As Germany marched to war in August 1914, the commander of the 3rd Prussian Reserve Division, General Curt von Morgen, called upon Polish subjects of the Russian Empire to rise up against their tsar, promising “political and religious freedom” for Poland in return. He did so on his own initiative, untethered from any official policy.Footnote 1 The son of a decorated officer, Morgen had been educated in the Prussian military tradition. He built his reputation in Cameroon, organizing its colonial infantry and commanding expeditions to pacify the colony's vast interior.Footnote 2 In 1912, he was promoted to major general.
Morgen's actions sit uncomfortably with our portrait of the German army in 1914, which typically casts the officer corps as embracing a nationalizing model of imperial expansion, preferring to secure conquered space through the repression, Germanization, or elimination of ethnic diversity. Historians have long associated the army with wartime proposals to pacify a “border strip” of annexed Polish territory through aggressive Germanization. Immanuel Geiss portrayed the army as Germany's most resolute supporter of nationalization, arguing that plans for the annexation and ethnic cleansing of a border strip “dominated” its agenda throughout the war.Footnote 3 Relying heavily on Geiss's conclusions, subsequent historians have accepted the army's preference for Germanization as axiomatic.Footnote 4
Vejas Liulevicius has reinforced this portrait, arguing that the First World War radicalized a German army already determined to construct a “continental colonial empire” in Russia's Baltic provinces.Footnote 5 From the beginning of the occupation, he contends, officers of the Supreme Command of German Forces in the East (OberOst) perceived the populations of these territories as primitive, disordered, and diseased. “Parasitic” peoples “incapable of producing Kultur or work,” they required German governance and civilization.Footnote 6 Gestures toward preserving “client nationalities” served larger plans to dominate, civilize, and transform these lands and peoples into extensions of the German Empire.Footnote 7 Primary schools would provide extensive German language instruction, while vernacular higher education would be strictly curtailed.Footnote 8 A caste of German administrators would govern the conquered provinces, limiting indigenous political activity and systematically excluding non-German residents from positions of authority.Footnote 9 OberOst personnel imagined that these policies would serve the gradual colonization of this “ideal settlement land,” the Germanization of resident populations, and the eventual transformation of the Baltic littoral into “truly German land.”Footnote 10 The experience and commemoration of defeat, Liulevicius argues, merely radicalized the German army's nationalizing and colonial model of empire, as frustrated veterans, officers, and paramilitaries reimagined the “lands” and “peoples” of eastern Europe as irredeemable lower “races” to be cleared away prior to colonization.Footnote 11 His work thus sits comfortably with literature that understands Nazism's apocalyptic violence in eastern Europe as a manifestation of pathologies already deeply embedded in the political and imperial culture of the German Empire.Footnote 12
Subsequent historians have sought to explain why the German army embraced nationalizing imperialism. Some have attributed this “preference” to a pathological military culture, which encouraged officers to obsessively seek absolute control or prioritize military necessity over civilian welfare.Footnote 13 Others have linked officers’ exaggerated reliance on coercion to social insecurities of the Prussian aristocracy.Footnote 14 Recent literature has suggested that colonial precedents normalized violent models of ethnic management. Some have speculated that “deportation methods” employed by European powers to pacify colonial territory inspired German military elites to draft similar programs of forcible resettlement in Poland and eastern Europe.Footnote 15 Other scholars understand the German army as paradigmatic of a larger transformation of European war culture during the First World War, characterized by a growing perception of foreign civilians and cultures as legitimate targets of war.Footnote 16 In almost every case, proposals for the Germanization of a Polish border strip are cited to demonstrate the army's perception of foreign civilians as de facto enemies to be uprooted for the sake of imperial stability.
Some have challenged this portrait. Recent research has identified General Hans Hartwig von Beseler, Germany's governor-general for occupied Russian Poland, as receptive to models of imperial rule based on collaboration with Polish nationalism. But Beseler is portrayed as a promethean figure, championing this policy against the skepticism of his colleagues.Footnote 17 Germany's military leadership is still framed as reluctant, willing only to briefly defer their annexationist agenda in Poland in a desperate gamble to recruit Polish soldiers.Footnote 18
This article argues that the imperial German army's attitudes toward ethnic management have been fundamentally mischaracterized. The German army did not march to war in 1914 saddled with the conviction that national homogeneity was indispensable for imperial stability. This preference for nationalizing models of ethnic management was learned during the First World War.Footnote 19 Specifically, the occupation of Congress Poland transformed the German army's assumptions about the relationship between ethnic diversity and empire.
In the first years of the war, influential officers throughout the army understood Polish identity as compatible with loyalty to the German Empire. They concluded that a multinational model of empire, one premised on a bargain between the Polish nation and German Empire, represented the most strategically advantageous method for securing control over Congress Poland. They proposed to establish an autonomous Kingdom of Poland and to bind this state in permanent military and political union with the German Empire. This plan for multinational union became the predominant imperial model espoused by officers involved in wartime Polish policy. Their vocal support of multinationalism contributed to Berlin's decision to establish a Kingdom of Poland in November 1916.
In the final two years of the war, however, repeated crises in occupied Poland eroded the army's confidence in the future stability of a German-Polish union. Officers increasingly feared that Poles would resist German leadership and that a Polish state would betray the German Empire. Some officers urged Berlin to abandon plans for a Polish state and revert to nationalizing models of imperial management. Those who continued to support multinational union sought to fortify Germany against potential treachery by limiting Poland's economic and military resources or by annexing and Germanizing Polish territory.
The Limited Appeal of Nationalizing Imperialism
The army considered Germany's eastern frontier indefensible in 1914. Congress Poland bulged westward from Russia, a salient reaching to within 250 kilometers of Berlin. The long concave frontier stretched German lines of communication but presented few obstacles to invaders. “Our open eastern frontier offers no opportunity for continued defense,” complained General Friedrich von Bernhardi in 1912, “and Berlin, the center of the government and administration, lies in dangerous proximity to it.”Footnote 20 In wartime officers described Poland as a “wedge” that “facilitated” Russian strikes deep into Germany.Footnote 21 The empire's future security, military elites concluded, depended upon seizing enough territory in Congress Poland to establish a defensible border along a shorter north-south line. Military opinion thus played a central role in shaping imperial policy toward Congress Poland from the first days of the war. On 20 August 1914, Chief of Staff Helmuth von Moltke telegrammed Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, insisting that Congress Poland must not be occupied primarily by Austro-Hungarian troops, lest this prejudice a final settlement of the critical Polish question in Vienna's favor.Footnote 22 In November the War Ministry convinced Berlin to prohibit recruitment for the Polish Legions in German-occupied territory for the same reasons.Footnote 23 Bethmann Hollweg indeed prioritized military considerations and routinely consulted with generals to determine war aims that would effectively fortify the eastern border.Footnote 24
Officers, however, wrestled with how to govern Polish territory. Education and settlement policies had manifestly failed to Germanize Prussia's Polish-speaking minority, and officers feared that merely annexing Polish territory would create a large and rebellious minority in eastern Germany.Footnote 25 Polish nationalists, frustrated by their political and cultural marginalization, might even collaborate with foreign powers to overthrow German rule. “The subjugation of Poland under German rule,” read one intelligence summary, threatened to “permanently maintain political ferment in the country, feed an irredenta, and open the door and gate to secret infiltration on the part of Russia and the Western Powers.”Footnote 26 Military elites therefore understood that any expansion into Congress Poland also required a new strategy for managing the political claims of the resident population.
