SEVEN

THE FIRST WORLD WAR AND ITS AFTERMATH

Cutting Lines, Creating New Links

The new correspondence of trains between the principal capitals of the Continent and London, via Ostende-Dover, cuts the journey’s length by five hours and a half and reduces to . . . 21 hours the journey between Berlin and London; to 51 hours the journey between St-Petersburg and London; to 32 hours the journey between London and Warsaw. . . .

These new services furnish the most rapid communication of modern times.¹

International Sleeping Car Company’s June 1914 guide

The new express train D 8 Berlin-Elbing-Riga sheds a harsh light on the current customs and passport drudgeries. . . . Travelers on this itinerary must endure no less than twelve customs and passport revisions, eight of them alone from Riga to Berlin. First, the Latvian exit inspection takes place at the Latvian border, followed by the Lithuanian entrance control in another station. This is followed by various other revisions on the way to Berlin, always at different stations; one Lithuanian, two German, two Polish, and again a German revision. In the past, there was a single passport and customs control on the entire Berlin–Petersburg journey; on the journey there in Wirballen, and on the return journey in Eydtkuhnen.²

Travel report in Thorner Zeitung, October 1921

AS THE JUNE 15, 1914, edition of the International Sleeping Car Company’s guide suggested, traveling across the continent would become quicker, more comfortable, and more widespread. That late spring, the Berlin-based German branch of the company was about to finalize a new contract with the Prussian State Railroads. The Nord-Express would become the fastest rail connection in the world.

However, the First World War broke out just weeks after the guide’s release. The cataclysmic events that followed illustrate that the primacy of the concepts of exclusive national identity, hubris, and power prevailed over the idea of a liberal cosmopolitan European travel community with transnational identities. In the first days of the war, the German Army occupied large parts of Belgium, and a German administrator took over the Sleeping Car Company’s headquarters in Brussels.³ Having confiscated the company’s rolling stock within the Central Powers’ territory, the Germans created the Mitteleuropäische Schlafwagengesellschaft, a company better known under the name of Mitropa. It provided services similar to those of the International Sleeping Car Company and existed until the early 2000s.

This chapter will first focus on the new geopolitical situation of the Ostbahn and the ways the Polish and German governments navigated the new borders. Second, we will revisit several places that are familiar to the reader. Starting in Berlin, we will move to the newly emerging railroad crossings at the Polish-German border. Subsequently, the focus turns to Königsberg and international trade, followed by Eydtkuhnen and a glance at tourism and migration in the interwar period. The chapter closes with the Tczew (Dirschau) bridges, where the first shots of the Second World War were fired.

SEVERED LINKS, REROUTED TRAFFIC

During the war, the lines of the Ostbahn served, first and foremost, the war effort. The front lines cut off travel, trade, and migration between Germany and its eastern and western neighbors. Travelers, seasonal laborers, and prospective migrants to North America alike found their routes blocked and returned to their homelands, otherwise facing internment. Friedrich List’s vision of the railroad as a force that would render war obsolete, which I evoked earlier in this book, lay in literal ruins.⁴ As a result, the “forces of modernization” flowing along the railroad, as evoked by John Stilgoe for the American case, also facilitated extreme nationalism and modern industrial warfare across Europe.⁵ The outcome of this proliferation of destruction was the breaking up of the railroad link between eastern and western Europe.

Vladimir Lenin’s return journey to St. Petersburg in 1917 offers a striking example of severed railroad lines. Lenin spent the early years of the First World War mainly in Switzerland; in 1916, he settled down in Zurich. When the February Revolution ended czarist rule in the Russian Empire, he planned to move to St. Petersburg. Just three years earlier, Lenin would have boarded a train in Zurich at 9:45 a.m. Hendschels Telegraph of May 1914 indicated a transfer in Basel and arrival in Cologne at 9:30 p.m. One hour later, he would have boarded the Nord-Express, directly connecting to St. Petersburg, where he would have arrived about thirty-five hours later, at 10:30 a.m. In 1914, the whole journey was scheduled to take approximately forty-eight hours.⁶ In April 1917, the voyage that would change global history took Lenin eight days.

Lenin’s company consisted of thirty-two Russian revolutionaries and their families. They crossed Germany in a sealed carriage.⁷ While the German military command had a strong interest in destabilizing the new Provisional Government of the Russian Empire to benefit the German war effort, they certainly did not want the revolutionaries to interact with the German population. The journey from the Swiss-German border to the ferry port in Sassnitz took four days. German officers who accompanied the group ensured that they stayed in the carriage during the frequent stops. They got stuck in Berlin for twenty hours because they missed the daily ferry from the German Baltic Sea port Sassnitz to Sweden.⁸ Once the group landed in Malmö, Sweden, they no longer traveled on sealed trains. In Stockholm, Swedish socialists organized a reception party and housed the group in the luxurious Hotel Regina.⁹ From Stockholm, Lenin and his comrades traveled farther north to the Swedish border with Finland at Haparanda.

During the war, Haparanda and its Finnish counterpart Tornio in Scandinavia’s North replaced Eydtkuhnen and Verzhbolovo as the most critical land crossing points between eastern and western Europe. Sweden remained neutral during the war, and Finland was still part of the Russian Empire. As a result, mail and goods traffic between the empire and its western European allies switched to maritime routes and the railroads of Scandinavia. According to Catherine Merridale, in six months in 1917 alone, the small border towns handled “twenty-seven million mail items and packets,” with cargo transported as far as Tokyo and Peking.¹⁰ Since there was no railroad bridge between the two border stations, in winter, everything was transported by sleigh across the frozen Tone River; in summer, “an overhead cable system . . . on floating pylons” facilitated transportation; smuggling was rampant.¹¹ As in Eydtkuhnen, even today, the track gauges on both sides of the border differ and require reloading or bogie exchange. In April 1917, Lenin and his group took a sled to Tornio; from there, the railroad transported them across Finland to Petrograd, as was St. Petersburg’s new name.¹²

New Borders, New Obstacles

As a result of the war and the subsequent peace treaties, new border regimes emerged along with new central and eastern European states, marking the starting point for an era of deglobalization. It also marked the beginning of a period of severed and inefficient travel and a relative decrease in the cross-border economic exchange between eastern and western Europe. The second quotation of this chapter’s opening is an extreme example of how the new borders and related visa regimes in eastern Europe decelerated long-distance travel—resembling the situation in early nineteenth-century Germany, with its multiple small- and medium-sized states and customs borders. As Per Högselius, Arne Kaijser, and Erik van der Vleuten have demonstrated, in the interwar period, a “new category of actors appeared, for whom the main goal was not to build new systems [and to reduce transportation times] but to control and restrict flows and channel them physically.”¹³ It seems as if the prewar border regime of Eydtkuhnen and Verzhbolovo was now replicated and implemented at all crossings throughout the continent.

Figure 7.1. Mail expedition during the First World War in Haparanda/Sweden on the border with the Russian Empire, ca. 1917. Photographer: Maria Amalia Green.

Courtesy of Postmuseum Stockholm, identifier POST.008820.

After 1918, newly independent Lithuania became East Prussia’s northeastern neighbor, and independent Poland became its neighbor to the south and the west. To the northwest, the Free City of Gdańsk (Freie Stadt Danzig) was established. As we have seen, in the decades before the war, the Ostbahn and its branch lines influenced the formation of a modern Polish nation. The Polish national movement successfully reconstituted the once-partitioned state as an outcome of the war. One of the main aspirations of Poland’s independence movement had been accessing the Baltic Sea. With the Treaty of Versailles, this request was fulfilled at the cost of Germany’s overland connection to the province of East Prussia.

Figure 7.2. “Polish Corridor.” Polish territory, separating East Prussia from the German mainland. Pommern Jahrbuch 4 (Stettin: Leon Sauniers Buchhandlung, 1929), inlet.

Courtesy of The Pomeranian Library in Szczecin.

