Lebensraum

[Futurist]

Except that in many (not all) cases those "local rulers" were actually Germans, who had established their own dynasties there after conquering those areas and incorporating them under the sovereignty of the Holy Roman Empire or to the State of the Teutonic Order.

What about the Piast rulers of Silesia? They were not themselves German, but they encouraged the immigration of German colonists, as did the Piast rulers of other parts of Poland.

Why exactly did these Polish rules encourage German immigration, though? In order to help stimulate economic growth? For other reasons?

[Jan-Hendrik]

I have never heart that Wolhynien, Bessarabien, Banat, Batschka etc. had 'german rulers.....or the Wolga was ruled by germans?? :roll:

Sorry Peter, that was a shot in the Knee by yourself

Jan-Hendrik

[Piotr Kapuscinski]

Except that in many (not all) cases those "local rulers" were actually Germans, who had established their own dynasties there after conquering those areas and incorporating them under the sovereignty of the Holy Roman Empire or to the State of the Teutonic Order.

What about the Piast rulers of Silesia? They were not themselves German, but they encouraged the immigration of German colonists, as did the Piast rulers of other parts of Poland.

Why exactly did these Polish rules encourage German immigration, though? In order to help stimulate economic growth? For other reasons?

Good question. Almost always when you invite immigrants, you do this to stimulate economic growth - isn't this the case also today? One reason was that - before the Black Death - Germany had a surplus of people (was overpopulated), and Poland had a shortage of people (low population density). Germany was also more modern, so immigrants were going to bring Western European innovations and solutions with them.

For example here is a good book in English which says about German settlement in Silesia (but doesn't really explain reasons!):

http://www.bibliotekacyfrowa.pl/Content ... _vol_1.pdf

http://www.bibliotekacyfrowa.pl/Content ... _vol_2.pdf

IMO German (and other - Walloon, Fleming, etc.) settlement in Piast Poland, was in many ways a similar case as that of Scotland.

Today almost all of Scotland's population speaks English (or its local dialects - e.g. Scots is actually a dialect of English). But when Scotland was founded around 843 AD, it was a fully Celtic-speaking kingdom (even though not all of the population spoke Gaelic Celtic - some groups in the south and east spoke Brythonic Celtic). It became a strong enough and centralised enough state to resist significant invasions, except for those in lightly populated fringes in the extreme north - the Northern Isles, etc. A core of the kingdom was solid from that time. No invaders subsequently permanently annexed any part of Scotland and no hostile wave of Germanic (and certainly not English) settlers happened.

The opposite thing was actually the case - Celtic Scotland annexed a large English-speaking territory after the battle of Carham in 1016 AD, and those lands became the south-eastern part of Scotland. That expansion brought for the first time a large group of English-speakers politically into the Scottish kingdom. Then - especially after 1100-1200 AD - Scottish kings invited small numbers of nobles/knights of the Anglo-Norman type tradition in order to form heavy cavalry shock troops loyal to the Scottish Crown. They also invited some urban-type settlers (including traders) and fishers of a mix of Norman, Breton, Fleming, Anglo-Saxon, French and other North-Western continental European backgrounds, presumably in order to increase the population and to help stimulate economic growth (very similar intentions as in Piast Poland).

Initially those migrants formed just scattered foreign islands in a sea of local Celtic-speakers. It was really only after 1400 (or between 1300 and 1600) that - for some reasons - Celtic language started to gradually disappear from much of Scotland, getting replaced by English language - and that eventually led to the highland-lowland division, and to a funny invertion of identity. Up until around the 1500s the main languages of Scotland were called Scottis (meaning Gaelic) and Inglis (meaning lowland Scots dialect of English). However, from around 1500 with Gaelic language retreating to the highland line and its loss of prestige relative to English, a weird invertion of identity and historical reality happened - Inglis started to be called Scottis, while Gaelic was falsely alienized by calling it Erse (Irish). So, identities morphed and turned reality on its head. However, in the case of Scotland the first waves of reduction of Gaelic to a retreating language was an internal process.

Between 843 AD and 1603 AD Scotland only suffered a handful or two years with invaders controlling parts of Scotland and none of them led to permanent settlement. The replacement of Gaelic was peaceful. Scotland kind of colonised itself culturally. Whether the change of language in Scotland was mostly cultural (i.e. local Celtic-speakers gradually adopting English language), or caused by higher natural growth rates of that "intrusive" population which entered Scotland in the High Middle Ages (but the language of which started to replace native Celtic dialects in the countryside only few centuries later) than of locals, remains debatable. Genetic evidence could shed some light on it.

By the way - a much less known fact is that there was also Late Medieval and Early Modern Era German settlement in Scandinavia - not just in Denmark but also in Norway and in South Sweden. We can call that "Nordsiedlung". It isn't as well known as "Ostsiedlung".

