Goals
The goals of the Commission were the financial weakening of Polish landowners, and ensuring Germanisation of Polish cities as well as rural areas. The destruction of Polish landownership combined with the fight against the Polish clergy (Kulturkampf) was to achieve the elimination of a Polish national identity. Polish landowners were regarded by Bismarck as the principal agitators for Polish nationalism, purchasing their estates and parceling them out to Germans in family-sized farms was intended to both disestablish this group and significantly higher the numbers of Germans in these areas.
The focus on land ownership was motived by the German "völkisch" idea that "where the German plough will plow, there German fatherland will arise". The settlement was to isolate Polish settlements in German inhabited areas by surrounding them with German settlements and spread German ones into Polish dominated areas to isolate specified Polish villages from the rest. The German settlements were to be always concentrated to provide a "barrier" to Polishness. While the Commission bought mostly German land, this was not interfering with the goal of increase of German presence, and buying a large tract of land from a single German owner to distribute it among many German colonists was perceived as beneficial to the goal. Of the colonists, 96,9% were Protestants as the Prussian authorities believed that ‘the true German is a Protestant". The whole practice was new and unheard in Europe. Besides Ostflucht, the German government justified its action to the international community by labeling Poles as internal enemies of the state. Those attempts didn’t achieve much success. Bismarck himself said that the Poles who find themselves without land should "move to Morocco".
Read more about this topic: Prussian Settlement Commission
Famous quotes containing the word goals:
“Despicable means used to achieve laudable goals renders the goals themselves despicable.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“Whoever sincerely believes that elevated and distant goals are as little use to man as a cow, that “all of our problems” come from such goals, is left to eat, drink, sleep, or, when he gets sick of that, to run up to a chest and smash his forehead on its corner.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“Let us beware of saying there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is no one to command, no one to obey, no one to transgress. When you realize there are no goals or objectives, then you realize, too, that there is no chance: for only in a world of objectives does the word “chance” have any meaning.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)