A Sonderweg through Eastern Europe? The Varieties of German Rule in Poland during the Two World Wars*

Abstract

The article challenges recent arguments about German relations with eastern Europe that stress pathological continuities, implying a new Sonderweg centred on German violence and expansionism in the region. It examines German policies towards Polish-speaking populations in the Imperial Government-General of Warsaw during the First World War and Nazi debates about whether to include the Polish city of Łódź in the Reich at the beginning of the Second World War. The article suggests that a key similarity existed in German imaginations of the region as an imperial space to be dominated, but that these imaginations competed with ideology, agency and contingency in both world wars. In uncovering key continuities and discontinuities between the two occupation regimes in Poland, it complicates arguments about the singularity and causality of a particular German mission in eastern Europe.

Since the appearance of Detlev Peukert’s 1989 essay ‘The Genesis of the “Final Solution” from the Spirit of Science’, a number of scholars have argued that Germany’s rapid economic growth produced distinctly ‘modern’ tensions, which help to explain the rise and extreme violence of Nazism.¹ In place of the Sonderweg’s story about the contradictions of modernization since 1848 in a uniquely backward Germany, this post-Sonderweg narrative emphasizes the triumph of the modern practices of social engineering, eugenics, rationality and science since the late 1890s.² It places Nazism within a transnational crisis of modernity. No longer the epitome of illiberalism, antimodernism and irrationality, Germany is now seen as the catastrophic apotheosis of modernity, reflecting the same dark problems of modernity found in countries across the world but to an extreme and seemingly unique degree. As A. Dirk Moses writes:

Rather than taking a ‘special path’ to modernity or standing apart sui generis from the other European powers, Germany is the exemplar of an experience they all underwent in varying degrees of intensity. It is the country where the process occurred most radically.³

While the original Sonderweg debate has dissipated since the 1980s, historians still emphasize continuities across the Imperial, Weimar and Nazi periods, even if now they conceive these temporal pathologies as ‘modern’ and often as ‘global’.⁴ Indeed, questions about continuity have shaped one of the richest debates today in modern German historiography: the history of German colonialism and its possible links to Nazi imperialism in eastern Europe. Inspired in part by renewed interest in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, historians have examined the violence of German and European colonialism to explain and/or contextualize Nazi genocides in eastern Europe.⁵ This literature has generally continued the post-Sonderweg paradigm of uncovering the dark sides of modernity that engendered Nazism. In different ways, Isabel Hull, Benjamin Madley and Jürgen Zimmerer have drawn either explicit or implicit connections with Nazism in their studies on military violence and genocide in colonial settings.⁶ Moreover, A. Dirk Moses, Mark Mazower, Wendy Lower and David Furber have conceptualized Nazism as an imperial project, arguing that the Third Reich radicalized ideas and practices found in overseas German and European colonies.⁷ While several scholars have recently challenged the various strands of this colonial continuity thesis, the issue of temporal continuities has structured the debate.⁸

The now sizeable literature on Germany’s overseas colonial past has, in turn, stimulated research on Germany’s colonial/imperial relationship with eastern Europe.⁹ Historians of modern Germany interested in eastern Europe also typically stress continuities, yet they tend to locate them more deeply in German history and they tend to rely more heavily on the heuristic of the nation state to analyse Germany’s allegedly pathological relationship with eastern Europe.¹⁰ Although this emerging literature is influenced by transnational, global and postcolonial studies, it stresses long-standing and specifically German national tendencies of domination and brutality in eastern Europe.¹¹ It emphasizes above all two impulses—violence and expansionism—that stretch back at least to the late eighteenth century with the Polish partitions. In so doing, this literature comes close to reprising some of Fritz Fischer’s arguments about German prewar expansionist plans to create a ‘Mitteleuropa’, designs that helped to start the First World War (and consequently the Second World War).¹² To be sure, few historians invoke Fischer, but they tend to give analytical priority, as he did, to the east as a long-standing ‘dreamland’ for German conquest and power.¹³ For example, in The German Myth of the East, Vejas Liulevicius describes how Reich policies in occupied eastern Europe from 1914–1918 stemmed from a ‘particular German national calling or mission’ to ‘impose order’ on a space believed to be disorderly, dirty, uncivilized and incapable of self-rule.¹⁴ Liulevicius does caution against homogenizing and essentializing German perceptions of eastern Europe. Even so, he concludes that ‘the Nazis brought to fruition precisely the most destructive elements of the German myth of the east’.¹⁵

Similarly, other historians have emphasized the experience of the First World War and defeat as turning points in the lead-up to Nazi domination of eastern Europe. Gregor Thum has traced Nazi policies in eastern Europe to the rise of extreme nationalist politics in the Weimar Republic in what he calls a ‘völkisch turn’.¹⁶ In The Impossible Border, Annemarie Sammartino has suggested that postwar völkisch conceptions of Germanness forebode later expansionism in eastern Europe: ‘The German crisis of sovereignty stretched across the political caesuras of defeat and revolution, beginning with German wartime success during World War I, which encouraged fantasies of territorial expansion’.¹⁷

These arguments about expansionist and violent continuities in eastern Europe are compelling. Germany was, after all, both a continental and a trans-oceanic empire, and radical nationalists considered eastern Europe central to Germany’s future.¹⁸ Several historians have indeed recently welcomed this continuity argument as a useful alternative to the ‘Windhoek to Auschwitz thesis’ proposed most thoroughly by Jürgen Zimmerer. Robert Gerwarth and Stephan Malinowski suggest that exploring both Germany’s colonial domination of the east and European continental imperialism might be ‘infinitely more plausible than the abstract search for the Holocaust’s “African roots”’.¹⁹ In a historiographical overview of recent research on German colonialism, Edward Ross Dickinson intimates that the ‘long-term roots of the catastrophic character of the war in Poland and White Russia in 1939–1945’ may lie partly in the ‘two centuries of Prussian conquest and occupation’.²⁰ Finally, David Blackbourn writes that late nineteenth-century German ideas of eastern Europe as a space for cultural, economic, political and physical domination ‘were implemented in deeds in a barbaric way’ during the Second World War.²¹

And yet, while these arguments about Germany’s long relationship with eastern Europe have much to offer, they come close to amounting to a ‘Freytag to Himmler thesis’—what might be seen as a new Sonderweg through eastern Europe. This line of reasoning raises four empirical and analytical problems.²² First, Nazi policies towards east Europeans reflected a significant rupture from earlier German practices in the region during the Imperial and Weimar periods. Second, Nazi spatial concepts of the east were exceptionally multiple.²³ While Hitler of course looked to the east to build his empire, its geographic boundaries were hardly clear beyond the general orientation towards Russia. Third, Nazi policies towards east Europeans evolved and adapted more according to wartime conditions and needs than to deeply ingrained and stable cultural perceptions.²⁴ Fourth, it is debatable just how significantly earlier German cultural fantasies of dominating eastern Europe drove Hitler and other Nazis to war. Colonialist ideas are perhaps important in explaining Hitler’s perceptions of the east as a tabula rasa that could be dealt with however he pleased, but less so his decision to invade and conquer.²⁵ For as Adam Tooze has shown, Hitler saw Lebensraum as essential to Germany’s economic survival and ability to prevail over the United States.²⁶ Hitler seemed motivated more deeply by economic anxieties than cultural imaginations of fulfilling some German cultural or völkisch mission to expand eastwards (Drang nach Osten). When in power, he was more than willing to sacrifice the needs of ethnic Germans abroad when it was opportune.²⁷