Some in the army proposed draconian policies of cultural repression or homogenization to pacify Polish territory. Believing that nationality reliably predicted political loyalty, these officers perceived national diversity as an inherent threat to imperial stability. Polish subjects, they believed, would invariably subvert the German Empire for their own national objectives. Imperial security therefore required aggressive Germanization.Footnote 27 Milder proposals imagined intensifying ethnic German settlement or establishing a semipermanent occupation to suppress Polish agitation. More radical officers proposed to dragoon the Polish inhabitants of annexed territories eastward into Russia.Footnote 28
Officers involved in Polish policymaking, however, generally balked at the political costs of nationalizing territory. Concerns about Polish hostility toward the German Empire were balanced by optimism that Germany might find common cause with Polish nationalists in its war with Russia. In January 1915, Colonel General Helmuth von Moltke, demoted to chief of the Deputy General Staff after his nervous breakdown, thus encouraged Berlin to cooperate with Polish nationalists in occupied Congress Poland.Footnote 29 Conversely, influential commanders denounced imperial models based on repression or Germanization as counterproductive, predicting that Poles would offer dogged and sophisticated resistance to any authority they perceived as hostile to Polish culture.Footnote 30 Annexation and colonization, officers warned, would likely encourage Polish collaboration with Russia to overthrow German rule.Footnote 31 Any partition of Poland, one general cautioned, could only “sharpen” Polish resistance and destabilize the German Empire.Footnote 32 Though ethnic cleansing promised absolute pacification, proposals to “resettle” or expel Polish residents from annexations were rejected by military elites as “utopian” or ill-conceived.Footnote 33 One memorandum circulated by the War Ministry argued that the German public's “renowned good nature and love of justice” prohibited driving Polish-speakers from their homes.Footnote 34
Military proposals for the demographic reorganization of Polish space were thus rare or muted. Even proponents of annexation often abandoned nationalizing imperialism in the first year of the war. Erich Ludendorff, chief of staff for the supreme commander of the Eastern Front, quickly discarded the idea of Germanizing proposed annexations in Congress Poland.Footnote 35 In a 1915 memorandum, Hans von Seeckt, chief of staff for the 11th Army, dismissed the idea of “deporting all [Polish] residents over the border and opening the entire land to new German settlement” as too impractical and politically costly to contemplate seriously.Footnote 36 He recommended annexing Polish territory into a new province of “South Prussia.”Footnote 37 Under Prussian administration, Polish nationalist organizations could be monitored. Rather than Germanizing South Prussia, Seeckt suggested cultivating Polish residents’ loyalty to the German state. Berlin might even extend “a certain provincial autonomy and self-governance” to “South Prussia,” assuring Poles that their national culture “will not be extirpated.”Footnote 38 Seeckt hoped to reconcile Polish identity with loyalty to the German Empire.
Though proposals for nationalizing Polish space circulated in the army, influential officers proved reluctant to embrace them. Few voices embraced nationalization. Responsible military elites generally balked at the political costs of ethnic cleansing or Germanization. Lacking military support, plans for a homogenized “border strip” were never adopted as official imperial policy.Footnote 39
Multinational Imperialism as the “Best Guarantee” of German Security
The Gorlice-Tarnów offensive (May–October 1915) brought Congress Poland under the control of the Central Powers for the duration of the war. This meaningfully altered Berlin's strategic calculations. Germany and Austria-Hungary split the region into two occupation zones. Vienna assumed control of the smaller Government General of Lublin and Berlin established the Government General of Warsaw (GGW) over the northern and western thirds of the country. The GGW was further divided into eleven military governments, overseeing security for thirty-one civilian districts. With Petrograd reluctant to negotiate a separate peace and the Central Powers occupying much of western Russia, Berlin began to contemplate bringing the entirety of Congress Poland under German imperial control. Bethmann Hollweg reopened discussion of Germany's objectives in an August 4, 1915, telegram to Falkenhayn, listing a variety of solutions to the Polish question.Footnote 40 From this point forward, the upper echelons of the army, including the OHL, OberOst, and the GGW, became central participants in discussions over the fate of Congress Poland.
The army ultimately embraced a multinational model of imperial management in Poland. Multinationalist officers did not equate nationality with political loyalty, nor did they regard Poles as irreconcilable enemies. They affirmed the compatibility of Polish identity with fidelity to a German imperial state. Multinationalists therefore proposed to strike a grand bargain with Polish nationalists, offering Poland domestic autonomy and security in exchange for accepting the German Empire's leadership in foreign policy and wartime military command. Multinationalist officers articulated remarkably consistent plans, proposing to establish an autonomous Kingdom of Poland in permanent military and political union with the German Empire. They reasoned that an autonomous state with authority over culture, education, and domestic affairs would satisfy Polish nationalists’ most important objectives. A national army trained and equipped to Prussian standards, but commanded by the Polish monarchy, would guarantee this autonomy.Footnote 41 In return, multinationalist officers proposed that the German Empire exercise “suzerainty” (Oberhoheit) over Poland.Footnote 42 Specifically, they insisted that the Kaiser assume joint command over the German and Polish armies in the event of war. Polish foreign affairs would likewise be “subordinated” to a common German-Polish foreign policy, managed by the Foreign Office in Berlin.Footnote 43 This arrangement, proponents argued, would secure both states from Russian expansionism.
