Prussian Settlement Commission: Difference between revisions

The Settlement Commission (German: Ansiedlungskommission) was a department that operated between 1886 and 1918, set up by Otto von Bismarck to increase land ownership of Germans at the expense of Poles in the eastern provinces of the German Empire, through the use of economic and political methods, as part of the country's policy of Germanisation. The original goal of the Commission was to remove Polish owners from the land completely. The first budget of the Commission was 100,000,000 marks.

At later times, even larger funds were made available to purchase lands from Poles. At the same time, laws were enacted that discriminated against Poles, making it more difficult for them to continue profitable operations and to rehabilitate failed operations. However the Commission in the end bought 613 estates from German owners and 214 from Poles, functioning to bail-out German debtors as often as fulfilling its declared mission. Up to 1914 22,000 German peasants had settled in the bought up land ^[1] and throughout its 32 years of existence the Commission was able to buy 8 percent of the total land in Posen - West Prussia ^[2]. Altogether 21.866 families were settled bringing the number of German colonists to 154,000^[3]. In 1913, 450 new villages were founded, areas of 438,560 ha was bought, of which 124,903 ha were bought from Poles, an overall 150,000 German inhabitants were counted on these lands since 1886^[4]. Only half of the settled families originated from outside partitioned Poland. Until 1913, of the 21,683 settled families (Ansiedlerfamilien), 5,706 (~ 35,000 people) were German natives from West Prussia and the Province of Posen, and about 5,000 families were Germans of the other parts of the partitioned Poland, Congress Poland (Russian province) and Galicia (Austrian province)^[5].

The creation of the Commission made Poles defend their ownership of the land, that gradually turned into Polish-German economic competition. It was to a great extent won by Poles, in that the measures failed to make much difference in the percentages of land ownership. Organized Polish countermeasures and the population decline of the Germans vs. the increase of the Poles figured greatly in the lack of success (see Ostflucht).

However, the Commission created numerous modern settlements, especially around city of Bromberg (Polish: Bydgoszcz).

In 1904 the Prussian Government tried to restrict the right to aquire land of ethnical Poles, even though they were German Citizens, but this attempt was stoped by a decision of the Prussian Administrative High Court^[6]. Due to overall failure of the policy, Prussian diet passed a law that enabled forcible expropriation of Polish landowners by the Settlement Commission in 1908. In 1912 the first and only four Polish large estates with 1656 hectares were expropriated ^[7]. German historian Profesor Imannuel Geiss in his scholary work on German designs for Poland during WW1 "Der polnische Grenzstreifen 1914-1918. Ein Beitrag zur deutschen Kriegszielpolitik im Ersten Weltkrieg" writes that laws were being designed by German leadership in preparation for larger colonisation effort, where circa 2 milion Poles and Jews would be removed to make room for German colonists in annexed territories of Congress Poland, while Poles within German Empire's Polish provinces obtained in Partitions of Poland would be "encouraged" to move out if they didn't accept Germanisation.

Outcome

The Settlement Commision failed to achieve its goals to increase German population and German property in Prussian Poland, neither short- nor long-term. In 1918, after the German Empire's defeat in World War I, the Commission ceased to function. By then, only the number of Poles as well as the amount of landed property owned by Poles had increased^[8]. Furthermore, after the constitution of a Polish state in 1918, the German population in these areas declined by another 70%, and the land owned by Germans by 45%^[9].

References

External links

• Selected Cliometric Studies on German Economic History
• Orphans of Versailles: The Germans in Western Poland, 1918-1939
• Imperial Germany, 1871-1918: Economy, Society, Culture, and Politics

See also

• Anti-Polonism
• Kulturkampf
• Deutscher Ostmarkenverein
• Drzymała car
• Rota
• Ostflucht