Infrastructure and Propaganda

Poland’s land bridge to the Baltic Sea, the so-called Polish Corridor, developed into a significant political issue in Poland and Germany and led to territorial claims, especially on the German side. These claims were based on similar arguments as in the decades before, such as the ethnic composition of the region in question, its history, or its strategic importance. As a result, the Ostbahn had to cross Polish territory to connect Königsberg with Berlin. As the Weimar Republic did not recognize its eastern borders and Poland introduced inconvenient tariffs on transit transportation, the number of services between the two Prussian metropolises was initially significantly reduced and even suspended. To replace transit transport, Germany introduced the Seedienst Ostpreußen—a shipping line from Swinemünde (Świnoujście) northeast of Berlin to Pillau (Baltiisk) near Königsberg. While this was an alternative for goods that did not rely on quick transportation, it extended travel times for passengers to an inconvenient twenty-four to twenty-five hours; as a result, the number of passengers traveling by boat dropped from 183,021 in 1920 to 15,624 in 1921, once Germany and Poland renewed full railroad transit.¹⁴

In long and difficult negotiations, the new neighbors settled the most essential transit issues, and they signed an agreement in February 1921. This Paris Convention stipulated free transit of people, goods, railcars, boats, mail, telegrams, and telephone lines across Polish territory.¹⁵ As a result, railroad services on the Ostbahn rebounded. Both sides agreed on direct train services between Germany and East Prussia on sealed trains to avoid passport and customs controls within Polish territory (so-called privileged transit). Regular transit was treated like every other cross-border traffic and included passport and customs controls and stops along the route. Even for regular transit, Germans and citizens of Entente countries did not need a visa.

To be sure, these agreements created more inconveniences for passenger traffic on the line than before the war. Now, for privileged passenger transit, locomotives had to be switched at the borders, passengers were not allowed to get on or off the train during transit, windows had to be kept shut, and Polish (and Gdańsk) personnel controlled the passengers.¹⁶ Also, Soviet and Lithuanian passengers were banned from privileged transit and needed special permission from the Polish Foreign Office to obtain visas for regular transit.¹⁷ Nevertheless, in the last years before the Second World War, eight daily express passenger trains connected Berlin and Königsberg. In 1939, it took a record six hours and thirty-eight minutes to get from Berlin to Königsberg—a speed not even matched during the Second World War when the Corridor was occupied by Germany and borders no longer hindered traffic.¹⁸

The number of passengers and goods transported between the western and eastern parts of Germany through railroad transit reached levels comparable to those in prewar times.¹⁹ In terms of freight rates, the German Railroads treated the Polish section of the former Ostbahn as an integral part of the German railroad net. The German Railroads paid the Polish State Railroads (Polskie Koleje Państwowe, PKP) for the transit, a significant income for the Polish state.²⁰ As a result, even German contemporaries had to admit that “in terms of transit, East Prussia is no longer an exclave. The railroad bridged the gap across Polish territory.”²¹ In fact, PKP reduced traffic only in the mid-1930s, when Germany refused to reimburse for the transit traffic, as agreed upon in the Paris Convention.²²

However, German propaganda successfully created the myth of the Corridor as a hindrance to passenger and goods transportation—a myth nurtured among others with a constant feeling of the civilizational superiority of the German nation over its eastern neighbors. As a result, the abolition of the infamous Corridor was among other pseudo-arguments used to justify the attack on Poland in 1939.²³

BERLIN: OSTBAHNHOF EUROPAS

The hall [Silesian Station, third-class waiting room] buzzes and whirs. Stale-smelling people. Beer, cheese, and garlic. Sometimes a train goes over their heads. Then they prick up their ears, silent, tense, thin-lipped. Their feet get wheels. Their breath whistles like a locomotive. They stick to their tables and yet ride. Their desire rides. To the east? To the west? Each time it’s an express train and sleepers with covered windows. For there they travel with money in their pockets. Business in Cologne and Königsberg. Express train Warsaw–Paris. Ladies and gentlemen sit at the windows, pretending to be borne on an express train. They lean on the cushions and read foreign newspapers. Or they smoke cigarettes and take a boring look at the platform. Don’t they know that people are sitting down here who would give anything if only in their dreams they could switch with those up there?²⁴

This scene from Julius Berstl’s novel Berlin Schlesischer Bahnhof adequately depicts the many worlds that met in Berlin in the interwar period. During the Weimar Republic, the German capital was a bustling metropolis with four million inhabitants. It served as a global meeting place for artists and offered a rich nightlife, “an artistic center of such concentration that London and Paris paled beside it.”²⁵ The industries drew more people than ever to the city, where urban planners could barely keep up with housing programs and infrastructure improvements, leaving many people stranded. It was also a very international place, with artists, diplomats, businesspeople, and migrants from many places—most notably a large community of White Russian refugees who could not or would not go back to their homeland, which was now the Soviet Union.²⁶

As we have seen, the groundwork for Berlin’s role as an industrial city serving as a European infrastructural hub was laid long before the First World War. Starlike railroads radiated in all directions, and the city administration established an efficient public transport system. In the 1920s, the Siemens company electrified the urban and suburban railroad lines (the S-Bahn). In 1929, Berlin founded the Berlin Transit Company (Berliner Verkehrsgesellschaft), the world’s most extensive public transport system.²⁷ The late 1920s also saw an extension of the underground railway (U-Bahn). In his epic portrayal of the less-affluent social classes of Berlin, Alfred Döblin effectively described the ongoing construction amid one of Berlin’s busiest plazas in his novel Berlin Alexanderplatz: “Boom boom boom goes the steam pile-driver on the Alexanderplatz.”²⁸ Another biographer of Berlin is Julius Berstl. He created a literary monument to the life of ordinary people in and around Silesian Station. This station kept its role as the primary gateway to the city for travelers and migrants to and from eastern Germany and eastern Europe, or the Ostbahnhof Europas, as Karl Schlögel has put it.²⁹ As for the nearby original terminus of the Ostbahn on Küstriner Platz, it was first used as a warehouse and then, in 1928–1929, converted into the variety theater Plaza—one of the many establishments of this kind in interwar Berlin.

After the First World War, Berlin continued to serve as Germany’s capital. This role was the stage for German politicians’ decisions on trade and travel with eastern German territories and eastern Europe.

NEW ADMINISTRATIONS AND NEW BORDER STATIONS

For its first fifty years, the Ostbahn had been administered from Bromberg. In 1895, it lost its administrative independence and was fully incorporated into the Prussian State Railroads. Henceforth, three directorates in Bromberg, Danzig, and Königsberg each administered segments of the previous Ostbahn network.³⁰ After the First World War, only Königsberg remained part of the German Empire. At the same time, Bydgoszcz was now Polish, and Gdańsk was part of the Free City of Gdańsk. On April 1, 1920, the German government in Berlin formed the Deutsche Reichseisenbahnen (German Imperial Railroads, henceforth Reichsbahn), merging the previous state-owned railroads. In 1924, under the regulations of the Dawes Plan, the German government transformed the German Reichsbahn into a state-owned enterprise (Deutsche Reichsbahn-Gesellschaft) that had to contribute a significant share of its profit as war reparations.³¹

When the Reichsbahn lost its previous directorate headquarters, it consolidated the remaining eastern German railroad lines under the directorates of Königsberg, Stettin, and a newly created Railroad Directorate East (Eisenbahndirektion Osten) in Berlin; in 1923, the directorate’s headquarters was moved to Frankfurt on the Oder, one hundred kilometers to the west of the new Polish-German border.³²

From Germanization to Polonization

As we have seen, in the 1870s, the Bromberg municipality argued with the vital “German element” among its railroad employees when petitioning Berlin to keep the Ostbahn headquarters in the city. Also, in its eastern provinces, the Prussian State Railroads rarely hired Polish employees in mid- and high-level positions. Poles usually had to move to the western provinces to get a promotion.³³ As a result, the managerial positions were almost entirely occupied by Germans. This did not reflect the Polish share of the population: in the 1910 German census, only one-third of the three million inhabitants of the later-ceded Prussian lands declared themselves Germans.³⁴ After the war, only those Germans who had lived on the now Polish lands before 1908 could stay when taking Polish citizenship; Germans who had moved there after that date or who did not want to resign their German citizenship were given two years to leave the country.

There was significant political and economic pressure on the German population to leave. Also, there was a widespread fear of living in a foreign country and being forced to speak a language they did not know well. Losing their employment with the railroad or other government agencies, such as administration or education, left many without income; others were offered work in Germany by their employers or feared economic or political instability in the new Polish state. As a result, between 1918 and 1939, the German population in Poland’s western provinces declined by 70 percent.³⁵

When Poland gradually took over previously German railroad administrations, it initially wanted the German experts to stay since it lacked the indispensable Polish specialists. Therefore, in a particular Polish-German treaty, the two neighbors pledged to keep previous administrative personnel in their posts until March 1920. Germany wanted to renew the treaty but proposed a package deal regulating transit traffic. Despite the shortage of qualified personnel, Poland rejected this idea, and the Reichsbahn ordered all German employees to leave. As a result, only 387 of the 2,821 employees of the railroad directorate in Gdańsk stayed beyond March 1920, resulting in a chaotic situation on the rail.³⁶ Ethnic Polish employees (mostly of lower ranks) could stay but had to take Polish citizenship. They would often quickly rise in the ranks when replacing Germans.³⁷

Thus, with the unexpected support of the German state, the Polish Railroads in the freshly acquired Prussian territories thoroughly Polonized their cadre. This was part of a broader ethnonational design. For many Polish politicians, reducing the share of Germans seemed to be a necessity that served the idea of a modern, ethnically homogeneous nation-state. As a result, the Polish state applied ethnic categories similar to those the Germans used before the war—for the questionable sake of assuring national allegiance.

