The German Question, Part One Hundred Thirty-Eight

"Hitler Rules Germany" Part Two/C
"Germany In World War Two" Part One/D
"War Comes To Europe" Part Four

Besides the reincorporation of Danzig into Germany, the defeat of Poland also brought formerly German-ruled* areas back into Germany. The thing was, with the exception of Danzig itself, which had an overwhelming German population, most of the areas outside of Danzig; that is, the so called "Polish Corridor," had a Polish majority, with the overall Polish majority in the area, again, not counting Danzig, being at least two to one Polish.** Posen and that general area was also taken over, and it too was overwhelmingly Polish, but with some German populated enclaves. This area had been overwhelmingly Polish even when it had been a part of Germany up until the end of World War One. Some areas, again with Polish majorities, were also tacked onto East Prussia. Some very small part of Silesia that had become part of the reconstituted Poland did have some local German majorities, but Hitler took more than those areas, he took the Polish majority areas too. It is important to note, after these various areas became part of Poland, many, but not all, Germans gradually left for Germany. You may quite logically wonder why Hitler would take in so many non-Germans, after preaching about gathering Germans into his Reich. It is also very important to know that Poland was home to about three and one half million Jews, although the largest part of the Jewish population lived in the areas annexed to the Soviet Union.*** Still, with about a half million or so Jews then coming under Nazi rule, the potential consequences were ominous. The tragic answer would come in the very near future for both Jews and Poles.

* I'm using the term "German-ruled" to indicate that many of these areas did NOT have a German majority population.

** This is one of the reasons why people in the British and French governments questioned Poland's decline of Hitler's offer over Danzig and the Corridor (see Part 131 and Part 134 for more info) especially when he consented to a plebiscite in the Corridor territories, as it was no secret that most of the area was Polish. Hitler was conceding the Corridor, or at least the overwhelming majority of it, to Poland. Now, would Hitler have honored this? We'll never really know, but "if" he was aiming for a German-Polish alliance against the Soviet Union, he probably would have honored it, at least until he didn't need Poland anymore. Further, Hitler publicly laid out the basic proposal he had made to Poland in his speech to the Reichstag of April 28, 1939. If Poland had accepted, would Hitler then have torn up the agreement after having gone so public? Again, we'll never know, but this was a man who had a sort of "tin ear" to international public opinion, and even German public opinion, although the latter was difficult to gauge. Unlike democratically elected leaders who have to keep some degree of public sentiment in mind about policies, Hitler, while he frequently "claimed" to be acting because of German public opinion, how the hell would anyone really know what German public opinion was during his regime? His domestic security agents (that is "spies") made reports about German public opinion, and he had to know that the possibility of war did NOT excite many Germans, but we have to remember, Hitler, through propaganda guru Goebbels and the strictly controlled German press and radio, could manufacture public opinion however he wanted it to come out. The only thing is, this then became delusional, because it was not real, but in such a rigid police state, who was going to object?

*** The Russian Empire had controlled large areas of eastern Poland, including Warsaw. When Poland was reconstituted at the end of World War One, Russia, the then emerging Soviet Union, was in turmoil from civil war, as the Bolsheviks tried to stamp out the last vestiges of resistance to their takeover. These Polish areas became part of the new Poland, but Poland and the Soviets got into a war which ended in 1921, and Poland took a chunk of territory from what were then known as "White Russia" and from the western Ukraine. The area also contained a substantial Jewish population. Some historians argue Poland needed a "buffer" area between itself and its large eastern neighbor, the Soviet Union. Others feel the Poles made a terrible mistake by overreaching and that eventually the Soviets would come back to retake the lost territories, which is indeed what happened.

WORD HISTORY:
Slay-Like its relative "slaughter," this verb goes back to Indo European "slak," with the idea of "hit, strike, beat." This gave the Old Germanic spinoff "slakhanan," also with the meaning "hit, strike, beat," but also the extended meaning "to kill," from the notion of "hitting/beating someone until dead." This gave Anglo-Saxon (Old English) "slean," with the same general meanings. Later it became "sleen," and "slayen," before the modern spelling. While the "hit, strike" meaning was overtaken by the word "hit," leaving "slay" with the meaning "kill," its derivative "slug," retains the original sense of "hit, strike." "Slay's" various forms are common in the other Germanic languages as well, where the basic word has retained the "hit, strike" meaning^: German has "schlagen," which kept the original sense "hit, strike," but it is used in many German compounds with a much broader meaning. Low Saxon German has "Schlagg," a noun form, meaning "strike, hit." Dutch and West Frisian have "slaan," Swedish, Norwegian and Danish all have slå; and Icelandic has slá; again, all with the meaning "hit, strike." 

^ German, however, has the prefixed verb "erschlagen" and the compound verb "totschlagen" which mean "to slay, to kill, to beat to death."