The case of Poland is instructive here. Poland would seem ideal for making arguments about continuities in German imperial ambitions, expansionism and violence on the continent because Prussia and Germany controlled western Poland for over a century.²⁸ Furthermore, two German states occupied Poland during two world wars, and both occupation regimes dominated the country based on perceptions of it as an ‘imperial space’ subordinate to Germany.²⁹ But the differences between the two occupations overwhelm their similarities: why and how this imperial space was to be dominated diverged strikingly during the two world wars. As Martin Broszat noted long ago and as John Connelly has recently emphasized, Hitler said little about Poland before the German invasion in 1939.³⁰ Had Poland collaborated with the Third Reich in the fight against the Soviet Union in 1939, it might have survived as a satellite state like Slovakia. But when Poland refused Hitler’s advances and was later militarily defeated, it received the wrath of the Nazi state like few other geographic areas in Europe.³¹ Nationalist agitators and occupation authorities radicalized earlier anti-Polish sentiments, but the sheer brutality of their methods was distinct. The German occupation of eastern Europe during the First World War cannot just be read as a less intense precursor of what was later to come when the Nazis arrived. It hardly established, as one historian has recently written, ‘perceptions and behaviors that would return with even more devastating vigor during the Third Reich’.³²

Rather, the Imperial German military occupation of Poland during the First World War was largely non-violent. Imperial German policies in wartime eastern Europe reflected a conservative-monarchical and paternalistic vision of direct rule and hegemonic influence, whereas the Nazis pursued a revolutionary plan of destruction and genocide. Imperial Germany wanted domination; Nazi Germany wanted radical demographic change. These different varieties of German rule could not have affected more differently the native populations of eastern Europe. In 1916, Imperial Germany decided to restore an autonomous Polish polity under its influence. It wanted Poland to serve as a military buffer against Russia and aimed to assert German control over Polish nationalism, which, if left to find another champion, could be problematic for Germany given its substantial Polish minority. Poland would be culturally independent and run its own internal affairs, but would be a client state expected to support Germany’s political, military and economic interests. These strategic aims shaped Imperial Germany’s handling of occupied Poland. The occupation regime restored Polish participation in municipal governance, allowed for the re-establishment of Polish-language instruction in Poland, and tolerated a flourishing Polish and Jewish press. While the occupation certainly brought suffering for Poles, especially immense economic hardships, everyday life was devoid of the wanton terror and brutality that characterized the Nazi occupation.

Finally, this article challenges—through the example of Łódź during the Second World War—arguments about geographic continuities. It argues that strategic and economic concerns competed with seemingly deterministic völkisch German imaginations of controlling Poland. The annexation of Łódź, Poland’s second largest city with several tens of thousands of German speakers, might appear to be an almost natural outcome of Nazi völkisch ambitions.³³ Yet, the deliberation over the extension of the German eastern border does not easily fit into a singular narrative of long-term German dreams of dominating eastern Europe. Even as the Nazis unleashed extreme violence against Poles and Jews immediately when they crossed into Poland, German authorities still showed considerable confusion and hesitation in how to annex and administer Polish territory.³⁴ Only after weeks of political wrangling did the Nazis decide to transfer Łódź from the nascent General Government to the Reichsgau Wartheland. Expansion in this part of Poland happened not because of but despite völkisch ambitions.

By uncovering the largely non-violent nature of Imperial German rule in Poland and the fluidity of Nazi imaginations of the east, this article complicates arguments about the uniquely destructive logic of the German military, Germany’s supposedly pathological impulse of violence and expansionism into eastern Europe, and the ideological centrality of colonialist, völkisch perceptions of the east in understanding German policies in the region. Rather than viewing Germany’s relationship with Poland in terms of an inexorable expansionist drive or reducing it to extreme violence, it emphasizes competing continuities in assessing Germany’s convoluted path through eastern Europe. While the two occupations may seem to reflect an uninterrupted line of colonial and völkisch fantasies that extend back into modern German history, this article highlights how other established ideas of Germanness, national interests and practices unfolded and competed in the region. This multiplicity in understanding the east is important for contextualizing the radical increase in violence unleashed by Nazism. Although Germans dominated eastern Europe in both conflicts, the rupture of German practices in the region between the First and Second World Wars was substantial.

I: The Imperial Government-General of Warsaw

The Imperial Government-General of Warsaw, Imperial Germany’s putative forerunner to the Nazi occupation regime, was established in August 1915 after a joint Austro-German offensive drove the armies of Russia out of central Europe. It was commanded by General Hans Hartwig von Beseler, a military engineer who had served in the Franco–Prussian war and then passed through a variety of staff and command positions before being forced to retire in 1910. Recalled to duty at the beginning of the war, Beseler fought on both the Western and Eastern Fronts before being named Governor-General of Poland in August 1915. He arrived at his post knowing little about the area, but he worked quickly to remedy this deficiency, reading extensively in Polish history and literature, receiving briefings from Bogdan Graf von Hutten-Czapski, a prominent Prussian Polish nobleman assigned to the Government-General, and traveling throughout the lands placed under his control.³⁵

Beseler soon arrived at a view of Poland that mixed the patronizing and the favourable, the harshly judgmental with a kind of paternalistic sympathy. In the autumn of 1915, Beseler captured this blend of sentiments in a letter to his wife written shortly after journeying through the Government-General. Poland, he wrote, was ‘beautiful beyond all expectations and favoured by nature’, but it was also

lacking good government and the superior intelligence of an intellectually distinguished people. The Poles have been repressed by the Russians, they don’t know what they want and the cleavage amongst the inhabitants, especially as well the unfortunate Jews, hinder the growth of progress. It’s a pity about this land, but about its people too, who are certainly gifted . . . What will one day become of all this is still completely unclear.³⁶

By the spring of 1916, Beseler had come to three conclusions about Germany’s role in Poland. First, he had decided that Germany’s strategic interests dictated that Germany should establish long-term political control over Polish-speaking Europe. Second, he realized that this control would not endure if it were based on coercion alone and ignored Polish desires for greater political and cultural autonomy. Finally, he had resolved to become the orchestrator of this ambitious project, bringing, as he saw it, more enlightened modes of government to an oppressed and benighted land.

