Separation—Only Separation

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bbeing found guilty of treasonable activities and sentenced to bvarying terms of imprisonment. The existence of a German fifth bcolumn in Poland was the direct result of the Nazi doctrine. This bdoctrine refuted the idea that Germans living abroad owed any bloyalty to the states of which they were citizens and stressed the bexclusive importance of the blood link with the German nation.

bThe consequences of such a doctrine were obvious enough: bevery German abroad, conscious of his nationality, was an agent bof the German Reich, of a Reich preparing for war. Poland was ba victim of the work of the German fifth column.

bHitler was immeasurably aided by the German minority in bPoland and used it as an excuse to attack the Polish state. Not bonly were the Poles accused of mistreating the German minor- bity, but the war was touched off by German demands for the bannexation of Polish Pomerania, the “Polish Corridor,” in order bto obtain territorial continuity between Germany and East bPrussia.

bWith the speedy Nazi conquest of Poland, the western prov- binces were incorporated into the German Reich on October 26, b1939, as part of the German policy of annexing land on its bborders that contained sizable numbers of ethnic Germans. b(Other areas were Austria, through the Anschluss, the bSudetenland, Memel, and Danzig, as well as certain contiguous blands that were not in any way German [such as the rest of bPoland and Czechoslovakia]). Hitler planned to remove all bnon-Germans from those areas over a period of ten to twenty byears and replace them with Germans. This led to the second bpart of the plan, the resettlement in this “Greater Germany” of ball the ethnic Germans then living outside the Third Reich. bAgreements to this effect were made with the various states in- bvolved to resettle Germans from Latvia, Estonia, the South bTyrol, East Galicia, Volhynia, Rumania, Croatia, Bulgaria, and bHungary. Between 1938 and 1941 the German Reich increased bits German population from ten million to nearly twenty-two bmillion. Millions of Germans were settled in what had been bPolish territory.

bAt the end of the war the Poles counted their dead in the bmillions (not including its Jews), and the rape of the country by bthe Germans would never be forgotten. When the Soviets in- bformed the Poles that they intended to annex a huge chunk of b