Federation of the German East

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The Bund Deutscher Osten ( BDO ) was founded on May 27, 1933, “Day of the German East”. The BDO united the German Ostmarkenverein u. a. with the "Heimatbund East Prussia ", the "Young Prussian Movement" and the "Reichsbund der Schlesier ". Together with the Association for Germanness Abroad (VDA), it was placed under the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle (VoMi) on February 3, 1939, by a decree of the “Deputy Leader”, Rudolf Hess , one of the most important pillars of Nazi national politics .

task

Under his Reichsführer Franz Lüdtke and his successors Theodor Oberländer , he was deposed at the end of July 1937, as well as SS-Standartenführer Hermann Behrends , who subsequently headed the BDO since the summer of 1937 and was at the same time head of the "VoMi", the BDO had the official task asked "to familiarize the German people with questions of the history of the spirit and the history of space in the East". From the very beginning, however, he pursued the initially secret revision policy of the Nazi regime in the east. H. the envisaged destruction of the young nation-state of Poland . Its establishment as a result of the Versailles Treaty had cost the German Reich considerable territorial losses on its eastern border and also separated many Germans - now, in contrast to the " Reichsdeutsche ", " Volksdeutsche " - in a foreign nation-state from the Reich. The basis for the “questions of intellectual and spatial history in the East” was the long-cherished conviction of the German cultural mission in the East, which saw the eastern settlement as the greatest achievement of medieval politics since the 11th century. The most influential exponent of this conviction was Albert Brackmann , who was closely related to the BDO and all other organizations and institutions involved in folk politics, and who tried to steer all research on the East as a "general" from the Berlin-Dahlem publications center , which is part of the Prussian Secret State Archives, until after his retirement . (See also Polish West Research .)

The following historical analysis for East Prussia shows how the BDO understood its popular political task in practice:

“Under its committed chairman Theodor Oberländer, the BDO also actively participated in the elimination of the Polish- Masurian language in East Prussia. In conjunction with the Evangelical Consistory , the BDO collected statistics on the use of the 'Masurian' language in church services in all parishes in Masuria . The aim of this survey was to prepare for the final banishment of the Masurian-Polish language from public life in Masuria. [...] The NSDAP in East Prussia, above all Theodor Oberländer and his BDO colleagues, was this circumstance a thorn in the side. With the approval of the Allenstein District President Karl Schmidt, the BDO carried out two counts of Polish church services in 1937 and 1938. But it was only after the occupation of Poland that the Gestapo implemented the BDO recommendation and on November 24, 1939, banned all Polish-language services in Masuria. A little later, on December 13, 1939, the Evangelical Consistory, a compliant instrument of the Nazi state, instructed all parishes to accept the ban, [...]. "

The lost eastern territories of the German Reich in the policy of expellees

The Federal Ministry for Expellees, Refugees and War Victims , which existed from 1949 to 1969, was headed in the 1950s and 1960s by key employees of the BDO, which disappeared at the end of the war: Theodor Oberländer (Minister from 1953 to 1960) and Hans Krüger (Minister from 1963 to 1964 ).

About the term "German East"

The term “German East” included in the BDO program meant all regions in which settlers of German origin had made their home since the Middle Ages and the “Ostsiedlung”. With the establishment of the empire in 1871, but above all after the loss of territory after the First World War , they were perceived beyond the borders of the empire and, in contrast to the "Reichsdeutsche", were soon considered "ethnic Germans" in the national consciousness. The attribute German is misleading insofar as national lines of connection between the widely dispersed German-speaking minorities were assumed and asserted, which should take shape in the term “Volksdeutsche”. This notion of " Greater Germany " terminology paved final with Nazism all the historical and geographical features between the communities of the various East-Central and Eastern European nation states population groups. The settlement in the east and further emigrations to the east up to the 19th century were not due to imperial political guidelines, but were migratory movements such as the European emigration to the USA, which became massive in the 19th century . What is said to have made the East a "German" in contrast to large areas of America is highlighted in the book "Die Helden des Deutschtums" by W. Opitz, published by Friedrich Brandstetter in Leipzig in 1906:

“Just as in our day the surplus population of the flourishing German Empire moves over to the New World in order to gain better working conditions and cheaper land for farming, so once the 10th century, but especially in the 11th to 13th centuries, crowds of settlers moved from all German districts to the Slavic area east of the Saale and Elbe. And while our current emigrants often have nothing more to do in a hurry than throwing off their nationality and adopting strange characteristics, the colonists of that time carried victorious German culture and German language across the old frontier into foreign countries; they clung to their national character and thus acquired new German territory from which the empire was to flourish again. […] The more the Slavs try to dispute the hard-won German property in the present, the more the German people must be reminded of what sacred property, inherited from the fathers, needs to be defended there today. "

Just as the General Plan Ost according to the guidelines of German national politics and Himmler's perspective of December 1942 should also refer to south- eastern and western Europe, the term “ethnic Germans” ultimately also meant Alsatians and Lorraine and all other German-speaking minorities in European countries. The East Central, East and Southeast European “Volksdeutsche” were resettled in the conquered Polish territories in 1940 or were deported by Stalin as Volga Germans in 1941 until they either fled the Red Army at the end of the war or, according to the provisions of the Potsdam Agreement, were defeated within the borders of the Germany were driven out, whereupon the "German East" ceased to exist in the form of the different settlement areas.

Since the 1950s, the term “German East” has become a “constructed place of remembrance” in the West German expellee milieu.

literature

  • Lexicon on party history. The bourgeois and petty bourgeois parties and associations in Germany (1789-1945) , Vol. 1, Leipzig 1983, pp. 308 ff.
  • Michael Burleigh : Germany Turns Eastwards. A Study of 'Ostforschung' in the Third Reich , London 2002 (first 1988).
  • Ingo Haar : Historian under National Socialism. German history and the “Volkstumskampf” in the east , Göttingen 2000.
  • Andreas Kossert : "Grenzlandpolitik" and Ostforschung on the periphery of the empire. The East Prussian Masuria 1919-1945 in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte , 51st vol., Issue 2, April 2002, pp. 117-146 ( PDF ).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Tammo Luther: Volkstumsppolitik des Deutschen Reiches 1933-1938 . Franz Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden, Stuttgart 2004. p. 165.
  2. ↑ Luther, Volkstumsppolitik , p. 153.
  3. ^ Lexicon on the history of parties. The bourgeois and petty bourgeois parties and associations in Germany (1789-1945) , Vol. 1, Leipzig 1983, pp. 308 ff.
  4. ^ Michael Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards. A Study of 'Ostforschung' in the Third Reich, London 2002 (first 1988), pp. 37-67.
  5. ^ Andreas Kossert, "Grenzlandpolitik" and Ostforschung on the periphery of the empire. The East Prussian Masuria 1919-1945, p. 142 in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, vol. 51, issue 2, April 2002, pp. 117–146.
  6. ↑ See the publisher's brochure appendix to C. Gude (ed.), Explanations of German Poetry, Leipzig 1906, p. 422. - Emphasis in the original.
  7. ↑ See Johannes Hürter, National Socialist Occupation Regime and the Racial War of Extermination in the East, in: Flucht, Vertrieb, Integration, ed. from the Foundation for the House of History of the Federal Republic of Germany, Bielefeld (Kerber) 2006, pp. 36–47.
  8. ^ Eva Hahn / Hans Henning Hahn, Flight and Expulsion, p. 343 f. in: Etienne François / Hagen Schulze (ed.), German places of memory, vol. 1, Munich (CH Beck) 2001, pp. 335–351.