Beseler therefore began to implement a series of policies intended to accommodate some Polish ambitions for self-rule and lay the foundations for Polish statehood. For all its patronizing overtones, Beseler’s embrace of this project provides a serious challenge to the idea that the German armed forces were especially prone to unrestrained violence when left to their own devices.³⁷ Beseler was a career military man intensely devoted to the army as an institution. Yet it was he who drove the German political and military establishment into a policy of conciliation in Poland. His policies were often met with criticism from civilians in Germany (the pastors and schoolteachers of the Eastern Marches Association were enraged) and in the occupied zone itself, where sceptics included the head of the civilian administrative apparatus, Wolfgang von Kries. This self-described ‘son of the Prussian Ostmark’ eventually resigned his post in despair over Beseler’s experiments.³⁸

Two of the most important institutions established under Beseler’s rule were local administrative bodies and Polish schools. In 1915, Beseler’s administration created native administrative structures in both the cities and the rural areas of Poland. Drawing on Prussian models, the Government-General created two institutions in the cities: an executive body (Magistrat) headed by a mayor and a city council (the Stadtverordnetenversammlung). Poles could elect members to the city council, but the Germans installed the mayor.³⁹ The cities were responsible for drawing up and maintaining a budget, seeing to public health and safety (the latter meaning, for example, maintaining fire-fighting equipment), attending to the upkeep of local infrastructure, and providing social services to the poor. The cities also had to extract from the population the funds they needed for their activities—a truly wretched obligation for officials ruling over a poor country suffering the privations of war. A similar administrative apparatus was set up in the countryside. In January 1916, the Government-General issued the District Order (Kreisordnung) that delegated to the districts many of the same tasks given to the cities through the creation of district assemblies (Kreisversammlungen).

These proto-state bodies, which worked under the authority of Imperial German officials, were created mostly to fill the administrative void left by the departure of the Russian state apparatus from Poland and to shift some of the burden of administration onto Polish shoulders. But by 1916, as Imperial Germany prepared to commit itself publicly to the restoration of a Polish kingdom (the announcement came on 5 November 1916), the Germans began to see them as crucially important to Poland’s long-term political future. One civilian report expressed the hope that these administrative bodies would ‘gradually train [erziehen] the rural population to participate . . . in public life’.⁴⁰ The use of erziehen—to bring up, train or educate—is telling here, as it implies the inculcation of values and skills in the young and malleable. The Germans thus imagined that they were training an ‘immature’ Polish mass and giving it the skills of self-administration that it had long lacked. As the chief German administrator in the district of Sokołów east of Warsaw put it, the local council was a ‘preparatory school’ (Vorschule) meant to train the population in ‘political affairs’.⁴¹ It is tempting, and not wholly incorrect, to draw parallels here between the Government-General and European colonial administrators throughout the world who claimed they were fulfilling a ‘civilizing mission’. Nonetheless, the Germans’ thoughts and actions were quite explicitly drawn from the period of post-Jena reform and renewal in Prussia. Baron vom Stein, rather than ideologues of European expansion into Africa and Asia, was the ideological father of the institutions of self-government in Poland.

The Government-General expanded these institutions as the occupation continued. Most importantly, it held elections to fill the new city councils. In 1916, the first such election took place in Warsaw for a new Warsaw City Council. Numerous difficulties leading up to the election divided the German occupiers and Warsaw’s political elite. The Poles wanted a broad franchise, while the Germans wanted a much more restricted one, which they ultimately implemented as no consensus emerged.⁴² Moreover, uncertainty about what role Warsaw’s substantial Jewish population would play in the election troubled both the occupiers and non-Jewish Varsovians. The Government-General and its advisors were faced with a truly daunting task in formulating policies that touched on the ‘Jewish question’ (sprawa/kwestia żydowska) in Poland. The question had been a central concern in Polish politics since the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. This issue, along with the sheer numbers of Jews in Poland, meant that the Germans could not possibly hope to avoid dealing with it in some way.

Yet to become involved in Polish–Jewish affairs was to enter a dismal political thicket with sharp and poisonous thorns. The liberal assimilationism once favoured by Polish and Jewish elites had faded from Polish political life by the time the Germans arrived; among Jewish elites, nationalist and Zionist political movements were gaining new favour, while Polish anti-Semitism was steadily rising. In 1912, Polish–Jewish tensions connected with the elections to the Duma had led to an outpouring of anti-Jewish sentiment, including a boycott that was still in place in 1914.⁴³ Nor could the Jews expect much protection from their Imperial Russian overlords; the war on the Eastern Front prior to conquest by the Germans was marked by brutal atrocities against the Jewish population by the Russian army.⁴⁴ Given that the arrival of the German army halted these atrocities, as well as the fact that the Germans tolerated both a Jewish press and Jewish political parties, it is easy to understand why many of the Congress Kingdom’s Jews initially welcomed the German armies as liberators.

German tolerance of Jewish political and cultural activity did not, however, extend to Warsaw’s elections, where they limited the influence of the city’s large Jewish population. Wolfgang von Kries, chief of the civil administration in the Government-General, thought (probably quite sincerely) that Warsaw’s Jews, whom he believed to be about 40% of the population, should be given ‘fair representation’. But he also wanted to preserve ‘the Polish character’ of Warsaw’s council. He believed that the intricacies of the curial system and the proportional elections would limit Jewish influence without blatantly excluding them. They would not, though, do enough. Kries suggested instituting a fifteen-year residency requirement for voters. ‘In this way’, reasoned Kries, ‘the Russian Jews . . . will gradually gain, with their advancing assimilation, the right of full participation’. At the same time, the institutions ‘of Selbstverwaltung [would] not be burdened by elements’ that were ‘foreign’.⁴⁵ Kries’s concern about the possibility of ‘Russian Jews’ constituting a too-visible presence in the city’s administration indicates that the occupiers were primarily worried about the so-called ‘Litwaks’, Jews who had arrived in Poland from the Pale of Settlement in the decades before the war.

This sense of national conflict simmering under the surface of the occupation, working its way into its institutions and intersecting with Germany’s own ambitions in Poland, is crucial to understanding how another set of institutions developed under the Germans: the school system. At the very outset of the occupation, the Germans had worked to get the school system functioning again. The language in these schools was Polish, which made an enormous impression in Poland since Polish education had been forbidden in prewar Russia (as it was in Germany).⁴⁶ The occupation curriculum in most schools was Polonized, meaning that Polish literature, especially Romanticism, was taught, as was Polish history. The Germans did not seem to pay much attention to what was going on in these schools. The schools could not cultivate hostility to the Germans, though exactly what that meant was never made clear, and it was a principle that was never very rigorously enforced.

