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A National No-Man’s Land: Polish Citizens, French Connections, and the Politics of Citizenship in the German Ruhr, 1920-1939

Fri, November 21, 10:00 to 11:45am EST (10:00 to 11:45am EST), -

Abstract

This paper investigates contestations between officials of the Polish Second Republic and the Weimar and Nazi German states over the citizenship status held by the thousands of Ruhrpolen—
German citizens of Polish family descent in the Ruhr—who had acquired Polish identity documents between 1920 and 1925 to move to the coal mining basin of northern France. As part of the labor supply arrangements established between the French Third Republic and the Polish Second Republic in the early interwar period, Polish consular officials in the Ruhr took an active role in facilitating the emigration of Ruhrpolen who sought better living conditions in France with Polish identity documents, the acquisition of which German officials recognized as a renunciation of German citizenship. This paper examines these developments and the efforts of Ruhrpolen who had forsaken their German nationality by obtaining Polish identity documents to re-acquire their former citizenship status, arguing that officials of the Polish Second Republic and the Weimar and Nazi German states came to view the Ruhr as a contested zone of layered sovereignty and the national “disciplining” of the Ruhrpolen as a crucial sociopolitical project.

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