Jewish Disloyalty 1900 Prussia Tims

Germanizing Prussian Poland: The H-K-T Society And The Struggle For The Eastern Marches In The German Empire, 1894-1919, by Richard Wonser Tims. 2011

Poland’s Successful Struggle Against the Prussian Boot. Jewish Complicity in the Prussian Oppression of Poles

The author is either British or British-oriented. He refers to the Poles of West Prussia as “Prussia’s Irish”. (p. 7). He uses only German sources (p. 8), thus providing a German perspective on Polish successes.

The Germans called this part of occupied Poland the “eastern marches”—as a German frontier. (p. 32). [The term itself delegitimized Poland, as would the later Nazi-occupation terms of Wartheland (land of the Warthe [Warta] River), and the adjacent Generalgouvernement (General Government).]

Under Prussian rule ever since the Partitions (1795), Polish society, at first, consisted of a “safely” small nationally-conscious element (nobility and clergy) along with a large one that was [supposedly] not nationally conscious (peasants). Did the peasants lack national consciousness, or did they have a national consciousness muted by life-circumstances? (p. 13].

GERMAN INDUSTRIALIZATION ON THE BACK OF THE POLES

Author Tims comments on the subsequent expansion of obvious Polish national consciousness, (quote) Since the founding of the [Second] Reich in 1871, circumstances had made the Germans acutely aware of this non-German group in their midst. A major factor was the crescendo of industrialization in Germany, which could scarcely have proceeded so rapidly without the aid of Polish brawn. The mines and foundries of Upper Silesia, speeding the transformation of Polish-speaking peasants into workers, inevitably preparing them for a new consciousness of their existence as a class, and hence a nation, distinct from the German owners. (unquote)(p. 12). Other Poles had the same experience in the expanding factories of Saxony and the Rhineland.

POLAK POTRAFI: THE POLES BESTED THE GERMANS AT “GERMAN” TRAITS

Even Kennemann freely admitted that, “‘The Polish working class is extraordinarily willing, hard-working, and capable…’” (p. 115). An urban Polish middle class began to develop in addition to the new factory proletariat. (p. 14). It included Polish tradespeople, editors, merchants, doctors, lawyers, etc. (p. 59). All these developments shattered the German anti-Polish myths about the disinclination of Poles to better themselves (e. g, “Slavic fatalism”, “the stagnant Slavic race”) and their innate incompetence of effectively doing so. (e. g, POLNISCHE WIRTSCHAFT and its equivalents (e. g, p. 266), still sometimes heard today.) Tims comments, (quote) They [the Germans] were uneasy over the census figures, showing a vigorous Polish birth rate, and equally uneasy over what they observed among the Poles at first hand—the growth of Polish savings banks, the rapid spread of peasant co-operatives, the multiplying of a substantial middle class, the efficiency of Polish tradespeople, handworkers and professional men in the eastern towns. (unquote). (pp. 47-48).

The enterprising Poles established Polish agrarian societies, numerous newspapers that boldly supported Polish interests, and Polish-aid foundations. For instance, there were 35 Polish newspapers in the area in 1896. (p. 42). The Marcinkowski society was founded in 1840 by a Polish doctor [whose possible descendant, Stefan Marcinkowski from the Bydgoszcz (Bromberg) area, I knew in childhood]. It funded Polish students in business, professions, engineering, medicine, law, pharmacy, etc. (pp. 59-60). Thanks to various Polish banks and cooperatives, Poles bought farms from Germans more often than the reverse. (p. 124, 127; reference 119, p. 187). In 1871, the Polish delegation to the REICHSTAG consisted mostly of wealthy landowners; in 1912, overwhelmingly of the Polish middle class. (p. 189).

POLES FINALLY STOPPED TRYING TO PLEASE OTHERS AT POLISH EXPENSE

The Poles repudiated the earlier Prussian-conciliatory quid pro quo policies, of the aristocrat Koscielski, as worse than fruitless. They began to stand up to their Prussian masters in general and the Hakata in particular. (p. 43). Poles began to boycott German organizations and enterprises. (p. 43, 64, 72).

In his KULTURKAMPF, Bismarck believed that he could stifle Polishness by dealing harshly with the nobility and clergy. Instead, as noted by a quoted German nationalist, the KULTURKAMPF only “brought the Polish classes together.” (p. 15).

