Post by pieter on May 31, 2017 15:36:42 GMT -7
Dear Jaga, Jeanne, Kaima, John, Karl, Eric, Bonobo, Pawain, Ludwik, Tomek, Aadam, Bunjo, Tufta and Nicetoe,
Poznań has a special charm with Polish and German-Prussian elements. I remember the city as a child and teenager (14 and 17 years old, I visited the city in 1984 and 1987), and have very good, sentimental, romantic and thus sweet memories about the city, my Polish grandparents there, my Polish uncles and aunts there and my two Polish cousins. The Communist Peoples Republic of Poland Zloty was cheap and our Dutch Guilders were a tough currency, so going to the cinema as a child, going for lunch or dinner in a Bar Mlechny or a Polish restaurant in the Old town or in one of the Orbis state hotels was cheap for us. The same counted fro the little charming Zoo in Poznan, we visit a lot as children, my sister and I.
I just loved walking along my grandparents Mickiewicza street and go to the state supermarket, Sam, on the Dąbrowskiego boulevard, and than to the city center over the bridge that went over the rialwaytracks along Teatr Wielki im. Stanisława Moniuszki (Great Theatre or Opera), and then towards the old city center passing some new are Peoples Republic buildings, old churches and large buildings probably from the Prussian era. I loved the old Gothic, Baroc & Rocco churches, the museums, the parks and simply the atmosphere of Poznań.
What my mother disliked about Poznań is what I loved about Poznań, it's layerd history, and the mix of Polish and Prussian (German( influences. I like Old German cities and towns and therefor also the Posen element of Poznań. My mother has a favor for Warsaw and Kraków, because the atmosphere there is more Polish. My mother considered the atmosphere in Poznań to be German, she disliked the Posen element of Poznań, being a 100% Western slavic Polish woman with no German roots. My Polish mother also dislikes Germany and Germans. She doesn't hates Germans or Germany, but simply dislikes the German atmosphere, the German language and German people in general. (That is a typical trait of the older Dutch and Polish generations.) The German element is the heavy tall buildings like the Imperial Castle in Poznań, popularly called Zamek (Polish: Zamek Cesarski w Poznaniu, German: Königliches Residenzschloss Posen), the classist and Jugendstil buildings (also the appartment building Mickiewicza 24 where my babcia and dziadek lived from 1945 until my babcia's death in 1987. -My dziadek died in 1977-).
The Prussian Imperial Castle in Poznań
As a child and teenager I loved the vibrant day and night life of this city with 551,627 citizens. I remembered in the evenings and nights hearing the trams driving over the tram tracks, busses, cars, nightcabs and truckdrivers with their trucks (It was a transport, commercial, trade and production Urban Agglomeration back then and today), and probably the trains that passed nearby.
Ofcourse I had the luxery of visiting and staying in my grandparents apartment and visiting several aunts and uncles of my mothers family and probably some friends and acqaintances of them, which made these visits different than someone who was a tourist. What does remains are memories about people, pedestrians, architecture, infrastructure, atmosphere, the fact that the city had some Polishness despite the heavy German influence. The Polishness was in the people, in their humanity, in the spirituality of the Roman-Catholic churches and in the faith of the people themselves in their homes, in the streets where they walked, in their cars, in their gardens, in their parks and in the bars, restaurants and bar mlechny they visited. Like Bonobo described old Krakow or Poland during communism it is a fact that a lot of the buildings were old and grey and brown due to the pollution of coal and Lignite (brown coal), and the fact that a lot of old communist cars produced some air pollution too. The Old Warszawa's and FSO Syrena's that drove around next to the two-stroke straight-twin engines of the Polski Fiat 126p, and other East block cars. Nex to that you had the coal driven communist steam trains, and communist era trucks, vans (FSC Żuk and ZSD Nysa 522) and old busses. Maybe a lot of people also used wood next to coals to get some heating? But next tot the greyness there was a lot of city green in the forms of old city trees and the trees and plants in the city parks.