Support for multinational imperialism grew steadily within the army from July 1915 through November 1916. Indeed, critics like Seeckt complained that proposals for a “Polish-German federal state” were becoming increasingly popular and influential among his colleagues.Footnote 44 Falkenhayn seriously discussed creating a Polish state with “limited autonomy under the control of us and Austria” with the kaiser in August 1915.Footnote 45 In subsequent communications with Bethmann Hollweg, he insisted that military and political union with an autonomous Kingdom of Poland represented “without a doubt” the “best guarantee” for German security.Footnote 46
The Deputy General Staff drafted the government's first detailed proposal for a German-Polish union. The Deputy General Staff was created in August 1914 to coordinate the army's logistics, provide usable military intelligence, and thereby free the Greater General Staff to focus on combat operations. Forty-three-year-old Major Hans Wolfgang Herwarth von Bittenfeld, a former General Staff officer, military attaché, and an experienced intelligence officer, was selected to oversee Department IIIB, responsible for intelligence and counter-intelligence.Footnote 47 Under his leadership, Department IIIB developed a substantial role in monitoring military, political, and economic conditions in wartime Russia and organizing intelligence summaries for use by the OHL and Supreme Army Commands (Armeeoberkommando).Footnote 48 To inform the intensifying discussions among the OHL and Germany's civilian leadership, on October 6, 1915, Herwarth von Bittenfeld contributed a memorandum detailing the Deputy General Staff's assessments of the political climate in Congress Poland and its conclusions about a variety of models for achieving German objectives in the region.Footnote 49 His proposal paralleled Falkenhayn's preferences. To reinforce Germany's “future position of power in the East,” Herwarth von Bittenfeld recommended a comprehensive “settlement (Ausgleich) of German and Polish interests” institutionalized through a “stately German-Polish subunit.”Footnote 50 He envisioned an autonomous Polish state, complete with its own administration, army, and monarchy, in military and political union with the German Empire. Germany's strategic interests, he wrote, demanded only that Berlin “assume leadership of the foreign affairs and military command” for the union.Footnote 51
General von Beseler emerged as the most stalwart champion of a German-Polish union. Appointed governor-general for the GGW in August 1915, Beseler was quickly persuaded by multinationalist arguments. Herwarth von Bittenfeld's memorandum likely influenced his thinking. Beseler read and annotated his junior colleague's paper, and his subsequent proposals closely followed its recommendations.Footnote 52 Beseler first endorsed the creation of a dependent Polish state on October 15, 1915.Footnote 53 In January 1916, he outlined his proposal for a Polish state under German suzerainty to the chancellor.Footnote 54 He repeatedly advocated this project throughout the spring and summer, echoing and building on Herwarth von Bittenfeld's recommendations for a German-Polish union.Footnote 55
Erich Ludendorff also endorsed an autonomous Kingdom of Poland under German suzerainty. In a September 1915 letter to the publicist Alexander Wyneken, Ludendorff opined that the Foreign Office should seek “union” with Congress Poland.Footnote 56 On October 20, 1915, he scribbled a letter to the Foreign Office, arguing that a “more-or-less” autonomous Polish state under German “suzerainty” (Oberhoheit) represented the most promising model for securing Germany's eastern border.Footnote 57 In 1916, Ludendorff even conscripted a reluctant Seeckt to promote the creation of a German-Polish union.Footnote 58 Poland, he wrote Seeckt, must “be brought unified into military and political dependence on Germany.”Footnote 59
Some quarters of the army were harder to convince. The War Ministry showed tentative interest in constructing a “more or less dependent Kingdom of Poland” in October 1915.Footnote 60 The Prussian war minister, Adolf Wild von Hohenborn, eventually accepted multinational union as the “least terrible” solution to Germany's strategic bind.Footnote 61 Paul von Hindenburg, supreme commander of German forces in the East, remained skeptical.Footnote 62 But with mounting enthusiasm for multinational union among military and civilian elites, Hindenburg dutifully advanced the project. After his appointment as chief of the General Staff, he pressured Austria-Hungary to renounce its claims to Congress Poland. Given Germany's interests in the region, Hindenburg explained to his Austro-Hungarian counterpart, Berlin would insist upon Poland's incorporation “under the military influence of Germany alone,” in permanent union with the empire.Footnote 63
Military support cemented an emerging official consensus in favor of a German-Polish union. By mid-February, Bethmann Hollweg had resolved to build a Polish “state which is itself militarily and economically incorporated into the German confederation, but otherwise self-governing.”Footnote 64 The Imperial Office of the Interior, Foreign Office, and army all agreed on the necessity of establishing an autonomous Kingdom of Poland under German suzerainty by the spring of 1916. Over the following months, the imperial government secured agreement from Austria-Hungary, the Bundesrat, and the Prussian Staatsministerium.Footnote 65 On November 5, 1916, the German and Austro-Hungarian kaisers proclaimed a Kingdom of Poland.
German officers embraced this strategy because they calculated that multinational union offered substantial advantages, from a “military standpoint,” over annexation.Footnote 66 Suzerainty promised to transform Poland's eastern border into the de facto frontier of the German Empire, allowing the army to fortify a straighter and more defensible border along, or even beyond, the Bug River. Union would achieve “the extension of German power” into eastern Europe and establish a “defensive wall” against Russia.Footnote 67 The “incorporation” of Poland “into our military system through an inviolable military convention” also promised to augment the German army.Footnote 68 With the kaiser as its supreme commander, the Polish army would fight “shoulder to shoulder” with German units to defend a common eastern frontier.Footnote 69 Only a German-Polish union, wrote Beseler, would enable Berlin to marshal Poland's “very considerable military powers.”Footnote 70
The behavior of Germany's Polish-speaking minority during the war assured officers that Polish identity could be compatible with loyalty to the German Empire. Problematic stereotypes of Polish recruits as stupid, lazy, or ill disciplined had festered in the Prussian army before 1914, undermining unit cohesion and contributing to disproportionately high suicide rates among units from Posen and Silesia. Few, however, had depicted Polish recruits as treacherous or dangerous, especially in comparison to widespread suspicions of Alsatian recruits.Footnote 71 In August 1914, mobilization proceeded without significant resistance from Prussia's 3.5 million Polish-speaking subjects. High-ranking Prussian officials reported that Polish subjects had shown a “completely patriotic and loyal attitude during mobilization.”Footnote 72 Many officers expressed satisfaction with Polish soldiers and some even encouraged their men to sing both Polish and German songs.Footnote 73 In a January 1915 conversation, Hindenburg was reported to have “repeatedly stressed” that “Poles in the field did their duty in an outstanding manner.”Footnote 74 Beseler agreed. When one memorandum asserted that “many” Polish Germans had hoped for a Russian victory in 1914, Beseler dismissively scribbled “?-evidence” in the margin.Footnote 75
Multinationalist officers expected that most Polish nationalists would eventually accept an autonomous Poland as legitimate. Guarantees of “national and cultural independence” and political autonomy, Beseler argued, were essential for stabilizing Congress Poland.Footnote 76 Polish nationalists, he wrote, had three primary goals: “independence, no partition, and their own army.”Footnote 77 Beseler warned that Poles would tenaciously resist any authority that threatened Polish culture. But he reasoned that most elites would welcome autonomous statehood, and the control of educational and cultural policies it afforded, as the realization of their most important goals.Footnote 78 A Polish army under Warsaw's peacetime command would guarantee this autonomy, implicitly deterring German interference in Polish affairs.Footnote 79 The creation of an autonomous Polish state, Herwarth von Bittenfeld agreed, would “satisfy the mass of the reasonable Polish population.”Footnote 80 OberOst and the OHL relied on intelligence reports from the GGW, indicating that Poles generally dismissed the “fantasies of political enthusiasts” for a fully sovereign Polish state and that Polish elites “would be happy with an autonomous Congress Poland dependent upon Germany.”Footnote 81 Raising no factual or interpretive objections, Colonel Max Hoffmann concluded that, on the basis of these reports, the German Empire would be advised to initiate plans to establish an autonomous Polish state.Footnote 82
Proponents in the army wagered that Polish elites would accept German suzerainty as necessary to secure their newfound autonomy from Russia. Since the late nineteenth century, Russian policies to suppress Polish nationalism had purged Polish bureaucrats from the imperial administration, discouraged Polish landownership via discriminatory taxes and restrictions, and begun to Russify the education system in Congress Poland.Footnote 83 During its “Great Retreat” in the summer of 1915, the Russian army desolated vast swaths of Congress Poland, torching fields, wrecking industrial machinery, and deporting entire communities eastward, killing scores of civilians in the process.Footnote 84 Surveying the destruction, Beseler commented that Russia had “laid the whole country to waste without sense or purpose, and driven out hundreds of thousands into the most mournful misery.”Footnote 85 Despite Prussia's longstanding Germanization policies, German officers calculated that Polish elites would regard the Russian Empire as the most urgent threat to their national interests.Footnote 86 Insisting that a small landlocked Polish state could never hope to defend its own borders independently, multinationalist officers argued that military and political “dependence” on the German Empire would become “acceptable” to Poland's elites as a necessary shield of their autonomy against resurgent Russian imperialism.Footnote 87 Polish elites, Herwarth von Bittenfeld concluded, would prefer German suzerainty to the inevitable alterative: a “dominating” and “arbitrary” Russian dominion that crippled the “best powers” of the Polish nation.Footnote 88
Political conditions in Congress Poland indeed seemed favorable for multinational union. Occupation personnel often noted a striking lack of resistance and remarked on the civilian population's deference, even “deep respect.”Footnote 89 Beseler concluded that, although nationalist sentiment remained potentially influential, the majority of the Polish population was “politically indifferent.”Footnote 90 The “urge to participate in political life,” Herwarth von Bittenfeld insisted, was normally restricted to a small circle of urban elites.Footnote 91 Occupation personnel believed that divisions over Russian loyalism, independence, and social policy split this elite into a hodgepodge of incompatible factions. The peasantry seemed “in general Russian-friendly” and “distrustful” of independence movements. Landowners worried that independence would endanger their privileges and property. Urban populations appeared divided: middle-class merchants, artisans, intellectuals, and professionals tended to support the loyalist National Democrats (Endecja or Endeks), whereas industrial workers split their loyalties among Poland's socialist parties. Only bitterness toward Russia's anti-Polish policies seemed to unite these constituencies.Footnote 92 Beseler described the political landscape as “equivocal” and “torn.”Footnote 93 In a 1915 report, he assured the kaiser that Poles’ “disunity” and “lack of clarity” over their national goals effectively precluded coordinated resistance against German authority.Footnote 94 So long as German imperial policy did not threaten Polish national culture, the GGW believed that Polish elites would either decline or fail to mobilize popular resistance against German authority.
