This article shows how German colonists from the Tsarist Empire were, by means of a colonialist discourse, made into instruments of the Germanization of Eastern Europe. Their supposed lack of sophistication was practically prerequisite for coping with the ostensibly primitive inhabitants and the untamed wilderness.
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During the 18th and up to the end of the 19th century, Germany saw extensive emigration. Many Germans who did not inherit a farm moved to places where land was cheaply available. While most emigrants went to America, many Germans also moved to Eastern Europe.
Colonization programmes in divided Poland-Lithuania
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After the
partitions of Poland-Lithuania
Partitions of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth
also:
In the course of three partitions in 1772, 1793 and 1795, the aristocratic Republic of Poland-Lithuania was divided between the Russian Empire, Prussia and the Habsburg Monarchy and disappeared from the political map of Europe as a sovereign state until 1918.
(1772-1795), Joseph II, Frederick II and Catherine II, monarchs from German dynasties, ruled over East Central Europe. In order to stimulate agriculture and trade, they were particularly keen to recruit German-speaking settlers for their new territories. In the Tsarist Empire, German immigrants were soon referred to as "colonists" and their settlements as "colonies", even in official communications.Partitions of Poland, Partitions of Poland-Lithuania, Polish Partitions
Rural exodus and immigration in "East Elbia"
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The industrial revolution of the 19th century and the rapid economic growth that followed the founding of the in 1872 changed the general trends in migration. Emigration decreased and, at the same time, internal migration from the agricultural regions to industrializing cities increased; this was referred to as the "rural exodus." However, the huge farms east of the Elbe needed farm workers during the harvest season. The landowners increasingly met this demand with Polish and Ukrainian seasonal workers from the Austrian and Russian partitioned territories in Poland. Within a short period of time, Germany ceased to be a land of emigration and became one of immigration, as seasonal workers began to settle permanently in the eastern regions of Prussia. The German public feared a Polonization of the eastern regions. For a long time, state officials had assumed that the local population would gradually start to speak German instead of Polish and would, over time, come to consider themselves German. However, bilingualism and ties to the Catholic Church continued to be of great importance to many residents of Prussia. For German nationalists, it looked as if immigration and the high birth rate of the immigrant communities, together with the rural exodus of the native population, would increase the Polish proportion of the population.
German Reich
deu. Deutsches Reich
The German Empire was a state in Central Europe that existed from 1871 to 1945. The period from its founding until 1918 is called the German Empire, then followed the period of the Weimar Republic (1918/1919-1933) and the National Socialism (so-called Third Reich) from 1933 to 1945. 01.01.1871 is considered the day of the foundation of the German Reich.
Internal colonization and "the battle of nationalities" in the Prussian eastern territories
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In 1885, the Prussian state expelled around 30,000 people who had Russian citizenship. A year later, it founded the "Royal Prussian Settlement Commission for West Prussia and Posen” (“Königliche Preußische Ansiedlungskommission für Westpreußen und Posen"). Its task was to buy up country estates, convert them into farms, and allocate them to German settlers by means of loans. The huge undertaking aimed at combating the rural exodus and the Germanization of the former Polish provinces and was referred to by political and academic supporters as "internal colonization."
However, the commission soon had to admit that it was not possible to persuade German-speaking farmers to settle in sufficient numbers. In a pessimistic statement, which already reflects the racist worldview of social Darwinism, the famous sociologist and active Pan-German [Alldeutschen]1 nationalist Max Weber (1864–1920), in his inaugural speech in Freiburg in 1895, suggested that the imagined demographic battle for the eastern territories had already been lost:
"One is immediately tempted to believe that the two nationalities' ability to adapt to different economic and social conditions is based on racial physical and psychological qualities. [...] But both processes -- the decline here, the increase there -- can ultimately be traced back to one and the same reason: the lower standards of living – partially material and partially non-material -- which were given to the Slavic race by nature or bred into it in the course of its history and helped it to victory."2
Weber and other nationalists believed that Germans and their culture were of higher value than Polish people (and Slavs in general) and the culture attributed to them. However, it was precisely their lower culture and frugal nature that was an advantage in any competition.
Weber and other nationalists believed that Germans and their culture were of higher value than Polish people (and Slavs in general) and the culture attributed to them. However, it was precisely their lower culture and frugal nature that was an advantage in any competition.
