Der Fuehrer - Hitler's Rise to Power (1944) - Heiden

158 DER FUEHRERtrick for history to play on a great people. At Versailles, Wilson andClemenceau gave them a route to the sea against English resistance.Approximately following the course of the Vistula, a strip of landabutting on the Baltic was cut straight through conquered Germany. Itwas not an unjust solution: this 'Polish Corridor' actually was inhabitedpredominantly by Poles. But at the same time, the Corridor did tearGermany apart, cutting off the German province of East Prussia fromthe rest of the Reich. Moreover, in order that Poland should have aseaport under her own sovereignty, the totally German port of Danzigwas taken away from Germany, contrary to the will of its inhabitants,and made into a sort of 'free city,' under League of Nations control.Also, there were numerous Germans living in the Polish Corridor, andabout a million of them, often by the harshest measures, were forced outof the country. It must be owned that this policy of Polonization servedsocial progress. It was part of a greater democratic agrarian policy,attempted in the whole of Poland: to divide the large estates among thepeasants and thus break the power of feudalism. In this struggle againstfeudal land tenure, Poland, at least in her western provinces, was moreadvanced than Germany; the East Prussian junkers remained an islandof feudalism in the midst of the agrarian reforms of eastern Europe.A second 'state against Germany' was Czechoslovakia, the mostimportant fragment blasted out of the Austrian Empire. She wassurrounded on three sides by Germany, a wedge between Germanterritories. Of her fifteen million inhabitants, between six and sevenmillion belonged to the dominant Czech nationality, while two and ahalf to three million were Slovaks, closely related to the Czechs; morethan three million were Germans. The German-inhabited territory couldnot have been separated from the core of the country without greatdisadvantage to all parties. On the whole, the Czechs treated theirGerman minorities more justly and humanely than the Poles did.Fortunately for both sides, economic relations between Germany andCzechoslovakia (unlike Poland) gave small cause for irritation. Buthere, too, there were expropriations, resulting in bitter and justifiableGerman protests. After 1918, Czechoslovakia — like Poland — facedthe alternative: to pursue a