"Polenfreundlichkeit" and Pettiness: Ethnic Politics and Denunciation in the WWII-Era Ruhr

Nikolas Weyland, Harvard University

This paper explores the insights that researchers can glean from a critical reading of denunciation records and police reports from wartime Nazi Germany. More specifically, it investigates how the Gestapo handled denunciations leveled against residents of the Ruhr region for displaying loyalties to Poland during WWII. Thousands of Polish-speaking German citizens moved to the industrializing Ruhr region from the Prussian East during the German Empire. Many of these Ruhrpolen stayed even after the recreation of an independent Polish state and into the Nazi period, when maintaining a Polish identity became perilous. Indeed, as dozens of case files from the records of the Gestapoleitstelle Düsseldorf reveal, many people with Polish family roots were denounced for alleged loyalties to Poland. Given the frequently untrustworthy nature of denunciations, the immense duress under which officials collected criminal testimonies, and the selective nature of these state-based records, what can researchers learn from these files? Engaging with the work of scholars like Natalie Zemon Davis, Robert Gellately, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and Stephen Kotkin, this paper contends that these files can provide an important window into ordinary Germans’ complex interactions with the Nazi state. My research suggests that while many residents of the Ruhr suspected the Gestapo had an interest in punishing “pro-Polish” behavior, police officers were far from taking these denunciations at face value. Instead, officials were surprisingly discerning in adjudicating accusations of “Polenfreundlichkeit” (friendliness to Poland) because they frequently attributed such allegations to personal vendettas. To elucidate these complicated dynamics, this paper develops the concept of “petty totalitarianism”: the unprecedented control exercised by the Nazi state over the lives of everyday Germans paradoxically induced people to use the Gestapo for their personal conflicts. This unintended consequence of Nazi control efforts produced extraordinary loads of “irrelevant,” “untrustworthy” information, which frustrated state officials then had to sort out.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 127. Class Inequality and Politics