The Polonization of the schools actually ended up causing serious tensions between occupiers and occupied, though not because the occupation regime was worried about the language or curriculum of the schools. Other people in Poland, however, had reason to worry. In 1917, the Germans decided that they wanted to demonstrate the sincerity of their commitment to meeting some Polish demands for autonomy. As a key concession, they wanted to turn over the administration of the schools. But the Germans were dealing with the Provisional Council of State, a Polish political organization that the Germans had themselves created in 1916. The council refused to guarantee that Poland’s minorities, namely Polish Germans and Jews, would have access to education in their own languages. Beseler’s occupation regime was under enormous pressure from various Jewish and German organizations in Poland and in Germany to secure these rights, and the regime did genuinely want to do something, at least for Polish Germans. The problem this posed for their policy is nicely captured in a letter that Beseler wrote to his wife in 1917:

I intend to give the Germans here [in Poland] some proper moral support at this moment, when, due to higher reasons of state, we must give a number of things to the Poles . . . In the homeland people are demanding all kinds of unreasonable things in this regard, demands that one cannot make of a state, if it is to bear this name at all . . . In any case I have decided in the matter of the schools . . . to make the protection of the minorities, especially the Germans, a conditio sine qua non.⁴⁷

Negotiations with the council dragged on for months. The council was a kind of puppet government, but the occupation regime was either unwilling or unable to force the council to do what it wanted. Finally, in the autumn of 1917, the regulations turning the administration of the schools over to the Poles were published. They contained an elaborate series of regulations governing the place of minority schools in the new school system, but they applied only to the German minority. Jews were not to be protected. Polish Jews saw this exemption as a great betrayal by the German occupiers.⁴⁸ It was, however, a betrayal that was inextricably linked with the Germans’ active encouragement of Polish nationalist aspirations.

So, too, were Germany’s plans to create an ethnically German ‘border strip’ (Grenzstreifen) between the new Polish state and the Reich. Ominously, the strip was to be created by ethnic cleansing, although most of the German political establishment clearly rejected violence as a means of accomplishing the transfer of populations. This border zone has enjoyed a long postwar career as the most compelling piece of evidence that Germany’s ambitions in the east during the First World War foreshadowed those of the Nazis.⁴⁹ The Polish border strip of the First World War, however, was a limited response to pressures generated by the growth of nationalism in the multi-national empires of central Europe. These pressures created a crisis of sovereignty that erupted first in the Balkans with the attempt to create states based on a fusion of nation and territory—a task impossible to accomplish without destroying the existing political order.⁵⁰ The concern that a similar crisis would destabilize its eastern frontier was at the heart of Germany’s Polish policy. The new Polish state that was certain to arise from the political wreckage of the war, either with or without German assistance, could easily generate that peculiarly volatile mix of foreign and domestic pressures on the German–Polish border that had proved so fatal to Austria-Hungary (and with it the peace of Europe).

The border strip was not an attempt to create a Greater German empire, but was rather an attempt to avoid the creation of a Serbia-like Poland. Far from being driven by fantasies about empty land awaiting settlers, the problem the border zone was meant to solve for the Germans was precisely the opposite: the Reich’s pre-1914 eastern borderlands were full of people whose loyalty to the state—a state whose elections they participated in, whose army they served in, and whose schools they attended—was suspect. In both their aims and their methods, then, Imperial Germany’s various plans for the Polish border zone resembled neither Hitler’s ‘General Plan East’ (Generalplan Ost) nor the colonial dreams of expansionist nationalists. While it is true that the Pan-Germanists and the Eastern Marches Association hoped for the creation of a Germanized ‘border zone’, the wild schemes that inflamed their imaginations bore little relation to the strategic concerns that drove Beseler’s project. In addition, the establishment of a border zone of the völkisch-nationalist variety was certainly not to be tied to the creation of a Polish state, while in Beseler’s view the two policies were linked in an inseparable causal relationship. Rather than speaking of a ‘border strip’, it is perhaps better to think of a variety of plans for potential border strips, plans that shared, at best, a family resemblance. Which version of the Grenzstreifen would have won out had Germany emerged victorious from the war is difficult to say, but given the total lack of influence exercised on Polish policy during the war by the Pan-Germanists and Eastern Marches Association—from whose ranks Beseler’s most bitter critics were drawn—there is reason to doubt that the postwar border would have been drawn to their liking.

In sum, the unrealized ambition to create a ‘border strip’ should not obscure the fact that Germany’s occupation of Poland during the First World War was marked by genuine attempts to accommodate at least some Polish desires for autonomy. To be sure, the occupation was harsh. Everything that could be used for the German war effort was taken, from food to coal to church bells. Even samovars disappeared from Polish kitchens, seized and melted down to be put to use in the war.⁵¹ The German occupation was a time of extraordinary privation, cold and hunger for Poles forced to endure it. Still, recent work on everyday life in Germany during the war suggests that the proper point of departure for a comparative analysis of the Germans’ economic policies in Poland should be the wartime policies in Germany itself.⁵² There, too, the enormous material demands created by a prolonged war of attrition led to the requisition of anything that could be put to use in the service of victory. In stark contrast to the Second World War, Germany’s economic policies at home during the First World War were markedly similar to its policies in its occupied territories. Finally, the Imperial Government-General used force at times to maintain its authority. In 1916, ‘forty-two spies and bandits’ were shot in Warsaw.⁵³ But there was little of the violence and terror of the sort that would be inflicted by the Nazis on Poland.

Still, crucial links between these two experiences exist. The 1915–18 occupation of Poland ended quite badly for the Germans. As Germany collapsed into revolution, so too did the German army occupying Poland, which formed soldiers’ councils that seized control from the officers. At the very time that this was happening, there was a coup d’état in occupied Poland orchestrated by armed detachments of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS). As part of this coup, the PPS insurgents began to confiscate German arms which were, with very few exceptions, handed over without a fight.⁵⁴ Numerous stories circulated in which Polish children approached German soldiers on the street and demanded their weapons, which were duly surrendered. The soldiers’ councils completed the German disarmament by negotiating a deal with the Polish Socialist Party, according to which the German soldiers still in Poland were allowed to leave but only after turning over all military equipment, including their weapons, to the Poles. Beseler, the Governor-General, was not around to participate in this surrender, since he had already fled Warsaw in early November. This collapse of the army along with Beseler’s flight left a poisonous legacy in Germany, where, after the war, Beseler was slandered by politicians and pamphleteers and the behaviour of the occupying forces became a source of public shame. The collapse of the occupying army was a bitter prelude to the Polish uprising that took place in Posen in December 1918; to the awarding of large chunks of formerly Imperial German territory to the new Polish state at the Paris Peace Conference; and to the period of bitter suspicion that marked German–Polish relations in the interwar period, with Germany coveting its lost territory and Poland, not without justification, fearing Germany’s intentions towards its lost territory. Thus when German armies crossed the Polish border in September 1939, they brought with them legacies of the nineteenth century, but also animosities of a far more recent historical vintage.