And those Germans became allegedly so influential in Scandinavia, that at the beginning of the 16th century a royal decree was issued establishing quotas according to which Germans could not occupy more than 50% of seats in city councils in the Kalmar Union (implying that before that decree, in at least some Scandinavian city councils migrants from the HRE had managed to take control of more than half of all seats). Southern Schleswig became actually permanently Germanized (in the Early Middle Ages ethnically Danish territory extended as far south as a line connecting the mouth of the River Eider with the Bay of Kiel - today these lands are German-speaking rather than Danish). In other parts of Scandinavia, continental settlers eventually got assimilated by local populations (speakers of Norwegian, Danish, Swedish).

I have never heart that Wolhynien, Bessarabien, Banat, Batschka etc. had 'german rulers.....or the Wolga was ruled by germans?? :roll:

Sorry Peter, that was a shot in the Knee by yourself

Jan-Hendrik

Well, good point...

But, wasn't Catherine the Great actually German? Even though born in an "ancient Slavic borough of Szczecin"... As for Transylvanian Saxons - many of them came when the Teutonic Order ruled there. There was a rather short-lived Teutonic State in Burzenland:

Here a nice documentary (but unfortunately in Polish; I'm not sure if English or German subtitles are available somewhere):

[Futurist]

There was a rather short-lived Teutonic State in Burzenland:

English-language source, please?

[sarahgoodson]

I think it's hilarious reading posts by the wannabe neo-Nazis on Stormfront claim that Lebenstraum only meant getting back the lands that were taken from Germany after WW1 by the Treaty of Versailles.

Such as this nonsense: https://www.stormfront.org/forum/t893388-7/

These people truly are thick as a brick, haha.

[Piotr Kapuscinski]

English-language source, please?

Check wikipedia first. They were invited to Hungary by King Andrew II to fight against Cumans, but later he expelled them.

Andrew II didn't like them (he said: "Teutonic Order is like fire in one's chest, like mouse in one's rucksack, like viper in one's womb").

Shortly after their expulsion from Hungary, they were invited to Poland by Duke Konrad of Mazovia to fight against Prussians.

====================

As for your questions about Medieval German immigration to Poland - here are some sources in English and German:

Benedykt Zientara, "Foreigners in Poland in the 10th - 15th centuries...":

http://rcin.org.pl/Content/13947/WA303_ ... H_01_o.pdf

P. Wiszewski, "The Long Formation of the Region Silesia (Vol. 1 c. 1000-1526)":

http://www.bibliotekacyfrowa.pl/Content ... _vol_1.pdf

Vol. 2 (1526-1740): http://www.bibliotekacyfrowa.pl/Content ... _vol_2.pdf

Andrzej Buko, "The Archaeology of Early Medieval Poland" (2008 edition):

http://brego-weard.com/lib/ns/The_Archa ... Discov.pdf

Jan M. Piskorski, "Slawen und Deutsche in Pommern in Mittelalter" (pp. 73-92):

https://books.google.pl/books?id=J3ijrz ... &q&f=false

[Futurist]

English-language source, please?

Check wikipedia first. They were invited to Hungary by King Andrew II to fight against Cumans, but later he expelled them.

Andrew II didn't like them (he said: "Teutonic Order is like fire in one's chest, like mouse in one's rucksack, like viper in one's womb").

Shortly after their expulsion from Hungary, they were invited to Poland by Duke Konrad of Mazovia to fight against Prussians.

Thank you very much for sharing this information, Peter!

As for your questions about Medieval German immigration to Poland - here are some sources in English and German:

Benedykt Zientara, "Foreigners in Poland in the 10th - 15th centuries...":

http://rcin.org.pl/Content/13947/WA303_ ... H_01_o.pdf

P. Wiszewski, "The Long Formation of the Region Silesia (Vol. 1 c. 1000-1526)":

http://www.bibliotekacyfrowa.pl/Content ... _vol_1.pdf

Vol. 2 (1526-1740): http://www.bibliotekacyfrowa.pl/Content ... _vol_2.pdf

Andrzej Buko, "The Archaeology of Early Medieval Poland" (2008 edition):

http://brego-weard.com/lib/ns/The_Archa ... Discov.pdf

Jan M. Piskorski, "Slawen und Deutsche in Pommern in Mittelalter" (pp. 73-92):

https://books.google.pl/books?id=J3ijrz ... &q&f=false

Thank you very much for sharing these links, Peter! Indeed, I will certainly make sure to take an extremely detailed look at all of the English-language links here later on.

Also, though, do you have/know of any other (preferably, but not necessarily free) English-language links about this topic, Peter? Also, to clarify--I am talking about the Ostsiedlung in general here rather than exclusively/only about the Ostsiedlung to Poland.

