Settlement Commission
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The Settlement Commission (German: Ansiedlungskommission) was a department that operated between 1886 and 1918, set up by Otto von Bismarck to increase land ownership of Germans at the expense of Poles in the eastern provinces of the German Empire, through the use of economic and political methods, as part of the country's policy of Germanisation. The original goal of the Commission was to remove Polish owners from the land completely. The first budget of the Commission was 100,000,000 marks.
At later times, even larger funds were made available to purchase lands from Poles. At the same time, laws were enacted that discriminated against Poles, making it more difficult for them to continue profitable operations and to rehabilitate failed operations. However the Commission in the end bought 613 estates from German owners and 214 from Poles, functioning to bail-out German debtors as often as fulfilling its declared mission.
The creation of the Commission made Poles defend their ownership of the land, that gradually turned into Polish-German economic competition. It was to a great extent won by Poles, in that the measures failed to make much difference in the percentages of land ownership. Organized Polish countermeasures and the population decline of the Germans vs. the increase of the Poles figured greatly in the lack of success (see Ostflucht).
However, the Commission created numerous modern settlements, especially around city of Bromberg (Polish: Bydgoszcz).
Due to overall failure of the policy, Prussian diet passed a law that enabled forcible expropriation of Polish landowners by the Settlement Commission in 1908. In 1912 the first four Polish large estates were expropriated. In 1918, after the German Empire's defeat in World War I, the Commission ceased to function.
[edit] References
- Selected Cliometric Studies on German Economic History
- Orphans of Versailles: The Germans in Western Poland, 1918-1939
- Imperial Germany, 1871-1918: Economy, Society, Culture, and Politics
