[Ger-Poland-Volhynia] Use of the Deutsche Volksliste after 1945

[Richard Benert]

untitledHere is the article I promised in my previous posting.  It deals with
problems associated with claims to German identity by people who emigrated
from Poland to Germany after WW II (among other things).  In about the tenth
paragraph, he gets to discussing the Deutsche Volksliste and its use up to
about 1990.  I don't know how many of our readers are personally concerned
with this recent migration, but I assume some are.  Even if this doesn't bear
on one's personal family, however, it's interesting stuff.  Unfortunately,
it's written in pretty stilted "Academese", so be prepared to struggle with it
at some points.  I've also included his bibliography at the end, in case
anyone wants to pursue this further.  Thanks again to Lonnie Scallen, who
clued me into joining her web search on "Deutsche Volksliste".  This search
turns up still other items, but this is the most interesting one that I've
found.

Dick Benert
Remembering and Forgetting as Modes of Survival:
the Manipulation of Ethnicity across the River Oder
Robert Parkin
[I have snipped the opening paragraphs.  They deal mostly with the currently
fashionable topic of "historical memory"]


In the rest of this paper, I will offer an account of ethnic manipulation in
the interests either of crossing the German-Polish border or of staying on one
or the other side of it in the post-war period, as well as saying something
about the ethnic cross-stereotyping that has accompanied such movements. I
have divided the account into two broad sections, the first dealing with the
post-war expulsions of Germans from Poland and German popular and official
reactions to it, the second with those who have elected to migrate to Germany
subsequently, and in some cases to return to Poland again. While the first is,
as already indicated, therefore historical, the second is principally an
ethnographic account relating to the late 1980s and early 1990s, when I was
resident in both Germany and Poland.

German Expellees in West Germany

After the war, border changes deprived Poland of the eastern territories which
had been taken over by the Soviet Union in 1940, while she acquired
territories from Germany as compensation. This entailed mass expulsions of all
supposed Germans who did not accompany the retreat of the German army. A
considered estimate (Urban 1994: 56-7) is that about seven million people were
expelled from the annexed territories, plus a further 1.3 million from within
the pre-war Polish borders. Despite this tremendous upheaval, 1.1 million are
estimated to have stayed behind in 1945 who could have qualified for German
citizenship.

In order to weed out as many Germans as possible, the Polish authorities
instituted a verification process (verificacja), in which dubious individuals
had to prove their Polishness to the authorities by, for example,
demonstrating their fluency in the language. To begin with, although there
were differences between regional authorities, the process was strictly, even
vengefully carried out, no distinction of class or political opinion being
taken into consideration: even Germans who had belonged to the resistance to
Hitler were expelled (ibid.: 7, 15). However, by the late 1940s the
authorities were changing tack, encouraging as many candidates as possible to
apply for Polish citizenship in order to boost the population figures in the
newly annexed areas (ibid.: 17). Even then, there was a refusal rate of about
ten percent.

One of the characteristics of the second world war was the extent to which the
ethnic identity one assumed or was recognized by could determine one's chances
of physical survival. This was not entirely a feature of Naziism. To the
notorious cases of Jews, Poles and often Russians can be added the lesser
known ones of the many Latvians and Estonians who claimed Germanness in order
to escape creeping Soviet rule after the fourth partition of Poland of 1939/40
(Lumans 1993: 160). Nor did this cease with the ending of the war. While it
was official post-war Polish policy to expel Germans, not kill them, in
practice the expulsions entailed great risks, and some 1.2 million people are
thought to have lost their lives as a result. Beyond that, ethnicity was
important as a means of ending up where one wanted to be. As we have seen,
proving Polishness was for long necessary if one wanted to stay in the
country. In 1945, this was not necessarily considered undesirable: although
Poland's infrastructure had been largely destroyed in the war, for a time it
still seemed a better economic prospect than a destroyed, divided Germany
swollen with refugees and likely to be under foreign occupation for years to
come, its eastern factories already being dismantled and trundled off to the
Soviet Union. Only as the 1950s economic miracle took hold in Germany did this
perception change. Conversely, those who actually wished to go to Germany in
1945 could only gain entry as Germans. Nor did this situation apply solely to
the west of Poland. An equally large number of migrants were on the move in
the east too, from areas taken over by the Soviet Union. Their entry into
Poland similarly depended on ethnicstatus, and on hiding any Ukrainian,
Lithuanian etc. background.

