Orphans Of Versailles by Richard Blanke

Author:Richard Blanke [Blanke, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History, Eastern Europe, European General, Modern, 20th Century
ISBN: 9780813187822
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2021-11-21T05:00:00+00:00

6

The Impact of National Socialism

There are no statistics showing the precise degree of support for National Socialism among Germans in western Poland, but it is clear that a substantial majority of them embraced this movement and its attendant ideas without much hesitation. Even though there had not been much of a National Socialist movement in Poland before January 1933, the major German newspaper in Poznania declared just a few months later that “we Germans in Poland are all National Socialists.”1 This was an exaggeration, perhaps, but only a slight one; a 1937 article in Slavonic and East European Review estimated that 70-80 percent of the minority was committed to Hitler and his ideology, and among young Germans the figure was higher still.2 Indeed, the percentage of Germans who genuinely sympathized with Nazism was probably greater in Poland than in Germany itself, which is all the more remarkable when one considers the absence in Poland of the totalitarian state apparatus that compelled adherence to Nazism inside Germany.

One does not have to look far to find reasons for this quick and positive response. Poland had certainly done little to win the allegiance of its German-speaking citizens, and there was also widespread disappointment with the system of international guarantees and organizations just then; many Germans saw the more assertive Reich promised by Hitler as the only effective means of easing their situation. Moreover, the supra-state, non-territorial concept of nationality advocated by National Socialism accorded well with ideas of national solidarity across political boundaries which German minorities had long advocated as the best means of long-term survival in the diaspora. Polish Germans also expressed the hope that Germany would now see them less as a moral obligation, an object of charity, and more as the equals of Reich Germans in the all-German Volksgemeinschaft. The fact that Hitler himself was an Auslanddeutscher of sorts only enhanced their readiness to see him as their savior.

Of course, Polish Germans had only an imperfect understanding of the changes taking place in Germany after 1933. Their accounts reveal more wishful thinking than firm knowledge of developments; and the minority’s own press rarely discussed the less savory aspects of Hitler’s rule. Superintendant Blau, spiritual leader of most Germans in Poznania and Pomorze, declared his own support for the “new currents in the Reich.” The “spiritual movement in Germany,” he said, was “healthy for our area and so must to be approved unanimously.” But he defined it in the most benign terms, as little more than an attempt to mobilize national resources more efficiently under a more unified leadership. In guidelines prepared for his pastors, Blau described Nazism as a movement promising renewal, diligence, cleanliness, the suppression of subversive ideas, and improved relations between people and their churches. He showed no awareness of those aspects of Nazi ideology that bothered other churchmen: its neo-paganism, its racial anti-Semitism, its glorification of political dictatorship.3

The ready adoption of National Socialism by most Germans in Poland was encouraged by their close and dependent relationship to various Reich agencies.

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