On 1 April 1948, in the city of Bottrop in the western German Ruhr region, a retired coal miner named Ceslaus Strybylki was busily preparing for a long eastward journey.Footnote 1 After sixty-eight years, Ceslaus was returning to his birthplace, a city in Upper Silesia that had once belonged to Germany but now lay in Poland.
Strybylki’s trip was no ordinary homecoming. Along with his wife, son, daughter-in-law and three grandchildren, he intended to permanently emigrate to Poland from the British zone of occupation in western Germany. The Strybylkis had all held German citizenship since birth, and Ceslaus, as a Spiegel article on the family averred, resolutely maintained that he was a ‘Bottroper’. For all but the first fifteen months of his life, he had called the Ruhr his home, labouring here for decades as a miner. Moreover, he was a proud First World War veteran of the Imperial German Army.
Still, throughout his entire life in Germany, even during the Nazi period, Strybylki had spoken Polish within his family and maintained a deep interest in the Polish–German borderland of his birth. Furthermore, he had joined the Union of Poles in Germany upon its founding in 1923 and frequently attended Polish-language Catholic church services in the Ruhr, including in the pre–Second World War Third Reich. As he later asserted, Ceslaus had not considered moving to Poland until 1 September 1939, when the German invasion of the Second Republic ‘revised his thinking’. ‘In that moment’, a Spiegel correspondent related, ‘Ceslaus had realized that it was better if everyone lived with their own tribe’. Ceslaus’s experience with ‘living as a foreign body (Fremdkörperdasein) drove him into passive opposition to the Third Reich’ and eventually, after Nazi Germany’s downfall, to a serious interest in emigration to Poland. Just like an Essen-based leader of the Union of Poles in Germany, Ceslaus had evidently concluded that ‘the best solution to the predicament of the Ruhr Poles (Ruhrpolenproblem) was the return to the motherland’.
Besides, Ceslaus Strybylki simply believed that ‘Poland was stronger than the Ruhr’s coal mining basin’. His family’s Bottrop house had twice suffered damage from wartime Allied bombing raids, and his devastated hometown now lay under British military occupation. On 3 April 1948, at a train station in the nearby city of Wanne-Eickel, the Strybylkis therefore boarded a caravan to the Republic of Poland along with 153 other so-called repatriates. After a ceremony filled with ‘flag waving, poetry and song’, the repatriates embarked on their journey without shedding a tear, or so a Spiegel journalist claimed. But the Strybylki family also carried mementos from the Ruhr – ‘a piece of coal, a bit of ore and a sack of red earth’ – as they rolled eastward towards an unfamiliar motherland now firmly under communist control.Footnote 2 Although the Spiegel curiously named neither Ceslaus Strybylski’s birthplace nor the family’s ultimate destination, Polish records indicate that many repatriates from this Wanne-Eickel transport were resettled near the Ludwik Coal Mine in Zabrze, which had lain in Germany until 1945.Footnote 3
Along with the Strybylkis, over five thousand German citizens of Polish descent undertook state-sponsored ‘repatriation’ in 1948 and 1949 from the Ruhr to Poland, especially to its so-called Recovered Territories (Ziemie Odzyskane), which had until very recently fallen within Germany’s borders.Footnote 4 The unusual eastward migration of these repatriates from the Ruhr differed from the westward movement of ethnic German refugees and expellees out of the Recovered Territories during and after the Second World War in both its much smaller scale and especially its voluntary nature. These repatriates belonged to a population – colloquially referred to as Ruhr Poles (Ruhrpolen) in German and as Westphalian Poles (Westfalczycy or Westfalacy) in Polish – established in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Footnote 5 In those decades, hundreds of thousands of people had departed the eastern stretches of the German Empire for the Ruhr, a rapidly developing coal mining and industrial region. An estimated 350,000 Polish-speaking Catholic German citizens had once lived in the Ruhr, fulfilling a vital role in its mining and industrial sectors and participating in a wide variety of cultural associations.Footnote 6 While harsh Germanisation policies led some to develop an interest in Polish nationalism – however inchoate, hybrid or intense – many acculturated more closely to German-language cultural milieux.Footnote 7
Regime change, state formation and socio-economic turmoil after the First World War had exercised a significant impact on the settlement patterns of the Ruhrpolen. The re-establishment of Polish statehood after the First World War led around 100,000 Ruhrpolen to forsake their German citizenship and emigrate eastward between 1918 and 1925.Footnote 8 An estimated 100–130,000 additional Ruhrpolen acquired Polish identity documents in those years to move to northern France and Belgium.Footnote 9 But approximately 150,000 Ruhrpolen remained in the Weimar Republic and retained their German citizenship.Footnote 10 Many of them gradually loosened any ties with Polish culture, ceasing to speak Polish regularly and often Germanising their surnames. Incentives to disconnect from Polish culture only intensified in Nazi Germany, a regime in which people of Polish descent were often cast as outsiders to the imagined German Volksgemeinschaft, especially during the Second World War.Footnote 11
Despite these obstacles, thousands of Ruhrpolen continued to nurture ties with Poland and drew the attention of its civil society and state leadership in the early post-war years, when the Republic of Poland’s acquisition of extensive territories from Germany generated major populationist exigencies and the consequent inauguration of a global diasporic repatriation campaign.Footnote 12 The Polish state project to repatriate Ruhrpolen between 1945 and 1949 belonged to a broader early post–Second World War European order of ethnic sorting and unmixing.Footnote 13 For Polish authorities, that mission also included repatriating millions of Polish displaced persons from Germany and other formerly Nazi-occupied territories; categorising the existing inhabitants of the Recovered Territories broadly as redeemable ‘autochthonous’ Poles or Germans who were to be expelled; and resettling Polish émigré workers, residents of central Poland and denizens of the Polish–Ukrainian borderlands in western Poland.Footnote 14 While Polish commentators often employed the term ‘re-emigration’ in reference to the envisioned eastward movement of Ruhrpolen, they frequently also labelled this process a ‘repatriation’, a rightful ethnic return.Footnote 15 While recognising the problematic nationalist connotations of that actor’s category, this article nevertheless prefers ‘repatriation’ as a shorthand, as nearly all of those who would leave the Ruhr were lifelong German citizens and not emigrants from a Polish state in the first place.Footnote 16
Repatriation would hold only limited appeal among the Ruhrpolen – out of well over 100,000 German citizens of Polish descent in the Ruhr, only around 12,000 (including dependents) registered interest in emigration on Polish questionnaires and only about 5,600 people are estimated to have left.Footnote 17 But this campaign still occasioned critical disputes between Polish, British and German observers over the role of coal mining in post–Second World War European economic reconstruction and the symbolic position of a long-settled multi-ethnic population in Germany’s industrial heartland.