Frankfurt on the Oder: A War Profiteer

Prussian state employees had the additional advantage of keeping their employment when moving to Germany. The newly formed Reichsbahn assigned them alternative administrative positions, often in the recently created Directorate East in Frankfurt on the Oder, where seven hundred displaced railroad employees found a new home. Frankfurt had been a regional administrative center even before the war and had housed several garrisons. With most of the military personnel gone because of the stipulations of Versailles, the railroad directorate could move into one of the vacant garrisons. Still, the administration had to arrange for housing; this started a building program that created modern quarters with more than “600 large, medium-sized, and small apartments.”³⁸

Describing the postwar situation of Frankfurt on the Oder, contemporary urban planner Martin Kießling stated, “The war turned capitalists into beggars, master plumbers into industrialists, mansion-lined streets into rental quarters, and humble villages into stately residential districts. It scrambled the lots, and, from the crowd of losing tickets, Frankfurt on the Oder drew a winner. Eastern Germany was lost, and Frankfurt became the most important border town for the new middle Ostmark.”³⁹

Frankfurt was indeed a beneficiary of the postwar borders. As the capital of the mittlere Ostmark (middle Ostmark)—alluding to the medieval term for eastern borderlands (Mark)—it gained political and economic importance. When creating new quarters for Germans arriving from the east, the town made sure to keep the memory of the lost cities and towns alive—for example, by naming streets after Bromberg, Thorn, Dirschau, or Danzig. The Wappenhaus (Coat of Arms Building) is an outstanding example of revanchist thinking. Here, the coats of arms of many “lost” towns and cities decorate a modern residential building—places familiar to the readers of this book.⁴⁰

Different Perspectives: A Story of Loss or Success?

While the German perspective on the aftermath of the First World War is usually a story of loss and severed infrastructural ties, the Polish view is the opposite. Poland’s access to the Baltic Sea was a mainstay in propaganda. It was even celebrated in an event called the Wedding to the Sea, when a Polish soldier threw a ring into the sea to mark the official acquisition of the shoreline. PKP took over all railroad lines in the formerly Prussian territory. The Ostbahn and its branch lines were organized as a railroad district under the newly formed Polish State Railroads Directorate in Gdańsk, with its headquarters in the previous Prussian directorate building.⁴¹ While Gdańsk doesn’t seem to be the first choice, given its location in the extreme north of the railroad district, Poland wanted to make a strong political statement about the city’s historical ties with Poland. At the same time, Gdańsk was now the core of a new state, the Free City of Gdańsk; still, some essential public services, such as most railroad lines, were under Polish jurisdiction. In 1934, for administrative reasons, the directorate moved to Toruń.⁴²

As for Polish rail traffic on the former Ostbahn and its branch lines, it served primarily local needs. Except for the line to Gdańsk, the former Prussian railroad lines within the Corridor ran from east to west, thus facilitating communication between the German mainland and East Prussia rather than within the Polish state. In addition, in the interwar period, the existing north–south connections ran through German territory or the Free City of Gdańsk. The Polish state invested in a new north–south railroad line on Polish territory to bypass foreign territory. It connected the coal mines and steelworks of Upper Silesia with the emerging port at Gdynia (Gdingen) on the Baltic coast (so-called Coal Trunk-Line, Magistrala Węglowa). While some sections of the future line already existed, others had to be built from scratch. With the assistance of French investors, Poland opened the line to traffic in 1933.⁴³ With the Coal Trunk Line, Poland symbolically united the country, loading the “railway system with national significance”—as Felix Jeschke aptly noted for the similar Czechoslovak case.⁴⁴

Figure 7.3. Housing development for resettled German railroaders from Poland in Frankfurt on the Oder, depicting the coats of arms of “lost” German cities (1925). Martin Kießling, Ostmarkbauten. Städtebau in einer Mittelstadt (Stuttgart: Julius Hoffmann, 1925), 2. Author’s collection.

Zbąszyń and Neu Bentschen: New Border Stations

The postwar political borders created new railroad borders. They cut through lines initially created to facilitate communication between Berlin and Prussia’s eastern provinces. On the former Ostbahn route, three new railroad crossings emerged. Travelers from Berlin Schlesischer Bahnhof entered Polish territory in Chojnice (Konitz) after four and a half hours. Here, Polish personnel boarded the train, and a “Polish” locomotive replaced the “German” one—a procedure that took only eight minutes in 1934. The next crossing came after seventy minutes, at Tczew, where the train entered the territory of the Free City of Gdańsk. Finally, after another eighteen minutes, the train reentered German territory in Marienburg, where personnel and locomotive changed again.⁴⁵ In these relatively small stations, German, Polish, and Free City of Gdańsk administrations set up border and customs control posts and arranged for a swift engine change. Since the border stations on the historical Ostbahn route served mostly less severely controlled transit traffic, there was no need for the railroad companies and state administrations to expand the existing facilities significantly.

The situation differed on the railroad line between Berlin and Poznań, which was extended to Warsaw in 1921. This line replaced the Ostbahn as the main artery between western Europe and Poland. As a result, the previous, longer route via the Warsaw–Bydgoszcz Line lost its significance. The previous border station at Aleksandrów was obsolete; now located in the center of the Polish state, its inhabitants lost their income sources provided by the border, and “spatial development almost came to a standstill.”⁴⁶ The town developed into a symbol of shifting borders and communication routes, part of a “phantom border.”⁴⁷ As a result, on both sides of the new border to the west of Zbąszyń (Bentschen), the Polish and German Railroads invested heavily in infrastructure—and not only to cater to the needs of the railroad, border, and customs. Just as in Aleksandrów before, the border stations also had a political function as symbolic gates to Germany and Poland, respectively.

Before the war, Bentschen was a vital railroad junction for regional communication and traffic from Berlin to the provincial capital Posen (Poznań). Now, the new border cut through one of the north–south lines. German travelers had to cross the Polish-German border twice or change trains in the newly Polish Zbąszyń to continue their journey to Berlin.⁴⁸ To remedy this situation, Berlin did not look for a solution comparable to the agreement on transit traffic through the Corridor. Instead, in 1923, the Reichsbahn erected an additional railroad station just west of the Polish border to create a representative entrance gate for travelers to and from Germany. This entrance gate was named Neu Bentschen (Zbąszynek). It was a drawing-board town consisting of a modern residential area for railroad and customs employees and border police and featured facilities to smooth freight traffic with Poland. After the construction of several new railroad sections, travelers no longer had to cross the Polish border to change trains.⁴⁹

Figure 7.4. Railroad junction Zbąszyń/Zbąszynek (Bentschen/Neu Bentschen) in the interwar period. Wahldresdner, GNU Free Documentation License, version 1.2. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. Access date July 3, 2023. Adapted from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Skizze_Zbaszynek.png.

The Polish State Railroads initially used the old station building in Zbąszyń to facilitate border procedures. However, as Werner Benecke demonstrated, the Prussian red-brick building was functional but not representative enough to welcome travelers to Poland adequately. When Poznań organized the Polish General Exhibition (Powszechna Wystawa Krajowa) in 1929, the State Railroads inaugurated a new, more representative station building to welcome international visitors at the country’s borders.⁵⁰

In 1938, Zbąszyń was also the scene of the infamous “Zbąszyń Deportations” (so-called Polenaktion), in which Nazi Germany expelled almost twenty thousand Jews with Polish citizenship, just two weeks before the Kristallnacht.⁵¹ On October 15, 1938, the Polish government issued a decree demanding that all citizens living abroad pay their consular offices a visit to endorse their passports. Otherwise, they would forfeit their citizenship. The cut-off date was October 31. In many instances, Polish consular agents in Germany refused to validate the passports of Jewish Poles. This antisemitic measure was meant to keep Jews out of Poland. The German government reacted swiftly and detained nearly twenty thousand Jews with Polish citizenship to deport them to Poland before the end of the month. The Reichsbahn transported most people to Neu Bentschen, forced them to disembark from the trains, and sent them across the border on foot. Caught by surprise, Poland let in many of the first groups of refugees but then refused to allow more. As a result, thousands of Jewish Poles were stranded in Zbąszyń, awaiting international negotiations that would slowly resolve the issue and help the refugees to settle down with family in Poland or emigrate. Polish authorities dissolved the provisional refugee camp in Zbąszyń just days before the outbreak of the war.