In the post-war period, this situation has contributed to Polish
cross-stereotyping between different regions, on the basis of which can be
considered the most Polish. It is difficult to challenge the Polishness of
Masovia, the region around Warsaw in the heart of the country. But Poznan,
even though the earliest Polish capital is near by, at Gniesno, is often
considered very German, its inhabitants supposedly being harder working and
more orderly than elsewhere in Poland. This representation amounts to
forgetting the important role played by Poznan in anti-German resistance
before the first world war, though the attitude has a long history, marked by
Pilsudski's suspicion of the loyalty of the area after that war. Similarly,
the far west of Poland, to which many eastern migrants were sent in 1945, is
variously seen as German or Ukrainian, the latter conceptualization meaning
that Poland's ethnic geography has become mixed up, its west becoming its
east, so to speak. This is one basis for the contestedness of ethnic claims,
to which I will return.

It is worth remarking at this point on the perhaps better-recognized problems
of westward-moving refugees in being recognized as Germans in the rump
Germany. It is clear that they bore the full brunt of Polish and Soviet
revenge after the war, more so than the inhabitants of the Altreich (cf.
Schieder 1960: 15-16). One recent book (de Zayas 1993) explicitly seeks to
establish their credentials as victims of the war, going so far as to envisage
an agreed return of some lost territory some time in the future as recognition
of this. More straightforwardly anthropological is Lehmann's study (1993), his
opinions, when they do make themselves felt (e.g. ibid.: 76), leaning towards
what he identifies as a common West German feeling, namely that although the
expulsions were unjust, they were the result of German crimes against Poland.
Whatever happened in the past, the cycle of revenge must be broken by
accepting the present situation.

Although on the whole the refugees managed to become integrated and to achieve
varying degrees of success in the new Federal Republic, there was nonetheless
the potential for conflict between them and the settled population. The latter
often saw the refugees as Poles, Russians, Romanians or Gypsies, depending on
area of origin, as superstitious, backward, etc., and generally cast doubts
and aspertions on their claims to being proper Germans (Lehmann 1993: 49,
170ff., 235; Schmalstieg 1990: 156-7). The older term Volksdeutscher came to
be associated with, and then in popular discourse replaced with,
Beutedeutscher (cf. English 'booty') or Auch-Deutscher ('would-be German'),
though in official discourse they remained Vertriebene ('expellees'). Here, as
Lehmann makes clear, a popular racism survived the discrediting of Naziism,
leading at least to the deprecation of the refugees as of mixed origins. The
arrival of Gastarbeiter in the 1960s improved things somewhat for refugees, in
that this re-directed popular dislike away from them somewhat. For the
refugees too, these newcomers, who were mostly from southern Europe and the
Balkans, occupied a lower position down the hierarchy, broadly speaking the
position they themselves had occupied previously. As a consequence, they lost
some of the feeling that they were foreigners in what had become their own
land (ibid.: 68, 175).

Thus categories applied to the refugees by others came to be transferred by
those refugees on to yet other categories of people who arrived later (cf.
Lehmann 1993: 178-9). This aided their own identification with the Federal
Republic. On the one hand, their new home in Germany was presented in a good
light (ibid.: 33), in order to increase their identification with it in the
eyes of others. Another part of this process, however, was to adopt the same
attitudes to Gastarbeiter, Spdtaussiedler ('late migrants', who came of their
own accord in the 1950s and later), black labour from Poland etc. as the
indigenous population (ibid.: 32-3, 176ff.). Expellees compared the official
willingness to accept these categories with their own difficulties with
elements of the indigenous population after the war. The involuntary removal
of the expellees and their generally recognized contribution to the post-war
economic miracle were also compared favourably with the voluntary, supposedly
largely economically driven motivation of the other categories in wishing to
seek settlement in Germany. Spdtaussiedler from Poland were especially
regarded with some disgust, since they tended to be seen as people who became
Polish immediately after the war in order to be able to avoid expulsion from
what seemed at the time more favourable economic conditions. When the Polish
economy collapsed, it is said, these very same people came over to Germany to
improve their economic conditions once again. Here,one's own consistency and
loyalty to Deutschtum ('Germanness') was compared with the fickleness and
opportunism of the newcomers. Language was another sore point: true Germans
should speak German, something many of the Spdtaussiedler could hardly do, so
that the German government had to spend public money providing them with
courses (ibid.: 182; also Otto 1990: 52-3).