Competing concepts of redemptive state building shaped by nascent Cold War strife consequently emerged from these early post–Second World War contestations over the Ruhrpolen.Footnote 18 A shared redemptive language linked the past, present and future position of this population to different national projects of recovery and salvation.Footnote 19 In the Polish case, this discourse entailed lifting the Ruhrpolen from their profound diasporic affliction back to the promised land of their ancestors, whereas in the German context, an envisioned emergence from the ashes of the Second World War and greater integration into the democratic, capitalist West undergirded attitudes towards the Ruhrpolen. Just as urban planners in the post–Second World War Germanies and Poland sought to ‘redeem’ urban landscapes after Nazism, and western German thinkers aimed to recover regional notions of Heimat (homeland) in service of new national projects, efforts to claim the Ruhrpolen emerged as integral components of new state building missions across Central Europe.Footnote 20 This language was also heavily masculinised, revolving significantly around the imagined productivity of male workers of Polish descent in the Ruhr, and homogenising, in that it elided the complex ethnic identities of this heterogeneous population.Footnote 21 The intra-allied discussions that erupted over harnessing the Ruhr’s energy reserves in this period thus also encompassed the very residents of the region once drawn thereto by its booming economy. At their core, debates over the status of the Ruhrpolen centred around alternate interpretations of the Ruhr’s labour regime, especially its coal mining industry, as a transformative ethno-political apparatus.
Polish officials and interested observers typically presented the experiences of the Ruhrpolen in western Germany’s industrial forge as an exercise in diasporic ‘organic work’ whereby they had concomitantly honed their productive capacities and commitments to Polishness.Footnote 22 Per this conception, the Ruhrpolen constituted a community of forced migrants compelled to move westward by the avowed ravages of Prussian rule in their families’ ancestral home regions.Footnote 23 Their triumphant ‘restoration’ to Poland’s Recovered Territories thereby rectified an historic wrong and even dovetailed with other reparatory demands.Footnote 24 The redemptive return of the Ruhrpolen thus meant ‘saving’ this community from denationalisation and second-class status in Germany while simultaneously applying their hard-won professional skills from the Ruhr to the ‘re-Polonised’ Recovered Territories’ economic development. While some Ruhrpolen had ongoing familial connections to areas within the ‘Recovered Territories’, many others did not. Indeed, many of the individuals in the Ruhr whom the Polish state targeted for repatriation had family origins in the former Prussian provinces of West Prussia and Posen, territories that had already formed part of the inter-war Polish Second Republic.Footnote 25 A certain tension therefore inhered in the state project to ‘repatriate’ these people to the Recovered Territories, evoking fantasies of both ethnic return and pioneer life in Poland’s new ‘Wild West’.Footnote 26 Nevertheless, the actual return of thousands of Ruhrpolen attracted significant propagandistic attention. Frustration with life in Poland eventually became widespread among repatriates from the Ruhr, but the Polish state continued to present their ‘re-Polonisation’ as a success story after the late 1940s.Footnote 27
By contrast, British and (especially) German authorities and commentators often depicted the Ruhr’s work regime as a metamorphic tool of ‘Germanisation’, one that had ‘moulded’ persons of Polish ethnic descent into integral members of the region’s working class who could now power its redemptive arc from the weapons forge (Waffenschmiede) of the Third Reich to the nucleus of Western European recovery.Footnote 28 The labour power of the Ruhrpolen, a population supposedly ‘saved’ from developmental backwardness and ‘civilised’ into the native German working class by the modern, integrative energy of the Ruhr, was crucial to this transformational mission. In consultation with regional German authorities, British officials would eventually settle on strict guidelines for repatriation, rejecting claims about the essential Polishness of the mass of Ruhrpolen and even preventing many interested repatriates from departing if they worked in essential economic positions.Footnote 29 British authorities thus only relaxed the general proscription on the emigration of German citizens in post–Second World War–occupied western Germany on a case-by-case basis.Footnote 30 British and German figures largely believed that agitation for repatriation to Poland risked sowing social discord in the Ruhr and ‘reopening’ the region’s Polish question (Polenfrage), an ‘already-closed’ case of ethnic integration.Footnote 31 Asserting that the overwhelming majority of the Ruhrpolen had Germanised also served an important symbolic function, for it lent an impression of communal solidity and working-class corporatist unity to a devastated region whose future lay under immense uncertainty. Reinforcing such asseverations that the Ruhrpolen had ‘Germanised’ were reports on the frustrations that repatriates would experience in the Recovered Territories, often advertised in regional newspapers from the late 1940s onward.Footnote 32
Some Ruhrpolen certainly welcomed the chance to repatriate, but for others, this campaign brought unwanted public scrutiny over their ethnic status. As a corollary, however, it could also present them with the chance to clarify their ethnic positionality and highlight special socio-political commitments. Several thousand Ruhrpolen emphasised their Polish backgrounds to secure state-funded travel eastward, employment and housing in Poland as well as an esteemed position in nationalist imaginaries of the Recovered Territories.Footnote 33 The overwhelming majority who remained in the Ruhr could underscore their loyalty to the region, benefit from the relatively privileged status accorded to miners and industrial workers in the early post–Second World War period and later stress their participation in the West German ‘economic miracle’.Footnote 34
By examining early post–Second World War official and popular debates about the repatriation of the Ruhrpolen, this paper seeks to intervene in three bodies of scholarly literature. Firstly, and most centrally, this article contributes to literature on ethnic politics, nationalist sorting and migration in early post–Second World War Central Europe, highlighting that this period of geopolitical transition reinvigorated debates over the status of German citizens of Polish descent.Footnote 35 Secondly, it engages with works on shifting sovereignty and economic recovery in post–Second World War Central Europe.Footnote 36 It contends that the restored Polish state framed its claims to the Ruhrpolen as a historically justified reparatory endeavour, which it linked closely with reacquisition of the Recovered Territories and even demands for other material transfers. British and German observers in turn repudiated this line of thinking to spur the Ruhr’s recovery. Lastly, this article engages with research on workforce composition and reconstructive efforts in post–Second World War European coal mining zones.Footnote 37 By focusing on cultural perceptions of labour participation among the Ruhrpolen, this paper asserts a central link between ethnic redefinition efforts and notions of redemptive work in both the Ruhr and the Recovered Territories.
