Peter K wrote:Austrian historian Erik Maria Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn in his book "Die falsh gestellten Weichen: Der rote faden 1789-1984", writes that the best border solutions after WW1 would have been:
- give Grenzmark Posen-Westpreussen (that area of 7.695 km2 shown above) to Poland
How about simply holding a plebiscite there, though?
- give Danzig to Poland (instead of creating a Free City there), ignoring ethnic structure
That I am actually tempted to agree with!
After all, Danzig appears to have been
much more important for Poland than it was for Germany.
- create Upper Silesia as a Polish-German condominium instead of partitioning the region
Wouldn't both Germany and Poland have opposed this, though?
When it comes to East Prussia, separated from the rest of Germany by Polish territory - von Kuehnelt-Leddihn compared it to Alaska, separated from the rest of the USA by Canadian territory.
Good analogy (other than for the fact that, unlike Alaska, I consider East Prussia to be a "gateway" to eastern Lebensraum for Germany
).
He also wrote: "probably it would have been better, if East Prussia was incorporated to Poland as well".
Well, at the very least, this probably
wouldn't have created a German demographic problem for Poland like the annexation of the Sudetenland arguably did for the Czech Republic. Indeed, maybe Germany should have received some/most/all (depending on whether or not Austria is annexed to Germany) of the Sudetenland from Austria while losing
all of East Prussia to Poland. After all, this would have certainly resulted in nicer and cleaner borders for Germany.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_von_Kuehnelt-Leddihn
Erik Maria Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (born July 31, 1909 in Tobelbad (now Haselsdorf-Tobelbad), Austria-Hungary; died May 26, 1999, in Lans, Austria) was an Austrian Catholic nobleman and socio-political theorist. Describing himself as an "extreme conservative arch-liberal" or "liberal of the extreme right", Kuehnelt-Leddihn often argued that majority rule in democracies is a threat to individual liberties, and declared himself a monarchist and an enemy of all forms of totalitarianism.[1]
Thanks for sharing this link with us, Peter!