In the official context too, the question that chiefly arose is who exactly
qualified as German. West and East German officialdom answered this question
quite differently (Bornemann 1992: 81). Theoretically, anyone who accepted the
socialist message could become a citizen of East Germany, but for West Germany
'Germanness' ( 4Deutschtum 5) was above all important, as enshrined in Article
116 Paragraph 1 of the West German constitution. This defined a German
initially through citizenship and then through the concept of
Volkszugehvrigkeit (lit. 'belonging to the people') in the case of refugees
from the east (Urban 1994: 18-19; Otto 1990: 55). The vagueness of this
definition led to a practical reliance on descent, mediated through a notion
of blood. This was aggravated by the poor or non-existence knowledge of the
German language of many migrants: although Volkszugehvrigkeit could officially
be defined through language, having had a German upbringing, having German
culture and so on, lack of the first effectively ruled out the other two.

This West German reliance on blood as a determinant of Deutschtum had obvious
continuities with the Nazi period. There was a similar desire to make the area
of German settlement coordinate with German political rule. This could now
only be achieved by bringing Germans abroad back to the homeland, not by
conquest. However, even this is less of a contrast than it seems: Hitler's
early policy, before the launch of Operation Barbarossa, often had to be very
similar, for strategic reasons. These post-war migrants were not immigrants in
the official view, because they were supposedly identical ethnically with the
home population. Moreover, even acknowledging one's Germanness in official
documents was seen as inheritable, in that the children and grandchildren of
those registered in them were also eligible for entry into West Germany (Otto
1990: 49). Although this reliance on blood was widely rejected by a younger
generation from the 1960s onwards, most vocally but not entirely by those on
the radical left (Bornemann 1992: 282-3), it conforms with what is still
perhaps the most common folk model (Forsythe 1989). One result of this
official position has been that Volksdeutsche from the eastern bloc have
enjoyed a much more secure and privileged status in the Federal Republic than
foreigners who have settled or even been born in there, let alone asylum
seekers (cf. Bornemann 1993: 307; Diedrich 1993: 38).

Another continuity was the fact that Nazi documentation was used for many
decades by the West German immigration authorities in deciding cases of
migrants from Poland in particular. One of the main forms of Nazi
documentation used was the so-called Deutsche Volksliste (DVL), established as
a register of who in the conquered population of Poland could be considered
German and therefore useful and who not and therefore dispensible. It should
be remembered here that German policy towards Poland's population not only
entailed the ultimate destruction of the Jews, but also the reduction of the
Poles themselves to virtual slave status by deliberately killing off their
political, cultural and religious leaders and other elites and depriving them
of all but the most basic education. Because of the country's ethnically mixed
population before 1945, the DVL was created to identify not only ethnic
Germans - who were covered by the first two of its four categories - but also
what Himmler and the SS called the eindeutschungsfdhig ('those capable of
becoming German'). These basically consisted of individuals who were regarded
as either polonized Germans or germanized Poles. Unlike members of the first
two categories, those in Category III were considered suspect in either racial
or political terms, only acceptable once they had been deported to the
Altreich and retrained in being proper Germans. The last, fourth category was
reserved for individuals who were supposedly ethnically German, but who had
shown themselves to be politically anti-German or anti-Nazi in the ethnic
struggles of inter-war Poland. Their usual fate was the concentration camp.
Enrollment on one of the first three lists was long accepted as proof of
Germanness by the authorities of the Federal Republic (Bornemann 1993: 308;
Lehmann 1993: 179; Otto 1990: 33; Otto ed. 1990: 187). In practice Category
III, the most ambiguous one, was most relevant in this context. Members of
Categories I and II must generally be assumed to have been able to find refuge
in Germany during the retreat of 1944-5, while members of Category IV mostly
suffered extermination. Other Nazi documentation accepted by the West German
immigration authorities included Germany army and SS identity cards
(Tagezeitung, 17/1/1989).

