ABSTRACT
Central Europe’s transition from empire to nation-state, associated with the treaties signed during the Paris Peace Conference 1919/1920, produced a large and partly disgruntled German minority population in East Central Europe. Many of these so-called Volksdeutsche felt deprived of their status as privileged nationalities in the no longer existing multi-ethnic monarchies and discriminated by the politics of the new nation-states that favoured the titular nations at the expense of ethnic minorities. Hence, they constituted a significant reservoir of opposition against the post-war order right-wing revisionists in Germany, including the Nazis, could draw upon.
The chapter explores through the stories of two influential German völkisch radicals, the Bohemian Karl Hermann Frank and the Balt Max Hildebert Boehm, how growing up in the multi-ethnic setting of East Central Europe’s borderlands shaped their political views, and where their thinking differed from Nazi racial ideologues, who did not share this borderland experience. To highlight the range of political attitudes and counteract the stereotype of the Volksdeutsche as Hitler’s “fifth column,” the story of Paul Schiemann is included, a well-known Baltic German liberal and international minority activist who shared some of the concerns of the right-wing radicals but opposed their politics.
