The term "Polish Border Strip" (German : Polnischer Grenzstreifen; Polish : polski pas graniczny), also called "Polish Frontier Strip", refers to those territories which the German Empire wanted to annex from Congress Poland after World War I. It appeared in plans proposed by German officials as a territory to be annexed by the German Empire after an expected German and Central Powers victory. German planners also envisioned forced expulsion and resettlement of the Polish and Jewish population which would be replaced by German colonists. [1] [2] [3] [4] The proposed area of the Border Strip comprised up to 30,000 km2 (approximately the size of Belgium), and up to 3 million people were to be ethnically cleansed to make room for German settlers. [3] [5] [6] The strip was also intended to separate the Polish inhabitants of Prussian-held Greater Poland from those in Congress Poland.
The idea of a future "buffer zone" to be cleared of Poles and Jews was discussed officially at highest levels as early as 1914. [7] In July 1917 the German supreme command under General Ludendorff, as part of the debate and planning regarding the cession of the "border strip" to Germany, specified its own designs in a memorandum. [1] It proposed annexing a greatly enlarged "border strip" of 20,000 square kilometres, and ethnically cleansing its Polish and Jewish population (numbering between 2,000,000 and 3,000,000 [3] ) from a territory of 8,000 square kilometres and settling it with ethnic Germans. [1] [2] [8] Poles living in Prussia, especially in the province of Posen, were to be "encouraged" by unspecified means to move into the German-ruled puppet state of the Kingdom of Poland. [3]
The German minority living in Congress Poland, which had earlier suggested the annexation of all territory up to Łódź in a letter to the German government, also supported such proposals. [9] The German government developed and agreed to these plans in March 1918, and in April gained support in the Prussian House of Lords; the plans for this were debated and developed across a wide spectrum of political parties and interested groups such as political scientists, industrialists, and nationalist organisations like the Pan-German League. [3]
Friedrich von Schwerin, head of administration in Frankfurt/Oder and chairman of the Settlement Commission, stated, "The German people, the greatest colonizing people on earth, have again been given a great colonizing task. The current world war provides the opportunity for Germany to resume in a resolute way its colonizing mission in the East".
For administrators like Schwerin, the plan was to be accompanied by massive expulsion of Poles as in his words "new land can usually only be won at the expense of those who own the land". [10] The German nobility in certain versions of the plan were to become the "colonial administration". [11] The plan has been described by historian Hajo Holborn as the first instance in modern European history of planning the removal of whole populations as a solution to national conflicts. [12]
By removing the Polish population, all resistance to Germanization of Polish territories would be bypassed. [13]
Parts of the plans were adopted by Nazi Germany after the war, and implemented in the genocidal Generalplan Ost. [3]
The Polish Corridor, also known as the Pomeranian Corridor, Danzig Corridor or Gdańsk Corridor, was a territory located in the region of Pomerelia, which provided the Second Polish Republic with access to the Baltic Sea, thus dividing the bulk of Weimar Germany from the province of East Prussia. At its narrowest point, the Polish territory was just 30 km wide. The Free City of Danzig, situated to the east of the corridor, was a semi-independent German speaking city-state forming part of neither Germany nor Poland, though united with the latter through an imposed union covering customs, mail, foreign policy, railways as well as defence.
Lebensraum is a German concept of expansionism and Völkisch nationalism, the philosophy and policies of which were common to German politics from the 1890s to the 1940s. First popularized around 1901, Lebensraum became a geopolitical goal of Imperial Germany in World War I (1914–1918), as the core element of the Septemberprogramm of territorial expansion. The most extreme form of this ideology was supported by the Nazi Party and Nazi Germany. Lebensraum was a leading motivation of Nazi Germany to initiate World War II, and it would continue this policy until the end of the conflict.
The Curzon Line was a proposed demarcation line between the Second Polish Republic and the Soviet Union, two new states emerging after World War I. Based on a suggestion by Herbert James Paton, it was first proposed in 1919 by Lord Curzon, the British Foreign Secretary, to the Supreme War Council as a diplomatic basis for a future border agreement.
The Treaty of Riga was signed in Riga, Latvia, on 18 March 1921 between Poland on one side and Soviet Russia and Soviet Ukraine on the other, ending the Polish–Soviet War (1919–1921). The chief negotiators of the peace were Jan Dąbski for the Polish side and Adolph Joffe for the Soviet side.
The Prussian Settlement Commission, officially known as the Royal Prussian Settlement Commission in the Provinces West Prussia and Posen was a Prussian government commission that operated between 1886 and 1924, but actively only until 1918. It was first up on the initiative of Otto von Bismarck to increase land ownership by ethnically German Germans at the expense of Poles in Germany, by economic and political means, in Prussia's eastern provinces of West Prussia and the Posen as part of his larger efforts aiming at the end of Poles in Germany, the Germanisation of greater territories, in particular those under German rule and strengthening of and ascendancy of “Germandom” and the dominant German culture especially in the “East”, during the Kulturkampf though it survived it, and the end of the Bismarck-era generalised anti-Catholic government policy.
In present-day Germany, the former eastern territories of Germany refer to those territories east of the current eastern border of Germany, i.e. the Oder–Neisse line, which historically had been considered German and which were annexed by Poland and the Soviet Union after World War II. In contrast to the lands awarded to the restored Polish state by the Treaty of Versailles after World War I, the German territories lost with the post-World War II Potsdam Agreement were either almost exclusively inhabited by Germans before 1945, mixed German–Polish with a German majority, or mixed German–Czech with a German majority (Glatz). Virtually the entire German population of the territories that did not flee voluntarily in the face of the Red Army advance of 1945, was violently expelled to Germany, with their possessions being looted and stolen.