A small number of scholars have examined this specific episode in works focused heavily on Polish–British diplomatic negotiations and official nationalities policy in the Recovered Territories.Footnote 38 Michael Fleming has compellingly argued that the Polish state’s repatriation project in western Germany centred around a ‘perennialist’ ethnic claim to the Ruhrpolen that was countered by British officials’ more ‘constructivist’ view that this population had largely Germanised.Footnote 39 Andreas Hofmann has also underscored the central role of economic considerations in the Polish recruitment of the Ruhrpolen, the corresponding disinclination of British authorities to permit their mass resettlement and the frustrations many repatriates experienced in the Recovered Territories.Footnote 40
In contrast to those earlier works, this article foregrounds dynamics in the Ruhr region and popular conceptions of ethnic identity in western Germany and Poland. This paper’s use of sources from German state archives and newspapers highlights that native observers in western Germany strongly influenced British planning initiatives, frequently dampened interest in repatriation among potential migrants and often inserted this episode into public parables of ethnic integration in the Ruhr, an impact significantly understated in existing scholarship. Furthermore, this paper argues that the lack of interest that many ordinary Ruhrpolen displayed in repatriation greatly sharpened British and German views on the transformative, ‘Germanising’ character of industrial society in the Ruhr. While Westphalian Polish activists played a major role in advancing repatriation efforts, the most durable contribution of everyday Ruhrpolen to wider perceptions of early post–Second World War ethnic identity in western Germany was to lend credence to public mythologies of social integration in the Ruhr. Lastly, by moving beyond analyses of official debates, this paper highlights that this repatriation campaign revitalised concerted popular contestations over the occupational status of the Ruhrpolen, their ethnic transformation and the place of coal mining throughout post–Second World War Central Europe.
From One Wild West to Another: Polish Claims on the Ruhrpolen, 1945–7
The immediate impetus for the Polish government’s post–Second World War repatriation campaign in the Ruhr emerged from conversations in this rubble-filled region shortly after Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender. Even prior to the end of the Second World War, the notion of resettling German citizens of Polish descent from the Ruhr circulated in certain Allied policy circles, often in the context of envisioned post-conflict ‘population transfers’. For instance, a 1944 contributor to the Washington, DC-based CQ Researcher who contemplated the aftermath of the Second World War suggested that there were ‘many thousands of Poles in the Ruhr and other parts of Germany who could be exchanged for the evicted German nationals’ of territories that might come under Polish control.Footnote 41 Yet concrete planning efforts to this end in the Ruhr and Poland only solidified after the war’s conclusion. As a 1947 Polish report corroborated by British authorities contended, ‘in summer 1945, some large groups of Poles who had been living since before the war in Westphalia, conveyed a message to Warsaw (through a Polish officer returning from a camp in western Germany), stating that they wished to be permanently repatriated to Poland’.Footnote 42
Many of the Ruhrpolen advocating for repatriation in this period were decades-long veterans of Polish cultural associations in the Ruhr. A 1946 note from a Union of Poles in Germany member claimed that thousands of members of these associations ‘had been somewhat politically aligned with Germany’ during the preceding Nazi years – when they had faced intense, violent pressure to assimilate – and ‘need[ed] to undergo rehabilitation proceedings’ if they were to seek repatriation.Footnote 43 Two of Ceslaus Strybylki’s nephews, for instance, had apparently been conscripted and forced to serve in Nazi-occupied Poland, although both were members of the Union of Poles in Germany.Footnote 44 But many other advocates for repatriation were survivors of Nazi concentration camps, imprisoned there when Gestapo officers undertook mass arrests of leading figures in Polish associations in the Ruhr immediately after the 1939 German invasion of Poland.Footnote 45 Jakub Przybylski, who would later serve as the leading repatriation representative of the ‘Westphalian Poles’, was one of many confined in the Sachsenhausen or Ravensbrück concentration camps during this terrible wave of arrests.Footnote 46 Przybylski received conditional release from Sachsenhausen in late November 1940, but many other such prisoners, like the First World War veteran Peter Tomyslak, tragically perished from their brutal treatment.Footnote 47
For such victims of Nazi persecution, and for the many other Ruhrpolen who had long experienced anti-Polish prejudice in Germany, repatriation therefore held considerable appeal. The early post–Second World War re-establishment of the Union of Poles in Germany provided an institutional base for negotiation with Polish bureaucrats, as did the formation of a formal Polish Military Mission in Berlin and the stationing of Polish officials in the British occupation zone.Footnote 48
Openness to repatriation frequently also derived from another condition, namely the profound socio-economic and political uncertainty that pervaded the early post–Second World War Ruhr. Voluntary eastward migration across incipient Cold War boundaries was relatively uncommon in this period, and even many Polish citizens who found themselves as displaced persons in occupied Germany resisted repatriation to their home country.Footnote 49 Yet for some German citizens of Polish descent, life in Poland appeared arguably more attractive than in the Ruhr. Ruined neighbourhoods, dislocated people and long queues for inadequate food rations were omnipresent in a region that had formed the core of Nazi Germany’s industrial base and, consequently, come under heavy wartime attack. So too, ethnic Germans who had fled or been expelled from Poland and other territories in eastern Europe, many of them women, children or retirees, settled in large numbers in the early post–Second World War Ruhr, increasing demand for scarce resources and exposing individuals of Polish descent in the region to further resentment.Footnote 50 Although many of the Ruhr’s mines were still basically operational, inadequate mechanisation, workforce shortages and productivity deficits crippled this sector.Footnote 51 So too, much of the Ruhr’s already-low mining output in these years was exported to the Allied powers, so the region’s desperate residents were forced to compete for scant other fuel sources.Footnote 52 The future of the Ruhr – the degree of Allied control over the area, its residents’ economic prospects and its communal stability – thus appeared radically unclear.