Anti-German measures in the Tsarist Empire
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During the same period, the way in which Russia dealt with immigration in the border regions of the empire also changed. The rapidly growing number of German colonists in the Governorate (in present-day Western Ukraine), due to high birth rates and increased immigration, led to fears in the government and the nationalist public of a Germanization instead of a Russification of the former Polish regions. The establishment of agricultural banks was intended to increase the proportion of Russian farmers in the countryside, and legal measures were intended to limit the acquisition of land by Germans and Poles in the western regions of Russia. Faced with leases that were not renewed and the impossibility of acquiring land, many Germans looked for a new home. The unrest of the Russian Revolution of 1905-06, in particular, prompted many colonists to emigrate. Some colonies moved to Brazil, Canada or the USA. Around 10,000 people settled in the Russian Baltic provinces of Livonia and Courland in what is now Latvia and Estonia, where German-speaking landowners promised them farms on former large estates.3
Volhynia
deu. Wolhynien, pol. Wolyń, ukr. Воли́нь, ukr. Wolyn, deu. Wolynien, lit. Voluinė, rus. Волы́нь, rus. Wolyn
The historical landscape of Volhynia is located in northwestern Ukraine on the border with Poland and Belarus. Already in the late Middle Ages the region fell to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and from 1569 on belonged to the united Polish-Lithuanian noble republic for more than two centuries. After the partitions of Poland-Lithuania at the end of the 18th century, the region came under the Russian Empire and became the name of the Volhynia Governorate, which lasted until the early 20th century. The Russian period also saw the immigration of German-speaking population (the so-called Volhyniendeutsche), which peaked in the second half of the 19th century. After the First World War Volhynia was divided between Poland and the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, from 1939, as a result of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, completely Soviet and already in 1941 occupied by the Wehrmacht. Under German occupation there was systematic persecution and murder of the Jewish population as well as other parts of the population.
After World War II, Volhynia again belonged to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and since 1992 to Ukraine. The landscape gives its name to the present-day Ukrainian oblast with its capital Luzk (ukr. Луцьк), which is not exactly congruent.
Returnees [Rückwanderer] as Germanizers [Germanisierer] of the Eastern Territories?
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After 1905, colonists willing to emigrate quickly came to the attention of the Settlement Commission and the Prussian state. In 1908, the “Welfare Association for Returnees [Fürsorgeverein für Rückwanderer]” was founded in Berlin, intended to help colonists who had mostly emigrated from Germany many generations ago to “return home”. Significantly, this supposedly charitable initiative was founded by the Prussian Ministry of Agriculture. Those in need of welfare were seen as providing an opportunity to get the stalled “internal colonization” moving again. In fact, returnees made up about a quarter of the new settlers in the settlement areas after 1905.
With this initiative the Prussian state was responding to a demand from the nationalist Pan-German League, which had already campaigned in 1896 in the Alldeutsche Blätter, to "direct the return flow of Germans already begun to [the areas of the Settlement Commission]." In "those proven pioneers of Germanness [one] would undoubtedly find excellent material for settlement."4
On the one hand, this quote reveals the mercenary view that elites within the German Empire had of the Germans from Russia, whom they declared to be "settler material." On the other, one can already discern here the idea of their "pioneer character" for "Germanness." As colonizers, they cultivated wilderness under hostile conditions and produced countless descendants who in turn opened up further land for the German people. Such a stylization of German colonists from Russia, and imagined scenarios on the utilization of this "tried and tested material" for the existing goals of the German state, took place during the First World War on a much larger scale.
On the one hand, this quote reveals the mercenary view that elites within the German Empire had of the Germans from Russia, whom they declared to be "settler material." On the other, one can already discern here the idea of their "pioneer character" for "Germanness." As colonizers, they cultivated wilderness under hostile conditions and produced countless descendants who in turn opened up further land for the German people. Such a stylization of German colonists from Russia, and imagined scenarios on the utilization of this "tried and tested material" for the existing goals of the German state, took place during the First World War on a much larger scale.
Colonists as pioneers of the Germanization of conquered Russian territories
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When the Central Powers started to advance into the Tsarist Empire in 1915, St. Petersburg reacted by systematically expropriating and deporting any so-called enemy aliens. About 130,000 Germans in Volhynia were deported to the interior of Russia and to Siberia, but more than 10,000 managed to escape into German-controlled region by fleeing across the front.
At the same time, politicians, journalists and intellectuals were engaged in a debate -- both publicly and behind closed doors -- about expansion and population shifts in the occupied territories. In addition to the settlement of veterans and invalids in the occupied and in the planned Polish border strip, advocates of expansion hoped to be able to redirect the German colonists from Russia to the areas to be annexed after peace. Those Germans from Volhynia who had come to the Baltics after 1905 at the invitation of the German landowners played a special role in popularizing this idea.
Ober Ost
bel. Obier-Ost, bel. Обер-Ост, lit. Oberostas, lav. Oberosts, pol. Obszar Głównodowodzącego Wschodu, deu. Ob. Ost, deu. Gebiet des Oberbefehlshabers Ost, deu. Ober Ost
Ober Ost was the name of an occupation administration on Polish, Lithuanian and Belarusian territory led by the Prussian military, which exploited the controlled area economically and, unlike the General Government of Warsaw, did not place it under civil administration. Plans for annexing the areas to the German Reich and settling them with Germans were developed early on here.