These perceptions explain the army's strategy for confronting paramilitaries like the Polish Army Organization (Polska Organizacja Wojskowa, or POW). The POW developed from Józef Piłsudski's strategy of pursuing Polish independence through armed revolution; an irregular force originally meant to commit acts of sabotage and organize popular insurrection against Russian rule.Footnote 95 In the first year of the war, POW cells had been established throughout Russian Poland.Footnote 96 After the Central Powers had occupied Congress Poland, however, Piłsudski continued to recruit new members for the POW.Footnote 97 The GGW's police and intelligence apparatus were aware of the POW and understood that its leadership aspired to secure the “unqualified independence of Poland.”Footnote 98 They concluded that Piłsudski wanted to “reserve” the POW to act as the vanguard of a popular insurgency in a future struggle for Polish independence.Footnote 99 GGW intelligence assumed that the POW had cached military-grade firearms abandoned by the Russian army during its retreat.Footnote 100
The existence of a paramilitary preparing for a national insurrection should have disturbed German officers. The GGW, however, barely registered the POW as a threat. Convinced of widespread political apathy and factionalism in Poland, army intelligence tended to view the POW as an isolated group with unstable supplies and dwindling recruits.Footnote 101 Through 1916, banditry and robbery were considered more urgent problems.Footnote 102 Alarmed by prostitution, the GGW pleaded for more vice police in 1915. It made no comparable requests for reinforcements to combat paramilitary cells.Footnote 103 POW cells were quietly surveilled. Captured members received mild punishments. In one instance, authorities released all of the suspects they had captured, opting to place only the organizers of the cell on probation.Footnote 104 Deliberate and quiet countermeasures against the POW, Beseler insisted, would best serve Germany's interests.Footnote 105
Military intelligence suspected that POW members were more often motivated by unemployment or frustrations with wartime deprivation than by principled commitment to national independence.Footnote 106 They concluded that most POW members could be reconciled to German suzerainty eventually.Footnote 107 Officers charged with combating the POW therefore emphasized social programs over coercion. In an August 1916 conference on security policy, the GGW's eleven military governors urged Beseler's administration to combat paramilitarism through employment programs, specifically by facilitating migrant labor in Germany and creating local jobs in municipal sanitation, farming, and public works.Footnote 108 “To show that we do not only know how to forbid and requisition but rather also how to help,” the military governors argued, represented the most effective strategy for reducing POW recruitment and cultivating Polish sympathy for the German Empire.Footnote 109
Overt Polish support for a German-Polish union further encouraged multinationalists. A handful of sympathetic Polish politicians communicated directly with Beseler, conceding that Poland lacked the resources to defend itself independently and suggesting that Germany and Poland shared an interest in military and political union.Footnote 110 Władysław Studnicki introduced himself to Beseler in 1915 as an “anti-Russian” writer who favored Poland's “future cooperation” with Germany.Footnote 111 He eventually became the spokesman for the “Club of the Supporters of Polish Statehood,” or the “Polish Political Club,” a faction that favored the “closest union” with Germany as a safeguard for Poland's “inner development.”Footnote 112 In 1916, the club publicly supported binding a Kingdom of Poland in a “lasting and constitutionally inscribed” union with the German Empire.Footnote 113 “The German kaiser” they agreed should “be entitled to [Poland's] international representation and the supreme command of the Polish army in the event of war.”Footnote 114 Though small, the club reported success in winning over magnates, notables, and even modest popular support, which Beseler interpreted as evidence for the “day to day” growth in Polish support for German suzerainty.Footnote 115
German authorities never deceived themselves that the majority of Poles preferred German suzerainty.Footnote 116 Beseler acknowledged that Polish distrust of Germany ran deep and that the two most influential political movements in Congress Poland, the Endecja and Piłsudski's Polish Socialist Party (PPS), favored either Russian loyalism or independence.Footnote 117 His subordinates never believed that the Polish Political Club represented a substantial segment of popular opinion.Footnote 118 But Germans drew confidence from the apparent disunity, apathy, and tenuous commitment of Polish nationalists, concluding that suzerainty would not inspire significant Polish resistance, so long as Berlin respected Poland's domestic autonomy.Footnote 119
Indeed, many officers were convinced that Germany could reshape Polish national sentiment by enlisting the support of Polish elites. They believed that social, political, and intellectual elites wielded disproportionate influence over national political discourses and that this influence could be channeled by German authorities to gradually, but effectively, shape attitudes and reinforce the legitimacy of German suzerainty.Footnote 120 In particular, German officers recommended seeking the support of the Polish nobility, distrustful of Russia after its crackdown and expropriation of Polish property following the rebellion of 1863.Footnote 121 They focused on winning the support of the Roman Catholic Church, seeing it as a lever for securing the German-Polish union's legitimacy among the peasantry.Footnote 122 Popular anger toward Russia's past harassment of the church, Herwarth von Bittenfeld noted, could prove “stronger than the political or national” sentiments in Poland.Footnote 123 Finally, German observers hoped that the promise of self-governance and security would lure Poland's middle class from the Endecja.Footnote 124 Herwarth von Bittenfeld claimed that “discerning men of all classes of society” who treasured prosperity or “spiritual culture” often conceded “that the Germans want to bring them salvation” from Russia's stultifying rule.Footnote 125 Beseler agreed that bitter grievances against Petrograd were already convincing the Polish intelligentsia of the virtues of union with the German Empire.Footnote 126 To reinforce Germany's credibility as a guardian of Polish culture and national autonomy, both he and Beseler recommended the immediate abolition of Prussia's Germanization policies.Footnote 127 By positioning Germany as the defender of property, the shield of Roman Catholicism, and the guardian of national autonomy, occupation officials hoped to win the support of the Polish nobility, the Roman Catholic clergy, and moderate nationalist intellectuals. These groups would then persuade the masses to accept German leadership.
