Between Two Poles: The Experience of the Ruhrpolen in Nazi Germany

• In Event: Slavs in the Nazi World, 1933-1945

Abstract

This paper explores the complex treatment of German citizens with Polish family roots in the heavily industrialized Ruhr region during the Nazi period, an era during which official practice shifted from a peculiarly liberal attitude toward the Polish minority instituted after the 1934 German-Polish Non-Aggression Pact to significant intolerance following the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939. These Ruhrpolen, Polish-speaking migrants (and their descendants) who had left the Prussian East during the German Empire (1871-1918), thus navigated a complicated, unpredictable set of relationships with different wings of the Nazi movement, municipal authorities, and their ordinary German neighbors. This presentation will briefly examine policies toward the Polish minority in the Ruhr between 1933 and 1939 before turning toward a more substantial analysis of records from the Gestapoleitstelle Düsseldorf, which contain dozens of fascinating cases in which German citizens with (real or alleged) connections to Poland were denounced for displaying abiding loyalties after 1939 to that now-enemy state.

Author

• Nikolas Weyland, Harvard U