[WW2Researcher]

It would have been a utopia, but a German-only utopia. The local Slavic population would have either been killed, enslaved or deported in Siberia and their land would be occupied by German population.

[michael mills]

Once again a tired old mythology is being presented as if it were historical fact.

Hitler's concept of permanent German rule over conquered Soviet territory was based on British India, where a few tens of thousands of British administrators ruled over more than 100 million natives. That was a quite different concept from mass colonisation.

Himmler did order the development of grandiose plans for colonising specified areas of occupied Poland and European Russia with ethnic German settlers (not the whole of those territories), but the specialists who prepared those plans knew very well that they were pipe-dreams since there was not sufficient excess German population to provide the number of settlers required, and were not shy of telling Himmler so in a round-about way.

The most that could have been realistically achieved in terms of German colonisation of territory in the East would have been the thorough-going germanisation of the western Polish provinces annexed by Germany (Danzig-West Prussia, Wartheland, East Upper Silesia) through removal of the Polish population and the settlement of ethnic Germans in their place. However, that would have required the concentration of the entire ethnic German population of Eastern Europe in those areas, which would have resulted in the disappearance of most of the ethnic German population from Eastern Europe, as happened in historical reality after the German defeat in 1945.

Thus, if Germany had not been defeated but had retained control over Poland and European Russia, it would have been faced with an invidious choice:

1. Leave the population distribution in the conquered territories unchanged, and post some tens of thousands of German military and civilian personnel to administer those territories with the assistance of local collaborators.

2. Germanise the Polish territories lying to the immediate east of Germany by removing the native population and bringing in ethnic German settlers from the rest of Eastern Europe (eg from Eastern Poland, European Russia, Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia), at the cost of the disappearance of centuries-old German colonies in the East.

[Futurist]

The most that could have been realistically achieved in terms of German colonisation of territory in the East would have been the thorough-going germanisation of the western Polish provinces annexed by Germany (Danzig-West Prussia, Wartheland, East Upper Silesia) through removal of the Polish population and the settlement of ethnic Germans in their place. However, that would have required the concentration of the entire ethnic German population of Eastern Europe in those areas, which would have resulted in the disappearance of most of the ethnic German population from Eastern Europe, as happened in historical reality after the German defeat in 1945.

What about having Germany successfully colonize some or all of the Baltic countries, though?

Also, can you please make a similar such calculation for an Imperial Germany that would have won World War I and would have wanted to use parts of Eastern Europe (such as some or all of the Baltic countries) as Lebensraum, Michael? After all, I certainly look at both World War I and World War II when I'm looking at Lebensraum. (Yes, Lebensraum wasn't really an Imperial German war aim in World War I. However, Imperial Germany does appear to have had some (future) colonization plans for the Polish Border Strip, Estonia, Livonia, and maybe Courland during World War I.)

[michael mills]

Futurist, during the First World War some German planners attached to the German High Command in the East proposed to evacuate all the ethnic population of the Russian Empire (about two million) and concentrate it in the Baltic Provinces of Estonia, Livonia and Courland.

If that plan had been implemented, it would have resulted in the substantial germanisation of those provinces, since the German settlers would have been at least equal in number to the native population. However, it would have resulted in the disappearance of the German colonies in the rest of Russia, eg in Bessarabia, the Black Sea region, the Volga region, parts of Ukraine, Volhynia.

That is the point I was making. The ethnic German population of Eastern Europe was substantial but widely scattered, such that it did not constitute a solid majority anywhere in that area. If that entire ethnic German population could have been concentrated in one specific area, eg in the Baltic Provinces or the western part of Poland, then that one area would have been thoroughly germanised in population, but the ethnic German presence elsewhere in Eastern Europe would have been greatly reduced if not eliminated entirely.

What has happened in historical reality is that the ethnic German population that used to exist in the Russian Empire and elsewhere in Eastern Europe has indeed been concentrated in one area, but that area is the residual German state west of the Oder-Neisse Line, which is now more densely populated than previously.

A parallel might be drawn with the World Jewish population, which used to be widely scattered but is now concentrated (close to 90%) in two centres of equal size, Israel and the United States.

[Futurist]

Futurist, during the First World War some German planners attached to the German High Command in the East proposed to evacuate all the ethnic population of the Russian Empire (about two million) and concentrate it in the Baltic Provinces of Estonia, Livonia and Courland.

If that plan had been implemented, it would have resulted in the substantial germanisation of those provinces, since the German settlers would have been at least equal in number to the native population. However, it would have resulted in the disappearance of the German colonies in the rest of Russia, eg in Bessarabia, the Black Sea region, the Volga region, parts of Ukraine, Volhynia.