I remember that due to the Western location of Poznań, the Polish family (of whom most originally came from Southern Poland - somewhere inbetween Krakow and Katowice -the Austrian occupied territories- ) weren't particulary fond of Germans despite of the half German heritage of one of the uncles. There was not so much personal hatred against people, but distrust about future intentions of Germans. In the case of Eastern-Germany that wasn't that strange at all, because these Prussian strict East-German communists with their Prussian militarist tradition in their East-German NVA (Nationale Volksarmee, National Peoples Army) army were not to be trusted. Twice large East-German military concentrations were near Poland. In 1968 when the East-Germans considered attacking Czechoslovakia to support the Sovjets and in 1981 when the East-Germans considered entering Poland.
So, Poznań was great in the seventies, eighties and probably in the nineties and 21th century too. Poznan today will be cleaner and more modern. When I look at Mickiewicza 24 with Google maps I see that the building has changed completely and the street too.
www.google.nl/search?q=poznan&oq=poznan+&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.2686j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#q=mickiewicza+24+pozna%C5%84+Polska
If you look at this Google map link you see the building with Kobiet and materiały biurowe, the window in the corner where the lady is standing on the street under the Kobiet sign and the two windows under the materiały biurowe sign was the large one room apartment where my grandparents lived in Poznan. They shared the hall, the kitchen, the bathroom, the attic, and a cool room (they didn't had a refrigerator) with neighbours. As child you remember your grandparents, that my dziadek was a kind, humble and rather old fashionate man with a hat, suit, small moustache and his typical old generation Polish gentleman behavior and gentle sense of humor. They were rooted in prewar Poland, my dziadek was born in the late 19th century and my babcia in the early 20th century. They had to leave Warsaw in 1944/45 and start a new life in Poznań, the city of my babcia's familymembers. In the twenties my dziadek met my babcia in Poznań where they lived for a short time before leaving for Warsaw, where they lived during the twenties, thirties and early fourties. Due to the Uncle with German roots and connections they found out that the apartment in Mickiewicza 24 was vacant in late 1944 and early 1945, because the Volksdeutsche Nazi (Polish German) which had lived in that apartment was gone (fled or murdered, I don't know). They had some possessions of the Volksdeutscher, which he had left. Some furniture, some paintings, and some Tableware. My grandparents could take few possesions from Warsaw and a lot of their posessions were looted at the end of the war in the chaos of the war ending. My granmother had spend months in Austria in Mauthausen where she did slave work for Austrian farmers and my dziadek was wondering around in Poland after the had escaped from execution in Warsaw by the German/Austrian Waffen-SS. He switched sides from a group of young Warsaw Polish men to a group of Old Polish men. The young men were shot shortly afterwards. By miracle my grandmother escaped from Austria and my grandfather managed to come to Poznań (without means of transportation, income, or places to stay), and my mother and her sister (their daughters) traveled from town to town, being helped by connections, relatives, acqaintances and people who felt empathy for the small (little) girls. It is a miracle that both the Warsaw and the Poznań family survived the war, because the Nazi occupation was anti-Polish, and saw Poles as Slavic subhumans. My Dutch family on my fathers side had hard times in Rotterdam (the bombed Dutch city which was destroyed by bombing on 14 May 1940) too, but you can't compare the Polish suffering with the Dutch suffering. The Germans were irritated with the reluctance of the Dutch to join the Great Germanic Empire of the Nazi Third Reich and became disillusioned with the stubborn Dutch. You had Dutch Nazi's and collaboration with the Germans ( a whole lot more than in Poland, because many Dutch felt themselves to be fellow Germanic people), but not enough in the mindset of the German/Austrian Nazi authorities. To much Dutch people simpy refused to becoma hard line Nazi's. The Germans had hopped the Netherlands to be the same as Austria, but the majrotiy of then Dutch was less enthousiast then the Austrians who cheerfully welcomed the German Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS forces. Adolf Hitler didn't came to the Netherlands for a victory parade or a speech for large crowds of Dutch people. The Reichskommissar for the Occupied Dutch Territories Arthur Seyss-Inquart was a notorious Austrian Nazi.