Against this background, the possibility of repatriation among Ruhrpolen, not simply the millions of Polish displaced persons scattered around occupied Germany, emerged as a serious cause célèbre among Polish observers. Throughout 1946 and the first half of 1947, a period that arguably marked the nadir of living conditions in post–Second World War western Germany, wider redemptive narratives increasingly crystallised in Polish calls for repatriation across the country’s political spectrum.Footnote 53 Many such entreaties suggested that a mythic ethno-social transformation among the Ruhrpolen, once forced to leave their ancestral homelands, would come to a triumphant fruition in post–Second World War Poland. Particularly emotive were exhortations by former residents of the Ruhr, such as Franciszek Mańkowski, a leading figure in the powerful Bochum-based Polish Labor Union (Zjednoczenie Zawodowe Polskie) in the imperial and early Weimar-era Ruhr who had emigrated in the early inter-war period to the Polish Second Republic, where he first won election to the Sejm as a member of a Christian democratic party. When Mańkowski raised the issue of repatriating the Ruhrpolen to his fellow post–Second World War parliamentarians in 1947, he referred to this population’s presence in western Germany as an ‘exile’ and a ‘tragedy’.Footnote 54
According to commentators like Mańkowski, however, these wretched experiences held a redemptive potential. Exacting work in western Germany’s unforgiving industrial cauldron and experiences of prejudice during the imperial, Weimar, and Nazi periods had elevated the Ruhrpolen to a higher plane of Polishness, transforming them into self-assured, diligent and nationally enlightened representatives of the ethnic collective. Indeed, Mańkowski claimed that the ‘Westphalians’ enjoyed a stellar reputation in Poland as ‘democrats’ who had worked to ‘create Poland in exile and serve her in every need’.Footnote 55 Some of Mańkowski’s claims – the Westphalians had done well to preserve the ‘faith of their fathers’ – clearly did not resonate with communist figures in Poland, who increasingly held sway after the 1947 Polish parliamentary elections.Footnote 56 Nevertheless, the motif of the Ruhrpolen as a group of industrious migrants whose repatriation to their motherland would save them from continued discrimination in Germany and repair an historic wrong found wide appeal.Footnote 57 These migrants had transformed the Ruhr – once known as the Prussian ‘Wild West’ – into Europe’s most developed mining and industrial zone and would now hopefully move as ‘returnee-pioneers’ to Poland’s new ‘Wild West’.Footnote 58
Pressing economic exigencies in the Recovered Territories’ coal mining zones concretised plans for repatriation in 1946 and 1947 and situated this campaign of ethnic return within a broader reparatory framework.Footnote 59 Most immediately, the Silesian coal mining industry demanded skilled workers.Footnote 60 As a 1946 message relayed to the Polish Military Mission in Berlin accentuated, the Central Administration for Coalmining Industries (Centralny Zarzas Przemysłu Węglowego [CZPW]) in Katowice wished to encourage ‘the spontaneous initiative from miners in Westphalia’ to repatriate, offering to guarantee adequate living conditions and employment opportunities for skilled workers in Upper and Lower Silesia.Footnote 61 Indeed, for these officials, repatriation from the Ruhr was intended to recruit ‘skilled miners’ to help fulfil production goals, not simply to consummate a general scheme of ethnic return.Footnote 62 When a delegation of Westphalian Poles helmed by Jakub Przybylski finally toured Silesia in late 1946 and early 1947, it seemed that a wave of eastward relocation was imminent.Footnote 63 CZPW officials, who even claimed that up to 60,000 German coal miners and industrial workers of Polish descent inhabited the Ruhr, thus viewed that population as a potential reservoir for Polish economic development.Footnote 64 In addition to the repatriation of persons of Polish descent from the Ruhr, officials of the CZPW in Katowice apparently also envisioned accompanying reparatory transfers of raw materials and transportation equipment from western Germany to the Recovered Territories.Footnote 65 Pressing for repatriation among the Ruhrpolen thus buttressed the Polish state’s desire to assert itself in wider European affairs while also reinforcing broader compensatory claims.
Systematising this repatriation scheme both motivated and bedevilled Polish officials – while resettlement promised to deliver much-needed labour power to the Silesian coal mining industry and a major symbolic victory, it also confronted its authorities with a basic conundrum: how should one define a ‘Ruhr Pole’? In broad terms, as Michael Fleming has claimed, Polish officials hewed to a ‘perennialist notion of ethnicity’, asserting that the Ruhrpolen constituted an intrinsically Polish collective because of their ancestry.Footnote 66 Yet important differences frequently emerged in debates over the ethnic status of this group. For instance, when Gerard Kujanek, a Poznań lawyer who had spent time as a wartime POW, forced labourer and post–Second World War Polish liaison officer in the Ruhr, wrote to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs about the German citizens of Polish descent he had encountered there, he proposed a three-tiered categorisation system for these co-ethnics.Footnote 67 While the first group, comprised of largely endogamous Polish-language speakers active in Polish associational life, was most useful for its ‘national values’ and would presumably have the strongest interest in repatriation, the third group, formed of persons with weak Polish-language skills from mixed German–Polish families who had entered into the Ruhr’s ‘semi-intelligentsia’, arguably had the strongest ‘social values’ but was least likely to depart.Footnote 68 Even contributors to Repatriant, a state newspaper designed to encourage return to Poland among DPs and other potential emigrants, admitted that many Ruhrpolen had succumbed to Germanisation and would not be suitable for repatriation.Footnote 69 Tellingly, these debates over sorting Ruhrpolen for repatriation bore a certain resemblance to post–Second World War Polish ethnic categorisation efforts in the Recovered Territories and even to Nazi-era negotiations over inclusion on the German People’s List (Deutsche Volksliste) in occupied Poland.Footnote 70
As a result of these classificatory uncertainties, the number of potential repatriates from the Ruhr that Polish officials trumpeted in their negotiations with British and German authorities varied significantly. General Jakub Prawin, the head of the Polish Military Mission in Berlin, posited that a population of 200,000 Ruhrpolen existed, but admitted that ‘a quarter of them [were] already strongly Germanized’.Footnote 71 According to one figure in the British Manpower Division, other Polish ministries estimated the number of ‘Westphalian Poles’ at 100,000.Footnote 72 Polish officials appear to have employed high population estimates as leverage in talks with British and German officials, but this tactic also posed the risk of limiting their overall credibility, especially when it became apparent that only around 12,000 people were at all interested in repatriation to Poland.Footnote 73
So too, the issue of deciding ‘which kind’ of ‘Ruhr Pole’ was best suited for life in the new Poland generated significant uncertainty among Polish commentators. For one, as a 1947 report elucidated, many of those who had ‘dreamt for many years during their wandering in exile of return to the longed-for and idealized Motherland’ were old.Footnote 74 Although these individuals could help to repopulate the Recovered Territories, they were less valuable in work-related terms for redemptive state-building efforts. Repatriation involved Polish ministries and industries at the local, regional, national and international levels; while for some a wider movement of Ruhrpolen to Poland was laudable, to others it threatened communal or economic order.