II: The Twisted Road to Litzmannstadt

The hatreds generated by the collapse of the occupation regime and the subsequent period of German–Polish hostility may provide a partial explanation for why the Germans behaved with such savagery once they arrived back in Poland at the beginning of the Second World War. Such festering resentments, however, did not in and of themselves engender a programme of extensive territorial expansion and racialized warfare. Certainly the bitterness of the interwar years provided impetus for the more aggressive forms of eastern expansionism and völkisch politics that defined Germany after the First World War. But, even so, these postwar animosities and their toxic interaction with radical nationalist influences do not adequately account for the scope and depth of Nazi Germany’s territorial ambitions as the war progressed. As shown by the deep uncertainties regarding the place of Łódź⁵⁵ in the new German east, the conquest of Poland in 1939 did not immediately lead to the fulfilment of a maximalist völkisch programme of expanding the Reich’s borders to include as many ethnic Germans as possible. Right up until the moment the Nazis unleashed their most brutal visions of imperial conquest in eastern Europe, uncertainty lingered as to how Germany’s east was to be treated or even, indeed, where Lebensraum was to be found.

In September 1939, the Second Polish Republic collapsed under the blows of German attacks in the west and the Soviet invasion in the east. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned Poland along the Bug River. Once again, the territories of central Poland, including Warsaw and Łódź, fell under German rule. Yet the newly conquered territories were further partitioned. Warsaw became part of another General Government, with the seat in Cracow.⁵⁶ This time, the Reich directly annexed large parts of western and central Poland, including Łódź. Renamed Litzmannstadt the following year, this industrial centre became the Reich’s sixth largest city and a key site of Germanization efforts. In early 1940, Poland’s second largest Jewish community was ghettoized, and the Germans began gassing Jews in vans in nearby Chełmno (Kulmhof) in December 1941.

This wartime expansion and ethnic repopulation might appear at first glance to be an expression of a deep-seated Drang nach Osten, which has led many historians to draw connections between older German views of the east and the murderous policies of ethnic cleansing—such as those inflicted on Łódź—in the Second World War.⁵⁷ But the contested annexation of Łódź does not support a simple narrative of a long-term German quest for eastern Lebensraum, seasoned with a new völkisch twist, exploding across the eastern frontier in 1939. For weeks, Reich authorities, researchers of eastern Europe (Ostforscher), and the German minority in Łódź debated incorporating the city in the Third Reich, a debate that exemplifies the persistent ambiguities in German views of the east and complicates the supposition that völkisch claims predetermined Nazi expansionism.

While there had been a strong desire across the German political spectrum for territorial revisions with Poland, views on the extent and purpose of these changes varied greatly. Rather than reconciling differences, the actual conquest of Poland initially exacerbated tensions over what the ‘German east’ was actually to be. The clear consensus for recovering the lost Prussian territories stood in contrast to the ambiguity surrounding Łódź, which had been part of the Russian Empire before the First World War. Despite its German minority, some 60,000 strong—the largest concentration of Germans in Poland—Łódź had been relatively neglected during the interwar period by those German agencies funnelling money to Poland because of its geographical location and the apparent ‘national indifference’ of its German population.⁵⁸

Although the victory over Poland in 1939 opened new possibilities, many authorities in the Reich remained cautious about expanding beyond Germany’s 1914 borders. Despite his long-standing references to Lebensraum, for example, Hitler himself did not contemplate annexing Polish territories much beyond those of Germany’s 1914 borders until late September 1939.⁵⁹ Above all, the Reich Interior Ministry embodied the push for a territorial restoration-revisionism that would mainly annex the formerly Prussian areas of Poland. The Interior Ministry had vigorously supported ‘eastern research’ (Ostforschung) before the war.⁶⁰ Recent studies have focused on the significant connections between interwar Ostforschung and Germany’s eastern expansionism.⁶¹ Yet many of the German Ostforscher, including Dr Ernst Vollert, who directed borderland issues, remained hesitant about including the former Congress Polish territories of Imperial Russia. He feared that expanding beyond formerly Prussian Poland would present an insurmountable task in the expulsion of Poles.⁶² Łódź—Poland’s second largest city with its large and concentrated Polish and Jewish population—would have been especially difficult for the Reich to incorporate, and the Interior Ministry’s border plans worked out in early October did not include Łódź.⁶³ In the autumn of 1939, Germans made up only about 10% of the city’s population.⁶⁴

This ambivalence towards the city could be seen in the case of Theodor Schieder, who served as president of the Association of Historians in Germany from 1967 to 1972. After the conquest of Poland, aged thirty-one, he had led a working group on redrawing the Reich’s eastern border. The work was commissioned by the Publikationsstelle Berlin and was under the auspices of the Reich Interior Ministry, and the results were released on 7 October 1939. Schieder’s memorandum proposed the mass expulsions of Poles and Jews in the territories annexed by Germany to a rump Polish state. Schieder has recently drawn criticism both for his support of eastern expansion and his radicalism in dealing with ethnically mixed areas. His work is commonly seen as the basis for the later and more expansive Generalplan Ost of the SS.⁶⁵

A closer look at Schieder’s memorandum drafts, however, shows how strongly a restoration-revisionism still dominated the minds of many Ostforscher and those interested in Volkstum matters at this stage of the war. Schieder had initially assumed that the new German border with Poland would run largely along the old 1914 border. He even contemplated moving Germans from Łódź and Central Poland to resettle and re-Germanize the recovered territories in Poznania and Pomerelia.⁶⁶ In other words, Łódź Germans would be brought ‘home into the Reich’ (Heim ins Reich) much like the Volhynian and Baltic Germans—through migration from east to west, not annexation from west to east. Schieder’s limited concept of the ‘German east’ in 1939 actually planned for the de-Germanization of much of central and eastern Poland.

Yet the Reich Interior Ministry was, of course, not the only player in determining the Reich’s new borders. On 6 October, the ministry’s Staatssekretär Wilhelm Stuckart met with various Gauleiters as well as Hans Frank, who was then the chief of the civil administration for the occupied Polish territories, to discuss the division of territory.⁶⁷ Despite the lack of a clear resolution on Łódź, Hitler issued a proclamation to annex parts of western Poland on 8 October 1939, creating what would become Reichsgau Wartheland and Reichsgau Danzig-Westpreußen. The German Foreign Ministry remained worried about overly aggressive annexations and the international implications of destroying a Polish state that would also be needed to sign a peace treaty. After British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain rejected the so-called peace offer on 12 October, however, Hitler felt he no longer had a compelling reason to maintain any semblance of Polish independence.⁶⁸ A memorandum dated the same day announced the formation of a General Government, to be effective on 26 October 1939. The General Government was to exist next to the Reich and to be, at least initially, a kind of Polish reservation. Hans Frank was the designated Governor-General.⁶⁹

The period between 8 October 1939, when Hitler proclaimed the Reich’s annexation of western Polish territory, and the official annexation of Łódź on 9 November 1939, took nearly as long as the military defeat of Poland itself. During this time, it was not clear on which side of the border the city would be. Indeed, the administrative seat of the General Government was initially supposed to be Łódź, not Cracow.⁷⁰ By mid-October, Frank’s staff had partially moved from its temporary headquarters in Posen (Poznań) to Łódź.⁷¹ The running of the nascent General Government from Łódź served to strengthen Frank’s claim to keep the city.⁷² Some in the Reich who feared economic competition, especially those from the textile industry, also supported leaving Łódź in the General Government.⁷³

Yet Frank’s position on this matter deteriorated. On 24 October, two days before the army’s handover of the occupied Polish territories to civilan rule, the military administration of the region designated Łódź to be part of the Reich.⁷⁴ Frank thus prepared to transfer his office from Łódź to the Wawel Castle in Cracow. The move-in was scheduled for 6 pm on 7 November.⁷⁵ On 28 October, Frank discussed various details about the move, including ensuring that the cafeteria (Casino) would be ready for the staff’s arrival.⁷⁶ Despite these setbacks, however, Frank seemed unfazed in his quest to keep Łódź. The Governor-General’s journal entry for the same day reported the following:

Oberregierungsrat Schepers reported on the drawing of borders in the west. The issues were Kutno, Lodsch and Dabrowa.