Hans Frank and Arthur Seyss-Inquart at a parade in Kraków, 1941
During World War II, he served the Third Reich in the General Government of Poland and as Reichskommissar in the Netherlands. He fully supported the heavy-handed policies put into effect by Hans Frank , including persecution of Jews. Following the invasion of Poland, Seyss-Inquart became administrative chief for Southern Poland, but did not take up that post before the General Government was created, in which he became a deputy to the Governor General Hans Frank. He was also aware of the Abwehr's murder of dozens of Polish intellectuals. I say that the persecuation of Roman-Catholic Poles and jews in the beginning was worse in Poland then in the Netherlands. The Germans didn't hunt down and murdered Dutch teachers, professors, journalists, scientists and other intellectuals. The persecution of Duch jews started later in the Netherlands, because first the Nazi authorities wanted to show a friendly, fellow Germanic face to the West-Germanic Duch, their so called Brudervolk and Bruderstaat. The Duch didn't felt that way and so soon the things would change to the worse, but they would never become as bad as in Poland. The persecuation of the Polish jews started right away in 1939 with the mass murder of Polish jews by the Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD. The main culprits were members of the Sicherheitspolizei (Sipo) – consisting of Geheimer Staats- (Gestapo) and Kriminalpolizei (Kripo) –, of the Sicherheitsdienstes (SD), the Ordnungspolizei (Orpo) and the Waffen-SS. But also units of the German Wehrmacht intelligence agency Abwehr and Wehrmacht army units took part. Bad elements of the German minirotity in Poland of Volksdeutsche took part in the Intelligenzaktion (Intelligentsia action) which was a secret genocide conducted by Nazi Germany against the Polish élites (the Polish intelligentsia, teachers, priests, physicians, et al.) early in the Second World War (1939–45). The genocide operations were conducted to realise the Germanization of the western regions of occupied Poland, before territorial annexation to the German Reich. The executioners of the Einsatzgruppen death squads and the local Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz, the German-minority militia, pretended that their police-work was meant to eliminate politically dangerous people from Polish society.
Members of the Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz in police uniforms
The Intelligenzaktion was a major step to implementing Sonderaktion Tannenberg (Operation Tannenberg), the installation of Nazi policemen and functionaries — from the SiPo (composed of the Kripo and Gestapo), and the SD (Sicherheitsdienst) — to manage the occupation and facilitate the realisation of Generalplan Ost, the German colonization of Poland. Among the 100,000 people killed in the Intelligenzaktion operations, approximately 61,000 were of the Polish intelligentsia, whom the Nazis identified as political targets in the Special Prosecution Book-Poland, compiled before the war began in September 1939. The Intelligenzaktion occurred soon after the German invasion of Poland (1 September 1939), and lasted from the autumn of 1939 until the spring of 1940; the Nazi genocide of the Polish nation continued with the operations of German AB-Aktion operation in Poland. People in Poznań suffered terribly from the Germanisation policies of the Nazi's and the Intelligenzaktion too. In Poland in general you feel the heritage of the war more than in the Netherlands, because more people were massacred, tortured, murdered and hurt there than in the Netherlands.
