Settlement Commission: Meaning (information, definition, explanation, facts)

The Settlement Commission (German: Ansiedlungskommission) was a department that operated in the decades around 1885 by Bismarck to increase land ownership of Germans at the expense of Poles in the eastern provinces of the German Empire, through the use of economic and political methods. The original goal of the Commission was to remove Polish owners from the land completely. The first budget of the Commission was 100,000,000 marks.

At later times, bigger sums of funds were made available to purchase lands from Poles. At the same time, laws were enacted that discriminated against Poles, making it more difficult for them to continue profitable operations and to rehabilitate failed operations.

The creation of the Commission made Poles defend their ownership of the land, that gradually turned into Polish-German economic competition. It was to a great extent won by Poles, in that the measures failed to make much difference in the percentages of land ownership. Polish organization and the population decline of the Germans vs the increase of the Poles figured greatly in the lack of success.

However, the Commission created numerous modern settlements, especially around city of Bromberg (Polish: Bydgoszcz).

Due to overall failure of the policy, Prussian diet passed a law that enabled forcible expropriation of Polish landowners by the Settlement Commission 1908. In 1912 the first four Polish large estates were expropriated. In 1920, after Germany was defeated in WWII, the Commission naturally ceased to function. The majority of ethnic Germans either fled, died in the attempt or were slaughtered by the advancing Soviet troops. The remaining German landowners were subject to persecution and pressure to leave, and many did. Much of the land that was vacated was given to displaced peoples from lands seized by Russia in the former southeastern Polish lands.

Today, as Poland has joined the European Union, while most choose to leave the past as it is, a small percentage of the Germans and their descendants who lost land at the end of WWII are suing for restituin. This is a source of concern and outrage among the affected Polish landowners. It is not expected that the plaintiffs will ever win a case, except that a precedent has been set in the case of Pole being restituted for lost land and the European Union laws might not allow for differential treatment.