Polish Border Strip

Not to be confused with Polish Corridor.

The term "Polish Border Strip" (German: Polnischer Grenzstreifen; Polish: polski pas graniczny), also called "Polish Frontier Strip", refers to those territories which the German Empire wanted to annex from Congress Poland after World War I. It appeared in plans proposed by German officials as a territory to be annexed by the German Empire after an expected German and Central Powers victory. German planners also envisioned forced expulsion and resettlement of the Polish and Jewish population which would be replaced by German colonists.[1][2][3][4] The proposed area of the Border Strip comprised up to 30,000 km2 (approximately the size of Belgium), and up to 3 million people were to be ethnically cleansed to make room for German settlers.[3][5][6] The strip was also intended to separate the Polish inhabitants of Prussian-held Greater Poland from those in Congress Poland.

  1. ^ Cite error: The named reference border strip was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  2. ^ Cite error: The named reference Goemans was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  3. ^ a b Cite error: The named reference Geiss was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  4. ^ Legacies of Violence: Eastern Europe’s First World War Jochen Böhler, Wlodzimierz Borodziej, Joachim von Puttkamer page 119 Germans in the East 1914-1918: Fantasies of Forced Movement
  5. ^ Elusive Alliance: The German Occupation of Poland in World War I Jesse Kauffman - 2015 The ethnic cleansing foreseen by the border strip's champions
  6. ^ Empires in World War I: Shifting Frontiers and Imperial Dynamics in a Global Conflict Richard Fogarty, Andrew Jarboe I.B.Tauris, 2014 this idea developed into one of annexing a Polish border strip, or frontier strip ... by ethnically cleansing the area of nationalist Poles and colonising the region with Germans from das Altreich