KÖNIGSBERG: CAPITAL OF AN EXCLAVE

The new geopolitical situation put interwar Königsberg in a particular position as the capital of a German exclave. After 1919, Polish territory divided East Prussia and mainland Germany because of the new border. East Prussia was now a German exclave, which made it particularly difficult for the city to recover from the consequences of the First World War.

Modernizing the City

As we have seen, the extension and modernization of Königsberg’s port and railroad facilities were already on their way shortly before the war. After the war, these infrastructural projects were continued, with the addition of a civilian airport. These investments were part of an ambitious plan to modernize the city, as outlined in the 1913 General Development Plan (Generalbebauungsplan). This plan stipulated the demolition of the fortifications and the construction of modern city quarters and parks.⁵² During the interwar period, under long-time mayor Hans Lohmeyer, the city implemented many projects. However, the city’s population rose only modestly, mainly through incorporations.

Notwithstanding the economic difficulties of the immediate postwar years and an unclear international political and economic situation, the city continued port construction in 1920. The plan envisioned five docks to the west of the existing port-railroad transshipment facility (Kaibahnhof). Because of a lack of funds, only three docks, including a free port, were accomplished. To facilitate the rebounding grain export, the port authorities erected modern elevators, and in 1924, the facility was opened to shipping traffic.⁵³ Another improvement for maritime traffic was the deepening of the Seekanal waterway from 6.5 to 9 meters in 1930.

A new central station (Hauptbahnhof) was the other crucial infrastructural development. The project started in 1913 on the grounds of the newly demolished fortifications, and it was accomplished in 1929. This was the Reichsbahn’s most significant interwar investment overall. In the end, the new station to the southeast of the previous facilities combined the functions of the Südbahn and Ostbahn termini. In contrast, the previous facilities continued to serve freight transportation.⁵⁴ The new brick station building combined a modernist entrance hall, a three-nave 178-meter concourse, and an adjacent post office building (refer to fig. 8.2 in the epilogue). A giant pointed arch window dominated the facade; it was supposed to refer to the “native Teutonic Order architecture.”⁵⁵ In this way, the building continued the tradition of earlier bridges and railroad buildings, alluding to the medieval German past of the region. Not without reason, the head of the Reichsbahn, Bruno Möller, declared that the opening of this building “was the most important event . . . since the opening of the old Ostbahn station in 1853.”⁵⁶ As part of railroad modernization, the Reichsbahn erected several new bridges. The most impressive was the Reichsbahnbrücke across the Pregel, a two-story combined road and railroad bridge with a sophisticated turning element in the middle to facilitate river navigation.⁵⁷

In addition, Königsberg was a German pioneer in civil aviation. In 1921, passenger traffic started with a link to Berlin, soon followed by connections to Kaunas and Rīga (Riga). In 1922, the German-Soviet company Deruluft (German-Russian Airline) started regular flights between Königsberg and Moscow, reducing travel times from fifty to ten hours.⁵⁸ In 1924, the new Devau Airport, considered the “first modern civil airport globally,” opened to the public.⁵⁹ The airport and the emerging air traffic network provide evidence of Königsberg’s role as “Germany’s hub for air traffic with Eastern Europe,” while at the same time symbolically connecting the East Prussian exclave to the German mainland.⁶⁰ Although the number of passengers remained relatively low, this was still a foretelling of international travel’s shift from rail to air traffic.

International Trade Rebounding?

While the First World War disrupted international commerce in the city almost wholly, the Königsberg merchants hoped for its rebound during peacetime. In implementing major infrastructural projects, the municipal leaders created a solid foundation for the city’s economic future. However, the new geopolitical situation proved to be a significant hurdle.

After the initial economic setback caused by unregulated procedures for transit traffic between the German mainland and East Prussia, Königsberg’s importance as a trade hub between eastern and western Europe slowly rebounded. Political aspects played an essential role in this economic resurgence. As we have seen, the Polish-German agreement privileged goods transit across the Polish Corridor to East Prussia. While this de facto inner-German trade had been crucial for Königsberg even before the war, trade with the Russian Empire had been the main driver of its development. Germany tried to reestablish trade links with the Soviet Union and the Baltic states to foster a resurgence of these connections. Still, while the Polish-Bolshevik War (1919–1920/1921) raged, trade—let alone freight transit between Germany and the Soviet Union—was impossible.

Even when the Riga Peace Treaty between Poland and the future Soviet Union was signed in 1921, the new political borders significantly affected the established trade networks.⁶¹ The extension of the Südbahn to Ukraine was now mainly running through Polish territory. Because of tense Polish-German economic and political relations, Poland had no interest in funneling Ukrainian agricultural products to a German port through Polish territory. As a result, the line lost its importance for freight transportation to Königsberg. The second crucial prewar link between Königsberg and the Russian Empire’s capital of St. Petersburg was now running through Lithuanian territory and the contested Vilnius region. In 1922, Poland annexed this region. Lithuania severed diplomatic ties with Poland and interrupted the rail link to protest this move.

From 1928 to 1931, the League of Nations Council and its Traffic and Transit Committee discussed the interruption of this crucial link. In 1930, the committee recognized that the closure caused severe disruptions in international transit traffic and requested its reopening on the basis of a Polish-Lithuanian treaty.⁶² The Königsberg’s Chamber of Commerce’s intensive lobbying seemed to have paid off. However, during subsequent negotiations, political considerations gained upper ground. For the sake of its claim to Vilnius, Lithuania denied the request. In supporting Lithuania, the German government saw an opportunity to gain concessions concerning the disputed, previously German Memel Territory (now Lithuanian Klaipėda). In addition, Germany wanted to harm Poland politically and thus acted against the economic interests of Königsberg: in vain, the chamber of commerce argued that transportation costs from Belarus and the Vilnius region would rise 30 percent if goods had to take a detour. In 1931, the Court of Arbitration in The Hague decided in favor of Lithuania.⁶³ Consequently, the railroad line remained closed, to the disadvantage of transit traffic to Königsberg.

As a result of the disruptions, the city’s merchants looked for permanent alternative feeder lines across newly independent Lithuania and Latvia to the Soviet Union to restore trade with eastern Europe. From the onset, it was clear that the new route would be more than one hundred kilometers longer than the previous one, thus putting Königsberg at a constant disadvantage with its competitors on the Baltic coast.⁶⁴ Moreover, Germany first had to regulate trade with the Soviet Union, which they did in 1922 with the Treaty of Rapallo.

In articles 4 and 5, the treaty stipulated that “the two Governments shall co-operate in a spirit of mutual goodwill in meeting the economic needs of both countries” and that “mutual, commercial and economic relations, shall be effected on the principle of the most favoured nation.”⁶⁵ Just two months later, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, and the Soviet Union signed a railroad convention to establish direct rail links between Germany and the Soviet Union.⁶⁶ Since the privileged rail transit across the Polish Corridor allowed for all goods transported free of customs, including those bound for other countries, it could now be extended to the Baltic states and the Soviet Union. As a result, the Baltic states assumed the role of a transit area or “bridge between the economies of Soviet Russia and Western Europe.”⁶⁷ This was a thorn in Poland’s side: the country feared the rapprochement between its two biggest neighbors as a danger to its economic and political stability and its sheer existence.

