In the second half of the 19th century, Bismarck revived memories of the German genocide of the Balto-Slavic Prussians in the 13th century. As early as 1856, Prussian Chancellor Otto Bismarck (1815 – 1898), Berlin’s ambassador to the all-German Parliament in Frankfurt, wrote that the Polish minority must be exterminated. Bismarck’s anti-Catholic and anti-Polish policies were the basis for his “Kultur Kampf” program. Such ideas were a prelude to the genocides and mass murders of the 20th century – the century in which more people were killed that ever before in the entire history of mankind.
Chancellor Bismarck repeatedly likened the Poles to wolves, which should be “shot to death whenever possible.” In 1861, he declared, “Hit the Poles till they despair of their very lives…if we are to survive, our only course is to exterminate them.” (Werner Richter, ‘Bismark’ New York: Putnam Press, 1964, page 101). Generally, Bismarck’s extremist attitude towards the Poles remains unknown in America. Thus, on March 5, 1990, during progress towards the unification of Germany, a headline of U.S. News & World report stated: “Finishing what Bismarck began.” It must have been written without the knowledge of Bismarck’s pronouncements such as those quoted above.
Prussian hatred of everything Polish has been well documented ever since the Hohenzollerns, the ancestors of German emperors, starting in 1525, and continuing for more than a century, had to pay tribute to the king of Poland on their knees before they became the vassals of the king of Sweden. Kingdom of Prussia was created in 1701 with the capital in Berlin, formally outside of the fragmented Roman Empire of the German Nation.
The Kingdom of Prussia shaped the cradle of the modern German militarism. The name “Prussia” symbolized the continuity of German militaristic tradition by recalling the 13th century conquest and genocide of the Balto-Slavic Prussians by the armed monks of the Teutonic Order. However, the Kingdom of Prussia faced destruction during the Seven Years’ War (1758-1763).
Berlin was occupied and burned by Russian army in 1760. Russia decided to destroy the new Kingdom of Prussia in order to prevent it from acquiring means to unify the 350 independent German principalities, into a united Germany, with their capital in Berlin (for the first time ever). In exchange for Prussia and Silesia, Poland was to give Podolia to Russia. However, the Polish citizens living in Podolia refused to agree to become subjects of the tsar.
Poland’s refusal, saved the Kingdom of Prussia from destruction and permitted the Hohenzollerns of Berlin to return to their schemes for the partitioning of Poland after the new and weak-minded Tsar Peter III (1728-1762) became very accommodating to Prussia. The situation remained favorable to Berlin, after Peter III was assassinated with the connivance of his German wife, Catgherine II (1729-1796), who usurped the Russian throne by a coup d’etat on July 9, 1762.
Berlin was then able to provoke a series of Polish-Russian wars: each war gave a chance to Berlin, for the robbery of Polish land by annexation. Cultural and economic oppression by Prussia of the annexed Polish lands followed, until the times of Bismarck who formed his plans for the elimination of Polish from the region. Berliners had a strong anti-Polish tradition, with which they helped to inspire Hitler’s genocidal crimes against citizens of Poland.
On April 24, 1939, when Hitler terminated his non-aggression pact with Poland, he was furious that had Poland rejected his offer of friendship and alliance. Hitler made such an offer for the first time as early as August 5, 1935, when he declared, that good Polish-German relations were of primary importance to him. He wanted a military alliance with Poland and Japan against the Soviet Union, to which he did not have land access, because Poland’s territory constituted a physical barrier between Germany and the Soviets.
Apparently Hitler’s “best case scenario” was to attack the Soviets with some 600 divisions: 220 German, 200 Japanese, 60 Polish and 80 of other nations, without having to fight on the western front. He hoped to mobilize in Poland some 10% of the population, or over three and half million men. When Poland refused, Hitler put into practice Bismarck’s plans and committed mass murder in Poland.
In view of Bismarck’s and Hitler’s racism it is interesting to remember that the population of Germany is mainly of Germanic, Slavic and Avar-Turkic ancestry and the German language is unique among the Germanic languages to have Slavic type augmentatives and diminutives. Few remember that in 880 AD the Frankish fortifications, “Limes Sorabicus” and “Limes Saxoniae” on the eastern shores of the Rhine River were built from the Danish Mark to the Mark of Avaria, which after a few centuries became the Mark of Bavaria, populated with many carriers of the Turkic Asiatic DNA. Thousand years ago, from the Frankish fortifications, “Limes Sorabicus” and “Limes Saxoniae” started the “push east to conquer Slavic lands,” known as “the Drang nach dem Slvischen Osten” which ended as Hitler’s “life and death struggle between races” for the “survival of the fittest” along with his willingness to let German perish in his attempt to implement the doctrine of Lebensraum rather than let her turn back and be “disgraced forever.’
Against the backdrop of history of the “Drang nach Osten” it is interesting to notice that the national memory stored in Poland does not include arrivals of the forefathers of the Poles from some faraway lands because apparently the national identity of the Poles was formed in the basin of the Vistula River, in the great central European lowlands in the vicinity of the steppes of Ukraine and of Russia where the original Proto Indo-European language was developed and used already some 5500 years ago. This development is described by David W. Anthony, professor of anthropology at Hartwick College in England. This author has conducted extensive archaeological and DNA fieldwork in the Ukraine, Russia, and Kazakhstan.