During the German occupation of 1939–1945, Poznań was incorporated into the Third Reich as the capital of Reichsgau Wartheland. Many Polish inhabitants were executed, arrested, expelled to the General Government (the territory of Warsaw, Radom, Kraków and Lublin) in which or used as forced labour; at the same time many Germans and Volksdeutsche (Polish Germans) were settled in the city. The German population increased from around 5,000 in 1939 (some 2% of the inhabitants) to around 95,000 in 1944. One of these Volksdeutsche, was the Nazi who lived in my grandparents apartment in Mickiewicza 24. The man could have been a Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz member, or part of the administration of Reichsgau Wartheland, the Nazi German administration of Posen (the German name of Poznań). For some reason my Polish family from my babcia's side managed to survive (maybe due to the German family connections and German family of my Polish uncle with German family roots. He was not a collaborator nor a nazi, but used his connections pragmatically to help his Polish family and wife). Again it was a miracle that my Polish dziadek, Babcia, mother and aunt survived the war in Warsaw, Mauthausen and other places. It was a fifty fifty case, several times they could have died, but God had mercy on them and spared them and granted them a life in Post-War Poznań. I remember that we found Nazi lecture of that Volksdeutsche, my grandparents had put away on top of a shelf in the dark hall in the dark in brown paper that was covered by decades of dust. We found Jahrbücher des Dritten Reichs from 1933 until 1938, Nazi Art magazines with Adolf Hitler on the first page, and awful mean nazi stories inbetween the rather nice art images, beautiful drawn social realistic Waffen-SS books about heroic fighting handsome, tall, blond, blue German soldiers, who were ofcourse victorious towards the enemy. And books of the various army sections; Wehrmacht, Kriegsmarine (Navy) and Luftwaffe. My father didn't want to take it with us to the Netherlands, being afraid that the East-German border guards or Vopo's (East-German police) would catch us with nazi lecture. That would have been embarrassing, awkward, and not so wise. We already smuggled that old Polish and German paintings, table ware and other antiques outside of Poland. So I have lot's of memories about Poznań. For a long time I also remembered the atmosphere, smell and sounds, but now I have grown older these memories sadly faded away. I only have memories about the images, people and experiences today.
Polish Germans of the Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz Nazi militia in Western Poland during the Second World War
Cheers,
Pieter
P.S.- I have to say that there were also Volksdeutscher who were anti-Nazi. Some of the German Poles also were active in the Polish resistance. Władysław Anders, Emil August Fieldorf, Adam Fastnacht, Wilhelm Orlik-Rückemann, Maximilian Kolbe (Kolbe had a German father), Józef Haller had German roots.
Poznań has a special charm with Polish and German-Prussian elements. I remember the city as a child and teenager (14 and 17 years old, I visited the city in 1984 and 1987), and have very good, sentimental, romantic and thus sweet memories about the city, my Polish grandparents there, my Polish uncles and aunts there and my two Polish cousins. The Communist Peoples Republic of Poland Zloty was cheap and our Dutch Guilders were a tough currency, so going to the cinema as a child, going for lunch or dinner in a Bar Mlechny or a Polish restaurant in the Old town or in one of the Orbis state hotels was cheap for us. The same counted fro the little charming Zoo in Poznan, we visit a lot as children, my sister and I.
I just loved walking along my grandparents Mickiewicza street and go to the state supermarket, Sam, on the Dąbrowskiego boulevard, and than to the city center over the bridge that went over the rialwaytracks along Teatr Wielki im. Stanisława Moniuszki (Great Theatre or Opera), and then towards the old city center passing some new are Peoples Republic buildings, old churches and large buildings probably from the Prussian era. I loved the old Gothic, Baroc & Rocco churches, the museums, the parks and simply the atmosphere of Poznań.
What my mother disliked about Poznań is what I loved about Poznań, it's layerd history, and the mix of Polish and Prussian (German( influences. I like Old German cities and towns and therefor also the Posen element of Poznań. My mother has a favor for Warsaw and Kraków, because the atmosphere there is more Polish. My mother considered the atmosphere in Poznań to be German, she disliked the Posen element of Poznań, being a 100% Western slavic Polish woman with no German roots. My Polish mother also dislikes Germany and Germans. She doesn't hates Germans or Germany, but simply dislikes the German atmosphere, the German language and German people in general. (That is a typical trait of the older Dutch and Polish generations.) The German element is the heavy tall buildings like the Imperial Castle in Poznań, popularly called Zamek (Polish: Zamek Cesarski w Poznaniu, German: Königliches Residenzschloss Posen), the classist and Jugendstil buildings (also the appartment building Mickiewicza 24 where my babcia and dziadek lived from 1945 until my babcia's death in 1987. -My dziadek died in 1977-).
