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 Germans are always too late. They are late, like music, which is always the last of the arts to express a world condition,—when that world condition is already in its final stages. They are abstract and mystical.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“It is the women of Europe who pay the price while war rages, and it will be the women who will pay again when war has run its bloody course and Europe sinks down into the slough of poverty like a harried beast too spent to wage the fight. It will be the sonless mothers who will bend their shoulders to the plough and wield in age-palsied hands the reaphook.”
—Kate Richards O’Hare (1877–1948)