Furthermore, increased communist control over the Polish state required careful consideration about which members of Westphalian Polish society to recruit and how to frame appeals for repatriation. As Polish officers in western Germany concluded, while some Ruhrpolen displayed an interest in communism, a significant number supported Christian democratic and social democratic parties.Footnote 75 Indeed, although Polish officials often heralded the Ruhrpolen as ‘labour’s aristocracy’ and lauded their decades of experience in union organising, much of this activity had taken place in non-communist, and sometimes decidedly anti-communist, social democratic and Christian democratic associations.Footnote 76 Some articles in Repatriant sought to link anti-German convictions with Marxist ideas, like an article from late 1947 that claimed that ‘capitalists’ in the Ruhr ‘continue[d] to parasitize on the hard work of Polish miners’.Footnote 77 But other pieces also relied on more traditional arguments, a variability symptomatic of a wider ideological wrangling in Poland.Footnote 78 Indeed, even at the end of 1947, an article by the later-persecuted Polish priest, Father Zygmunt Kaczyński, appeared in Repatriant underscoring that the new citizens of Poland ‘were united [with their brothers in the Ruhr] by the same ideals – love for Polish land and loyalty and devotion to the faith of our fathers in the Catholic Church’.Footnote 79
Adequately facilitating recruitment for repatriation from the Ruhr and resettlement in the Recovered Territories became a central focus of Polish communist authorities in 1947, not least because it enabled them to distinguish themselves from the parties that had ruled the inter-war Second Republic, widely considered to have failed at properly managing return migration from the Ruhr to reconstituted Poland after the First World War.Footnote 80 Issues with unemployment, overcrowding and low administrative capacity in inter-war Poland had led state bureaucrats to periodically limit return migration from the Ruhr.Footnote 81 So too, many Ruhrpolen who did move eastward after the First World War were dissatisfied with life in Poland, their perceived self-assurance and experience in democratic labour politics often earning them derision as haughty ‘Westphalian Bolsheviks’.Footnote 82 The post–Second World War Polish state therefore hoped to prevent these kinds of dynamics from impeding order in the Recovered Territories and to properly channel such ‘civilizing’ dispositional impulses among the Ruhrpolen.Footnote 83 The fact that a 1947 report from the Bochum branch of the Union of Poles in Germany urged Polish authorities to cluster eventual repatriates from the Ruhr together in particular settlements in Poland implied that older concerns about this diasporic population’s prospects of integration persisted.Footnote 84
Plans for repatriation prompted significant debate between Polish authorities and public observers, but officials undertook more serious negotiations with British bureaucrats over resettlement in late 1946 and 1947. Via a series of written demands by higher-level officials to the British Foreign Office and occupation authorities in Germany, public speeches and on-the-ground recruiting efforts in the Ruhr, the Polish government stepped up its pressure campaign to initiate concrete repatriation procedures.Footnote 85 The Polish government even enlisted Wincenty Pstrowski, a Polish-born miner who had worked between 1937 and 1946 in Belgium, resettled in Poland and become the country’s most famous post–Second World War ‘Stakhanovite’, to exhort his ‘Polish brothers’ in Westphalia to repatriate over the radio.Footnote 86 But while some British officials had initially appeared receptive to Polish entreaties for repatriation, discussions would soon take a turn, revealing the centrality of the Ruhrpolen to redemptive state-building efforts in post–Second World War western Germany.
The Germanising Energy of the Ruhr’s Coalfields: British and German Responses to Repatriation Efforts, 1947–8
‘There has been a lot of talk lately about the so-called “Westphalian Poles”’, a contributor to the Westfälische Nachrichten underscored in an 25 October 1947 article that appeared a week after the Union of Poles in Germany had again urged British authorities to expedite repatriation from the Ruhr.Footnote 87 While stressing that ‘the ultimate decision’ about the scope of repatriation lay with British occupation officials, its author also argued that they needed to, ‘in the interest of historical truth’, correct misconceptions about the Ruhrpolen propagated by Polish authorities.Footnote 88 Firstly, its author contended, the ‘[Imperial-era] influx of Polish coal miners and industrial workers from the eastern provinces of Prussia was not the result of coercion, but of stronger employment opportunities, work conditions, and living standards’.Footnote 89 That so many of these people had ‘adapted to the settled population, given up their use of the Polish language’ and undergone ‘a Germanization process (Eindeutschungsprozess)’ highlighted the ‘voluntary character’ of this initial westward movement and these migrants’ ensuing acculturation.Footnote 90 This article concluded by suggesting that ‘many of those people who today have discovered their Polish heart have done so for very material reasons that have very little to do with actual patriotism’.Footnote 91 In this author’s view, the mass of Ruhrpolen had Germanised during their time in Germany’s industrial core. Even among those who expressed interest in repatriation, poor living conditions in the early post–Second World War Ruhr, rather than genuine love for Poland, were the decisive influences.
While Polish commentators often claimed that the Ruhr conurbation was a transformative space because it had honed both the industriousness and Polish nationalist ethos of its denizens from the east, German authorities presented this area as a metamorphic, disciplining zone of Germanisation that had elevated the Ruhrpolen into integral members of its native working class. As Mark Roseman has underscored, revitalising the Ruhr’s workforce and its coal production were arguably the core regional priorities of British occupation officials.Footnote 92 Any perceived threats to this goal, such as losing skilled workers to an increasingly communist-controlled country, therefore generated significant anxiety. British and German models of post–Second World War redemptive state-building in the Ruhr were generally complementary, with both stressing the importance of the ‘largely Germanized’ Ruhrpolen for economic recovery efforts in Western Europe. Many German observers’ visions of redemptive state-building, however, tapped into a deeper emotional current, portraying the Ruhr as a transformative space that had inculcated a ‘German work ethic’ in its residents of foreign descent, possessed a coherent regional identity and could reorient its productive capacities away from bellicose German nationalism towards European stability. This repatriation campaign also came at a time during which incipient popular conceptions of regional identity gained greater traction, such as the sociologist Wilhelm Brepohl’s claim that an industrial ‘Ruhr ethnicity (Ruhrvolk)’ had formed via the mass East–West migrations of the Kaiserreich and adaptation to the area’s ‘German work culture’.Footnote 93
British and German observers had discussed interest in repatriation among certain Ruhrpolen since 1945. Indeed, already in the spring of 1946, British authorities stationed throughout the Ruhr region had attempted to establish the numbers of German citizens of Polish descent in particular cities in response to Polish entreaties for repatriation, relying apparently on both members of local Polish associations and German officials for information. Significant confusion and informational variability vis-à-vis the exact definition of this population characterised early reports, especially British ones. For instance, one occupation official in Duisburg suggested, after consulting with the ‘chairman of the local branch of the League of Poles in Germany’, that 20,000 Ruhrpolen alone lived in this city and its suburbs, whereas the occupation branch office in the city of Oberhausen returned no information on this question.Footnote 94