With Soviet-German trade taking the Baltic route, the Polish State Railroads had no immediate control over and no revenue from the goods transported. Hence, they lobbied for longer trajectories for German and Soviet goods passing through their own network, allowing for higher revenue. This route would have bypassed East Prussia and the Baltic countries. Still, the Polish-German and Polish-Soviet talks on implementing privileged transit through Poland in 1922 faltered over political differences.⁶⁸ Future negotiations and treaties did not change the status quo, and most of the German-Soviet transit remained on the northern route through East Prussia.⁶⁹ In protest, Poland refused to transport goods bound for the Soviet Union. Still, in 1925, it lost a related lawsuit at the Polish-German-Gdańsk arbitral tribunal and had to tolerate the transit trade via East Prussia.⁷⁰

In 1925, Germany and the Soviet Union concluded a trade agreement to foster trade further. It contained a railroad treaty, drawing on stipulations of the 1894 treaty discussed in chapter 5. A most-favored-nation clause was supposed to benefit trade by rail between the two countries. The Königsberg lobbying had paid off since article 4 (a) stipulated that freight tariffs on imported, exported, or transiting goods between Königsberg/Pillau and the USSR would have to be equal to those on lines leading from the USSR to other non-Soviet Baltic seaports. Also, the treaty stipulated direct traffic with unified tariffs between Königsberg and Soviet railroad stations on the condition that Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland agreed.⁷¹ This would have reinstituted the advantageous transport situation of the 1894 treaty. However, the devil is in the details, and Germany first had to conclude the relevant treaties with the Baltic states and Poland.

Despite the existing difficulties, Königsberg’s merchants, industrialists, and administration firmly believed in the city’s role as a “bridge between Germany and the Soviet Union.”⁷² Thus, they lobbied for renewed trade relations with East Prussia’s eastern neighbors—not only the Soviet Union but also the newly independent Baltic states. While the city again facilitated most rail-bound transit traffic between the Soviet Union and western Europe, the port’s turnover also slowly rebounded. However, the port faced additional difficulties since the Baltic states and the Soviet Union tried to route their modest exports through their domestic ports. As a result, Klaipėda, Liepāja (Libau), and Leningrad (the previous St. Petersburg/Petrograd) expanded at the expense of Königsberg. For example, when Germany and Lithuania negotiated their first trade treaty in 1923, the Königsberg Chamber of Commerce in vain tried to include a stipulation that would harmonize railroad freight tariffs to Klaipėda with those to Königsberg—just as was the case after the 1894 treaty with the Russian Empire.⁷³ Negotiators finally resolved this question in long and difficult talks when concluding the 1928 German-Lithuanian Trade Treaty.⁷⁴ Still, the German-Latvian Trade Treaty of 1926 did not include a similar provision. As a result, the Latvian port of Rīga was at a significant advantage.⁷⁵

The most severe issue for Königsberg’s transit trade was the tariff war between Germany and Poland from 1925 to 1934. While their postwar trade relations had never been good, this conflict made things worse. It severed traditional economic links and largely hindered the export of Polish agricultural goods through East Prussia. Poland favored the transit port in the Free City of Gdańsk and its newly developing port in Gdynia.⁷⁶

Still, Königsberg slowly redeveloped its trade relations with eastern Europe. One tool they used to achieve this goal was the establishment of an international trade fair—the Deutsche Ostmesse (German Eastern Fair). The first Ostmesse opened in September 1920. Germany’s president, Friedrich Ebert, and its minister for economic affairs were guests. The trade fair developed into an important meeting place for economic exchange in east central Europe in the following years. From 1922, the Soviet delegation regularly had the most extensive exhibit. In 1923, it “reciprocated Königsberg’s hospitality and invited the city . . . to participate as exhibitors in the Pan-Russian Exhibition in Moscow.”⁷⁷ Königsberg established the Economic Institute for Russia and the Eastern European States (Wirtschaftsinstitut für Rußland und die Oststaaten e.V.), editing the German-Russian journal Der Ost-Europa-Markt (Eastern European Market). Local Königsberg politicians and the chamber of commerce continued to lobby Berlin and Moscow for lower railroad transit tariffs and, to this end, made an extensive trip to the Soviet Union in 1929. In addition, the Königsberg Savings Bank (Stadtbank) granted loans to the Soviet Foreign Trade Representation to secure the export of Soviet grain and lentils through Königsberg—with moderate success. Because of the nationalization and monopolization of trade in the Soviet Union, previous personal trade connections, frequently between Jewish merchants in the Russian Empire and Königsberg, lost their significance. As a result, after the conclusion of the German-Soviet trade agreement, the state company responsible for grain exportation (Еksportkhleb) opened representations in Hamburg and Königsberg to facilitate the transactions.⁷⁸

All the efforts notwithstanding, the port’s trade volume never reached prewar numbers (except in 1926). There were severe challenges: new borders, disadvantageous trade agreements, trade wars, and severed rail lines. Finally, agriculture in Ukraine, the Soviet Union’s breadbasket and a significant producer of grain for export, only slowly recovered from the war. After production levels reached prewar numbers in the mid-1920s, collectivization, famine (the Holodomor), and political persecution led to a significant decrease in grain production, limiting the Soviet Union’s ability to export agricultural products.⁷⁹

All these developments had a dramatic impact on Königsberg’s grain trade. From 1911/1913 to 1928, it drastically declined by 50 percent. While the supply of domestic grain remained stable, the supply from abroad (mainly from eastern Europe) decreased by 75 percent. The situation in the herring trade was even worse. From 1913 to 1933, imports shrank by 85 percent: the Soviet Union, a significant consumer, now imported salted herring directly through Leningrad. Timber floating was another business that suffered enormously. The import of timber to Königsberg through the largely blocked off Memel River went down from 729,800 tons in 1913 to 246,000 tons in 1932.⁸⁰ While timber floating was not directly related to rail traffic, it significantly reduced the port’s turnover in timber products.

It is still remarkable that the port’s import and export volume rebounded from 74 percent of the 1913 volume in 1925 to 91 percent in 1928. Also, the decrease in trade volume must be seen in perspective with other ports and an overall difficult economic and political situation that was not favorable to trade. Some competing ports like Rīga and Leningrad fared even worse, while Danzig remained an outlier—closely behind Königsberg in 1913, it increased its volume substantially.⁸¹

Despite these developments mirroring the international connections of Königsberg in trade and travel, the city was also a center for German revanchists who planned to change Poland’s borders in the interwar period. At the university, right-wing student organizations and professors imagined East Prussia as a bulwark against the “Slavic flood” that would threaten should a land connection with the Reich not be reestablished. Consequently, after Hitler’s arrival to power, East Prussia underwent major construction, with numerous new barracks and roads being built in Königsberg and also in many smaller East Prussian towns. This accounted for a boom in the region’s underdeveloped economy and was a prerequisite for the attacks on Poland and the Soviet Union.

EYDTKUHNEN AND LITHUANIA: BORDER CROSSINGS, TRAVEL, TRADE, AND MIGRATION IN THE INTERWAR ERA⁸²

A passport (Pasport’) is indispensable for all foreigners visiting Russia. It must be furnished with the visa of a Russian consul in the traveller’s own country (fee 2 ¼ rb. = 4s. 9d.) before the frontier is crossed. . . .

1 V (from Eydtkuhnen) Wirballen (Verzhbolovo; Railway Restaurant, with bedrooms, fair) is the first Russian station. Passport and baggage are examined here . . . causing a halt of 1 hr.⁸³

Changing Border Regimes, Rerouted Trade Links

This information was included in the 1914 English edition of Baedeker’s Russia guidebook. Within weeks, the outbreak of the First World War made the whole manual obsolete, an archival document reflecting previous travel opportunities. New borders and political regimes hindered travel between western and eastern Europe for another seventy-five years beyond the First World War.

In the first months of World War I, retreating German and advancing imperial Russian troops heavily damaged the Eydtkuhnen railroad station and a significant part of the town. In February 1915, the German army recaptured Eydtkuhnen. With the front steadily moving eastward, many inhabitants believed a new German-Russian border would be set up farther east, thus leading to a dramatic decline in the town’s economic importance. Among the plans for future development was the unification of Eydtkuhnen with the neighboring town of Kybartai.⁸⁴ However, the outcome of the First World War did not lead to a border change at the Lepone River. After 1918, independent Lithuania became Germany’s northeastern neighbor.

With Germany in a constant tariff war with Poland, most land-based trade with the Baltic states and the Soviet Union bypassed Poland and passed through Eydtkuhnen and now-Lithuanian Virbalis (the former Verzhbolovo). Briefly, at the beginning of the 1920s, Eydtkuhnen and its Lithuanian counterpart prospered once again, even at an unprecedented scale. The economy of the newly established Baltic states made up for years of war and the loss of the region’s traditional hinterland, now part of the Soviet Union.

However, this boom was short-lived. In the long term, the small Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian domestic markets could not substitute for the enormous market of the Russian Empire that had funneled goods through Eydtkuhnen before the war. As a result, passenger traffic decreased by 30 percent, and the turnover in goods was significantly down (see the section on Königsberg). However, the two border towns were still fortunate. The trade war between Germany and Poland blocked the traditional trade route to Ukraine via the Südbahn. As a result, German-Soviet trade was entirely rerouted to the Eydtkuhnen crossing.