The Prussian Imperial Castle in Poznań
As a child and teenager I loved the vibrant day and night life of this city with 551,627 citizens. I remembered in the evenings and nights hearing the trams driving over the tram tracks, busses, cars, nightcabs and truckdrivers with their trucks (It was a transport, commercial, trade and production Urban Agglomeration back then and today), and probably the trains that passed nearby.
Ofcourse I had the luxery of visiting and staying in my grandparents apartment and visiting several aunts and uncles of my mothers family and probably some friends and acqaintances of them, which made these visits different than someone who was a tourist. What does remains are memories about people, pedestrians, architecture, infrastructure, atmosphere, the fact that the city had some Polishness despite the heavy German influence. The Polishness was in the people, in their humanity, in the spirituality of the Roman-Catholic churches and in the faith of the people themselves in their homes, in the streets where they walked, in their cars, in their gardens, in their parks and in the bars, restaurants and bar mlechny they visited. Like Bonobo described old Krakow or Poland during communism it is a fact that a lot of the buildings were old and grey and brown due to the pollution of coal and Lignite (brown coal), and the fact that a lot of old communist cars produced some air pollution too. The Old Warszawa's and FSO Syrena's that drove around next to the two-stroke straight-twin engines of the Polski Fiat 126p, and other East block cars. Nex to that you had the coal driven communist steam trains, and communist era trucks, vans (FSC Żuk and ZSD Nysa 522) and old busses. Maybe a lot of people also used wood next to coals to get some heating? But next tot the greyness there was a lot of city green in the forms of old city trees and the trees and plants in the city parks.
I remember that due to the Western location of Poznań, the Polish family (of whom most originally came from Southern Poland - somewhere inbetween Krakow and Katowice -the Austrian occupied territories- ) weren't particulary fond of Germans despite of the half German heritage of one of the uncles. There was not so much personal hatred against people, but distrust about future intentions of Germans. In the case of Eastern-Germany that wasn't that strange at all, because these Prussian strict East-German communists with their Prussian militarist tradition in their East-German NVA (Nationale Volksarmee, National Peoples Army) army were not to be trusted. Twice large East-German military concentrations were near Poland. In 1968 when the East-Germans considered attacking Czechoslovakia to support the Sovjets and in 1981 when the East-Germans considered entering Poland.
So, Poznań was great in the seventies, eighties and probably in the nineties and 21th century too. Poznan today will be cleaner and more modern. When I look at Mickiewicza 24 with Google maps I see that the building has changed completely and the street too.
