AHC: Early Lebensraum?

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With a PoD occurring after the establishment of the Duchy of Prussia, the challenge is to have the territories that encompass modern day Poland, Belarus, and the Baltics comprise of at least 40% German in terms of ethnic demographics.

Depending on your answer, in what way would it effect the establishment of Germany as a unitary state in the 19th century?
 
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The Baltics I could see if Russia loses the wars and they stay Swedish. Sweden in its great power phase always depended on Germany as a source of manpower, and German was a prestige language which means they would not have been expected to switch to Swedish the way Finns and Sami were. A concerted effort to repopulate areas devastated by war, famine and ethnic cleansing could get you there.

Western Poland isn't even hard. A small nudge in the demographic is all it would take.

But most of Poland and Belarus? I don't see any realistic way that this would happen short of some weirdly selective demographic disaster.
 
The Mongols staying for some years in Poland and the Baltics? In Hungary, half the population died after they invaded... then again, Hungary didn't become German-speaking either.
 
With a PoD occurring after the establishment of the Duchy of Prussia, the challenge is to have the territories that encompass modern day Poland, Belarus, and the Baltics comprise of at least 40% German in terms of ethnic demographics.

Depending on your answer, in what way would it effect the establishment of Germany as a unitary state in the 19th century?
They almost did, one third of modern Poland was part of Germany once.
 

SRBO

Banned
Eh that could happen, temporarily. Russia seeks natural borders (protip: there isn't one, tou can potentially go all the way to the Pyrenees) and has a natural distaste for Germans

It would be inevitable that something like post-WW2 genocide occurs
 
Baltic-States1.gif


With a PoD occurring after the establishment of the Duchy of Prussia, the challenge is to have the territories that encompass modern day Poland, Belarus, and the Baltics comprise of at least 40% German in terms of ethnic demographics.

Depending on your answer, in what way would it effect the establishment of Germany as a unitary state in the 19th century?

Your POD is way too late. To achieve such a result you would need to butterfly away what the roman world called "the barbarian invasions" and that the germans call "the migration of (germanic) peoples".

Many germanic peoples chose to move westward and southward instead of eastward. The eastward germanic colonization started much later. This is why the germanic-slavic cultural frontier was where It was OTL.
 
Your POD is way too late. To achieve such a result you would need to butterfly away what the roman world called "the barbarian invasions" and that the germans call "the migration of (germanic) peoples".

Many germanic peoples chose to move westward and southward instead of eastward. The eastward germanic colonization started much later. This is why the germanic-slavic cultural frontier was where It was OTL.

I'd completely disagree with you there- Prior to the Ostsiedlung the boundary of the German speaking lands lay some way to the west of the Elbe- even Berlin was still a Slavic area until the 13th Century. A more devastating Mongol Invasion or the Teutonic Order successfully taking over Lithuania (or indeed combining the two- large parts of Poland and Lithuania are devastated by the Mongols allowing the Teutonic order to essentially waltz in and take over) and you could have seen widespread German settlements being established across the area and a completely Germanised aristocracy.
 
I'd completely disagree with you there- Prior to the Ostsiedlung the boundary of the German speaking lands lay some way to the west of the Elbe- even Berlin was still a Slavic area until the 13th Century. A more devastating Mongol Invasion or the Teutonic Order successfully taking over Lithuania (or indeed combining the two- large parts of Poland and Lithuania are devastated by the Mongols allowing the Teutonic order to essentially waltz in and take over) and you could have seen widespread German settlements being established across the area and a completely Germanised aristocracy.

I know this and never wrote the contrary.

Now, why would the Mongols exterminate slavs while that did not OTL ?

And if they did, do you think that germanic settlers would rush to a placé where they know the Mongols just exterminated everybody ?
 
I know this and never wrote the contrary.

Now, why would the Mongols exterminate slavs while that did not OTL ?

And if they did, do you think that germanic settlers would rush to a placé where they know the Mongols just exterminated everybody ?

Poland got off very lightly compared to Russia though. And considering that the main delay on settlement in Russia was roving bands of Tartars...
 
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