The most earnest discussions between different British and German directorates and offices about the precise nature and scope of repatriation, however, began in late 1946 and early 1947.Footnote 95 Debates over repatriation in the Ruhr also attracted a notable degree of public attention in the Anglophone world, including in The Times and the New York Times, and even in French newspapers.Footnote 96 The fact that French bureaucrats facilitated the repatriation of tens of thousands of Polish citizens from the coal-mining regions of northern France and that, as the historian Johannes Frackowiak once highlighted, Soviet authorities in eastern Germany permitted German citizens to move to Poland from the brown coal mining zones around Bitterfeld in this period put British representatives on the defensive in a burgeoning Cold War context.Footnote 97
For British authorities, judging the merits of repatriation entailed a delicate balancing act, particularly between meeting the diplomatic interests of the state’s Foreign Office, avoiding dangerous precedent-setting decisions for the Legal and Political Directorates of the British Element of the Allied Control Commission and fulfilling its Manpower Division’s needs in the Ruhr. Diplomats in the British Foreign Office occasionally expressed sympathy towards Polish officials calling for repatriation.Footnote 98 Frustrations, however, mounted within the British diplomatic community towards Polish agitation for repatriation in 1947, especially when Polish officials became increasingly contentious in negotiations and sought to initiate a population exchange of 10,000 ethnic German coal miners held behind in Wałbrzych for a corresponding number of Westphalian Poles.Footnote 99 One British diplomat claimed that the Polish state had also begun a public awareness campaign on repatriation ‘partly in the hopes that it may frighten us into accepting the Polish demands and partly to discredit with Polish public opinion our general policy as regards Germany’.Footnote 100
To an even greater degree, officials in the Manpower Division, especially those stationed in western Germany, were wary even of limited repatriation, acknowledging that ‘the re-emigration of Poles in small numbers would not be a serious matter’ but stressing that a ‘general emigration’ could ‘have serious results on the manpower situation particularly in the Ruhr mines, not only through the direct loss of labour but also as a result of the unsettling effect on other Germans who could lay claim to foreign extraction’.Footnote 101 Members of the Manpower Division and other offices worried that ‘to grant specially favourable treatment to these “Polish” Germans would create a dangerous precedent’, not only by opening a door to emigration among other German citizens of foreign descent but also because it might lead the French government to enhance its demands for requisitioning of coal miners from the Ruhr.Footnote 102
In consultation with German figures, British authorities undertook more extensive investigations into ethnic politics in the Ruhr in 1947 and the beginning of 1948 to assess whether they might grant an exception to the general Allied principle barring German citizens from emigrating.Footnote 103 Both German and British authorities grew concerned that Polish officials were employing dubious recruiting tactics to mislead potential repatriates, so they wished to more accurately gauge commitment to and understanding of emigration to Poland.Footnote 104 British officials’ interest in local knowledge of material conditions and socio-political dynamics accorded German authorities significant influence. British officials, for instance, relied on information from a local investigation in the state of North-Rhine Westphalia, which had found that only 12,000 German citizens of Polish descent (including dependents) were registered for repatriation and had concluded that ‘a fair number of these men have registered in the hope of obtaining special advantage’.Footnote 105 Occupation authorities also tasked regional officials with furnishing historical materials about Polish life in the Ruhr and researching the historic social integration of Polish-speaking migrants.Footnote 106
Debates over repatriation therefore afforded German officials and interested observers an opportunity to impact both British policy-making and public perceptions of multi-ethnicity in the Ruhr. The Labor Minister of North-Rhine Westphalia, for instance, held that there were technically thousands of ‘persons of Polish descent (Polenabkömmlinge)’ in the Ruhr, but that years of residence in this mining and industrial area had led to them becoming so ‘acculturated and intermarried with the local population that one could not speak of them anymore as Poles’.Footnote 107 One newspaper article contended that the so-called Polish question had not existed in the Ruhr since the mid-1920s, as almost all descendants of the original generation of Polish-speaking migrants had integrated into the region’s native German working class.Footnote 108 Most strikingly, a contributor to the Rhein-Echo asserted that German citizens of Polish descent in the Ruhr had achieved ‘equal status’, ‘livelihoods’ and ‘jobs’ decades earlier in this region and were needed now for another transformative endeavour, namely the revitalisation of the ‘coal mining zones of Westphalia and the Rhineland, once misused as the armoury of German imperialism’ but now ‘a fundament of a new, peaceful Europe’.Footnote 109
The redemptive power of work in Germany’s industrial heartland – its alleged capacity to instil discipline, foster ethnic integration, ensure a rise in standard of living and lend meaning to the human experience – found mythologised expression in these accounts on the purported transformation of the Ruhrpolen. Such depictions drew on older popular notions of ‘German work’, while also bearing a resemblance to popular regional ideologies circulating at the time.Footnote 110 Perhaps the leading regional voice on ethnic identity in this period was a journalist and sociologist named Wilhelm Brepohl, who had headed the Nazi-loyal Research Centre for Völkisch Ethnography in the Ruhr Region and continued to publish works on eastern migration to the Ruhr in the ensuing decades as part of the Dortmund Social Research Institute.Footnote 111 Although Brepohl’s contentions were often highly ambiguous, he generally held that the Ruhr’s ‘German’ labour regime had exercised a positively transformative impact on Polish-speaking migrants, facilitating their civilisational development and ethnic incorporation into the region’s German working class.Footnote 112 At the same time, conservative German officials and mine managers increasingly aimed to valorise a traditional corporatist identity (Standesbewusstsein) among workers in the region’s most critical economic sector and secure them with especially strong ration, housing and monetary benefits.Footnote 113
The notion that German citizens of Polish descent had gained equal social standing in the Ruhr via this labour-driven corporatist integration was, of course, exaggerated. Indeed, sociological research conducted in a coal mining colony in the northern Ruhr in the early 1950s would confirm that persons perceived to have Polish family roots were still frequently viewed with suspicion and subjected to ridicule.Footnote 114 Popular prejudices against individuals of Polish descent, especially displaced persons, that drew on older notions of ‘Slavic inferiority’ remained pronounced in western Germany after the supposed ‘zero hour’ in 1945, biases that many Ruhrpolen also faced and that highlighted a deeply frayed regional social fabric.Footnote 115 But, in symbolic terms, trusting in the potential of the Ruhr’s industrial labour regime to deliver the region’s post–Second World War residents from low standards of living, national shame and the anomie of urban life served a significant purpose.