www.google.nl/search?q=poznan&oq=poznan+&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.2686j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#q=mickiewicza+24+pozna%C5%84+Polska
If you look at this Google map link you see the building with Kobiet and materiały biurowe, the window in the corner where the lady is standing on the street under the Kobiet sign and the two windows under the materiały biurowe sign was the large one room apartment where my grandparents lived in Poznan. They shared the hall, the kitchen, the bathroom, the attic, and a cool room (they didn't had a refrigerator) with neighbours. As child you remember your grandparents, that my dziadek was a kind, humble and rather old fashionate man with a hat, suit, small moustache and his typical old generation Polish gentleman behavior and gentle sense of humor. They were rooted in prewar Poland, my dziadek was born in the late 19th century and my babcia in the early 20th century. They had to leave Warsaw in 1944/45 and start a new life in Poznań, the city of my babcia's familymembers. In the twenties my dziadek met my babcia in Poznań where they lived for a short time before leaving for Warsaw, where they lived during the twenties, thirties and early fourties. Due to the Uncle with German roots and connections they found out that the apartment in Mickiewicza 24 was vacant in late 1944 and early 1945, because the Volksdeutsche Nazi (Polish German) which had lived in that apartment was gone (fled or murdered, I don't know). They had some possessions of the Volksdeutscher, which he had left. Some furniture, some paintings, and some Tableware. My grandparents could take few possesions from Warsaw and a lot of their posessions were looted at the end of the war in the chaos of the war ending. My granmother had spend months in Austria in Mauthausen where she did slave work for Austrian farmers and my dziadek was wondering around in Poland after the had escaped from execution in Warsaw by the German/Austrian Waffen-SS. He switched sides from a group of young Warsaw Polish men to a group of Old Polish men. The young men were shot shortly afterwards. By miracle my grandmother escaped from Austria and my grandfather managed to come to Poznań (without means of transportation, income, or places to stay), and my mother and her sister (their daughters) traveled from town to town, being helped by connections, relatives, acqaintances and people who felt empathy for the small (little) girls. It is a miracle that both the Warsaw and the Poznań family survived the war, because the Nazi occupation was anti-Polish, and saw Poles as Slavic subhumans. My Dutch family on my fathers side had hard times in Rotterdam (the bombed Dutch city which was destroyed by bombing on 14 May 1940) too, but you can't compare the Polish suffering with the Dutch suffering. The Germans were irritated with the reluctance of the Dutch to join the Great Germanic Empire of the Nazi Third Reich and became disillusioned with the stubborn Dutch. You had Dutch Nazi's and collaboration with the Germans ( a whole lot more than in Poland, because many Dutch felt themselves to be fellow Germanic people), but not enough in the mindset of the German/Austrian Nazi authorities. To much Dutch people simpy refused to becoma hard line Nazi's. The Germans had hopped the Netherlands to be the same as Austria, but the majrotiy of then Dutch was less enthousiast then the Austrians who cheerfully welcomed the German Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS forces. Adolf Hitler didn't came to the Netherlands for a victory parade or a speech for large crowds of Dutch people. The Reichskommissar for the Occupied Dutch Territories Arthur Seyss-Inquart was a notorious Austrian Nazi.
Hans Frank and Arthur Seyss-Inquart at a parade in Kraków, 1941
During World War II, he served the Third Reich in the General Government of Poland and as Reichskommissar in the Netherlands. He fully supported the heavy-handed policies put into effect by Hans Frank , including persecution of Jews. Following the invasion of Poland, Seyss-Inquart became administrative chief for Southern Poland, but did not take up that post before the General Government was created, in which he became a deputy to the Governor General Hans Frank. He was also aware of the Abwehr's murder of dozens of Polish intellectuals. I say that the persecuation of Roman-Catholic Poles and jews in the beginning was worse in Poland then in the Netherlands. The Germans didn't hunt down and murdered Dutch teachers, professors, journalists, scientists and other intellectuals. The persecution of Duch jews started later in the Netherlands, because first the Nazi authorities wanted to show a friendly, fellow Germanic face to the West-Germanic Duch, their so called Brudervolk and Bruderstaat. The Duch didn't felt that way and so soon the things would change to the worse, but they would never become as bad as in Poland. The persecuation of the Polish jews started right away in 1939 with the mass murder of Polish jews by the Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD. The main culprits were members of the Sicherheitspolizei (Sipo) – consisting of Geheimer Staats- (Gestapo) and Kriminalpolizei (Kripo) –, of the Sicherheitsdienstes (SD), the Ordnungspolizei (Orpo) and the Waffen-SS. But also units of the German Wehrmacht intelligence agency Abwehr and Wehrmacht army units took part. Bad elements of the German minirotity in Poland of Volksdeutsche took part in the Intelligenzaktion (Intelligentsia action) which was a secret genocide conducted by Nazi Germany against the Polish élites (the Polish intelligentsia, teachers, priests, physicians, et al.) early in the Second World War (1939–45). The genocide operations were conducted to realise the Germanization of the western regions of occupied Poland, before territorial annexation to the German Reich. The executioners of the Einsatzgruppen death squads and the local Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz, the German-minority militia, pretended that their police-work was meant to eliminate politically dangerous people from Polish society.