Oberregierungsrat Schepers was designated to represent the interests of the General Government in Berlin and to emphasize there the necessity of maintaining the viability [Lebensfähigkeit] of the General Government.⁷⁷

The terse description regarding border changes and interests only thinly masked the struggle behind the scenes. Even as he prepared for the move, Frank and his supporters continued to insist that the city would be part of the General Government.⁷⁸

Reich authorities weighed a combination of strategic, economic and völkisch considerations in the annexation of Łódź.⁷⁹ Yet none of these concerns were clear-cut, and various actors could interpret these issues in their favour. Hermann Göring, the director of Germany’s Four-Year Plan, probably played an important role with his desire to include Łódź’s industries in the Reich.⁸⁰ His support, it seems, outweighed the aforementioned objections of those who feared Łódź economically. Likewise, Werner Lorenz of the Ethnic German Liaison Office (Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle) supported a Germanization agenda that differed from Schieder’s earlier draft memorandum on evacuating the Germans from central Poland. Lorenz desired the annexation of Łódź because he wanted to resettle the incoming Baltic Germans in an urban setting.⁸¹

Because of these conflicting priorities, Łódź’s fate remained uncertain for several weeks. Only the advocacy of two other top Nazi leaders seems to have sealed the annexation of the city: Heinrich Himmler visited Łódź on 28 October and Joseph Goebbels briefly saw the city on 2 November while on an inspection tour of occupied Poland.⁸² Shortly thereafter, on 4 November, Hitler informed Governor-General Frank that the city would be part of Arthur Greiser’s Reichsgau Posen.⁸³ The same day, Frank finally gave the order to transfer his staff from Łódź to Cracow.⁸⁴ A ceremony on 7 November marked Frank’s arrival in the new capital of the General Government.⁸⁵

Frank’s last chance to keep the city in the General Government might seem to have disappeared completely on 9 November when Gauleiter Greiser arrived in Łódź to announce its incorporation into his Reichsgau. During a rally, attended by 30,000 according to reports, Greiser underlined the significance of the date for German and Nazi history. Regierungspräsident Friedrich Uebelhoer, who presided over the event, read a telegram that was to be sent to Hitler declaring the completed annexation.⁸⁶ The Reich’s incorporation of Łódź surprised not just the Germans. Ludwik Landau, a renowned Polish economist, wrote in his chronicle of wartime Poland that the annexation of the city happened more quickly than even the German occupation authorities had expected. He believed the rush was an attempt by the German leadership to put facts on the ground during the ongoing border negotiations with the Soviets.⁸⁷ Indeed, the incorporation on 9 November, a day sacred for the Nazis, could be interpreted as part of another power play between high German functionaries—that is as Greiser’s attempt to make the annexation irrevocable and to squash any remaining doubts about Łódź’s status.⁸⁸

Frank continued to hope, however, that Hitler and other erstwhile supporters of annexation would waver on this issue. Frank recorded in his journal on 7 November—three days after Hitler had informed him of his decision to annex Łódź to the Reich and two days before the official annexation—that Göring had assented at a meeting to Łódź being allocated to the General Government.⁸⁹ In the light of Göring’s previous push to incorporate Łódź in the Reich, his apparent change of mind in favour of Frank’s General Government must have been disconcerting to the pro-annexationists, who may have been worried about Hitler’s potential fickleness as well. Moreover, Goebbels remained singularly unimpressed by Łódź and hinted at the impossibility of ever making it German. In his diary entry on 8 November, the day before the official annexation, he noted: ‘I am also not much enamoured of the proposal to turn Lodz into a German city. The place is no more than a rubbish-heap [Dreckhaufen], inhabited by the dregs of the Poles and Jews’.⁹⁰ The unease that the Propaganda Minister felt regarding Łódź reveals that even the highest Reich officials had no consensus about what the ‘German east’ was supposed to be at this time. For Goebbels, at least, it is apparent that ethnic considerations actually were an argument against incorporating the city.

The day after Łódź was incorporated in the Reich, the Governor-General noted in his journal that General Bomhardt had presented the finality of the borders by referring to Hitler’s own role in the process and to the fact that the new borders had already been circulated.⁹¹ In the view of Frank and many others, however, there might still be room for backtracking. As already noted, even Göring’s initiative and persistence in annexing Łódź for its industries was unclear, and he had actually moved in Frank’s favour. According to the Governor-General’s journal entry for 13 November, four days after Greiser had proclaimed the annexation of Łódź, Frank’s deputy Arthur Seyß-Inquart reported on a meeting at which not only Göring but also the German High Command of the Armed Forces (OKW) and the Reich Interior Ministry still supported the inclusion of Łódź in the General Government and not in the Reichsgau. From this account, only Werner Lorenz from the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle advocated the already completed annexation in the Reich. Seyß-Inquart also underscored that the administrative borders would remain provisional until Hitler made the final decision.⁹² Likewise, Goebbels once again expressed his misgivings on 17 November regarding Łódź as part of the Reich:

The situation in Lodz is still topsy-turvy. The Jewish plague is gradually becoming intolerable. The various authorities seem to be exercising power against each other, rather than in cooperation. Why should this rubbish-heap, of all places, be intended to become a German city! Trying to Germanize Lodz is a real labour of Sisyphus. And we could have put the city to such good use as a dumping-ground [Abladeplatz] ⁹³

For several months more after the annexation, the city’s status remained contested. According to the Polish historian Czesław Łuczak, a representative of the Economics Ministry raised the question on 24 February 1940 of moving Łódź back to the General Government.⁹⁴