Would most of these ethnic Germans and their descendants have actually been willing to stay in the Baltic states, though? After all, couldn't the Ostflucht eventually affect these ethnic Germans as well, thus causing many, if not most, of these ethnic Germans and their descendants to leave the Baltic states and to move to the more industrialized western parts of Germany?

Indeed, any thoughts on this, Michael?

That is the point I was making. The ethnic German population of Eastern Europe was substantial but widely scattered, such that it did not constitute a solid majority anywhere in that area. If that entire ethnic German population could have been concentrated in one specific area, eg in the Baltic Provinces or the western part of Poland, then that one area would have been thoroughly germanised in population, but the ethnic German presence elsewhere in Eastern Europe would have been greatly reduced if not eliminated entirely.

Yes; correct! Indeed, if one wants to successfully fill a large amount of Lebensraum (living space) like the U.S. did, then one needs to consistently have a high total fertility rate and/or to consistently have large-scale immigration. While the U.S. had one or both of these things throughout the overwhelming majority of its history, Nazi Germany doesn't appear to have had either of these two things.

Of course, what might be the unpredictable factor here is this: Would Nazi Germany have been able to gradually Germanize millions or even tens of millions of "racially suitable" non-Germans?

Indeed, any thoughts on this, Michael?

What has happened in historical reality is that the ethnic German population that used to exist in the Russian Empire and elsewhere in Eastern Europe has indeed been concentrated in one area, but that area is the residual German state west of the Oder-Neisse Line, which is now more densely populated than previously.

Yes; correct! In turn, this shows that Adolf Hitler's belief that Germany lacked Lebensraum was more imaginary than real (as in, based on reality).

A parallel might be drawn with the World Jewish population, which used to be widely scattered but is now concentrated (close to 90%) in two centres of equal size, Israel and the United States.

Didn't most of the World's Jewish population live in Central and Eastern Europe in the early 19th century, though? If so, then I would like to point out that the U.S. probably currently has about as many people as Eastern Europe (including European Russia) currently has. In turn, wouldn't this mean that there was previously one big center (Central and Eastern Europe) of World Jewry whereas there are now two such centers (Israel and the U.S.)?

Also, though, I would like to point out that the demographic losses that Germany endured as a result of World War II (specifically the loss of about 10% of its total population) cannot be compared to the demographic losses that World Jewry endured as a result of the Holocaust (specifically the loss of about 35% of its total population).

[Futurist]

However, you are right/correct on one point, Michael--as far as I know, with the possible exception of some villages, cities, and urban areas, Jews didn't make up a majority of the population in any part of the world in 1800 or even in 1900. Of course, this certainly changed when millions of Jews immigrated to Palestine/Israel and thus (well, with the help of a large-scale exodus of the Palestinian Arab population in 1948-1949) caused the present-day territory of Israel to have an extremely large Jewish-majority population. Indeed, while Israel's current population is about 75% Jewish (or about 80% Jewish if one doesn't strictly use Jewish law when determining who exactly is a Jew), this percentage might very well increase to 85% or even to 90+% if the Arab-majority areas in the Galilee, Golan Heights, East Jerusalem, and central Israel are excluded from this calculation:

[Futurist]

Also, can you please answer this question of mine, Michael? :

http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 1&t=220518

After all, I am certainly extremely curious if any other countries which didn't manage to do this in real life would have realistically been able to do what the U.S. did in regards to settling extremely large amounts of Lebensraum (living space):

[michael mills]

Would most of these ethnic Germans and their descendants have actually been willing to stay in the Baltic states, though? After all, couldn't the Ostflucht eventually affect these ethnic Germans as well, thus causing many, if not most, of these ethnic Germans and their descendants to leave the Baltic states and to move to the more industrialized western parts of Germany?

That is quite possible, and indeed likely. After all, the Baltic Germans who were repatriated from Estonia and Latvia in 1939-40 were very disappointed to find themselves settled in the annexed Polish provinces rather than in Germany proper, where they had wanted to go.

Of course, what might be the unpredictable factor here is this: Would Nazi Germany have been able to gradually Germanize millions or even tens of millions of "racially suitable" non-Germans?

I personally doubt it, since there was a lot of resistance to germanisation by Alsatians, Poles and Danes. Perhaps a million or so non-Germans might have been successfully germanised, but the historical reality is that when the modern German state ruled over non-Germans it failed to reconcile the majority of them to German rule, even German-speakers such as the Alsatians.

Yes; correct! In turn, this shows that Adolf Hitler's belief that Germany lacked Lebensraum was more imaginary than real (as in, based on reality).

I think what most concerned Hitler was that although Germany had produced a large population surplus in the 19th Century, most of it, several millions, had been lost through emigration, mainly to the United States. He considered that the reason for that large-scale emigration was Germany's inability to provide living space for the increased population.