[Ger-Poland-Volhynia] More on Germans in Poland

[Richard Benert]

I happen be reading a wonderful (in some ways) and dreadful (in others) book 
by one Bernhard Schwarz, "Wolhyniendeutsches Schicksal", published in 
Germany in 1942.  He was a German soldier and quite sympathetic to at least 
the cultural cause for which he was fighting--the advancement of Deutschtum. 
But Schwarz did have a remarkable ability to describe nature and tell a 
story.  I hope that someday I or someone else will be able to bring this 
book to light somehow.
Though born in Silesia, he makes one absolutely yearn for Volhynia.

But for now I offer some comments he made about the reasons why people left 
Germany for Poland.  One was overpopulation in the villages, which we all 
know about.  Then he mentions the restrictions placed on people by gild 
regulations and "Bürgerordnung" (which I take to refer to all the civic laws 
regulating just about every aspect of life from dancing on the village green 
to what you wore and how you behaved towards your betters.  If I'm wrong 
about Bürgerordnung, someone please correct me).  This is perhaps something 
we sometimes overlook.  Finally he suggests that the emigrants "knew nothing 
other than that Germany had for centuries sent its sons abroad (in die 
Fremde) because the homeland was too small (die Heimat zu eng war)."  This 
last reason is, I think, commonly assumed but not mentioned very often.  It 
was just THE THING TO DO when things got tough.  Similar, I suppose, to 
moving to the frontier in the U.S.  Except that instead of wiping out the 
native population or restricting them to reservations, the Germans, he says, 
knew that they would be living among other peoples "either in misery or in a 
patient, meager guest friendship (Gastfreundschaft)."  Evidently, Schwarz, a 
mere Wehrmacht soldier, didn't know what the Nazi bigwigs thought of these 
other peoples, and he never lived to find out.  He was killed on the Russian 
front in June, 1941. (The way he talks about Jews, however, makes one wonder 
if he would have objected very much to the "final solution".)

Dick B.