Until the Soviet occupation of independent Lithuania in 1940, low-scale border trade and goods smuggling remained an important business at the border. As eyewitnesses recall, crossing with a small border traffic regime in force was easy. Inhabitants of the border district on both sides could once again apply for a special permit allowing for daily crossings. Inhabitants of Eydtkuhnen went grocery shopping across the border, where geese, ducks, hares, and pork were available for half the German price. Services like shoe repair or haircuts were even more affordable. The customs allowance for residents of the border region was one pound of sugar and one pound of barley. Children crossed the border several times a day to support their families by selling cheap sweeteners and chicken feed to residents and travelers from other parts of East Prussia. Lithuanians came to Eydtkuhnen to buy iron products, used agricultural equipment, and bicycles. Germans smuggled in horses and poultry, and Lithuanians brought radio sets.⁸⁵

After the occupation of Lithuania in the summer of 1940, the Soviet Union sealed off the border, erecting a barbed-wire fence that prevented inhabitants of the neighboring towns from crossing the border freely.⁸⁶ This was a significant blow to Eydtkuhnen since the town was located precisely on the border. Also, its urban structure was oriented toward the crossing, with the market square on the eastern side opening to the Lepone Bridge. Travel between the new Baltic Socialist Soviet Republics and Germany was almost completely banned. Instead, trade rebounded enormously between the two powerful European dictatorships, National Socialist Germany and the Soviet Union. Trade agreements between the two countries led to an increased flow of goods in both directions. As one employee of the Reichsbahn later recalled, Eydtkuhnen saw the reloading of grain and other agricultural products from the Soviet Union bound for Germany and industrial products bound for the Soviet Union.⁸⁷ The Soviet Union also facilitated Germany’s trade with its ally Japan since the rail transported industrial goods such as power-station equipment from Eydtkuhnen across the Soviet Union to Japan.⁸⁸

Travel in an Era of Fortified Borders

Because of the outbreak of the war, Sergei Diaghilev’s plan to perform in Berlin in October 1914 did not materialize. He continued his career in western Europe, and his company even toured the United States. However, because “The routes of the European touring company and guest performance business . . . were severed,” the Ballets Russes never returned to what had been the Russian Empire.⁸⁹ Diaghilev was not an exception. As we have seen in the second quotation from the onset of this chapter, borderless travel did not resume after the First World War, and restrictions known from the Russian Empire’s borders proliferated to the western part of the continent. “In this new age, queuing and waiting at borders became an important feature of international travel.”⁹⁰

Still, movement across European borders resumed after the First World War. At first, hundreds of thousands of the former Russian Empire’s citizens fled the new Soviet regime and civil war and settled in Paris, Berlin, and other Western capitals.⁹¹ These people were no longer part of a transnational “pan-European tourist class” but had become White Russian refugees who rarely returned to their home country.⁹²

After the flow of emigration from the former Russian Empire ebbed away, travel to and from the Soviet Union would not reach prewar levels. Direct regular rail service from Paris to Leningrad via Königsberg was not restored. However, in 1926, a new Nord-Express linked Paris to Warsaw and Rīga, the capital of independent Latvia. From Rīga, passengers had connections to the Soviet Union. This was part of an interwar effort to renew international railroad collaboration. In 1922, fifty-one railroad companies from twenty-nine countries founded the Paris-based International Union of Railways (Union internationale des chemins de fer). Despite political fault lines across Europe and the world, this organization successfully harmonized technical standards and timetables.

Königsberg made significant efforts to develop national and international tourism in the city. However, because of the peripheral location of East Prussia, this was not an easy task. Still, the 1920s saw a steady increase in overnight stays, and travelers embarked on excursion trains from the German mainland to East Prussia.⁹³ Both the municipal authorities and the German government had a strong interest in further developing tourism in the region—for similar reasons. First, in economic terms, tourism could substitute for some of the losses inflicted by the decrease in international trade. Second, in political terms, more tourism had the potential to strengthen the connection between East Prussia and the German mainland.⁹⁴ The marketing efforts paid off. While most of the visitors to Königsberg hailed from East Prussia, an increasing number arrived from Berlin and other places in Germany. One destination was the massive Tannenberg Memorial, some 160 kilometers to the south of Königsberg, erected to commemorate the German victory over the Russian armies in East Prussia in 1914–1915. Eighty thousand visitors from all over Germany celebrated its inauguration in 1927; while war veterans were an important group to visit, it was more often used for sporting events and youth camps.⁹⁵

Königsberg also tried to attract foreign tourists. As we have seen, before the war, Königsberg was an important stop on travelers’ itineraries on their way to and from St. Petersburg and the northwestern parts of the Russian Empire. After the war, those traveling from the Baltic states could not make up for the drastic decrease in travelers from the Soviet Union. Hence, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Königsberg Tourist Board aimed to attract tourists from North America, northern Europe, and Great Britain to make up for this loss. In 1930, Königsberg opened the North Station (Nordbahnhof) to traffic, offering quick connections to the nearby Baltic Sea resorts from Königsberg’s central Hansaplatz. The building also featured a luxurious hotel and a tourist office.⁹⁶ Also in 1930, the modernist Parkhotel added to an increasing offer of high-standard accommodations for western European tourists.⁹⁷

Emigration in Times of Harsher Border Regimes

Given the postwar turmoil in many parts of east central Europe, it was no surprise that transatlantic migration to the United States rebounded to 250,000 in 1920 and about 650,000 in 1921.⁹⁸ This happened during a severe economic recession in North America, nurturing anti-immigration sentiments. As a result, migrants faced increasing difficulties in crossing state borders. The US Emergency Quota Act of 1921 introduced quotas to reduce arrivals drastically. It set a 3 percent cap “of the foreign-born of each nationality resident in the United States in 1910.”⁹⁹ As a result, European immigration dipped to 216,000 in 1922.¹⁰⁰ The United States further restricted entries with the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, restricting immigration to 2 percent based on the 1890 US census; it set a goal of reducing European immigration to 110,000 per year.¹⁰¹ This discriminated against potential southern and eastern European immigrants, especially Jews, since most emigration from this part of Europe occurred only after 1890. Hence, demand for emigration authorization in southern and eastern Europe and the Middle East exceeded the quota (20,447) 78-fold, while the demand was three times higher than the quota for northern and western Europe. At the same time, the US enforced new bureaucratic systems of remote control, requiring immigrants to undergo “advance inspection” at the American consulates in their home countries before embarking for North America.¹⁰² As Ruth Leiserowitz has pointed out, the East Prussian transitional space moved away from the border to the capitals, where American consular agents decided on the fates of prospective emigrants.¹⁰³

These policies resulted in significantly lower emigration rates from eastern Europe, a shift in destination countries, and higher number of clandestine migrants in comparison to the prewar situation. The previous emigration catchment area of the Eydtkuhnen crossing was now in Lithuania and the northeasternmost part of Poland (Vilnius region). Because of the new border regimes and disrupted railroad lines, emigrants from interwar Poland rarely crossed Germany to reach their embarkation points. For Polish emigrants, Gdynia developed into the most significant emigration port.¹⁰⁴

For emigrants from Lithuania, though, crossing into Eydtkuhnen to reach ports in western Europe remained a critical option. Interwar Lithuania had a population of two million; a majority were ethnic Lithuanians (84.2 percent), followed by a substantial Jewish population (about 7.1 percent).¹⁰⁵ During this time, the threat of popular antisemitism was far from absent, and it would surge in the 1930s. However, it was less violent than under the tsar.¹⁰⁶ While there were no antisemitic laws like those in the Russian Empire, the Lithuanian government indirectly discriminated against Jewish businesspeople when implementing its economic policies.¹⁰⁷ Still, the sociopolitical status of Jews in Lithuanian society was better than under the tsar and in most other countries of the region.¹⁰⁸ In its early years, independent Lithuania arranged for the autonomy of its Jewish citizens. They were organized in kehillot (municipal administrative structures) that raised taxes and self-governed educational and religious affairs. The National Assembly (Natsional Rat) was the overarching elected body.¹⁰⁹ While the autonomy was de jure abolished in 1924, essential elements, such as Jewish educational institutions, remained intact. As Masha Greenbaum has shown, by 1925, “93 percent of Jewish children in Lithuania attended Jewish elementary schools; 80 percent attended Jewish secondary schools.”¹¹⁰