Multinationalist officers generally opposed the annexation and Germanization of territory, viewing it as redundant and offensive to Polish nationalists. From the autumn of 1915 through November 1916, many recommended limiting annexations to thinly populated territories in the northeast of Congress Poland, primarily intended to support a parallel program of German expansion along the Russian Baltic coast. Beseler recommended claiming up to the “Narew-Bobr Line,” including Suwałki and part of the Łomża province.Footnote 128 Hindenburg and Ludendorff accepted these limitations.Footnote 129 Ludendorff appears to have abandoned plans for annexations in western Congress Poland by August 1915.Footnote 130 In talks with Austria-Hungary over the Polish question, German negotiators claimed only the northern governorate of Suwałki.Footnote 131 When seeking the Bundesrat's approval for a German-Polish union in August 1916, Berlin similarly proposed to annex only Suwałki and explained that it would not attempt to Germanize this territory through population exchanges or forcible expulsions.Footnote 132
Disagreement persisted over Poland's eastern borders. Optimists like Herwarth von Bittenfeld favored annexing White Ruthenia to Poland and even proposed incorporating Russia's Baltic governorates in federal union with Warsaw.Footnote 133 Combining a newly formed “Baltic state with the Polish [state]” as a “subunit in federation with Germany” would fortify Germany's “position of power in the East.”Footnote 134 Beseler similarly supported elevating the “military capacity of Poland” through expansion into White Ruthenia.Footnote 135 A large and “capable” Polish dependency, he predicted, would compound Germany's power in eastern Europe.Footnote 136 Hindenburg and Ludendorff were reluctant to enlarge Poland. They proposed Germany annex the governorates of Courland, Kovno, and Grodno (lands to the east of Congress Poland), reasoning that absolutely reliable units must guard Germany's first line of defense against Russia.Footnote 137 The optimists initially won this debate and Berlin began preparing to expand Poland eastward. During negotiations with Vienna, German representatives declared their intention to extend Poland's borders as far to the east as possible, up to and including the governorate of Vilna.Footnote 138 Similar plans were presented to the Prussian Staatsministerium in October 1916. The new Polish state, Beseler and Bethmann Hollweg explained, would encompass Congress Poland and parts of Lithuania and White Ruthenia.Footnote 139
This was the optimistic program of the German-Polish union that Berlin pursued when the Kingdom of Poland was proclaimed on November 5, 1916. An autonomous Kingdom of Poland, equipped with its own national army, would accept permanent military and political union with the German Empire to secure their collective defense. Germany would arrogate Suwałki in the north of Congress Poland but planned to extend the borders of the new Polish state deep into White Ruthenia and Lithuania. This multinational imperial model had been developed with the support of the most influential ranks of the army, ranging from the OHL to the military governors and staff officers of Beseler's GGW. Military elites acted to build a new multinational empire on the assumption that ethnic diversity did not inherently threaten imperial security and that an autonomous Polish state could be trusted to defend a German-Polish union.
Crisis and the Erosion of Multinational Imperialism
These assumptions proved fragile. Soon after the declaration of Polish statehood, three major crises in Congress Poland tested German officers’ faith in multinational imperialism: the recruitment crisis of November 1916, the Oath crisis of July 1917, and the regency crisis of autumn 1917. These crises subverted expectations that sympathetic elites could redirect popular sentiment toward German ends. They amplified fears that Poles would never regard a German-Polish union as legitimate and that a Polish state would eventually betray the German Empire. Though Berlin pursued multinational union until the final weeks of the war, many in the army came to doubt Poland's future fidelity to the German Empire. Accordingly, they began to recommend modifying imperial plans to safeguard Germany, either by annexing larger territories along the German border, isolating and disabling the Kingdom of Poland, or Germanizing conquered Polish lands.
Officers embraced plans for a German-Polish union as a permanent imperial edifice in eastern Europe. They did not, as some have suggested, reluctantly tolerate Polish statehood as an expedient to recruit Polish soldiers into the war effort. Such a narrow objective could have been more easily achieved by supporting Polish independence or incorporating Congress Poland into the Austro-Hungarian Empire, options that the army broadly rejected as portending long-term strategic disaster.Footnote 140 Herwarth von Bittenfeld's long 1915 memorandum had neglected to mention raising Polish units for use in the present war.Footnote 141 Nor had Ludendorff's original endorsements in 1915 mentioned wartime Polish recruitment.Footnote 142 Falkenhayn's January 1916 endorsement of a German-Polish union had likewise emphasized only its permanent strategic advantages.Footnote 143 Beseler indeed vocally opposed recruitment and deployment of a Polish army during the ongoing conflict.Footnote 144
However, heavy frontline losses in 1916 convinced military leaders to pursue wartime Polish recruitment. Beginning in July, Falkenhayn and Ludendorff lobbied Berlin to reinforce Germany's depleted lines with Polish units, overruling Beseler's warnings that this would tar the Polish kingdom as a cynical ploy for cannon-fodder.Footnote 145 Germany's November 9 call for recruits to the new Polish army met with disaster, initially yielding only 370 volunteers.Footnote 146 Myriad factors explain the shortfall. Many Poles were certainly reluctant to take up arms against their family and friends already serving in the Russian army, especially for a state that still had no institutions of national self-government. Fence-sitting was logical; anyone who enlisted could be accused of treason if Russia regained possession of Poland.Footnote 147 Nationalist groups also organized poster campaigns and demonstrations against enlistment, some chanting “We don't want to be German soldiers.”Footnote 148
Only a few German officers grasped this nuance. More than simply disappointed that Polish divisions would not reinforce Germany's overstretched lines, many interpreted the recruitment shortfall as a repudiation and evidence that Polish nationalism was more popular, rigid, hostile, and dangerous than anticipated. Far from politically ambivalent, critics in the army began to suspect that the Polish population broadly rejected German suzerainty and that Polish nationalists would never renounce their territorial claims in eastern Prussia.Footnote 149 In policy meetings, Hindenburg and Ludendorff began to question the plausibility of bargaining with Polish nationalism and the advisability of a German-Polish union.Footnote 150 Even Beseler conceded that he had “completely misunderstood the national pride of the Poles.”Footnote 151 For the first time, his reports noted scattered “violent resistance” in occupied Poland.Footnote 152 Beseler reimagined the POW as a “wicked” and existential threat to German authority. It suddenly appeared to enjoy dangerous support among “youth associations, students, and schools” and the “nationally conscious proletariat.” Indeed, Beseler feared that attempting to abolish the POW would constitute a “signal for a revolt, and we are not strong enough to repress one without further [reinforcements].”Footnote 153 An “uncomfortable, even dangerous” situation could develop if the political atmosphere did not improve.Footnote 154
The crisis also eroded confidence in Berlin's ability to mold Polish sentiment through elite intermediaries. On November 21, the military government of Łomża noted a recruitment shortfall but assumed that local Catholic clergy could be persuaded to encourage enlistment.Footnote 155 In December, however, the Kreischef of Łomża sent a panicked report to Warsaw. Elite pressure had failed to bolster recruitment. Moreover, the local peasantry now accused landowners and clergy of betraying Poland for their own gain.Footnote 156 The Kreischef feared that unrest might soon tip into violence.Footnote 157 Germany, critics echoed, had “overestimated” the influence of Poland's Russophobic intelligentsia.Footnote 158 The Russian threat had not persuaded alternative political, social, and intellectual elites to embrace German leadership as readily as Beseler had expected.Footnote 159 Those elites sympathetic to multinational union, Beseler lamented, had exaggerated their influence or misrepresented the political climate in Poland.Footnote 160 Influential elites, like Piłsudski, discouraged their followers from collaborating with the German Empire.Footnote 161
