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22-12-28 Too many people? Challenges of demographic change | DW > .
Before WW2 and the rise of Communism in the East, tens of millions of Germans inhabited the region of Eastern Europe, but now only a paltry handful remain. How and why did nearly 20 million souls disappear from their homelands almost overnight in one of the most stunning vanishing acts in world history?
Drang nach Osten ("Drive to the East", "push eastward", "drive toward the East" or "desire to push East") is the motto of the 19th century German nationalist movement, that refers to the idea of German territorial expansion toward Eastern Europe into the lands of Slavic nations. In some historical discourse, Drang nach Osten combines historical German settlement in Central and Eastern Europe, medieval (12th to 13th-century) military expeditions like those of the Teutonic Knights (see Northern Crusades), and Germanisation policies and warfare of modern German states such as those that reflected Nazism's concept of Lebensraum.
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.
In Poland the term Drang nach Osten was used to indicate the programs for the Germanization of Poland, while in 19th-century Germany the slogan was used variously and delusory of a wider nationalist approbation of medieval German settlement in the east and the idea of the "superiority of German culture". In the years after WW1 the idea of a Drang nach Westen ("Drive to the West"), an alleged Polish drive westward - an analogy of Drang nach Osten circulated among German authors in reaction to the loss of eastern territories and the Polish Corridor.
The concept of Drang nach Osten was a core element of Nazi ideology. In
Mein Kampf (1925) Adolf Hitler declares the idea to be an essential element of his reorganisation plans for Europe. On 7 February 1945 he stated: "It is eastwards, only and always eastwards, that the veins of our race must expand. It is the direction which nature herself has decreed for the expansion of the German peoples."
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 and Balts. 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.
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.
In Poland the term Drang nach Osten was used to indicate the programs for the Germanization of Poland, while in 19th-century Germany the slogan was used variously and delusory of a wider nationalist approbation of medieval German settlement in the east and the idea of the "superiority of German culture". In the years after WW1 the idea of a Drang nach Westen ("Drive to the West"), an alleged Polish drive westward - an analogy of Drang nach Osten circulated among German authors in reaction to the loss of eastern territories and the Polish Corridor.
The concept of Drang nach Osten was a core element of Nazi ideology. In
Mein Kampf (1925) Adolf Hitler declares the idea to be an essential element of his reorganisation plans for Europe. On 7 February 1945 he stated: "It is eastwards, only and always eastwards, that the veins of our race must expand. It is the direction which nature herself has decreed for the expansion of the German peoples."
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