The numbers of those applying on any of these grounds were modest up to
1988-9, after which the progressive falling away of travel restrictions in
eastern Europe led to a flood of applicants - 370,000 in 1988-9 (ibid.). The
West German authorities would also accept people on the basis of their having
German forbears or at least a German grandfather from before 1914, whom Polish
commentators called, in ironic reference to the Nazi period, the 'Aryan
grandfather'. Although proving one's Germanness was formally required, before
1989 language and other tests were often applied perfunctorily, if at all.
Acceptance as an Aussiedler automatically brought acceptance of close family
members too, even if not of provable German descent, in the interests of
keeping families together (Urban 1994: 20). Although the German authorities
justified this as an obligation under international law, emigration could
actually represent a splitting up of families, some members of which would
frequently actually be left behind in Poland. Here is another example of the
gap between Western cold-war rhetoric and Eastern representations of reality
in this period (cf. Bornemann 1993: 181; Kurcz 1991). Not unexpectedly, the
desire to leave Poland for West Germany was strong enough to stimulate a black
market in both genuine and forged personal documents. Those who needed
recourse to such methods would come to becalled 'Helmut' in Polish slang,
after Helmut Schmidt, whose 1975 agreement with Gierek led to the exit of
another 125,000 individuals. Another tactic, especially for women, was simply
marriage to a 'German', which often meant someone who had only recently been
accepted as of German descent by the West German authorities. In this way,
many individuals acquired both Polish and West German papers, and in effect
dual citizenship, something they took advantage of to peddle trade back and
forth across the border as part of the growing shadow economy. According to
German figures, anything between 300,000 and 700,000 people may have both sets
of papers today, contrary to German though no longer Polish law (Urban 1994:
20-1, 23-4; on the shadow economy, Irek 1998).

This laxness by the authorities in accepting individuals as Germans was ended
by legal changes made in July 1990, passed in an atmosphere of growing public
concern over the numbers of immigrants entering the country generally.
Applicants now have to satisfy the authorities of their knowledge of German
and of the fact that they had suffered discrimination because of their
Germanness in their home country. In addition, they must await the outcome of
their application in the home country and not in Germany. Above all, it has
become much more difficult to gain acceptance through one's own or one's
forbears' enrolment in Category III of the DVL. As a result of these changes,
the numbers arriving went down from 250,000 in 1989 to 40,000 in 1991, and
have decreased still further since then. Other reasons given for this
reduction are the easing of travel restrictions between the two countries, the
recognition that there is a German minority by the Polish government, and the
pensions agreement between the two states, whereby Polish citizens who come to
live in Germany no longer receive German but Polish pensions, which are
smaller (Urban 1994: 22-3).

At this point, we return back over the border, to take up the story of the
expulsions and migration from that side. The return of Gomulka to power in
1956 signalled a thaw in Polish political life, an event which also coincided
with post-war disillusionment with Soviet control and the first spring shoots
of Germany's economic miracle. Some 400,000 people resettled from Poland to
Germany between then and the introduction of the state of emergency in 1981,
this being part of the regime's policy to solve minority problems by
encouraging free exit of their members, a reversal of policy from the late
1940s. Other reasons for allowing freer movement out of the country were the
need for West German credit, the desire to lower the chronic unemployment
figures, and the recognition that many who left to work abroad brought back or
remitted much needed foreign exchange (Urban 1994: 19-20). Even under the
state of emergency, the outflow by no means ceased, some 600,000 leaving in
the 1980s, leaving some Upper Silesian villages practically depopulated
(ibid.: 91-6).