The dissent and doubt about Łódź made it important for the pro-annexation camp to highlight the city’s essential Germanness. Greiser’s Reichsgau included three administrative districts (Regierungsbezirke), and the renaming of the territory from Reichsgau Posen to Reichsgau Wartheland (commonly called Warthegau) on 29 January 1940 more fully reflected the inclusion of the eastern areas.⁹⁵ ‘Lodsch’ also became the new seat of its Regierungsbezirk (formerly Kalisch) in the spring of 1940.⁹⁶ Even the renaming of the city on 11 April 1940 could be seen as an attempt to make the annexation permanent. Named after General Karl Litzmann, whose forces broke out of Russian encirclement near Łódź in November 1914, Litzmannstadt was to symbolize this successful German struggle against the Slavs. Not surprisingly, the name change was also instrumentalized in the turf war over Łódź and how far east Germany proper should extend. Although the initiative came from Greiser,⁹⁷ the choice of the name was highlighted as a decision made by Hitler himself.⁹⁸ The reliance on the Führer’s authority was clear in July 1940, when the regional Higher SS and Police Chief, Wilhelm Koppe, tried to convince Hans Frank of the necessity of accepting Łódź Jews deported to the General Government: ‘Since the Führer has given the name Litzmannstadt to the city formerly known as Lodz, all are convinced that this city has finally been made part of the Warthegau and will stay there’.⁹⁹ Similarly, in a draft of a speech written a year after the official annexation of Łódź, city treasurer and mayor Karl Marder still believed that it was necessary to state that Hitler’s naming of the city had settled the long-standing question of whether Łódź was to be part of the ‘Reich or General Government’.¹⁰⁰ Yet such assertions themselves underscore the peripheral nature and contested status of Łódź, which could be exposed as not really being German after all despite the ghettoization of Jews and the suppression of Polish civil society.

As we have seen, Łódź was annexed less for its supposed Germanness, and indeed völkisch criteria could be used to not include Łódź. Although scholars have acknowledged the role of the local German population in pushing for the Reich’s inclusion of the city, the influence of Volksdeutsche leaders remained ambiguous.¹⁰¹ Even after the annexation, the presence of a large number of Germans in Łódź was not enough of an argument for keeping the city in the Reich. These local German activists could easily be ignored when needed, and it appears that their presence played only a secondary role. There was also the sense that the Reich had taken on too much. Czesław Łuczak notes that Heinrich Himmler, faced with the difficulties of Germanizing Łódź quickly, wrote to Regierungspräsident Uebelhoer in April 1940 about possibly transferring the city back to the General Government.¹⁰²

Doubts about the Germanness of Łódź city itself would linger in the following years. The public pronouncements about the success of German resettlement and the presentation of Germanness in black or white terms only revealed that the much vaunted national community (Volksgemeinschaft) had not materialized there. Indeed, economic tensions deriving from high prices, low wages and scarcity of goods exacerbated the feelings of unfairness between German groups.¹⁰³ Reich Germans who had moved to the city complained about the high rents and the lack of amenities, but they also criticized the reluctance of ethnic German (Volksdeutsche) shop owners to sell them things such as hair dryers and Christmas tree tinsel.¹⁰⁴ Indeed, suspicions abounded that Volksdeutsche preferred selling foodstuffs to Poles and to speak Polish in stores and streetcars.¹⁰⁵ The perception of not being German enough caused insecurity among the Volksdeutsche; rumours circulated in the summer of 1940 among the local Germans that they might themselves be resettled in territories that had belonged to Germany in 1937 (the Altreich) for their ‘political and character refinement’.¹⁰⁶ It is telling that many ethnic Germans now believed that the Germanization of Litzmannstadt entailed a temporary ethnic cleansing of its prewar Polish German population. Even after annexation, variations of Schieder’s initial scenario of Heim ins Reich for the Łódź Germans persisted: moving people, not borders, seemed to be the better solution.

While Łódź’s place in the Reich may have solidified by the end of 1940, the initial hesitation about Łódź was replayed in Greiser’s thwarted plans to extend the Warthegau. There were tens of thousands of German speakers in the neighbouring countryside and towns east of Łódź. The contested annexation of Łódź created very tight-fitting borders around the city that left these Volksdeutsche stranded in the General Government. According to Polish historians, ethnic German activists in Łódź once again lobbied to include these other eastern Germans in the Reich, and Greiser also supported the planned annexation.¹⁰⁷ Yet economic, not ethnic, arguments once again seemed to dominate the discussions. Gau and municipal officials advocated increasing the territory to include the nearby cities of Petrikau (Piotrków Trybunalski) and Tomaschow (Tomaszów Mazowiecki), which were located in the General Government.¹⁰⁸ It was hoped that this expansion would give Łódź more resources so it would become more viable as part of the Warthegau. Karl Marder, the mayor, argued in June 1940 that the current eastern border had cut off the city from its natural suppliers of foodstuffs in the east. The ‘absurd’ border had forced the Reichsstatthalter (Greiser) to mandate higher prices in Łódź in an effort to steer goods from the western parts of the Warthegau to the city. According to Marder, however, a more spacious hinterland to the (poorer) east would reverse the high prices in Łódź, return a natural west-east price differential to the Warthegau, and reduce Polish and Jewish smuggling of textiles across the tariff border with the General Government.¹⁰⁹

Yet Hans Frank, who was determined to prevent further loss of his territory, vigorously opposed any plans to extend the Warthegau.¹¹⁰ He and Gauleiter Greiser only temporarily ended their feud in November 1940 with a letter to Hitler, in which both agreed to put off the resolution of the border question until the ‘successful end of the war’.¹¹¹ The tendency of the issue to cause dissension meant that the exact borders between the General Government and the Reich were to remain confidential until the end of the war.¹¹² Hence, where the Reich’s eastern border should be remained the way it had been established in 1939: limited and provisional.

Did völkisch aspirations drive Germany’s eastern expansion in 1939? There is no doubt that senior Nazi officials were völkisch-minded and had far-reaching ambitions before the war, but these ideas were often vague and even contradictory. The brutality of Germany’s war on Poland may have been shaped by anti-Slav attitudes from the outset, but a völkisch-inspired Drang nach Osten was hardly the driving force in the Polish campaign in 1939 or in how far-reaching the resulting annexations became. Despite völkisch rhetoric and the use of brutal methods right from the start of the Polish campaign, what (and who) was to be German was not preprogrammed. A study of Łódź in the critical years of 1939/40 complicates attempts to view Nazi prewar and occupation policies through the prism of a völkisch determinism that inexorably leads to the Generalplan Ost. Looking instead at competing continuities in the annexation process can reveal how historical mindsets often trumped ethnic concerns. While many German authorities shared and espoused völkisch ideas, these were not necessarily the deciding factors in the expansion beyond the 1914 borders. Ostforschung and Germanization could be interpreted in ways that limited Germany’s push to the east and prevented an annexation of Łódź. Different actors in competition with one another deployed historical, ethnic, economic and security arguments in determining how far the eastern borders were to extend and where the General Government would begin. In the annexation of Łódź in 1939/40, völkisch desires were a tenuous justification rather than a primary motivation.

