National Socialism in Contested German Borderlands, 1922-1933

Abstract

This dissertation examines how the special conditions of Weimar Germany's contested borderlands shaped the activities and evolution in them of the ascendant Nazi movement. For this comparative project, it draws on material from five regions – Upper Silesia, the Border Province Posen-West Prussia, Masuria, eastern Pomerania, and Schleswig – that between them encapsulate the diversity, in geographic location and in the fluidity of ethnic and national dividing lines, of the country's borderlands. It opens with a discussion of how reportedly formative experiences of the borders' vulnerability before, during, and just after the First World War influenced later Nazi activists' political trajectories. The second chapter shows how Nazis colonized the commemoration of post-war military and plebiscitary border struggles so as to associate their movement with those events' prestige. Chapter three analyzes other borderland-specific forms of propaganda. The fourth chapter looks more closely at the contradictory claims Nazi borderland propaganda made about the association between race and nation. On the one hand, the movement viewed this relationship as coextensive and fixed, from which it followed that the borderlands were theatres of conflict between well-defined and all-encompassing peoples. On the other, Nazi activists in the borderlands relaxed a hard-and-fast racial determinism that they understood to be impracticable for their political, irredentist work. The fifth chapter focuses on political violence of an ethno-nationalist nature, committed to quell the possibility of further foreign claims on German land. The sixth chapter explores Nazis' conflict and cooperation about border matters with the government and the wider far right. The final chapter surveys the reception of Nazism’s borderland activism by non-Germans and by ethnic Germans across the border. The rising Nazi movement, it overall emerges, engaged actively with concerns and resentments common in regions where Germany's post-war territorial losses constituted an acute, immediate reality.