THE HAKATA ATTEMPTS TO RE-IMPOSE GERMAN HEGEMONY

A German backlash developed against Polish successes, leading to the 1894 foundation of the Eastern Marches Association (OSTMARKENVEREIN). It grew to over 54,000 members, from all over Germany, by 1914. (p. 288). The Hakata included, as members, such German luminaries as Bismarck and his son Herbert, Heinrich von Treitschke, Ernst Haeckel, Max Weber, and Arnold von Siemens. (pp. 44-45). The Poles referred to this Hansemann-Kennemann-Tiedemann organization as H-K-T (H.-K.-T.) and the Germans followed suit. This became vowelized to Hakata. The term “Hakatism” subsequently assumed the status of an umbrella term for all Polonophobes (Tims’ term). (p. 40).

The chauvinistic nature of the Hakata is illustrated, for example, by its deliberate adoption of the English slogan, “My country right or wrong.” (p. 69). In addition, the wolf needed protection from the lamb: The Hakatists actually thought of themselves as protecting Germans and Germany from the Poles—including German in imminent danger of being replaced by Polish (e. g, p. 101), and even a “Polish peril”. (p. 255).

The Germans came to fear the biological proclivities of the Poles. (p. 47). Bernhard von Bulow (Buelow) compared Poles to rabbits in this regard. (p. 104). [Decades later, Hitler made a similar comment about the high Polish birthrate, albeit now in an overt racist-genocidal context.]

Some Hakatists praised “autonomous” Masurian-style submission to Germany as an example for the nationalistic Poles to follow. (p. 270). [Ironic to this, the Masurians became largely Germanized, and quite pro-Nazi]. Other Hakatists veered into Nazi-style racism against Poles (p. 269), and, during Germany’s WWI successes, even proposed massive, Nazi-style lebensraum German colonial expansion into Slavic lands. (pp. 273-274).

The growing German drive to eliminate all Polish language in West Prussia’s public life led to the required use of German for all school subjects except religion, starting in 1872-1874. (p. 78, 84). In time, thanks in part to Hakata pressures, even that exception was withdrawn. Polish noncompliance led to the Prussian beating of Polish schoolchildren at Wreschen [Wrzesnia] in 1901 (p. 83-on)—(something that even von Bulow (Buelow) admitted was “inexpedient”)(p. 90), the 1906 province-wide school strike by 100,000 Polish children (p. 91), and the Prussian arrest of 35 Polish priests. (p. 99).

The Hakata-encouraged militant Prussian campaign against the Polish language was not only a bullying assertion of the supremacy of DEUTSCHTUM, but also an attempt to rob Poles of political power. Tims writes, (quote) Every Polish syllable that pushed its way unchallenged into the center of the civic stage robbed German morale and German integrity and in some subtle manner added substance to Polish dreams of political equality and ultimate national liberation. (unquote)(p. 143).

JEWISH COMPLICITY IN THE PRUSSIAN OPPRESSION OF THE POLES

The Hakata had Jewish members (p. 211), but the strong Protestant emphasis of the organization had tended to discourage Jews from joining. (p. 72). Otherwise, the erstwhile Polish Jews of German-occupied northwest Poland had long since abandoned any form of attachment to Poland. Tims comments, (quote) The Jews in the East, who tended to regard themselves and to be regarded more and more as Germans rather than as Jews or Poles…(unquote)(p. 191). Interestingly, so pervasive had this self-Germanization become that, when Poles boycotted Jews, they boycotted them as Germans rather than as Jews. (p. 72).

POLES PUSH BACK AGAINST THE JEWS

The author quotes from the 1894 issue of the Posen (Poznan) Polish newspaper, KURYER POZNANSKI, on how the growing Polish national development is displacing the now self-Germanized Jews, (quote) The times are not so long past when almost all industry among us was in German hands and all commerce in Jewish, with only the plow and the petty handcrafts remaining for the Poles. Today things wear a different aspect…We see more and more big factories and other plants in Polish hands. The Jews are withdrawing more and more to their distant fatherland—not Palestine, since they can’t do business there, but Germany—and in their place the Poles have shown that when it comes to being careful in pounds, quarts and yards they are not so ignorant either. (unquote)(p. 59).

IN GERMAN EYES, POLES, AND EVENTUALLY JEWS, WERE A PROBLEM

In later decades, the Nazi Germans referred to the Jews in terms of JUDENFRAGE—implying that Jews were a problem that demanded some type of eventual solution—moreover an exterminatory one. But almost nobody mentions the fact that, during Prussian rule, there were also German publications repeatedly referring to a POLENFRAGE. (p. 65, 78, 141).