Drang nach Osten

Background

During the 19th and the early 20th century Drang nach Osten has been associated with the medieval German Ostsiedlung, the High Medieval migration period of ethnic Germans to Eastern Europe, inhabited by Slavs, Balts, and Finno-Ugrics. This movement caused legal, cultural, linguistic, religious and economic changes, that had a profound influence on the history of Eastern Europe between the Baltic Sea and the Carpathians.

Massive population increase during the High Middle Ages left increasing numbers of commoners like peasants, craftsmen and artisans displaced, who were joined by nobility not entitled to land inheritance, stimulating the movement of settlers from territories of the Holy Roman Empire, such as the Rhineland, Flanders and Saxony into the sparsely populated East. These movements were supported by the Slavic kings and dukes and the Church.

The future state of Prussia, named for the conquered Old Prussians, had its roots largely in these movements. As the Middle Ages came to a close, the Teutonic Knights, who had been invited to northern Poland by Konrad of Masovia, had assimilated and forcibly converted much of the southern Baltic coastlands.

After the Partitions of Poland by the Kingdom of Prussia, Austria, and the Russian Empire in the late 18th century, Prussia gained much of western Poland. The Prussians, and later the Germans, engaged in a policy of Germanization in Polish territories. Russia and Sweden eventually conquered the lands taken by the Teutonic Knights in Estonia and Livonia.

Drang nach Osten in German discourse

The term became a centerpiece of the program of the German nationalist movement in 1891, with the founding of the Alldeutscher Verband, in the words: "Der alte Drang nach dem Osten soll wiederbelebt werden" ('The old Drang nach Osten must be revived'). Nazi Germany employed the slogan in calling the Czechs a "Slav bulwark against the Drang nach Osten" in the 1938 occupation of the Sudetenland.

Despite Drang nach Osten policies, population movement took place in the opposite direction also, as people from rural, less developed areas in the East were attracted by the prospering industrial areas of Western Germany. This phenomenon became known by the German term Ostflucht, literally 'flight from the East'.

With the development of romantic nationalism in the 19th century, Polish and Russian intellectuals began referring to the German Ostsiedlung as Drang nach Osten. The German Empire and Austria-Hungary attempted to expand their power eastward; Germany by gaining influence in the declining Ottoman Empire (the Eastern Question) and Austria-Hungary through the acquisition of territory in the Balkans (such as Bosnia and Herzegovina).

Drang nach Westen

German nationalists called for a new Drang nach Osten to oppose what they conceived as a Polish Drang nach Westen ('thrust toward the West').

The Polish paper Wprost used both Drang nach Osten and Drang nach Westen in August 2002 to title stories about the German company RWE taking over the Polish STOEN and Polish migration into eastern Germany, respectively.

Drang nach Westen is also the ironic title of a chapter in Eric Joseph Goldberg's book Struggle for Empire, used to point out the "missing" eastward ambitions of Louis the German who instead expanded his kingdom to the West.

Lebensraum concept of Nazi Germany

Adolf Hitler, dictator of Nazi Germany from 1933–1945, advocated for a Drang nach Osten to acquire territory for German colonists at the expense of central and eastern European nations (Lebensraum). The term, by then, had gained enough currency to appear in foreign newspapers without explanation. Nazi propaganda depicted Eastern Europe as historically Germanic territories, promoting the myth that these regions were stolen from Aryan races by Hunnic and Avar tribes. Hitler viewed Slavs as primitive subhumans and for this reason detested the German empire's alliance with Austria-Hungary during World War I. In his works such as Mein Kampf and Zweites Buch, Hitler viewed the Slavs as lacking the capability to form a state. Academics in the field of Ostforschung worked with the Nazi regime to create a historical basis for such claims, arguing that all civilizational developments in eastern europe came from German settlers to the region.

Anti-Slavism was a core doctrine of Nazi ideology, which considered Slavs to be racially inferior Untermensch. Through the Generalplan Ost ("General Plan for the East"), Nazi Germany sought the total domination by Germanic peoples of Eastern Europe by conducting a genocide of Slavic inhabitants and forcibly deporting rest of the population beyond the Urals. After Nazi Germany's initiation of Operation Barbarossa, the propaganda of Axis powers described the military campaign as a "European crusade against Bolshevism" to foreign powers. Meanwhile, Nazi Germany's domestic propaganda depicted the war as a racial struggle of Aryans against "Jewish and Slavic Untermenschen" to annihilate "Judeo-Bolshevism". The Reich Security Main Office, under Heinrich Himmler, played an active role in distributing racist propaganda pamphlets on these topics across German-occupied territories.

In 1938, Adolf Hitler was given a report on 175 German eastern campaigns conducted during 789–1157, a third of which were successful, quarter were semi-successful, and the rest were a failure. Twenty of these eastern campaigns ended in military disaster for Germany. Nazi Germany's eastern campaigns during World War II were initially successful with the conquests of Poland, the Baltic countries, Belarus, Ukraine and much of European Russia by the Wehrmacht; Generalplan Ost was implemented by Nazi forces to eliminate the native Slavic peoples from these lands and replace them with Germans. The Wehrbauer, or soldier-peasants, would settle in a fortified line to prevent civilization arising beyond and threatening Germany.

This was greatly hindered by the lack of German people who desired to settle in the east, let alone act as Teutonic Knights there. Settlements established during the war did not receive colonists from the Altreich, but in the main part East European Germans resettled from Soviet "spheres of interest" according to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, and such Poles as deemed Germanizable by Nazis. However, the Soviet Union began to reverse the German conquests by 1943. Nazi Germany was defeated by the Allies in 1945.

Expulsion of Germans from the East after World War II

Most of the demographic and cultural outcome of the Ostsiedlung was terminated after World War II. The expulsion of Germans after World War II east of the Oder-Neisse line in 1945–48 on the basis of decisions of the Potsdam Conference were later justified by their beneficiaries as a rollback of the Drang nach Osten. "Historical Eastern Germany"—historically the land of the Baltic people called Old Prussians who had been colonized and assimilated by German Drang Nach Osten—was split between Poland, Russia, and Lithuania (a Baltic country) and repopulated with settlers of the respective ethnicities. The Old Prussians were conquered by the Teutonic Knights in the 13th century, and gradually assimilated over the following centuries; the Old Prussian language was extinct by the 17th or early 18th century. Henry Cord Meyer, in his book "Drang nach Osten: Fortunes of a Slogan-Concept in German–Slavic Relations, 1849–1990" claims that the slogan Drang nach Osten originated in the Slavic world, and it also was more widely used than in Germany.