In January 1948, after years of pressure from Polish officials to allow repatriation from the Ruhr, British authorities in Germany relented and agreed to permit limited departures, provided that the people in question did not hold essential positions in vital industries.Footnote 116 While British officials held sway in western Germany, local and regional German officials in the Ruhr would exercise a key function in permitting emigration. After individual applicants received approval forms for repatriation from Polish consular officials in the British zone of occupation, local German work boards (Arbeitsämter) would carefully scrutinise ‘each individual case of a worker who wishe[d] to go to Poland and recommend to [the] Military Government whether he is considered to be in essential employment or not’, after which a final stamp of approval would come from the British Control Commission’s Chief Manpower Division.Footnote 117 German authorities held significant leeway in interpreting ‘essential employment’ and were later even permitted to approve repatriation applications from working-age men in vital industries if they deemed the number of that person’s dependents burdensome on public resources and housing stocks.Footnote 118
Before their official assent to limited repatriation, British officials had conducted careful polling research, finding in one survey of 400 people with Polish last names that only three strongly desired to move to Poland, all of them committed communists, and that ‘the descendants of those who arrived between 1870 and 1900 . . . regard with derision any suggestions that they are Poles’.Footnote 119 Moreover, they continued to assign officers and agents to monitor Polish associational meetings and the activities of Polish officials. While British authorities noted with dismay in early 1948 that Polish officials appeared intent on organising a ‘recruiting drive among Westphalian Poles’ and that, in one instance, the ‘Polish Mission [wa]s calling on police stations for lists of people with Polish names and then interviewing them street by street’, they still allowed limited repatriation to move forward.Footnote 120 In a March 1948 report, a British official averred that ‘[the Polish government’s stated] figure of 12,000 wishing to return to Poland is probably a gross exaggeration, and in any case, those who wished to return are probably more than half elderly and pensioned men’.Footnote 121 ‘At every one of these meetings’, this officer stated, ‘there was a feeling that old and simple people were being exploited for non-humanitarian ends’.Footnote 122 Still, thousands of repatriates clung to idealised images of Poland. As the spring of 1948 rolled around, an extended registration and approval process for repatriation unfolded in the Ruhr, setting the stage for a set of momentous eastward journeys.
Paths to Redemption: The Resettlement of the Ruhrpolen in the German and Polish Collective Conscience from 1948 Onward
The first trains of repatriates to Poland departed from the Ruhr in April of 1948, beginning a process that would collectively see an estimated 5,644 German citizens move eastward.Footnote 123 Only people who were deemed totally non-essential to the Ruhr’s economy received permission to leave, so while the Polish government scored a symbolic victory with the return of thousands of Ruhrpolen, many skilled workers had their applications to depart refused.Footnote 124 Indeed, the Polish Military Mission in Berlin complained in a March 1948 letter to the British Manpower Division that many repatriates were invalids, women and children, as many working-age men had not received permission to depart.Footnote 125
Still, a considerable number of working-age men, even coal miners, were permitted to leave, as later Polish reports would reveal.Footnote 126 Officials of one local German work board in Oberhausen worried that ‘the campaign of return of the so-called Westphalian Poles’ had ‘exercised a deleterious impact in some areas [of the Ruhr], especially in the coal mining sector’.Footnote 127 Underscoring such lingering anxieties in the Ruhr, the Labor Minister of North-Rhine Westphalia reiterated in a report that applications were to be thoroughly investigated in consultation with local work boards and stressed that certain categories of workers – such as coal miners – were absolutely essential.Footnote 128 Since 1946, rumours had circulated in the Ruhr that German citizens of Polish descent were occasionally making their way to Poland on DP transports, so British officials also undertook controls on other trains to Poland to prevent ‘unauthorized’ repatriation among German citizens of Polish descent.Footnote 129
Transports passed the Polish border near Szczecin, a migratory ‘crossroads’ through which ethnic German expellees moving westward frequently also travelled.Footnote 130 After a brief adjustment period, specific trains then delivered the repatriates to their new homes, typically in coal mining cities in Upper and Lower Silesia.Footnote 131 Beforehand, as an official of the CZPW in Katowice stressed, doctors were to inspect each male repatriate to ensure that only families of those who were ‘fit for mining work’ were allotted precious housing in mining colonies in Upper and Lower Silesia.Footnote 132 As transport records from 1948 and 1949 indicate, repatriates who headed from Szczecin to these mining colonies were often relocated to the same neighbourhoods as other re-settlers from the Ruhr. One report elucidated, for instance, that 115 repatriates from a July 1948 Bottrop transport were resettled in the city of Nowa Ruda around its eponymous coal mine.Footnote 133 In the Recovered Territories, repatriates from the Ruhr were joined by fellow settlers of Polish descent from across Europe and further afield, including the Ukrainian SSR, France, Belgium and Manchuria.Footnote 134 Słowo Polskie, a Polish newspaper published in Germany, marvelled at the ‘reemigrant Tower of Babel’ that had emerged in the dynamic city of Wałbrzych, where many recent repatriates had settled.Footnote 135
The redemptive return of the Westphalian Poles attracted considerable public attention in Poland. Indeed, Repatriant devoted its entire 10 April 1948 edition to the inauguration of repatriation from the Ruhr and the journey of the first round of settlers from Wanne-Eickel to Szczecin and then to the Recovered Territories. Polish officials carefully curated transport conditions, ensuring that the first trains sent to transport repatriates to Poland looked like veritable cornucopias, outfitted with large quantities of food that would also be distributed to friends and family members of repatriates at train stations in the Ruhr.Footnote 136 While repatriation could be contentious and chaotic – one Union of Poles in Germany member claimed that ‘people Prussian to their core (Stammpreußen) and veiled big-time Nazis (getarnte Nazigrößen) often tried to sneak into the [groups]’ and another underscored that some people scheduled to return balked on the train station platforms themselves – the Polish state presented this movement as orderly and successful.Footnote 137
Countless later editions in Repatriant and Słowo Polskie would provide updates on the pioneer experiences and social integration of repatriates from the Ruhr.Footnote 138 For many of the working-class families featured in these public profiles, this kind of attention would have been unusual and represented a symbolic status enhancement. Indeed, the Ruhrpolen who repatriated to Poland occupied an outsize place in nationalist imaginaries of the Recovered Territories that was often disproportionately greater than their previous social standing in Germany. Behind the scenes, Silesian-based labour and mining officials lamented the number of invalid and elderly repatriates on transports, but these nationalist newspaper depictions remained common.Footnote 139
Repatriation among the Ruhrpolen also received coverage in western German newspapers in 1948 that was typically characterised by an admixture of sympathy, scepticism and condescension. An article in the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, for instance, wished repatriates to Poland a ‘nice journey’ and expressed hope that the Ruhrpolen moving eastward could serve as political bridge-builders.Footnote 140 But its author also warned ‘of the flaming red border on the new map [of Europe]’, implying that these repatriates had decisively erred by departing for an increasingly communist-dominated country that lay on the wrong side of incipient Cold War boundaries. An article from the Neue Ruhr Zeitung covering repatriation in Oberhausen suggested that many prospective returnees were credulous simpletons; many believed they were headed for a ‘dreamland’ where ‘milk and honey flowed’, and its author hoped that ‘the disappointment of many of these emigrants was not too big’.Footnote 141 Other journalists stressed that they supported individuals’ right to repatriate but maintained that the Ruhr’s labour regime had Germanised most other Ruhrpolen. An article in the Neuer Westfälischer Kurier, for example, began by recalling a time when ‘at a frenzied pace, mine shaft after mine shaft was sunk in the Ruhr’ and ‘Poles streamed into the land’.Footnote 142 These people, generally from agricultural areas but ‘predestined to become hewers and haulers’, had eventually ‘adapted to the culture and civilization of the West’.Footnote 143 Yet, because ‘not all Poles had completed this assimilation process’, some were departing the Ruhr for the homeland of their ancestors.
