portraying them as a vanguard to protect the Empire.
Despite the enthusiasm the German government attempted to instil in the endeavour, migration to the east fell far below expectations. The post-war economic boom in the Rhineland forced the German populace to gravitate towards the prosperous west. The Junkers were left worse off, now with an even more diminished work force to draw from, while those that did move east fell into near absolute poverty. The image of impoverished Weltkrieg veterans became a cause célèbre in the German Empire in the early 1920s.
The failure of the Polish Frontier Strip scheme exacerbated the corruption inherent in the Osthilfe program which led to the Osthilfeskandal and the end of the Ludendorff junta. The lack of funds and investment in the area made it an unappealing prospect for resettlement. With no agriculture or industry worth holding onto, the Germans were apt to cut their losses. By the 1923 German elections, all administrative links to the Frontier strip were cut and the area was quietly transferred to the Kingdom of Poland. Economic ties with Poland were damaged and the wider integration of Eastern Europe into Mitteleuropa was set back by several years.