GalleryHITLER'S GERMANS PREFERRED
The Polish Government's policy toward the German minority was characteristic. In the days of the weak, republican Weimar regime which, until 1926, was not a member of the League of Nations, the German minority was gradually edged out of the Western Polish provinces and its place taken by Polish settlers. When Germany became a Nazi dictatorship all this changed. The equality which the Polish Government refused to grant to the Jews and Ukrainians and White Russians in the name of justice was granted readily to the Germans in the name of brute force. Though the Nazis later used the persecution of the German minority as a pretext for their invasion of Poland it is an ironic fact that during the Nazi regime the German minority enjoyed exemplary treatment in Poland.1
| 1 | The situation of the German minority is far more complex than represented. The German population of inter-war Poland was an amalgam of historically distinct German communities from three separate collapsed pre-war empires. Indeed, in the 1930's, Polish authorities were forced to intervene between competing and at times violently opposed German factions, having to remind them they were, after all, "civilized people." The rise of Nazism and Polish repression became flashpoints ostensibly justifying the German invasion starting WWII. We have found no basis for the contention that Hitler's rise was a panacea for German minority rights. Instead, the German minority was generally prejudged to be an enemy of the Polish state; scholars debate whether more positive treatment of its German minorities (and former masters depending on pre-WWI empire) could have engendered more loyalty to the Polish state and less to rising Nazism. |