Already from 1948 onward, however, frustrations with life in Poland among many repatriates became apparent. For instance, Augustyn Smółka, who had left Recklinghausen for Mieroszów on the outskirts of Wałbrzych in 1948, wrote to a leading repatriated Polish activist from the Ruhr that he felt ‘forced on my own behalf and in the name of my colleagues from Westphalia to describe our misfortune’, underscoring the poor living conditions and food shortages that many repatriates encountered in Lower Silesia.Footnote 144 These kinds of negative experiences and the wider increasing communisation of Poland effectively spelled the end of the repatriation drive in the Ruhr, which ground to a halt by 1949.Footnote 145 Indeed, General Jakub Prawin of the Polish Military Mission in Berlin contended that dissatisfaction with life in Poland among repatriates had significantly cut down on further interest in eastward emigration from the Ruhr.Footnote 146 A 1949 article in Repatriant by Jan Klich, the Westphalian Polish activist to whom Augustyn Smółka’s 1948 complaint had been addressed, claimed that propagandists were spreading news about poor conditions in Poland simply to prevent more Ruhrpolen from leaving but acknowledged that ‘some time would, of course, need to pass before they [the repatriates] had settled down and their life became more normalized in their new apartments and environments’.Footnote 147 In addition, the effects of the Currency Reform of 1948 in the western Allied occupation zones stabilised economic conditions in the Ruhr to a greater degree and likely limited interest in emigration.Footnote 148 In the Ruhr, news of negative experiences among repatriates also spread publicly. For instance, an article in a local edition of the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung related the experiences of a man from Wanne-Eickel who ‘had succumbed to the enticements of the Poles and went there in June of this year’ but now desperately wished to return.Footnote 149
As a result of frustrations with difficult living conditions and communist leadership in Poland, many repatriates began strongly considering a return to Germany in the late 1940s and 1950s.Footnote 150 As Andreas Hofmann has underscored, some disgruntled repatriates even sought to register as ‘ethnic Germans’ to expedite their return to the Ruhr.Footnote 151 Felix Kosmala, who was born in Wanne-Eickel in 1914, had repatriated to Wałbrzych in 1948 with his family and returned to West Germany in the late 1950s, was evidently one of the people who registered as an ethnic German emigrant (Aussiedler) with Polish authorities to facilitate his move back to the Ruhr.Footnote 152 Much like the native Upper Silesians who were categorised as ‘autochthonous’ Poles after the Second World War but moved in later decades to West Germany as Aussiedler, repatriates’ expressed ethnic identities were often fluid, situational and instrumental.Footnote 153
Interest in returns among repatriates to Poland sometimes attracted attention among German observers eager to tout West Germany’s purportedly superior post–Second World War redemptive state-building efforts. A 1952 article in the Neue Zeitung, for instance, argued that ‘as soon as the resurgence of the Federal Republic began, thousands of letters poured in from Polish mining regions’ in which repatriates underscored that ‘they had made a poor decision: in Bolshevised Poland there was no more freedom – the living conditions were now much harder and worse than in the Ruhr’.Footnote 154 Those who had stayed in the place where ‘their parents and grandparents had established a new home through their work (erarbeiteten eine neue Heimat)’, had apparently made the correct decision.Footnote 155
As Cold War tensions escalated, many Ruhrpolen found themselves caught between two poles. Indeed, Polish associational life in the Ruhr split, with a smaller faction supporting Poland’s communist authorities and a much larger one rejecting them.Footnote 156 Many Ruhrpolen who had remained in Germany and maintained Polish cultural practices increasingly trumpeted their community’s historic contribution to industrial development in the Ruhr. For instance, at a conference for European ethnic minority organisations held in Aachen, a representative of the Union of Poles in Germany claimed that ‘the still significant number of German Poles participated just as actively in the Federal Republic’s economic miracle as our ancestors did in the great industrialization of the previous century’.Footnote 157 Pertinency in western Germany and continued contributions to its economic development had, per this conception, moulded the Ruhrpolen into integral members of the region’s working class.
Conclusion
The voluntary eastward emigration of roughly five thousand German citizens of Polish descent from the Ruhr to the Republic of Poland in 1948 and 1949 was an unusual phenomenon that contrasted with the desire of many East-Central Europeans to depart this increasingly communist-dominated region. As Tara Zahra has compellingly argued, mass emigratory departures from East-Central Europe after the Second World War were fundamentally intertwined with constructed notions of a ‘free world’ to the west.Footnote 158 Yet for those Ruhrpolen who repatriated eastward in 1948 and 1949, Poland apparently embodied a kind of redemptive vision that life in occupied western Germany could not offer. Its relatively small scale and abnormal directionality notwithstanding, this campaign of repatriation crucially shaped Allied negotiations over the future of Polish and German reconstruction, attitudes towards coal mining in post–Second World War Central Europe and understandings of ethnic transformation and regional identity in the Ruhr and the Recovered Territories. The transnational, multi-ethnic population that lay at the heart of these discussions between Polish, British and German officials and commentators became a symbol onto which figures with variously local, regional and national lenses projected alternative notions of redemptive state building and corresponding ethno-social salvation.
Debates between Polish, British and German policymakers and observers over the repatriation of the Ruhrpolen in the early post–Second World War period, this article has contended, fundamentally lauded either the elevation of the Ruhrpolen into the native western German working class or their advancement into paragons of proletarian Polish patriotism. Adherence to these argumentative parameters was certainly not absolute. There were, for instance, certain Polish observers who questioned whether the ‘Westphalian Poles’ could indeed be considered co-ethnics and some German journalists who welcomed the return home of the Ruhrpolen to their ‘true’ motherland.Footnote 159 In overall terms, however, debate typically followed these overarching patterns. Grounded in divergent models of redemptive state building, projects of claiming German citizens of Polish descent in the Ruhr variously functioned as assertions of (partial) sovereignty over the region, rationales for justifying specific forms of political rule and symbolic interpretations of the redemptive power of work. Still, the mythologised narratives about the Ruhrpolen that emerged from these debates were often not primarily of their making and obscured their complicated, multifaceted ethnic identities.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Anna Bisikalo, James Bjork, Lauren Bohm, Annie Boniface, Andrew Demshuk, Alison Frank Johnson, Emma Friedlander, Stephen Gross, Wendy Hunter, Iryna Kovalchuk, Mary Lewis, Derek Penslar, David Rubinstein, Jan-Paul Sandmann, David Spreen, Frank Uekötter, Kurt Weyland, the editors of Contemporary European History and three anonymous reviewers for many important comments and suggestions on ideas presented in this paper.
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