Because German military and civilian elites had imagined deriving long-term strategic advantages from an autonomous Polish state, the recruitment crisis did not derail plans for a German-Polish union. Beseler still saw no better strategy for securing Berlin's interests than establishing a “powerful, capable, and defensible” Kingdom of Poland under German suzerainty.Footnote 162 On November 12, he announced the creation of a Provisional Council of State (Tymczasowa Rada Stanu, or TRS), tasked with organizing Poland's government.Footnote 163 A training command for new Polish officers soon followed.Footnote 164 Fleshing-out institutions of Polish statehood, Beseler hoped, would build legitimacy for the state and produce a “volte-face” in public opinion.Footnote 165 Beseler also addressed Polish notables in Warsaw in December 1916, requesting their cooperation in convincing the apathetic and “denationalized” peasantry of the virtues of “Anschluß” with Germany.Footnote 166 Bethmann Hollweg trusted Beseler's assessment and reassured him that the chancellery still “emphatically” supported Germany's “military and political leadership” over Poland.Footnote 167 A chancellery conference in February 1917 confirmed that a German-Polish union remained the centerpiece of Berlin's imperial agenda in eastern Europe.Footnote 168 The OHL confirmed its willingness to “adhere” to this program.Footnote 169 Indeed, in May Ludendorff professed renewed faith in cultivating Polish imperial loyalty by building credible institutions of Polish statehood.Footnote 170
But multinationalists also became more cautious and readier to employ coercion. Beseler warned that the Polish intransigence might doom multinational union.Footnote 171
It would not be surprising if, instead of the more fortified border we desire and are pursuing, we were to receive one even less secure than existed in 1914. Because beyond this border, instead of a liberated and satisfied nation, as we hoped for, a fanatical enemy [would] stand between us and Russia.Footnote 172
He now advised against fielding a Polish army during the present war, citing the danger of equipping a large and unpredictable formation behind German lines.Footnote 173 Indeed, he requested several battalions to reinforce the occupation. Beseler further proposed the unification of the Austro-Hungarian and German occupation zones to consolidate “the most complete governing authority,” even “dictatorial power,” of a single German “regent,” “Statthalter,” or “governor-general” over Poland until the end of the war.Footnote 174 Ludendorff similarly urged Berlin to demonstrate its authority. “They must now finally be shown that we command, and not they.”Footnote 175
The Oath crisis of July 1917 represented a direct challenge to multinational imperialism. German officers began training the first units of the Polish army in January 1917.Footnote 176 The new army's service oath was critically important. The GGW required a Polish officer corps that was both accustomed to cooperation with the German army and convinced of the virtues of union with Germany.Footnote 177 If Polish troops would not swear a pro-imperial oath, Beseler faced the unsavory choice of training an army of unpredictable loyalty or scrapping the formation and raising doubts about Germany's commitment to Polish autonomy.Footnote 178 Signs of unrest were already showing in early 1917. Austria-Hungary's Polish Legions had been integrated into the national army to flesh out its ranks. Beseler had reluctantly admitted Piłsudski and his followers in the Legions into the army, hoping that his participation would validate the formation.Footnote 179 Throughout the spring, small pro-independence cells began to organize around Piłsudski's followers in Polish training camps.Footnote 180
Tension boiled over in July when Beseler asked the TRS to approve an oath that pledged the Polish army's loyalty to both Warsaw and the German and Austro-Hungarian kaisers. Piłsudski and the left wing of the TRS resigned in protest.Footnote 181 The rump TRS approved the controversial text. But on July 9, roughly two-thirds of Polish officers refused to swear the oath.Footnote 182 Mutineers reportedly shouted, “Shame on the hirelings, who have sold their honor, against the will of the people … Long live independent Poland!”Footnote 183 The mutiny triggered a longer political crisis leading to the mass resignation of the TRS in August.Footnote 184
After this crisis, officers worried that even carefully trained Polish soldiers could not be relied upon to serve German imperial interests. Lieutenant Colonel Nethe, Beseler's chief of staff, feared the outbreak of armed rebellion in the days after the mutiny. “The danger could not be dismissed out of hand that these well-trained soldiers … could instigate unrest and threaten the [supply] lines of the eastern army leading through Poland.”Footnote 185 Beseler denounced the “politically compromised troops” inspired by “revolutionary” strands of Polish nationalism, who had conspired to derail “any army formation according to the German model.”Footnote 186 Departing from his previous assessments, he warned that hostility toward the German Empire constituted a dominant current in Polish nationalist discourse.Footnote 187 Ludendorff continued to support multinational union, hoping that Polish nationalism could still be gradually channeled to serve German imperial interests.Footnote 188 But he simultaneously emphasized his growing doubts about Poland's loyalty and his grave concerns about Polish irredentist claims in Prussia.Footnote 189
Military personnel thus advocated more coercive measures to assert German authority in the GGW. Nethe supported the temporary internment of mutineers and oversaw a crackdown on the POW and nationalist organizations in the wake of the mutiny, insisting on “sharp measures” to suppress Polish “insubordination.”Footnote 190 Piłsudski and leaders of the POW were imprisoned.Footnote 191 Ludendorff called for demonstrative force and more stringent censorship to deter Polish resistance.Footnote 192 “The Pole,” he wrote, “must be controlled, day and night, or else he attacks us.”Footnote 193
The Oath crisis finally convinced officers to abandon efforts to build a large Polish army during the war. After July, Beseler insisted on training only a small core of dependable Polish officers.Footnote 194 In light of “incidents” related to the “swearing in” of Polish troops, he concluded that Germany could no longer reasonably trust the Polish state with any “large army” until it had secured victory.Footnote 195 “In view of the unreliable attitude of the Poles and the lack of clarity regarding further political development in the country,” Ludendorff likewise argued that “absolute security” demanded training only the “minimum” force necessary “to demonstrate to the Poles our willingness to assist them, in time, towards a useful army.”Footnote 196 The GGW accordingly narrowed its efforts to training the “smallest possible” army, comprising one or two infantry regiments with no technical services or heavy weapons.Footnote 197
The regency crisis cemented the officer corps’ disillusionment with multinationalism. In late July, the GGW announced the organization of a three-person Regency Council to serve as an interim executive for Poland. Beseler nominated the aristocratic clerical trio of Archbishop Aleksander Kakowski, Prince Zdzisław Lubomirski, and Józef Ostrowski to the Regency Council. Occupation officials were initially optimistic, believing that Kakowski in particular supported Poland's “unbreakable alliance with the Central Powers.”Footnote 198 After the council selected a regent for Poland, Beseler planned to condition his “accession to the throne” on Warsaw's formal acceptance of military and political union with the German Empire.Footnote 199
German officials were soon disappointed. Before confirming the councilors, Beseler asked each to promise that they would elect the pro-German Józef Mikułowski-Pomorski as minister-president and that they would accept German suzerainty over the Kingdom of Poland. Lubomirski initially agreed to both conditions on September 19.Footnote 200 On September 22, however, Lubomirski and his colleagues rejected Beseler's conditions, arguing that the Regency Council should not “anticipate the results of the international peace negotiations in the Polish question.”Footnote 201 They further insisted that Adam Tarnowski, an Austro-Hungarian civil servant, represented the only viable candidate for the minister-presidency.Footnote 202 This triggered protracted negotiations between the Regency Council and Beseler, who feared that Tarnowski would maneuver Poland into Vienna's orbit.Footnote 203 The impasse lasted until November 1917, when a compromise candidate for the minister-presidency was selected.