Not even this outflow, however, has denuded Poland of those whose own view of
their ethnic identity was that it was not Polish. This is most strikingly true
of Silesia. The question here is, to what extent is it German or actually
Silesian? The numbers involved are the first problem. Figures for remaining
'Germans' in 1989 ranged from 1.1 million (Bund der Vertriebenen) to 200,000
(German Red Cross) to 2,500 or zero, depending on which Polish official
figures one consulted. The newly founded Deutsche Freundschaftskreise could
boast altogether 300,000 members in the early 1990s (Urban 1994: 12). Many of
these groups appear to have existed solely to bolster proof of their members'
Germanness for purposes of migration, slowly but almost automatically
dissolving as their members left for Germany. Polish commentators have
persistently had difficulties in accepting these people as German. Rather,
they prefer to talk of a separate Silesian identity, or of germanized Poles,
or of a dialect group, Wasserpolnisch (Slonsak). The bases of claims to a
Silesian identity are partly linguistic, in that Wasserpolnisch is derived
from Old Polish, but they also lie in the fact that many if not most of the
minority have distinctly Slavonic surnames (ibid.: 12-13; Peuckert 1950: 352).
The latter is also true, however, of thousands of otherwise thoroughly German
citizens born and bred in Germany,
not to mention nineteenth-century Prussians and many of Hitler's officers and
officials.

Similar claims have been made in relation to other minorities in
twentieth-century Poland. One example are the Masurans of north-central
Poland, who also speak a supposedly archaic Slavonic dialect related directly
to High Polish but who have at times been claimed to be Germans on the basis
of their protestantism. A recent German study (Rogall 1992) sees them as
descendants of the original, i.e. Slavonic Prussians, Poles from around Warsaw
and German, Dutch and Swiss settlers, their own claims to Germanness arising
because this is connected with good conditions and advancement. However,
Masuran labour migrants into pre-world war I Germany, who felt themselves to
be German, were often inscribed as Poles in official documents. Another
example are the Kashubans of Pomerania, another separate but Slavonic dialect
group. A third are the Sorbs or Wends (Serbs), a Slavonic-speaking group of
Lausitz, eastern Germany. All these groups and the areas they live in,
including the last, have been the basis of Polish claims to sovereignty, while
to German commentators, whatever their origins, what is important is that they
are germanized (Urban 1994: 12-14). The Masurans mostly left Poland in the
late 1950s and settled in West Germany, including many who had been accepted
as Poles by the post-war verification commissions (ibid.: 81).

Such debates have a long history in academia (especially in history and
ethnology) as well as in political life and ethnic conflicts between Poles and
Germans. The days of the crudity and hectoring of Nazi wartime foundations
such as the Institut f|r Deutsche Ostarbeit at Cracow are long past as far as
the former arena is concerned. Increasingly, one tactic has been to use the
concept of a minority in order to deny a particular ethnic affiliation to the
opposite side. From the Polish point of view, one of the virtues of claiming
the existence of a separate Silesian identity which is neither German nor
Polish is that an ethnic separatism can be recognized without accepting German
claims to it. There are similar examples from the German side, such as the
Masurans cited above. This may not be deliberate propaganda, but nonetheless,
in their enthusiasm for establishing checklists of German and Slavic
minorities in Poland, both sides have tended to pursue a certain essentialism,
ignoring the right and ability of the people concerned to choose their own
ethnicities and, what is more, to choose to change them. The more distanced
and nuanced commentaries recognize this, though often only over time: thus the
Polish sociologist Zbigniew Kurcz has noted the passing in and out of
Germanness by the same Silesian families, generation after generation,
depending on political and economic fortunes (1991).

The Current and Recent Ethnographic Situation

In this final section, I will continue to view matters from the Polish point
of view, bringing the story up to date as far as possible. At this point
history becomes less salient, and we can begin to use at least the
ethnographic present. The main focus will be on the migration of Polish
citizens into the German city, now officially capital again, of Berlin. This
concerns those whom German officialdom would regard as Spdtaussiedler and to
whom many Poles give the ironically loaded label '120% Germans'.

[I've snipped the rest of this, even though it's very interesting stuff, on
the assumption that it would concern very few of our readers.   Anyone wishing
to read the rest can find it at
http://www.ukc.ac.uk/anthropology/staff/robert/oder.html  ]

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