Members of the Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz in police uniforms
The Intelligenzaktion was a major step to implementing Sonderaktion Tannenberg (Operation Tannenberg), the installation of Nazi policemen and functionaries — from the SiPo (composed of the Kripo and Gestapo), and the SD (Sicherheitsdienst) — to manage the occupation and facilitate the realisation of Generalplan Ost, the German colonization of Poland. Among the 100,000 people killed in the Intelligenzaktion operations, approximately 61,000 were of the Polish intelligentsia, whom the Nazis identified as political targets in the Special Prosecution Book-Poland, compiled before the war began in September 1939. The Intelligenzaktion occurred soon after the German invasion of Poland (1 September 1939), and lasted from the autumn of 1939 until the spring of 1940; the Nazi genocide of the Polish nation continued with the operations of German AB-Aktion operation in Poland. People in Poznań suffered terribly from the Germanisation policies of the Nazi's and the Intelligenzaktion too. In Poland in general you feel the heritage of the war more than in the Netherlands, because more people were massacred, tortured, murdered and hurt there than in the Netherlands.
During the German occupation of 1939–1945, Poznań was incorporated into the Third Reich as the capital of Reichsgau Wartheland. Many Polish inhabitants were executed, arrested, expelled to the General Government (the territory of Warsaw, Radom, Kraków and Lublin) in which or used as forced labour; at the same time many Germans and Volksdeutsche (Polish Germans) were settled in the city. The German population increased from around 5,000 in 1939 (some 2% of the inhabitants) to around 95,000 in 1944. One of these Volksdeutsche, was the Nazi who lived in my grandparents apartment in Mickiewicza 24. The man could have been a Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz member, or part of the administration of Reichsgau Wartheland, the Nazi German administration of Posen (the German name of Poznań). For some reason my Polish family from my babcia's side managed to survive (maybe due to the German family connections and German family of my Polish uncle with German family roots. He was not a collaborator nor a nazi, but used his connections pragmatically to help his Polish family and wife). Again it was a miracle that my Polish dziadek, Babcia, mother and aunt survived the war in Warsaw, Mauthausen and other places. It was a fifty fifty case, several times they could have died, but God had mercy on them and spared them and granted them a life in Post-War Poznań. I remember that we found Nazi lecture of that Volksdeutsche, my grandparents had put away on top of a shelf in the dark hall in the dark in brown paper that was covered by decades of dust. We found Jahrbücher des Dritten Reichs from 1933 until 1938, Nazi Art magazines with Adolf Hitler on the first page, and awful mean nazi stories inbetween the rather nice art images, beautiful drawn social realistic Waffen-SS books about heroic fighting handsome, tall, blond, blue German soldiers, who were ofcourse victorious towards the enemy. And books of the various army sections; Wehrmacht, Kriegsmarine (Navy) and Luftwaffe. My father didn't want to take it with us to the Netherlands, being afraid that the East-German border guards or Vopo's (East-German police) would catch us with nazi lecture. That would have been embarrassing, awkward, and not so wise. We already smuggled that old Polish and German paintings, table ware and other antiques outside of Poland. So I have lot's of memories about Poznań. For a long time I also remembered the atmosphere, smell and sounds, but now I have grown older these memories sadly faded away. I only have memories about the images, people and experiences today.
Polish Germans of the Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz Nazi militia in Western Poland during the Second World War
Cheers,
Pieter
P.S.- I have to say that there were also Volksdeutscher who were anti-Nazi. Some of the German Poles also were active in the Polish resistance. Władysław Anders, Emil August Fieldorf, Adam Fastnacht, Wilhelm Orlik-Rückemann, Maximilian Kolbe (Kolbe had a German father), Józef Haller had German roots.