German Empire
In the territories annexed during the Partitions of Poland, German authorities sought to limit the number of ethnic Poles by their forced Germanisation and by new wave of settlement by German colonists at their expense. Beginning with the Kulturkampf, laws were enacted to restrict Polish culture, religion, language and property. Bismarck initiated the Prussian deportations of 1885-1890, which affected some 30,000 Poles and Jews living in Germany who did not have German citizenship. This is described by E.J. Feuchtwanger as one the precedents to modern policies of ethnic cleansing. In 1887 Bernhard von Bülow, the future Chancellor of the German Empire, advocated expelling Poles by force from territories which were Polish-inhabited and slated to become part of Germany.
Already in 1908 Germany legalized eviction of Poles from their properties under pressure from pan-German nationalist groups who hoped this law would be used to reduce the number of Poles in the East by force.
Read more about this topic: Expulsion Of Poles By Germany
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“The Germans—once they were called the nation of thinkers: do they still think at all? Nowadays the Germans are bored with intellect, the Germans distrust intellect, politics devours all seriousness for really intellectual things—Deutschland, Deutschland Über alles was, I fear, the end of German philosophy.”
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