ABSTRACT
The drive to turn occupied Poland into an area of German settlement was central to the Nazi regime's vision of German expansion in eastern Europe. Launched in the wake of conquest and occupation, the regime's “Germanization” policies evoked tradition while at the same time representing a radical break with the past. Propaganda depictions of the Germanization campaign drew on the motif of the “German drive to the east” and the long-established notion of a German “cultural mission” in eastern Europe. 1 Colonizing wartime Poland was presented as restoring German domination in lands torn from the Reich by the Treaty of Versailles and reclaiming historic sites of German settlement from a more distant past, as well as pushing outward into new territory. However, the regime was also quick to stress how unprecedented its policies were in their scope and in the means used to achieve them. For Nazi planners, the vision of the expanding frontier of “Germandom” was an opportunity to apply research in history, geography, and “racial theory” to the systematic management of populations. Polish territory was conceived as a vast laboratory for ethnic restructuring, a space to be emptied and refilled with a population of the “correct” ethnic/racial “stock.” For those classified as non-Germans, the Nazi experiment was to have devastating consequences: colonization in wartime Poland was an instrument of genocidal warfare, a drive to destroy the nationhood of a defeated enemy and physically to eradicate people of “alien ethnicity.” 2 Immediate impetus for displacing and driving out Poles and Polish Jews was given by the arrival of ethnic German resettlers (Umsiedler), who comprised a key element of the Nazis’ “ethnic resources” for colonizing the east. Brought from other parts of eastern Europe in a series of population transfers in order to swell the numbers of Germans in Poland, the ethnic German resettlers were treated as the human material for a project of settler colonialism. The following discussion focuses on the regime's treatment of the settlers and explores how purported lessons from other settler colonial projects figured in the drawing up of strategies to manipulate them. It aims to illuminate both the extent of the regime's ambition to control the settlers and the limits of its power to achieve anything on the ground except destruction.
