Poles in a central power victory

[Mikestone8]

Could this result in significant umbers of Prussian Poles migrating into the new Kingdom? After all, even in a puppet state, at least their kids would be able to speak Polish at school. So could we see West Prussia and even Posen getting more German?

 

[Ijon Tichy]

Would Polish nationalists have been happy and satisfied with a Polish puppet state, whose strings were pulled by Berlin?

I don't think so. In fact I think Polish nationalists of all stripes would have seen this CP victory Poland as, at best, a base for further operations.

With all that that implies.

 

[Nivek]

Could this result in significant umbers of Prussian Poles migrating into the new Kingdom? After all, even in a puppet state, at least their kids would be able to speak Polish at school. So could we see West Prussia and even Posen getting more German?

Some might, others might just stay as they have their jobs and family.

Would Polish nationalists have been happy and satisfied with a Polish puppet state, whose strings were pulled by Berlin?

I don't think so. In fact I think Polish nationalists of all stripes would have seen this CP victory Poland as, at best, a base for further operations.

With all that that implies.

Good luck with that, at best you will on jail, at worst diswoned by your goverment and in exile in USA or six feet under

 

[Riain]

Would Polish nationalists have been happy and satisfied with a Polish puppet state, whose strings were pulled by Berlin?

I don't think so. In fact I think Polish nationalists of all stripes would have seen this CP victory Poland as, at best, a base for further operations.

With all that that implies.

I have no doubt that this would be the case, but compared to direct rule by Russia a puppet state is a better place from which to work toward independence. This needn't be done totally in opposition to Germany and by violent means.

Poland wouldn't be the only country in MittelEuropa newly freed from direct Russian rule and puppetised by Germany, Poland could open relations with other ME members and seek common cause or engage in dispute negotiation and perhaps agitate to get status similar to less puppetised ME members. Over decades such an approach might make Poland far more independent than in 1918 and far less ready for violent confrontation to alter the status quo.

 

[SealTheRealDeal]

How do the Central Powers win?

A world where Austria-Hungary is reduced to a battered German client state will be very different for Poland compared to one where Austria-Hungary has pulled enough of its own weight to remain Germany's equal.

 

[Jürgen]

There's also a important other difference, in a world where there exist a independent Poland closely allied/vassalized to Germany and AH, Poles in both countries will be treated more careful, simply because the treatment of them have stopped being a domestic matter and have become a foreign policy one. While in Poland antagonism toward Germany and AH will be seen as something which risk hurting their minorities in both countries. It also help that Poland here will be a far smaller countries, so it won't suffer under the idea that it's a great power.

 

[Mikestone8]

Would Polish nationalists have been happy and satisfied with a Polish puppet state, whose strings were pulled by Berlin?

Their options may be limited if they are hemmed in between Germany on one side, and her Lithuanian and Ukrainian puppet states on the other.

Some might, others might just stay as they have their jobs and family.

Presumably they could take their families with them.

As to jobs it depends on their line of work. If they are ag labs, they can probably find jobs on either side of the order.

 

[Retro_Reaction]

So, while I do NOT believe the Germans of WWI were on the same level as the Nazis, I do not find it too crazy that Germany (or as it has been pointed out, some German officials) would at least put a pin in the idea of weakening the numbers of Poles in a particular area.

The Nazi opinion of the Poles did not come from the ether. It was the culmination of previous ideas taken to it's most extreme. The same can be said for the Holocaust. The gas chamber was simply the culmination of a slow progression of ideas.

 

[Jan Olbracht]

Could this result in significant umbers of Prussian Poles migrating into the new Kingdom? After all, even in a puppet state, at least their kids would be able to speak Polish at school. So could we see West Prussia and even Posen getting more German?

I doubt it. Compared to Posen or West Prussia, Russian Poland was underdeveloped and overpopulated, so there would be little inective to emigrate. If allowed, Poles from former Russian Poland would be more likely to migrate to Posen, but that is something Germans would not be happy about (well, not all Germans-German middle class was actually more anti-Polish than junkers, for whom Poles were just source of cheap labour, thus they were not interested for obvious reasons in closing border for Polish workers).

 

[Mikey]

To some extent, a Central Powers victory is going to change the history of nationalism quite a bit; you're not going to have the whole ethos be self-determination in Eastern and Central Europe. Austria-Hungary was already a multinational state, with a significant population of Poles in Galicia who were given a fair degree of autonomy in the empire, and had a ruling class that was pretty friendly to Vienna.

Germany, of course, was a more explicitly nationalist state, and a Protestant one, so less compatible with Polish Catholicism. At the same time, though, it meant that while Berlin wanted military and diplomatic control over a Polish state, it wouldn't necessarily require any kind of integration into the empire, and a Polish Kingdom could be autonomous domestically. Ultimately, that would very likely mean a German monarch, but that's not necessarily a dealbreaker domestically; plenty of non-German states had German monarchs.

 

[A Piece of History]

The Nazi opinion of the Poles did not come from the ether. It was the culmination of previous ideas taken to it's most extreme. The same can be said for the Holocaust. The gas chamber was simply the culmination of a slow progression of ideas.

Yeah, I know. On a separate post, I elaborated on how the before the war, the Germans had a negative view of their Polish subjects.

 

[Snaut]

Keeping the 1914 border would have had interesting implications for Germany. The end goal of assimilating its Polish population was a difficult one to attain. Assimilating populations can be very difficult, and in this case Germany would be facing a population with characteristics such as being represented in all levels of society (as opposed to e.g. being almost solely farmers), having a clear national identity, having strong traditions of independent statehood, speaking a different language, practising a different religion from the dominant state religion, being relatively numerous, and living in areas which Germans weren't very willing to settle - all of these characteristics would make assimilation harder. Germany had two options. Option one was progressing towards democratization, liberalization, rule of law and other nice things. Doing so would create conditions where Polish culture and organizations could flourish. The outcome of this option would have been the acceptance that large parts of the provinces of West Prussia, Posen and Silesia will never be German in character. Prioritizing Germanization over the development of civic society would have required the use of double standards damaging the legal system and the development of the whole of Germany, without guaranteeing any permant success in assimilation. If most of the Ober-Ost is made into a Greater Lithuania, Lithuania will have the same kind of problems, only much more serious.

The so called area was of septemberprogamm...we dunno if was official and might have change of plans and that more sense the 'make Imperial german proto-nazis' anedoctes too.

"Germany" didn't, Ludendorff (and a few others) did... there's a big difference there. Hoffman counseled the Kaiser against taking too large of a "Polish Border Strip"... considering that I've NEVER seen a definitive map of any planned annexation in Congress Poland, I'd say that anything calling for expulsions of millions of Poles and Jews is sheer hyperbole and conjecture...

AFAIK there had never been a final decision to go along with the border strip idea (which is not surprising since Germany lost the war and never had the opportunity to finalize all decisions regarding its temporary gains in the east). BUT it was very much in the mainstream of German political thinking, and the concept was embraced by people including the Emperor himself who was directly involved in talks on this subject, from 1914 until 1918. I have seen references that E. Geiss in his Der polnische Grenzstreifen 1914–1918 (1960) provides a detailed description of at least one such variant of the border strip discussed in a conference in Warsaw in August 1916. So let's not whitewash the Imperial German ruling class. Just because it's unfair to call them Nazis doesn't mean they weren't aggressive and brutal.