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“The Latvians would be easily evacuated. In Russia, resettlement is not regarded as cruel in itself. The people are used to it. . . Those alien peoples who are of German descent and are currently so ill-treated can be allowed to move into this area and found colonies. [These] do not need to be integrated into Germany, but must be affiliated, albeit with cement, so that their slipping back to the Russian side is ruled out.” –German banker Max Warburg, 1916.​

As some people have noticed, I’ve soured a bit on the Kaiserreich of late, in that I think its collapse was emphatically a good thing. To illustrate why that’s the case, I’d like to raise a discussion about German policy in the east in the aftermath of a Central Powers victory.

It’s pretty clear that by 1917 German victory in the east was envisioning, to some degree, German colonization of the border reason. LFor instance, Ludendorff opposed border recficiations was that it would increase the number of Poles inside Germany; the German Supreme Command’s position was to expel all the Jews in the region and force the Poles to trade land their land for land held by Germans in Poland. (I am sure this would have worked out this way). An estimate is that it would entail moving two million people; a not infeasible number, given the population transfers in the Balkans and Turkey in this period.

(Only one Minister of the Interior suggested this might be a bad idea which would casue an unfavorable reaction in Poland).

Meanwhile, others in the High Command were suggesting that Latvia should be planted with 50,000 new farms settled by immigrants from the Reich.

Meanwhile, the Finnish-German treaty, ratified on June 3, 1918, gives us some idea of the future of Eastern Europe; Finland would not be allowed to ally with a foreign power other than Germany, with military and naval bases on Finnish soil. In the economic sphere, German goods would enter Finland free from a duty, but Finnish goods would be forced to pay German tariffs.
[1]

Things were little better in the Ukraine, where the Ukrainian Rada was a joke. By April Ludendorff had given the officers in the Ukraine permission to remove the Rada government, declaring “Russians still want to feel the knout.” The Rada, was promptly replaced by a dictatorship with no popular support, to the point that Ukrainian workers went on strike in July.

The High Command and Ludendorff, perhaps disillusioned by this disaster, began speculating about a new Crimean/Tatar state, propped up by German settlements in the region.

I'm willing to grant some sort of German victory on the Western Front in 1917, although I really question its probability. But I don't see how any of the deluded visions for the east, which would have possibility worked, and I wonder how long it would have taken for a German leadership already considering ethnic cleansing to consider more final solutions.

[1] Evidently Niall Ferguson doesn’t know how the EU actually works when he says this sounds like the EU.
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