The book “THE HORSE, THE WHEEL, AND LANGUAGE: How Bronze-Age Riders From the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World,” by David W. Anthony. (Illustrated. 553 pp. Princeton University Press. $35, was published in 2008). It gives good scientific arguments, which are in agreement with the old mythology of Poland and with existing linguistic evidence. Baltic Sea was sometimes called the Slavonic Sea or “Morze Słowiańskie.” The Balto-Slavs are known to have lived on the shores of the Baltic Sea as far back as nearly 4000 years ago according to genetic evidence and carefully time-dated DNA studies.
According to the linguists, some 3500 years ago, the Balto-Slavic language separated from the Arian language in which Sanscrit texts were written in India. Then 500 years later it divided itself into the Baltic and the Slavic family of languages. During the next 1500 years the Slavic family of languages was developing in parallel with other families of related languages such as Baltic, Celtic, Germanic Hellenic, Iranian, Kurdish, Latin, and Sanskrit among other families of Indo-European languages.
Thus Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, (old) Prussian, English, Welsh, French, Greek, Kurdish and Punjabi belong to the Indo-Europen family of languages. Some 1500 years ago the Polish language separated from the old Slavic or the old Savonic language, and started its own development, which is still in progress.
Turning point in spreading of the Indo-European languages came with the domestication of horses, which was first accomplished around 4,800 years ago, or at least some 2,000 years after cattle, sheep, pigs and goats had been domesticated in other parts of the world. Initially, horses were most likely used as a source of meat. Some centuries later horses began to be ridden and had we have evidence of the wear marks on horses teeth dating from that time. Eventually horses were used to pull carts first with solid wheels and later on with spoked wheels.
Proto-Indo-European speakers became mobile herders who spread their language through the steppes. Then they became skilled warriors and were equipped with battle chariots on wheels with spokes. They spread their language farther and farther so that now nearly three billion people use languages, which originated from the Proto-Indo-European language. Today, some 90% of the world scientific and technological knowledge, has been discovered by people speaking languages derived from the Proto Indo-European language.
Today linguistic studies give information, for example, about the cross influence between European languages. Old Slavic word for the wind “wetru” in antiquity and “wiatr” in modern Polish, serves as a borrowed word, adapted to English as “weather” and to German as “Wetter.” English “fist” and German “Faust” end with letters “st” because of the ancient Slavic ending of the word “pięść” based on “five fingers in a fist” from the word “pięć” meaning “five.” The Slavic word “pług” meaning “horizontal cutting tool” similar to the word meaning a “skid” or “płoza” became “plow” in English and “phlug” in German. Slavic – Western Lechitic word “bierka” or “birka” became Fench “biere,” German “bier” and English “beer.”
St. Cyryl or Canstatine (827-869) and St. Metody or Michael (815-885), Greek brothers, sons of a Slavic mother were born in Thessaloniki and were “ They became apostles to the Slavs” in the IX century and Pope John Paul II declared then co-patrons of Europe with Saint Benedict of Nursia. They created the Cyrillic alphabet, which included Slavic nasal vowels “ą” and “ę” preserved uniquely in the Polish language among all other modern Slavic languages. This fact contributes an additional proof of the fact established by DNA studies, that the Poles and their ancestors for millennia lived in the basin of the Vistula River first as members of the Balto-Slavic family and then as members of the Slavic family of nations.
For several hundred years the Polish language served eastern Slavs as a conduit for learning about the western Latin culture. The Russian dynasty, the Romanovs, used Polish as the language of the court. For centuries the Polish language served as the language of diplomacy and civility between the Baltic and the Black Sea.
The antiquity of the Polish expressions is evident in the fact that the word “wall” in Polish is “ściana” meaning vertically cut dirt wall, below ground level, in dugout dwellings. Similarly the floor in Polish is “podłoga” or lower surface and the ceiling is “powała” or the roofing thrown over the dugout. The name of stairs in Polish indicates going down or “schody.” Since ground water could accumulate below the floors of ancient dugouts, in the crawling the space there could be a source of ground water. In Polish the verb “łazić” or “to crawl” possibly gave the origin for the word “washroom” or in Polish “łazienka.”
The structure of the Polish language is similar to classical Latin and Greek. The adaptation of the Latin alphabet to Polish sounds consisted of one definite process, rather than, as is the case, with the English language, which is a mixed language with simplified grammar inherited from the adaptation of the Latin alphabet to Anglo-Saxon and to French, which was used by the Norman conquerors of Britain. While the structure of English is Germanic, the modern English inherited two separate adaptations of sounds to the Latin alphabet: one from the Anglo-Saxon language and the other from the French language, which was brought to England by the French speaking people from Normandy.
The French language started to develop as a result of the Roman conquest of the Gaul and the obligation of Burgund and Frank slaves to learn Latin, after they were sold to slavery to work on Roman plantations in Gaul, where Roman Legions were stationed. The resulting French language today is pronounced in a way much less similar to the Latin language, than is the Spanish language. In the Germanic family of languages only the Germans borrowed the Slavic diminutive and augmentative forms during the 1000 years of the German conquest of western Slavic lands. Diminutives and augmentatives do not commonly occur in the other Germanic languages.
The historic role of the horse and the wheel, in the formation of Proto-Indo-Europran languages as shown in linguistic and DNA studies, and is described in the book “THE HORSE, THE WHEEL, AND LANGUAGE: How Bronze-Age Riders From the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World,” by David W. Anthony, is a milestone in the quest for a scientific basis for the determination of the formation of the racial and cultural character of the population of Europe especially the cultural and linguistic origin of the Heartland of Eurasia.