The Regency Council debacle underscored German officers’ already severe doubts about the plausibility of a German-Polish union. Germany's preferred allies, aristocratic and clerical elites, had rebuffed efforts to formalize German suzerainty, attempted to install an Austrophile at the helm of the Polish state, and sought to internationalize the Polish question. Beseler's report to the kaiser in October 1917 wallowed in pessimism. He now believed that the majority of Poles desired a completely sovereign Polish state. Indeed, he feared that most Poles dreamed of claiming vast stretches of Prussia for Poland.Footnote 204 Moderate nationalists, those who understood the “limitations of Polish independence” and sought Poland's “own security and a fruitful economic development” in cooperation with Germany, now seemed uninfluential.Footnote 205 Germany, Nethe reported to Berlin, could never expect to build a friendly relationship with Polish nationalists because “the Poles will hate us, so long as we hold Silesia, Posen, and West Prussia.”Footnote 206
Through this period, the army's commitment to plans for a German-Polish union remained remarkably durable. Until the end of the war, Beseler insisted that Polish nationalism could be managed and that a German-Polish union represented the most effective structure for realizing German interests.Footnote 207 In a November 1917 conference on Polish policy in Berlin, Beseler insisted that the Regency Council would eventually accept German suzerainty as legitimate and persuade the Polish population to do the same. Fear of the Russian Empire, he argued, already generated growing support for “Anschluß to Germany” among Polish elites.Footnote 208 Ludendorff joined Beseler in supporting the continued construction of a German-Polish union. Although he now considered the Kingdom of Poland unreliable, potentially even dangerous, Ludendorff hoped that deliberate state-building might yet achieve a stable union.Footnote 209 Suzerainty, he argued, would at least enable Germany to restrict foreign influence in Congress Poland and suppress nationalist threats before they matured.Footnote 210
Hindenburg proved more willing to abandon plans for multinational union. Germany's “enmity with Poland,” he explained at a policy conference in November 1917, “has always existed in history” and would persist in the future.Footnote 211 He indeed attempted to wash his hands of multinational policy, mendaciously denying the “legend, widespread in Berlin, that the Supreme Army Command had created the Kingdom of Poland.” He and Ludendorff, Hindenburg claimed, had been misled by fantasies of Polish divisions. He recommended abandoning the German-Polish union, citing the recent political crises in Warsaw.Footnote 212 Ludendorff apparently persuaded him to reconsider. The following day Hindenburg reluctantly endorsed multinational union, echoing Ludendorff's arguments that foreign influence over Congress Poland represented a greater threat to German security than an unreliable Polish state.Footnote 213
Though Berlin continued its efforts to build a German-Polish union, many officers recommended fortifying the German Empire against the possibility of Polish betrayal. Demands for annexations in Poland grew more expansive and insistent. Officers augmented existing demands for annexation in the north-east of Congress Poland with new claims along Poland's western border. Hindenburg and Ludendorff began to press for larger annexations soon after the recruitment crisis. On December 23, 1916, they insisted that Germany's border must extend to the Warta-Bzura-Vistula-Narew-Bobr line, incorporating swaths of territory in western Congress Poland.Footnote 214 They had moderated this program by April, but still urged Berlin to annex territory near Thorn, Kalisz, and Upper Silesia.Footnote 215 Civilian leaders offered a compromise, agreeing to annex the prescribed territories if Poland refused to accept German suzerainty. If Germany succeeded “in securing our predominance in Poland,” the OHL would “partially desist in its hitherto demanded border-line.”Footnote 216
Following the Oath crisis, Ludendorff and Hindenburg could no longer accept this conditionality. The OHL thereafter argued that Poland's questionable loyalty mandated sweeping annexations, regardless of the constitutional relationship between Germany and Poland.Footnote 217 “The development of Poland has shown,” Ludendorff asserted, that “we must never expect that” an “autonomous Kingdom of Poland” would guarantee Germany's critical security interests.Footnote 218 The vital industries of Upper Silesia required an expanded hinterland defended by reliable German units.Footnote 219 The OHL would insist upon massive annexations in both the north and west of Poland through July 1918.Footnote 220 Beseler opposed this “fourth partition” as certain to undermine the legitimacy of a German-Polish union.Footnote 221 But he found himself increasingly isolated. After the Oath crisis, the Prussian War Ministry also demanded a large border strip as essential for the “sufficient military security of the Upper Silesian industrial region.”Footnote 222
Military policymakers gradually abandoned plans to expand the Kingdom of Poland into Lithuania or White Ruthenia, fearing that this would only make Warsaw a more powerful adversary in the future. Indeed, leaders in the army increasingly urged Berlin to annex a second “border strip” of territory to the east of Congress Poland, placing the vital north-south defensive line with Russia directly under German control and isolating the Kingdom of Poland from sources of foreign support. In December 1916, Hindenburg renewed calls to annex territory around Brest.Footnote 223 “The [recent] experiences with Poland,” Hindenburg wrote Bethmann Hollweg, “make it indispensable that Germany contains Poland and not the other way around, and that the border between Poland and Russia be as narrow as possible.”Footnote 224 In April, he petitioned Berlin to deny the governorates of Vilna, Kovno, and Grodno, to Poland.Footnote 225 Beseler resisted, arguing through the spring and early summer of 1917 that annexing parts of White Ruthenia and Vilna to Poland would reinforce Germany's position in eastern Europe.Footnote 226 Civilian policymakers initially sided with Beseler. A cabinet conference at Kreuznach in May affirmed plans to transfer White Ruthenia to Poland.Footnote 227 The kaiser approved the eastward expansion of Poland in June.Footnote 228
The Oath crisis finally scuttled plans for a greater Kingdom of Poland. At August 9 conference at Kreuznach, the OHL asserted that transferring Vilna to the emerging Polish state would be “militarily impermissible.”Footnote 229 “Poland, so again teaches the present arrogant attitude of the Poles,” Ludendorff wrote the chancellor in September, “will only give [us] peace, if we keep it in check through extensive restrictions.” Neither Grodno nor Vilna could be awarded to the Polish state.Footnote 230 The OHL repeated this demand at a November policy conference in Berlin.Footnote 231 Following the regency crisis, Beseler also found it increasingly difficult to support Poland's expansion. He counseled restraint in only a few particular territorial questions.Footnote 232 By March 1918, Beseler had abandoned plans for the expansion of Poland altogether. At a Berlin conference, he conceded that the Polish nation suffered from an “incurable megalomania” and insatiable “fantasies of expansion.” “As the Poles do not themselves limit their yearning for territorial expansion,” Beseler conceded, “this must be done by us. The new state formation can only encompass the actual core of Poland.”Footnote 233 The possibility of expanding the Polish state deep into White Ruthenia or Lithuania “now no longer exists.”Footnote 234 Even the army's most optimistic supporters of multinational imperialism now aimed to contain Poland.
