Prussian Settlement Commission - Polish Countermeasures

Polish Countermeasures

The creation of the Commission stimulated Poles to take countermeasures, that gradually turned into a competition of the Polish minority against the German state with Poles running their own settlement banks and settlement societies, resulting in a "battle for soil" (Kampf um den Boden). In 1888 Teodor Kalkstein founded Bank Ziemski, supported by Poles from Austrian Galicia region. 1894 saw Polish intellectuals in cooperation with Polish farmers founding Spólka Rolników Indywidualnych. Ignacy Sikorski founded Bank Parcelacyjny in 1896. From 1890 till 1912 Polish enterprises, banks and associations grew in number and strength providing Poles with defence against the Germanisation of their land. The efforts to Germanise the region in fact strengthened the Polish nationalist movement and united Polish nationalism, Catholicism and cultural resistance among the Poles in Pomerania, Masuria and Silesia. For the Settlement Commission, these countermeasures led to a decreasing availability of purchasable Polish-owned land, in 1895 and all years following 1898, the vast majority of estates was purchased from Germans instead of Poles, and since 1902, the commission was able to acquire land from Poles "only rarely and only through a middleman".

Numerous initiatives proved to be more elastic and efficient then the large centralised German bureaucracy. A social understanding has risen among the Polish population that led to abandoning the class differences in order to defend national existence - the rich helped the poor to perform better in economy and were supported by the clergy in their actions. Rich nobility often sold their artistic heritage to invest in banking and financial enterprises, or to buy more land for Poles. This was viewed as moral and ethical behavior among the Polish population. Some Polish nationalists accused the Settlement Commission of being run by Germans and Jews, and distributed a leaflet in 1912 that warned "any Pole who buys from Jews and Germans undermines the existence of the Catholic Church and the Fatherland." Local newspapers attempted to intimidate residents who purchased goods from German and Jewish merchants by publishing their names in the paper and accusing them of "betray...their country."

As a result the German initiative created the very thing it tried to eliminate in the first place, a Polish national awakening in the Greater Poland region (province of Posen) and feeling of Polish national unity. Thus, faced with the inability to Germanise the Polish provinces by economic means led the German leaders and thinkers to consider pursuing extraordinary means. Catherine Epstein named Polish resistance to German methods as strengthening Polish nationalism and notes the similarity of Commission actions to the Nazis