First World War
Even before the First World War some Germans like Hans Delbrück or Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow proposed expelling Poles from eastern territories of Germany. With the coming of the war, those ideas begun to take real and determined form in the shape of plans to be realised after German victory and as consequence hegemony of Central and Eastern Europe. The idea of extraordinary measures was the result of the failed economic attempt to Germanise Polish provinces. Heads of the Settlement Commission were among the architects and supporters of those plans. The president of the Settlement Commission, Gense, was one of the chief supporters and planners of the so called "Polish Border Strip" that envisioned expelling circa 2 million non-Germans (chiefly Poles and Jews) from 30,000 square kilometers of the would-be annexed territories from Congress Poland, which would then become Germanised. The Poles remaining in Germany who would refuse to become Germanised were to be "encouraged" to move to a planned German-run Polish puppet state established from the remains of Congress Poland.
Other notable names of Settlement Commission activists include Friedrich von Schwerin and industrialist Alfred Hugenberg who worked for and represented the Krupp family.
Read more about this topic: Prussian Settlement Commission
Famous quotes containing the words world and/or war:
“The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and human responsibility.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)
“Christians would show sense if they dispatched these argumentative Scotists and pigheaded Ockhamists and undefeated Albertists along with the whole regiment of Sophists to fight the Turks and Saracens instead of sending those armies of dull-witted soldiers with whom they’ve long been carrying on war with no result.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)