In many brochures, articles and in a popular traveling exhibition about Courland in 1917, the resettlement was presented as proof of the feasibility of a large colonization program by colonial pioneers. The prerequisite for success was the cultural character of these colonists, who could rapidly and permanently secure even the most inhospitable regions for the German people. For example, Pastor Peter Bräunlich raved about the colonists from Volhynia who had settled in Courland:
"They took up the tough fight against virgin forest, steppe, swamp -- and often bands of robbers as well. With a loaded rifle on their backs ready to fire and their hands on the plough, many forced the untamed land to serve them. German towns flourished. Wastelands were transformed into fertile meadows. [...]Such miracles were due to the industriousness of the inhabitants, their frugality, their thriftiness, but above all, their fabulous abundance of children."5
In referring to the wildness of the "uncivilized" land, which the settler “transforms” into cultivated land using weapons and tools, the author demonstrated that his perspective is that of European colonialism, which was very widespread at the time.6 The agricultural professor Ernst Dietrich Holz wrote about the Volhynian pioneers who resettled in the Baltic States as follows:
"The prerequisite for the success of the whole project, however, was the recruitment of colonists who were prepared to accept the privations of the early days and who could demonstrate the qualities required for settlement under these conditions: hard work, toughness and frugality. [...] Such human material was found in the German farming colonies in Volhynia and southern Russia. [...] In addition to the hard work and modesty of this tribe of settlers, the extraordinarily large number of children in their families was particularly important.“7
In the German colonies from Russia, whose increasingly precarious situation often attracted the attention of a nationalist public, journalists recognized the antidote to the Polish threat and the flood of Slavs. It was precisely those characteristics of frugality and an abundance of children which, according to Max Weber, had helped the Slavs in eastern Germany to victory, that made the German colonists the ideal pioneers of Germanization. Only they were able to cultivate more and more land under adverse conditions and to secure it for Germany permanently through abundant offspring.
In the German colonies from Russia, whose increasingly precarious situation often attracted the attention of a nationalist public, journalists recognized the antidote to the Polish threat and the flood of Slavs. It was precisely those characteristics of frugality and an abundance of children which, according to Max Weber, had helped the Slavs in eastern Germany to victory, that made the German colonists the ideal pioneers of Germanization. Only they were able to cultivate more and more land under adverse conditions and to secure it for Germany permanently through abundant offspring.
Russian-German colonists in the propaganda of the Volksboden Theory and as Germanizers of the annexed territories under the Nazis
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The idea of the Volhynian Germans as pioneers of the Germanization of the East survived the First World War and took on a new, relevant function in the Weimar Republic. Since the 1920s, so-called Eastern research (“Ostforschung”) had served to lay claim to German territory lost after the First World War and to other areas that supposedly belonged to the German people’s, or German culture's, soil (“deutschen Volks- oder Kulturboden”]. Once again, the colonists from Volhynia8 and the characteristics attributed to them served as proof of German pioneering colonization in the East , which was now made part of a continuous process that had started in the Middle Ages:
“The German-Volhynian loves his soil, he fights for it with a tenacity and devotion that are unparalleled. But at the same time, he is lured by the distant virgin forest, wanting to clear it and make it his own. The conflict of the Germans – love of home and wanderlust, roots in the soil and the urge to migrate -- is embodied in a shockingly pure way in this youngest German tribe. The Volhynian German is thus a true descendant of those farmers who traveled to the East and who, setting out for the unknown again and again, repeatedly created genuine German national and cultural soil and thus overcame the dichotomy of being through their work .”9
When, at the beginning of the Second World War and as a result of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, several hundred thousand people of German descent were resettled in the areas annexed by Poland in order to “Germanize” them, the repetition of the established notion of the frugal settlement pioneer with a wealth of children played an important role in the propaganda and communication of the Home to the Empire (“Heim-ins-Reich”) project.10 In light of the history presented here, it seemed obvious to the elites of the German Empire to use German-speaking inhabitants from Eastern Europe as tools of German expansion. This also shows how deeply colonialism was entrenched in political action, both as a necessity for and a purpose of the German nation, and how the hierarchical and hegemonic thinking of colonialism still regulated the country itself. It was not just the supposed 'external' and 'internal' enemies of the people that had to be fought. Members of the "national community" were not intended to be the beneficiaries of the planned German rise to world power, but were merely seen as useful "settler material" to pave the way there. Thus, they too were subjected to a colonial logic that was based on the much earlier invention and devaluation of Eastern Europe and its inhabitants.
When, at the beginning of the Second World War and as a result of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, several hundred thousand people of German descent were resettled in the areas annexed by Poland in order to “Germanize” them, the repetition of the established notion of the frugal settlement pioneer with a wealth of children played an important role in the propaganda and communication of the Home to the Empire (“Heim-ins-Reich”) project.10 In light of the history presented here, it seemed obvious to the elites of the German Empire to use German-speaking inhabitants from Eastern Europe as tools of German expansion. This also shows how deeply colonialism was entrenched in political action, both as a necessity for and a purpose of the German nation, and how the hierarchical and hegemonic thinking of colonialism still regulated the country itself. It was not just the supposed 'external' and 'internal' enemies of the people that had to be fought. Members of the "national community" were not intended to be the beneficiaries of the planned German rise to world power, but were merely seen as useful "settler material" to pave the way there. Thus, they too were subjected to a colonial logic that was based on the much earlier invention and devaluation of Eastern Europe and its inhabitants.
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English translation: Gwen Clayton
