The Jewish Buffer State, composed of the Polish

[Gość: John]

The Jewish Buffer State, composed of the Polish provinces.

Jews in Poland"
by Prof. Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski

Pro-German Zionists formed the Zionist Association for Germany in 1897 and
elected as its president Max I. Bodenheimer (1865-1940), who served until
1910. In 1902 Bodenheimer wrote a memorandum to the German Foreign Ministry
in which he claimed that Yiddish, spoken by millions of East European Jews,
who lived in the provinces annexed from Poland by Russia and Austria, was "a
popular German dialect," and that these Jews were well disposed to Germany by
linguistic affinity. Bodenheimer stated that Zionism was currently controlled
by pro-German leaders, and that Germany's support for Zionist goals would be
a boon to German ambitions in the Near East and would earn the gratitude of
the entire Jewish people. "The influence of Jewry in foreign lands would
accrue to the benefit of Germany..."

On Aug. 11, 1914, Bodenheimer submitted another memorandum to the German
Foreign Ministry on the "concurrence of German and Jewish interests in the
World War." On Aug. 17, 1914, the German Committee for Freeing of Russian
Jews was founded by German Zionists including Max Bodenheimer, Franz
Oppenheimer (1864-1943), Adolf Friedmann (1871-1933) and Russian Zionist Leo
Motzkin (1867-1933). The German Foreign Ministry supported the founding of
the new committee.

In Sept. 1914 the German Committee for Freeing of Russian Jews sent
voluminous documentation about the Eastern Jews to the German Foreign
Ministry and proposed establishment of a "buffer state" within the Jewish
Pale of Settlement, composed of the former Polish provinces annexed by
Russia. The new committee warned against the resurrection of a Polish
national state and the danger of the Polish irredentist movement in the
territories annexed from Poland by Germany and Austria. Thus, the Poles were
the group to benefit the least from the establishment of the proposed new
German protectorate.

The new buffer state was to have been dominated by some six million Jewish
inhabitants, while other nationalities would counterbalance each other. The
Jews would be most important because of their distribution, control of trade,
and high literacy. Hatred of Russia and fear of other national groups in the
buffer state would make them dependent on German protection and support. The
new buffer state was to be a monarchy under a Hohenzollern prince from
Berlin. Lublin was to be its capital because it was the seat of the
autonomous Jewish national parliament, the Congressus Judaicus, before the
partitions of Poland.

The population of some 30 million of the proposed buffer state or "Lublin
Monarchy," was to be composed of autonomous groups of 6 million Jews, 8
million Poles, 11 million Ukrainians and Byelorussians, 31/2 million
Lithuanians and Latvians, and under 1/2 million Baltic Germans. The official
language, culture, and the officers' corps of the new monarchy was to be
German.

Major Bogdan Hutten-Czapski, a "Polish-German" from Posen (Poznan) who was
serving in the German General Staff, was assigned to evaluate the proposal
for the new buffer state as a part of his task to encourage revolutionary and
nationalist movements among the diverse ethnic groups which inhabited the
former Polish provinces annexed by Russia in 1772-1795. On Hutten-Czapski's
recommendation the proposal was rejected as utterly unrealistic. Eventually,
the World Zionist Organization separated itself from the proposal. Jewish
philosopher and defender of the Eastern Jews, Martin Buber (1878-1965), at
first supported the proposal for the Lublin state. Later he withdrew his
support from the idea of a "Jewish state with cannons, flags, and military
decorations." One of Buber's associates, Julius Berger, wrote that the whole
proposal of the Jewish buffer state verged on criminal irresponsibility and
that it was the product of an irresponsible political dilettantism, which
resulted in an increase of negative attitudes of Poles towards the Jews.
Berger felt that antagonizing the Poles was dangerous in view of the fact
that nobody could predict who would control the politics of Poland after the
war.

Bodenheimer and Oppenheimer were given a promise from Paul von Hindenburg
(1847-1934) and E.F.W. Ludendorf (1865-1937) that German Jews would be used
as trustees of the German military and civilian authorities in the occupied
territories populated by Eastern Jews. The name of the Committee for Freeing
of Russian Jews was changed to the Committee for Eastern Affairs. Even in
this new form, the committee did not succeed in representing all German and
Austrian Jews. However, after 1916, the committee acted as an anti-Polish
pressure group in Berlin and kept on stressing the common interests of Jews
and Germans in Poland. Oppenheimer, embittered by disagreements with other
Zionists, told his audience, "We are Germans to the last drop of blood."

Martin Buber wrote in Der Jude (a monthly magazine) in the fall of 1917 that
the Germans were losing importance for the Eastern Jews and that many Poles,
who might be left in control, saw Jews as "parasites and uninvited guests,
who sooner or later must leave Poland."

The idea of a Jewish Lublin state was used in German propaganda in the most
sinister way during World War II. For example, of the 70,000 Jews delivered
by the Vichy French to the Germans, many bought first class railroad tickets
to travel from France to the "Jewish Lublin State" for re-settlement there.
All of these people were murdered in Treblinka and in the vicinity of Lublin,
where the Germans organized an extermination camp in Majdanek; there alone,
in 1941-1944, some 200,000 Jews and 160,000 other Europeans, mainly Poles,
were murdered. Max Bodenheimer died in 1940 in Palestine, a refugee from
Germany.

The Lublin Monarchy - 1914

Prof. Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski, , 0000-00-00