Saxons

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Sachsengangers are German farm workers who left the agricultural regions of the East Elbe in the German Empire in order to find better paid work in the West. At first these farm workers worked in the Saxon sugar industry.

Sequelae

During the German Empire, a migration in Prussia from east to west of the Saxons (so-called east-west migration) established itself. The farm workers in the rural provinces of East Prussia , West Prussia and Posen left their region and found acceptance mainly in the sugar beet growing areas and in the better-paid industrial locations , e.g. B. in Upper Silesia , Saxony , in Berlin and especially in the Ruhr area . In order to compensate for the vacant and cheaply paid jobs, the East Elbe landowners recruited Polish workers from Russia and Austria . In order to counter the feared " Polonization ", Prussia developed a restrictive immigration policy. The settlement of those entering via Berlin was banned. The migrant workers were not allowed to stay in winter, also known as the waiting period . Only unmarried men and women were allowed to work as seasonal workers ; pregnant women were deported. In the central and western provinces, only farming was allowed.

A further tightening took place in 1909 when the domestic legitimation requirement was imposed .

The city ​​of Auschwitz , which belongs to the Austro-Hungarian monarchy , also built a barrack camp for the Saxons in 1916. This camp for around 12,000 Saxon citizens from Galicia consisted of 22 brick houses and 90 wooden barracks. The SS expanded this into the Auschwitz I concentration camp (main camp) during World War II .

literature

  • Deutsches Historisches Museum Berlin : Germany as a Land of Immigration - Migrations 1500–2005 . exhibition
  • Sybille Steinbacher : Auschwitz: History and Post-History. Verlag CH Beck , Munich 2004, ISBN 3-406-50833-2
  • Sybille Steinbacher: "Model Town" Auschwitz: Germanization Policy and the Murder of Jews in Eastern Upper Silesia. In: Institute for Contemporary History (Ed.): Representations and sources on the history of Auschwitz. KG Saur, Munich 2000, Volume 2, ISBN 3-598-24031-7
  • Manuela Obermeier: Die Sachsengänger: Migrant workers in beet cultivation, 1850 to 1915. Bartens, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-87040-069-2
  • A. Trunz: Citizenship , Hugo Voigt Verlag, Leipzig 1910, p. 111 ff.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Felix Bohr, Cordula Meyer, Klaus Wiegrefe : "Everyone noticed that" . Der Spiegel 35/2014, pp. 36–40.