The term fifth column, referring to those who undermine a threatened community from within, arose out of the context of the Spanish Civil War. But the group that possibly gained the most notoriety as a fifth column in the 1930s was Poland's German minority. Most of its leaders supported German irredentist demands throughout the interwar period and, following the German invasion in September 1939, participated in the destruction of the Polish state. Parallel to this reputation as arch villains, Poland's Germans also developed a reputation as arch-victims. National oppression during the interwar era was the initial foundation for this victimization narrative. But the mass flight and expulsion of civilians, mostly women and children, at the end of the war understandably took center stage in later accounts of German suffering.

Winson Chu's excellent new study of the German minority in interwar Poland moves us beyond these polarized caricatures and the polemics that they tend to generate. Chu sensibly treats the very existence of a “German minority” in the interwar Polish state as a problem rather than as a given fact. As he rightly notes, this ostensible imagined community was composed of many geographically scattered local communities. Most had previously lived as members of the titular nationality in the German Empire, and so tended to chafe at the need to adjust to minority status. But hundreds of thousands had previously lived in a Habsburg Galicia that was dominated by Polish elites or under Russian rule. A straightforward revisionist agenda—restoration of the frontiers of 1914—did little to address the interests of such Germans.

Chu's analysis focuses on the interplay between this underlying regional diversity and evolving attempts to create a single voice and common organizational structure for the German minority. “Why,” he asks, “did an increasing nationalization of political life in the minority widen regional divisions?” (11-12). In answering that question, Chu engages with but partially dissents from recent hypotheses regarding a decisive “völkisch turn” in views of “Germandom” beyond Germany's borders. He persuasively argues that “state-centered thinking persisted in new permutations among the Germans in Western Poland” (85) as the former German citizens of these areas continued to dominate German minority organizations, such as the Deutsche Vereinigung, and became the disproportionate recipients of subsidies from Weimar Germany. Attempts to recruit Germans in former Austrian and Russian lands into German minority organizations reflected an inherently unequal relationship. It represented, Chu suggests, an “internal colonialism” that not only insisted on German superiority vis-à-vis Poles, but also underlined the tutelage of ethnic Germans in eastern Poland to their ostensibly more advanced brethren in western Poland. Denigration of the Germans of Łódź (so-called “Lodzermenschen”) as nationally wavering and unreliable was a particularly striking example of these differential power dynamics among Poland's Germans.

The Nazis' rise to power in Germany had complicated, and not entirely intuitive, repercussions within the German minority in Poland. The Jungdeutsche Partei, a group based in the former Austrian part of Silesia that was more in tune with Nazi völkisch views, made some headway in the mid-1930s in challenging the minority's traditional leadership, which was based in the former Prussian regions of Posen (Poznań) and Pomerania. This challenge received some cautious support not only from Berlin but also from Warsaw. The nonaggression treaty of 1934 between Poland and Germany had convinced many within the Polish government that the new Nazi regime was a more reliable interlocutor than the old conservative elites within the German minority, and that the Polish state could only gain from undermining the latter's authority.

The Jungdeutsche Partei's bid for leadership of the entire minority community was ultimately unsuccessful, but the intra-German conflicts of the mid-1930s underlined the instability of intra-communal power relations. Demography played an important role here. Substantial out-migration of Germans from the former Prussian portions of Poland meant that the proportion of “non-Prussians” within the German minority grew steadily. By the eve of World War II, it had probably become a majority of the minority (204). Aware of the shifting relative weight of their constituencies, German activists in central Poland, in particular Ludwig Wolff of the Deutscher Volksbund, finally began to play a more powerful role in steering the activities of the minority. In jockeying for position, national activists of almost all stripes appealed for support from Berlin and readily incorporated antisemitic themes in their bids for ideological legitimacy. But Chu is persuasive in insisting on the agency of local actors, as both the financial subsidization and the attention of Reich officials remained limited throughout the late 1930s.

This is a wonderfully nuanced study that not only offers a major contribution to historiography on the interwar period, but also constitutes a stimulating case study for scholars who are interested in the paradoxical relationship between national integration and intra-national divisions. Chu's narrative—of a group that simultaneously seems to come together and spiral apart—is not only a convincing characterization of the German minority in interwar Poland, but also a useful way to look at interwar Poland as a whole, at Poland following World War II, as well as at Germany following its 1871 and 1990 unifications.

Relying as it does on a keen eye for regional subplots, Chu's account is especially effective in bringing certain regional contexts to light. The sections that focus on Łódź and the ambiguous legacies of the “Lodzermenschen” are especially rich and well developed. Other local communities, however, such as the scattered German settlements of Galicia or eastern Poland or the Germans of former Prussian Upper Silesia, are not really brought to life in the same way. Chu would likely argue that this is the point: only certain people played the role of activists within the German community, whereas other ostensible members of that community were “given ‘their’ leaders whether they liked it or not, and the nebulous silent majority accepted events and actions in their names passively” (19). But this assumes that the residents of interwar Poland were locked into particular national categories. In fact, as the statistics cited by Chu illustrate, there was enormous disagreement about who counted as a “German,” with hundreds of thousands of people—most, but not all, in former Prussian Upper Silesia—categorized as “German” by some, “Polish” by others. This taxonomic confusion was further amplified during World War II, as an additional 2,000,000 Polish citizens were reclassified as Volksdeutsche. Who among this vast population of part-time Germans should be seen as part of the story of interwar Poland's German minority? Future scholars, it is to be hoped, will follow Chu's lead in further breaking down not only the internal dynamics within Poland's German minority, but also the way in which people joined and exited this ostensible “ethnic community.”