Yet the early German victories in the east (and west) steadily fed greater ambitions. This was especially true of the SS, which usurped the influence of the Reich Ministry of the Interior with regard to the Polish border question; indeed the latter, which at the outset of the war had its initial 1914-centric border in mind, became increasingly sidelined by the former in the annexed regions.¹¹³ Himmler’s power grew as the Reich Commissioner for the Strengthening of German Nationhood (Reichskommissar für die Festigung deutschen Volkstums; RFK), and the expansion of SS power during the war years was tied to its claim to remake the east. Łódź and the Warthegau played a central role in the Germanization and ethnic cleansing in the Nazi east, and competition between the SS and Gauleiter Greiser over policy led to harsher anti-Polish policies there.¹¹⁴ With the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the nascent formulation of the Generalplan Ost empowered Himmler to carry out his ever more radical programmes in the conquered areas. But at the same time, Germanization plans continued to be plagued by a multiplicity of voices and a ‘general conceptual chaos’.¹¹⁵ In Łódź itself, the ‘German’ population only reached 28.5% (139,083) in December 1944, one month before Soviet troops liberated the city from German rule. As in much of occupied Europe, the Jewish population in the city was destroyed, dropping from 233,000 (34.7%) in 1939 to about 900 (0.2%) in December 1944. Difficulties in finding enough Germans to settle in Nazi Germany’s premier urban gateway to the east meant that the Polish proportion of Łódź’s population actually increased to 70% despite a decline in absolute numbers.¹¹⁶

As with the physical border of Germany, the internal borders of Germanness—or Polishness for that matter—remained unsettled.¹¹⁷ The annexation of Łódź unleashed the deadly dynamics of interethnic and intra-German hierarchy. Even the Ethnic German Register (Deutsche Volksliste), which was to be a pathway to citizenship for those deemed Germanizable, reflected the tensions between a political and racialized Germanness.¹¹⁸ As Doris Bergen notes, the very instability of the Volksdeutsche category fostered a radicalization of many ethnic Germans during the war.¹¹⁹ Those wanting to be considered German often proved their belonging in the Volksgemeinschaft by taking action against their neighbours and partaking in the spoils. In Łódź and other areas of questionable Germanness that were annexed with only weak ethnic claims, it seemed that only a great spring forward could break all lingering doubts.

III: Conclusion

In his comparative study on German colonialism in Qingdao, Samoa and Southwest Africa, George Steinmetz concludes that ‘there was no singular German approach to colonial governance’.¹²⁰ And yet Steinmetz implies at least one German singularity. Like historians John Horne, Isabel Hull and Alan Kramer, he emphasizes that the German military showed its ‘ethnographic acuity’ through hostility, repression and genocide. He claims that the armed forces’ approach to colonial governance was usually the opposite of what civilian colonial officials pursued. Steinmetz intimates that Germany’s armed forces developed institutional cultures and practices that often led to extreme violence.¹²¹

Poland during the First World War shows an important and little-studied case of a German military regime that refrained from excessive violence for a sustained period of time. The Imperial German occupation of Poland (and of eastern Europe, more broadly) bore similarities with Nazi imperialism, particularly in terms of exploitation of the area’s resources, forced labour, military brutality, conquest and the perception of the region as an area of German domination. But on balance Imperial Germany’s occupation of eastern Europe could not have differed more clearly from how the Nazis handled the region as an imperial space with the genocides of the Jews, the Roma, the Polish intelligentsia and the Soviet POWs, not to mention the plans for the starvation of millions in the Soviet Union and the expulsion of as many as forty-five million east Europeans envisioned in Generalplan Ost.¹²²

Moreover, a cultural or völkisch Drang nach Osten had little impact on Nazi discussions about the annexation of Łódź. The city had not been part of the German Empire that was lost after 1918, and it is thus an ideal test case for exploring whether annexations were driven by territorial-restorationist ambitions or völkisch-expansionist ones. As the twisted and hesitant positions on annexing Łódź show, the sizable German minority in Łódź and central Poland served less as motivation than as justification for several leading Nazis in German eastern expansion. Völkisch arguments and the Drang nach Osten were hardly determinative in the decision-making process concerning the eastern borders and the boundaries of Germanness, but contingent upon the changing political situation and institutional actors. After all, the ideological belief of many Nazis that the east should and could be Germanized was always tempered by practical concerns. At the same time, we are not attempting to revert to functionalist accounts of how the Third Reich operated, but rather we wish to stress that a multiplicity of competing intentions shaped the boundaries of the Nazi east. In fact, the geographical ambiguities of Nazi imperialism only underscore how constant the racialized Jewish threat remained to German leaders.¹²³ Łódź was the site of the first major ghetto in the Nazi empire; it was the second largest overall and by far the biggest within the borders of the Reich. Łódź was thus a major hub in the Holocaust and itself a site of mass death. Whether Łódź had become part of the Reich or the General Government, the hundreds of thousands of Jews in the city were destined for segregation and exploitation before other ‘solutions’ would be found.

So what is at stake in thinking about the occupations of Poland during the two world wars? Explaining the conquest of Poland and the Generalplan Ost as the product of deep-seated anti-eastern attitudes runs the risk of reducing Germany’s relationship with the region to one of atavistic animosities and of creating a new type of Sonderweg that ascribes a kind of pathological expansionism or ‘eliminationist anti-Slavism’ to German culture. It obscures the more ambivalent, heterogeneous and complex history of German relations in and perceptions of eastern Europe.¹²⁴ To be sure, Imperial Germany pursued an array of hostile policies towards Poles and viewed eastern Europe as a strategically important region that could be exploited for its interests. Yet these visions and practices of hegemony involved an expressly unequal economic union that would exploit the resources and markets of eastern Europe, not a war of destruction.¹²⁵ Pieces of the Nazi wartime policy mix can be found in earlier periods, but not the entire lethal brew that emerged during the Second World War. As Tara Zahra notes, ‘If Auschwitz has moved German historians to cast their gaze eastward, writing from the starting point of 1941 tends to colour all German-Slav relations with the tint of racism and colonial aggression’.¹²⁶

Put more broadly, this article cuts to the core of how to conceptualize violence and time in modern German history. Historians remain deeply influenced by linear conceptions of time as they look for continuities in Germany’s violent past.¹²⁷ The directionality of time’s arrow is essential to the writing of chronological history, but perhaps there are other temporal metaphors to aid historians in understanding the modern discipline’s iconic focus on change, continuity and contingency? In Zeitschichten, Reinhart Koselleck turns to geological, layered understandings of time to think about the complexity and plurality of the past.¹²⁸ As geologists study the history of the earth preserved through the strata of its sedimentary rocks, so, too, historians might examine the past through its layers in all their variety of shape, size, density, length, texture and porosity.¹²⁹ Nazism is a layer of time in German history with enormous density, breadth and depth; it is understandable that historians have long focused on reading the historical sediment that came before it. Yet, the challenge to historians is to study Germany’s layers as distinct layers without reading one as necessarily leading inevitably to the next, even though together they do indeed form the ‘German past’; the challenge is to see the many similar layers in Germany’s long relationship with eastern Europe but also those that are quite different from each other.