Even after independence, poverty forced many Lithuanian citizens to seek opportunities elsewhere. According to Alfonsas Eidintas, from 1920 to 1923, 22,325 Lithuanian citizens immigrated to the United States. When the US government established new quotas in 1924, the Lithuanian number was set at a mere 344 immigrants per year.¹¹¹ This did not include another 500 nonquota emigrants, leaving for the US to join their families or remigrating after temporarily returning to Europe after the war.¹¹² Emigrants’ embarkation points also shifted in the 1920s. In 1920, most emigrants took the Latvian port of Liepāja; from 1922 to 1924, a majority took the prewar Ostbahn route to Bremen in Germany.¹¹³

Eidintas indicates that the total number of Lithuanian immigrants was 102,461 from 1920 to 1940. Given the immigration restrictions, only 30 percent went to the US. In comparison, 48 percent chose South America (Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay), and smaller numbers left for South Africa and Palestine (7 percent and 4.9 percent, respectively). Approximately 20 percent of emigrants from Lithuania were Jewish—a number almost three times higher than their share of the population.¹¹⁴ Here, we see a continuity from prewar times, when Jewish emigrants had been overrepresented as well. Despite independence, antisemitism and a lack of economic opportunities still forced more ethnic Jews than ethnic Lithuanians out of the country. Before 1922, Eydtkuhnen and Ellis Island had been the two gateways of a transatlantic migration corridor. Now, this corridor turned into a narrow path with heavily fortified gates at both ends.

THE FIRST SHOTS OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR: THE DIRSCHAU BRIDGES IN 1939

Railroad infrastructure is crucial for modern warfare, and the Ostbahn and its branch lines were no exception. In the beginning, geostrategic considerations had a decisive impact on the line’s route. Also, the Ostbahn’s branch from Warsaw to Bromberg served both the imperial Russian military and the Polish insurgents during the 1863–1864 uprising. In 1870, the Prussian army used the Ostbahn to dispatch troops between East Prussia and eastern France. In the early months of the First World War, the German High Command successfully relocated two corps and one division from the western front to support the imperiled German armies in East Prussia. The total warfare of the Second World War and the role of the Ostbahn during the Holocaust are other intriguing aspects this book cannot cover.¹¹⁵ However, in the context of the war, two Ostbahn structures deserve special attention: the Vistula bridges in Tczew.

In preparation for the war, an essential focus of the German army was on these bridges. After the First World War, the border between the Free City of Danzig and Poland was set in the middle of the Vistula River in this area. However, the two bridges including the bridgeheads were assigned to Poland because of their strategic infrastructural importance. The Polish administration removed the reliefs depicting the region’s glorious “German” past for obvious political reasons.¹¹⁶

The 1857 Ostbahn railroad crossing served road traffic during this time, while the 1891 bridge continuously served the railroad. In 1939, when Germany prepared for the attack on its eastern neighbor, the army planned to seize several critical structures in surprise attacks before Polish pioneers could blow them up. In the case of Tczew, the bridges had strategic importance for transporting troops from East Prussia to Poland during the planned offensive. Hitler himself was involved in the planning and closely followed the surprise attack preparations.¹¹⁷ The Poles, too, were fully aware of the bridges’ strategic importance. They started defense preparations two months before the war, sending additional troops to guard the bridges. Also, a week before the first shots were fired, Polish railroad personnel kept the bridge’s gates shut and opened them only to scheduled trains. Finally, when war seemed imminent, the Polish army attached ten tons of explosives to several piers and spans on either side of the two structures, thus preparing for their demolition.¹¹⁸

In late August 1939, the German army registered a civilian transit freight train from East Prussia with PKP to outwit the Polish efforts. Instead of freight, soldiers clandestinely boarded the train, accompanied by German railroad personnel disguised as Polish railroaders. The train was supposed to arrive in Tczew just a few minutes before the start of the war in the early morning of September 1. Simultaneously, a German air raid was supposed to destroy the explosives’ ignition cables. Soldiers from the train would then disarm the explosives and seize Polish defensive positions, supported by an armored train following immediately behind the freight train.¹¹⁹

Despite meticulous planning, the whole operation failed. Polish railroad employees at the small station of Simonsdorf (Szymankowo), approximately ten kilometers to the east of Tczew, checked on the passing freight train, noticed irregularities, and informed the Tczew Station of the imminent danger.¹²⁰ When the freight train approached the bridges a couple of minutes late, Polish units had already closed the railroad bridge’s gate and barricaded the tracks leading to the crossing. At that very moment, at 4:34 a.m., eleven minutes before the scheduled attack on Poland, the German Luftwaffe carried out the planned air raid and successfully destroyed the ignition cables. Still, the whole operation was already compromised, and the surprise attack failed. Thus, the first shots of the Second World War did not have the anticipated effect; Polish units repaired the cables and destroyed both bridges between six and seven o’clock in the morning of the attack.

In the aftermath of 1939, the bridges were first restored and subsequently destroyed again in 1945. Once powerful symbols of technological advance and a transcontinental European communication artery, they now transformed into symbols of severed infrastructural ties that would only be fully restored after 1991.

CONCLUSION

The First World War and its aftermath dramatically reconfigured infrastructural links. Travel times across borders increased, international trade decreased, and emigrants faced new hurdles. The “shrinking of space”—seemingly unstoppable until the First World War—was followed by an “extension of space” in the interwar period. New borders and new border regimes severed existing ties and required complex bilateral and multilateral negotiations. Mobility changed, but not for all groups. Affluent travelers to the west of the Soviet Union faced new visa regimes and lengthy border controls but could still travel. In some instances, their journeys were even quicker than before, given the record travel times between Berlin and Königsberg and the introduction of air traffic. However, prospective emigrants and less-affluent travelers from eastern Europe faced much harder times.

Along with the securitization of borders went an ethnic homogenization in the Polish-German-Lithuanian borderlands—hampering the development of entangled borderspaces. Still, while international trade continued, Königsberg established an international trade fair, and railroad companies successfully collaborated. As a nonhuman actor, the railroad influenced developments such as the demarcation of the Polish border at Tczew. Also, it forced Polish and German politicians to the negotiating table to regulate transit traffic across the Corridor. On the one hand, the reconfiguration of infrastructural networks caused the closure of railroad sections and the downfall of border places such as Aleksandrów; on the other, though, new locations such as Frankfurt on the Oder and Zbąszyń/Neu Bentschen emerged and made their impact on transcontinental travel and trade.

NOTES

1.Compagnie internationale des wagons-lits, Guide officiel, advertisements in the section Abonné de publicité, between pp. 12 and 13.

2.Thorner Zeitung, 234 (October 14, 1921): 3.

3.GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 93 E, Nr. 1620, 282–300.

4.List, “Deutschlands Eisenbahn in militärischer Beziehung,” 267.

5.Stilgoe, Metropolitan Corridor, 3.

6.According to the schedules in Hendschel, Hendschels Telegraph; Compagnie internationale des wagons-lits, Guide officiel.

7.Merridale, Lenin on the Train, 144, 149.

8.Merridale, 159–160.

9.Merridale, 192–194.

10.Merridale, 201.

11.Merridale. The official website of Haparanda features an image showing the number of packages at the tiny post office in December 1914. Refer to Haparanda stad, “Haparandas historia.”

12.Refer to the map of Lenin’s journey in Merridale, Lenin on the Train, xii.

13.Högselius, Kaijser, and van der Vleuten, Europe’s Infrastructure Transition, 37.

14.Przegiętka, Komunikacja i polityka, 81, 116.

15.Przegiętka, 110–111.

16.Przegiętka, 113. For greater detail on rail traffic across the Corridor, refer to Musekamp, “Eine Erfolgsgeschichte?”

17.Przegiętka, Komunikacja i polityka, 113–114.

18.Przegiętka, “Komunikacja tranzytowa do Prus Wschodnich,” 25.

19.Przegiętka, Komunikacja i polityka, 116–118.

20.This treatment of the section as “German” was beneficial for the German railroads since they only had to reimburse the Polish State Railroads for the lower Polish rates. Refer to Kola, “Między Wojnami,” 85.

21.Reichsbahndirektion Königsberg Pr., Ostpreußens Wirtschaft und Verkehr, 9.

22.Przegiętka, Komunikacja i polityka, 121–122, 186–187.