Mass evacuation, forced displacement, expulsion, and deportation of millions of people took place across most countries involved in World War II. The Second World War caused the movement of the largest number of people in the shortest period of time in history. A number of these phenomena were categorised as violations of fundamental human values and norms by the Nuremberg Tribunal after the war ended. The mass movement of people – most of them refugees – had either been caused by the hostilities, or enforced by the former Axis and the Allied powers based on ideologies of race and ethnicity, culminating in the postwar border changes enacted by international settlements. The refugee crisis created across formerly occupied territories in World War II provided the context for much of the new international refugee and global human rights architecture existing today.
Eastern Borderlands or simply Borderlands was a term coined for the eastern part of the Second Polish Republic during the interwar period (1918–1939). Largely agricultural and extensively multi-ethnic with a Polish minority, it amounted to nearly half of the territory of interwar Poland. Historically situated in the eastern Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, following the 18th-century foreign partitions it was divided between the Empires of Russia and Austria-Hungary, and ceded to Poland in 1921 after the Treaty of Riga. As a result of the post-World War II border changes, all of the territory was ceded to the USSR, and none of it is in modern Poland.
The Kingdom of Poland, also known informally as the Regency Kingdom of Poland, was a short-lived polity that was proclaimed during World War I by the German Empire and Austria-Hungary on 5 November 1916 on the territories of formerly Russian-ruled Congress Poland held by the Central Powers as the Government General of Warsaw and which became active on 14 January 1917. It was subsequently transformed between 7 October 1918 and 22 November 1918 into the independent Second Polish Republic, the customary ceremonial founding date of the latter being later set at 11 November 1918.
Hans Hartwig von Beseler was a German colonel general.
The Act of 5th November of 1916 was a declaration of Emperors Wilhelm II of Germany and Franz Joseph of Austria. This act promised the creation of the Kingdom of Poland out of territory of Congress Poland, envisioned by its authors as a puppet state controlled by the Central Powers. The origin of that document was the dire need to draft new recruits from German-occupied Poland for the war with Russia. Even though the act itself expressed very little in concrete terms, its declaration is regarded as one of main factors in the Polish efforts to regain independence. Despite official statements, the German Empire really planned to annex up to 30,000 km2 of prewar Congress Poland, with expulsion of between 2 and 3 million Poles and Jews out of these territories to make room for German settlers.
Skwierzyna is a town in Lubusz Voivodeship in western Poland, serving as the administrative seat of the Gmina Skwierzyna. As of 31 December 2023, it had a population of 9,078 inhabitants. It is located at the confluence of the Obra and Warta rivers, about 18 km (11 mi) north of Międzyrzecz and 23 km (14 mi) south-east of the regional capital Gorzów Wielkopolski. The town is situated in a particularly green part of Poland. Extensive forests and numerous lakes can be found in the vicinity.
After partitioning Poland at the end of the 18th century, the Kingdom of Prussia and later the German Empire imposed a number of Germanisation policies and measures in the newly gained territories, aimed at limiting the Polish ethnic presence and culture in these areas. This process continued through its various stages until the end of World War I, when most of the territories became part of the Second Polish Republic, which largely limited the capacity of further Germanisation efforts of the Weimar Republic until the occupation during World War II.
The flight and expulsion of Germans from Poland was the largest of a series of flights and expulsions of Germans in Europe during and after World War II. The German population fled or was expelled from all regions which are currently within the territorial boundaries of Poland: including the former eastern territories of Germany annexed by Poland after the war and parts of pre-war Poland; despite acquiring territories from Germany, the Poles themselves were also expelled from the former eastern territories of Poland annexed by the Soviet Union. West German government figures of those evacuated, migrated, or expelled by 1950 totaled 8,030,000. Research by the West German government put the figure of Germans emigrating from Poland from 1951 to 1982 at 894,000; they are also considered expellees under German Federal Expellee Law.
The expulsion of Poles by Germany was a prolonged anti-Polish campaign of ethnic cleansing by violent and terror-inspiring means lasting nearly half a century. It began with the concept of Pan-Germanism developed in the early 19th century and culminated in the racial policy of Nazi Germany that asserted the superiority of the Aryan race. The removal of Poles by Germany stemmed from historic ideas of expansionist nationalism. It was implemented at different levels and different stages by successive German governments. It ended with the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945.
The Prussian deportations, also known as the Prussian expulsions of Poles, were the mass expulsions of Poles from Prussia between 1885 and 1890. More than 30,000 Poles who had immigrated to Prussia from the Polish regions of the Russian Empire and Austria and did not obtain a German citizenship, were deported back to their country of origin.
The bilateral relations between Poland and Germany have been marked by an extensive and complicated history. Currently, the relations between the two countries are friendly, with the two being allies within NATO and the European Union.
The Recovered Territories or Regained Lands, also known as the Western Borderlands, and previously as the Western and Northern Territories, Postulated Territories and Returning Territories, are the former eastern territories of Germany and the Free City of Danzig that became part of Poland after World War II, at which time most of their German inhabitants were forcibly deported.
The Germanisation of the Province of Posen was a policy of the Kulturkampf measures enacted by German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, whose goal was to Germanize Polish-speaking areas in the Prussian Province of Posen by eradicating and discrimination of Polish language and culture, as well as to reduce the influence of the "ultramontanist" Roman Catholic clergy in those regions.
The Expulsion of Poles by Nazi Germany during World War II was a massive operation consisting of the forced resettlement of over 1.7 million Poles from the territories of German-occupied Poland, with the aim of their Germanization between 1939 and 1944.