Germany decided to add some of what use to be Vistula Land to their European holdings at New York. Well that was done prior at Konigsberg but at New York it became accept by the wider world. Yet after learning from Posen, they decided they didn’t want all those pesky Poles in their nation. It was one of the reasons they decided to create the Kingdom of Poland as a client state so they would have a place to force all the Poles in the newly annexed eastern territories without putting other nations in undue burdens as Germany in 1919 still had touchy relations with a number of nations. They forget one key thing through, all those pesky Poles that they didn’t want in their nation wouldn’t go quietly into the night. They were damn attached to their clay and wanted to hold on to it.
In the Polish Border Strip by modern[1] estimation 2.5 million Poles, Jews, and other groups lived here which the German Empire simply didn’t want. This was on the top of the 18 or so million Poles, Jews, and others living in the newly created Kingdom of Poland. Yet the Germans really didn’t give a damn about the flight of the Polish people they simply wanted to use the Kingdom of Poland to keep the Poles under control and get rich as they do it. As they set up this new kingdom in Poland to make this happen everything was being controlled by the Germans.
Ethnic Cleansing is never an easy or neat thing. Yet Germany didn’t plan to remove all of the Poles from the border strip they were annexing after they needed cheap labor for farming and other hard and physically demanding jobs. It also planned to use the Kingdom of Poland as a meat shield against Russia once she got her act together again. The crazy thing of it was even the damn French in the newly annexed lands in the West were getting a fairer shake than the Poles were. They were given the choice either accept German rule and be a subject of the Kaiser or we will pay for you to move out. The Poles weren’t even getting that, they had no choice in the matter.
What happened next for the interwar period became known as the Crime of the Century. Well till what happened in China which replaced the Rape of Poland as the Crime of the Century. If far passed what the Austro-Hungarians were doing and what the British and friends were doing in South Africa and India. Given the rapid advances in technology which followed WWII the Rape of Poland is viewed in a tragic light as this could had been stopped with the technology of the early 21st century, yet that wasn’t there in 1919 when this started.
At first as the Germans rounded up the Poles in the Border Strip they had annexed things when smooth enough for what was happening. Yet news of what was happening quickly spread. And it spread like wildfire. Within weeks of operations starting to force Poles out a general Polish strike to protest this. Then things get fuzzy as there is the official German history, then there is the history told by the people who lived it. These are two radically different views on the events that happened. The only thing they agree on it was violent.
What caused this to turn violent is a bit of a mystery with a few different ideas being put forward as the reason things got violent, but once they did things when downhill quickly. Things then spilled over to the Kingdom of Poland and Posen itself. As the violence spread the army set up the efforts to enforced this idea of removing Poles from the border strip. Yet by 1920 they changed the location where they were sending the Poles as they were already enforcing marshal law there, they started to send these Poles into the cluster fuck that was Russia.
It was at this point that it became all out ethnic warfare between the Germans and Poles. However, there was no one coming to save the Poles. Everyone else was too busy dealing with the after effects of the war in their own nation. By 1921 Germany gave up the pretense of even trying to have a puppet Polish Kingdom by annexing the whole of the Polish Kingdom and started to push large numbers of Poles across the new German Soviet-Russia border. Poles with money and means figured it out fairly quickly and started to take off to any nation where they could buy visas to. This didn’t affect the Poles in Posen but many also left Germany as this was unfolding.
By 1923 things were returning to something that was close to normal in the areas that were just annexed by Germany. However, the cost was staggering. Hard figures have never been agreed on but estimates run from a half of a million to two million people having died during this time. Up to 2.5 million left Germany and Poland, this is including Posen for other nations outside of Europe. The vast majority of these people were intellectuals, skill workers, or people who came from money. They landed all over the globe as many nations notably in South America, the Imperial Federation, and South Africa were trying to boost their populations in the wake of the war. Up to a further 6.5 million was forced over into the hell hole that was Soviet Union where from what records that can be viewed by the public they all ended up in Central Asian and Siberian in force worker gulags.
[1] ITL 2017
...well joking aside, surprise are always good and it's probable that what happened in France will have scared everyone 'forcing' to make a more rational move.