23.For greater detail on German propaganda, revisionist plans, and efforts to abolish the Corridor, refer to Przegiętka, 245–315.

24.Berstl, Berlin Schlesischer Bahnhof, 8–9. I would like to thank John Lyon for his translation support.

25.For an accurate description of interwar Berlin’s social, political, and artistic life, refer to Gill, Dance between Flames, quotation on p. 90.

26.Schlögel, “Berlin”; Schlögel, Chronik russischen Lebens in Deutschland.

27.Gill, Dance between Flames, 157.

28.Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz, 155.

29.Schlögel, Das russische Berlin.

30.Born, Die Entwicklung der Königlich Preußischen Ostbahn, 126.

31.The best source for the German Railroads in the interwar period is Mierzejewski, Most Valuable Asset of the Reich, vol. 1. For greater detail on the Reichsbahn as “reparation pawn,” refer to Kolb, “Die Reichsbahn vom Dawes-Plan bis zum Ende der Weimarer Republik,” 109–124.

32.Przegiętka, Komunikacja i polityka, 57.

33.Kola, “Między Wojnami,” 39.

34.Blanke, Orphans of Versailles, 23. The numbers are undoubtedly inaccurate, as are the numbers of the Polish interwar censuses. Many people still were indifferent about their nationality, were bilingual, or simply chose the option that seemed most beneficial for themselves.

35.For greater detail on the Germans’ reasons for moving, refer to Blanke, 35–47, number on p. 240.

36.Przegiętka, Komunikacja i polityka, 55–56.

37.Przegiętka, 52, 56.

38.Kießling, Ostmarkbauten, 10.

39.Kießling. I would like to thank John Lyon for his translation support.

40.Illustration in Kießling, I. The building survived the Second World War. After the war, the coats of arms were covered by plastering. They were uncovered during a renovation project of the 2010s.

41.Kola, “Między Wojnami,” 44–45.

42.Kola, 47.

43.Przegiętka, Komunikacja i polityka, 214–219.

44.Jeschke, Iron Landscapes, 25.

45.1934 timetable printed in Musekamp, “Eine Erfolgsgeschichte,” 122.

46.Miernik, Rozwój przestrzenny, 101.

47.On the concept of phantom borders, refer to Grandits et al., “Phantomgrenzen im östlichen Europa.”

48.For greater detail, refer to Benecke, “Vollendete Tatsachen,” 183.

49.Benecke, 184–188. For an accurate depiction of the contemporary railroad situation, refer to the map in Högselius, Kaijser, and van der Vleuten, Europe’s Infrastructure Transition, 38.

50.Benecke, “Vollendete Tatsachen,” 188–189.

51.For greater detail on the 1938 “Polenaktion,” refer to Harris, “From German Jews to Polish Refugees”; Skórzyńska and Olejniczak, Do zobaczenia za rok w Jerozolimie.

52.Borm, Die Entwicklung Königsbergs i. Pr. zu einer modernen Großstadt, 158–159.

53.Borm, 195–198.

54.Borm, 173.

55.Albinus, Lexikon der Stadt Königsberg Pr., 121. Schreiben der Eisenbahndirektion Königsberg an die Deutsche Reichsbahn-Gesellschaft-Hauptverwaltung in Berlin vom 26.9.1927. Bundesarchiv R 5/20700, quoted in Borm, Die Entwicklung Königsbergs i. Pr. zu einer modernen Großstadt, 184.

56.Borm, Die Entwicklung Königsbergs i. Pr. zu einer modernen Großstadt, 189.

57.Albinus, Lexikon der Stadt Königsberg Pr. und Umgebung, 257.

58.Borm, Die Entwicklung Königsbergs i. Pr. zu einer modernen Großstadt, 312–315.

59.Borm, 206.

60.Borm, 312, 323.

61.The peace treaty included article 14, regulating the surrender of rolling stock, locomotives, and other railroad material worth 29 million gold rubles to Poland—just 1 million short of the remaining monetary compensation. Refer to “Traktat pokoju między Polską a Rosją i Ukrainą.”

62.Shindo, Ostpreußen, Litauen und die Sowjetunion, 454–455.

63.Shindo, 456–457, 470–475.

64.Shindo, 404–405.

65.Rathenau and Tchitcherine, “No. 498. Allemagne et République des Soviets de Russie,” 252.

66.Przegiętka, Komunikacja i polityka, 171.

67.Hinkkanen, “Bridges and Barriers,” 434.

68.PA AA, Sign. RZ 208/265657, 46–56, 75–77, 100–101, 165–171, 224–228.

69.PA AA, 175–176.

70.PA AA, 174–175.

71.“Gesetz über die deutsch-russischen Verträge,” 34.

72.Koziełło-Poklewski, “Znaczenie gospodarcze,” 146.

73.Shindo, Ostpreußen, Litauen und die Sowjetunion, 288–289.

74.Shindo, 418.

75.Shindo, 410–411.

76.Koziełło-Poklewski, “Znaczenie gospodarcze,” 142–143.

77.Shindo, “East Prussia, Lithuania and the Soviet Union,” 140.

78.Shindo, Ostpreußen, Litauen und die Sowjetunion, 718.

79.For an overview of economic developments in Ukraine in the interwar period, refer to Magocsi, History of Ukraine, 585–600.

80.Borm, Die Entwicklung Königsbergs i. Pr. zu einer modernen Großstadt, 366–367.

81.Borm, 364, 367.

82.An earlier version of this section was published in Musekamp, “Big History and Local Experiences,” 69–83.

83.Baedeker, Russia with Teheran, Port Arthur, and Peking, xviii, 34 (emphasis in the original).

84.Krüger, Eydtkuhnen, 145.

85.Edith Frank, “Erinnerung geht viele Wege,” 61; Herfordt, “Der Kleine Grenzverkehr,” 34–35.

86.Gell, “Der Anfang vom Ende,” 45.

87.Gell.

88.Kaspar, “Nach einer kritischen Viertelstunde,” 22.

89.Schlögel, In Space We Read Time, 364.

90.Högselius, Kaijser, and van der Vleuten, Europe’s Infrastructure Transition, 39.

91.Refer to Schlögel, Der große Exodus; Raeff, Russia Abroad.

92.Spode, “Die paneuropäische Touristenklasse.”

93.Borm, Die Entwicklung Königsbergs i. Pr. zu einer modernen Großstadt, 251–252.

94.Borm, 253–254.

95.Koshar, From Monuments to Traces, 106–107.

96.Albinus, Lexikon der Stadt Königsberg Pr. und Umgebung, 226.

97.Borm, Die Entwicklung Königsbergs i. Pr. zu einer modernen Großstadt, 262, 324–327.

98.Zolberg, Nation by Design, 246.

99.Zolberg, 253.

100.Zolberg, 254.

101.Zolberg, 258.

102.Zolberg, 264, 561n99.

103.Leiserowitz, Sabbatleuchter und Kriegerverein, 318.

104.Cymer, Początek drogi; refer to the Emigration Museum in Gdynia, accessed January 27, 2023, http://muzeumemigracji.pl/.

105.Eidintas, Lithuanian Emigration, 147. According to Sirutavičius, the number in 1923 was 7.6 percent. Sirutavičius, “Government Policy towards the Jews,” 261.

106.On antisemitism in interwar Lithuania, refer to Sirutavičius, “Outbreaks of Antisemitism.”

107.Sirutavičius, “Government Policy towards the Jews,” 283.

108.Greenbaum, Jews of Lithuania, 231. For a more recent look at Jewish autonomy in greater detail, refer to Zalkin, “Jewish National Autonomy.”

109.Greenbaum, Jews of Lithuania, 234–237.

110.Greenbaum, 262. For greater detail on Jewish education in interwar Poland, refer to Kaubrys, “Network of Jewish Schools.”

111.Eidintas, Lithuanian Emigration, 150.

112.Eidintas, 151.

113.Eidintas, 152.

114.Eidintas, 154.

115.For basic information on Prussian and German railroads during military conflicts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, refer to Mitchell, Great Train Race; Bremm, Von der Chaussee zur Schiene; Mierzejewski, Most Valuable Asset of the Reich, vol. 2; Browning, Hayes, and Hilberg, German Railroads, Jewish Souls.

116.Massel and Malinowski, “Mosty na Wiśle w Tczewie,” 20.

117.Schindler, Mosty und Dirschau 1939, 112.

118.Schindler, 126–127.

119.Schindler, 115–116.

120.Schindler, 119, 122–124; Ramm and Groh, Zeugin der Geschichte, table 31.