Military leaders also increasingly sought to ensure the absolute reliability of annexed territories through Germanization. Beseler and most civilian authorities resisted proposals for ethnic cleansing and colonization until the end of the war.Footnote 235 But in April 1917 the OHL began to champion German settlement in annexed border territories.Footnote 236 After the Oath crisis, Ludendorff more aggressively promoted national homogenization, demanding the “Germanization of the border strip” as essential for German security.Footnote 237 By November, Ludendorff's position had hardened, and he petitioned Chancellor Georg von Hertling to approve the “expulsion of Poles” from the border strip and the “resettlement of Germans” into the annexations.Footnote 238 Though politically costly, Ludendorff insisted that only a “reliable German population” could secure this “foreland” against Polish or Russian designs.Footnote 239
In 1918 Hindenburg, Ludendorff, and their sympathizers in the army began to invent legal covers for expelling Poles from the border strip. In a January 1918 policy conference, Major General von Bartenwerffer argued on behalf of the OHL that Germanizing a border strip through “settlement” or even “coercive” expulsions would be necessary to secure Germany's “military interests.”Footnote 240 “We need the border strip,” he stated curtly, “and it must be German.…”Footnote 241 He proposed to construct massive fortifications, artillery ranges, and other military installations as a pretext for expropriating thousands of square kilometers of land in the border strip and expelling Polish residents eastward.Footnote 242 In March, Nethe broke with Beseler, praising the OHL's proposal to remove large populations of Polish civilians from “security zones” around new military installations in annexed territories.Footnote 243 The OHL's final memorandum on the border strip, submitted on July 5, 1918, claimed 8,000 square kilometers of territory to insulate military stations and railways from Polish sabotage.Footnote 244 “For reasons of security,” the memo clarified, “only a reliable, German population” could be “tolerated” in these areas.Footnote 245 Since their “liberation,” wrote the OHL in defense of ethnic cleansing, Poles had done nothing that “could offer us some sort of guarantee for loyal conduct in the future.”Footnote 246 Suzerainty could provide no “secure protection” for Germany because Poland would “tolerate no such fetters on its independence in the long run.”Footnote 247 Experience had convinced the OHL that Poland would plot to betray Germany, “so long as the dream of a greater Poland is unfulfilled.”Footnote 248
Conclusion
The German army that marched to war in 1914 did not inherit the conviction that Germanization was necessary for the control of imperial space. Officers did not automatically understand foreign civilians as implacable enemies to be uprooted. Many regarded them as potential confederates in a German multinational empire. Multinationalist officers believed that Polish nationalists would accept union with the German Empire as necessary to preserve their national autonomy against Russian expansionism. Successive chiefs of the General Staff, intelligence officers in the Deputy General Staff, the governor-general of German-occupied Poland, and subordinate military governors wagered that the German Empire would be able to reshape Polish nationalism through alliances with influential social, intellectual, and political elites.
The army's preference for homogenization was learned during the war, as repeated crises in occupied Poland undermined faith in multinational union as a model of imperial organization. Officers began to worry that most of the Polish population desired national independence and that Polish elites were either unable or unwilling to reshape national discourse to legitimize German suzerainty. They began to reimagine national diversity as an obstacle to territorial consolidation and a threat to imperial stability. Berlin planned to build an autonomous Polish state in military and political union with the German Empire until the final weeks of the war.Footnote 249 However, concerned that Poland would eventually betray the German Empire, officers increasingly recommended fortifying Germany's border, reducing Poland's size, and aggressively Germanizing frontier territories to assure their reliability. The civilian government, with Beseler's support, managed to resist the most radical demands proposed by the OHL, decisively rejecting policies of expropriation and expulsion in July 1918.Footnote 250 But by the end of the war, many in the army doubted that national diversity could be reconciled with imperial stability.
How do we reconcile the military's initial interest in multinational models of rule for Congress Poland with OberOst’s fantasies of Germanizing and colonizing the Baltics?Footnote 251 Military elites perceived Polish nationality as qualitatively different from the various cultural communities of the Baltic littoral. From early in the war, the German army dismissed Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian, and White Ruthenian communities as primitive, incapable of marshaling significant resistance to German rule, and thus plausible candidates for eventual Germanization. Conversely, officers and even key OberOst advisers consistently and explicitly distinguished Poland as a politically sophisticated nation, whose elites could mobilize effective mass resistance to any form of rule deemed illegitimate.Footnote 252 German military elites calibrated their plans for Congress Poland accordingly. While multinationalists attempted to harness and channel Polish nationalism to support imperial expansion, skeptics contemplated more radical instruments for fortifying German security from Polish nationalist threats. In 1918, OberOst thus prescribed special, uniquely coercive methods of rule for suppressing potential nationalist challenges from the Polish-speaking populations of the Baltic littoral.Footnote 253 Military planners drew distinct, but terrifyingly complimentary, lessons from the occupations of the Baltic and Congress Poland because they had long imagined these regions, not as a single quasi-colonial “mindscape of the east,” but as distinct ethnographic spaces.Footnote 254 Efforts in OberOst laid bare the difficulty of Germanizing even politically disorganized communities composed primarily of peasants. The German occupation of Congress Poland, by contrast, shook officers’ confidence in Berlin's ability to incorporate politically “conscious” nations as reliably loyal components of a stable multinational empire.
Had Berlin managed to win the war and construct a stable German-Polish union, it might have restored the credibility of multinational imperialism in the army. Although expectations of Polish collaboration declined considerably, the GGW encountered little actual violent resistance until the end of the war. More assiduous observers declined to interpret wartime crises as proof of Poles’ incorrigible and inevitable hostility to German rule, instead blaming material grievances and Berlin's political errors for exacerbating friction with the Polish population. In 1918, many still argued that a period of economic stability and conscientious state-building could cultivate Polish loyalty to multinational union.Footnote 255
Germany, however, lost the war, and with it Posen, West Prussia, and parts of Silesia. The overthrow of the German occupation in Congress Poland and the loss of territory in the Ostmark fed anti-Polish sentiment in the army. Skeptical officers could look to the collapse of the GGW and claim that Poles had always plotted Germany's downfall. Ludendorff excoriated multinational imperialism as a catastrophic imperial policy in his memoirs, penned in exile between November 1918 and February 1919. He insisted that Poles’ intrinsic “hostility” to the German Empire had doomed multinationalism to failure.Footnote 256 The creation of an autonomous Polish state, he argued, could never alleviate this hostility, or divert Polish ambitions from Prussian territory.Footnote 257 Creating the Kingdom of Poland had only empowered an enemy nation to more effectively challenge German interests. “In view of the ambiguous attitude of Poland” Ludendorff wrote, “any arming of that country presented dangers which it was our duty to avoid….”Footnote 258 A Polish army had always threatened the German Empire because Poland had preferred “to achieve her ends against Germany” and “with the aid of the Entente.”Footnote 259 Berlin, Ludendorff concluded, should have pursued a “protective belt of annexations” along the German frontier, one purged of its “undesirable” Polish residents.Footnote 260
Ludendorff retained considerable prestige after the war. His distorted assessments of the war and German occupation policy and his endorsement of Germanization, even ethnic cleansing, carried real weight. His memoirs became tremendously influential and were included on lists of recommended reading for officer trainees in the Reichswehr.Footnote 261 They helped to cement, within the army, a firm association between ethnic diversity and imperial insecurity.
