Wehrbauer

The Habsburg use of "Wehrbauern" was the Military Frontier, which was established by Ferdinand I in the 16th century and placed under the jurisdiction of the Croatian Sabor and Croatian Ban since it was carved out of Croatian territory. It acted as a cordon sanitaire against Ottoman incursions. By the 19th century, it was rendered all but obsolete by the establishment of standing armies and was subsequently dissolved. During the Thirty Years' War, battles and raids were common throughout its land, and the Holy Roman Empire had to make greater use of Wehrbauern in other regions of the empire as well. In the 20th century, the term re-emerged and was used by the Nazi SS to refer to soldiers designated as settlers for the lands that were conquered during the German invasions of Poland and the Soviet Union. ==SS Wehrbauern==

Ideology The concept of Wehrbauern predated the Nazis, with the Artaman League (founded in 1923) sending urban German children to the countryside not only for the experience but also as a core of Wehrbauern. The Nazis intended to colonise the conquered Eastern European lands in accordance with Adolf Hitler's Lebensraum ideology through such soldier peasants. Plans envisaged them acting both as colonists and as soldiers, defending the new German colonies from the surrounding Slavic population in the event of an insurgency. Wehrbauern would have the task not of extending civilization but of preventing it from arising outside Wehrbauer settlements. Any such civilisation, as a non-German phenomenon, would pose a challenge to Germany. Beginning in 1938, the SS intensified the ideological indoctrination of the Hitler Youth Land Service (HJ-Landdienst) and promulgated its ideal of the German Wehrbauer. Special secondary schools were created under SS control to form a Nazi agrarian elite trained according to the principle of "blood and soil". The SS plan for genocide and colonisation of the territories of eastern Poland and of the Soviet Union was titled Generalplan Ost (English: "General Plan East"). The plan projected the settlement of 10 million racially-valuable Germanics (Germans, Dutch, Flemish, Scandinavians, and English) in the territories over a span of 30 years and displacing about 30 million Slavs and Balts, who would be either slaves under German masters or forcefully transferred to Siberia to make room for the newcomers. Volksdeutsche, such as the Volga Germans, would also be transplanted. From a historical perspective, the SS Wehrbauer concept deliberately referenced the model of the military frontier held by the Habsburg monarchy against the incursions of the Ottoman Empire. Himmler also believed that during the early migration period and the German eastward expansion of the Middle Ages, the conquering Germanic peasant-farmer had, in addition to farming, defended his land with arms, and the Wehrbauer model aimed to revive that custom. Settlement division In the General Government, composed entirely of pre-war Polish territory, plans envisaged setting up a number of "settlement areas" (German: Siedlungsgebiete), centred on the six Teilräume ("spatial regions") of Cracow, Warsaw, Lublin, Lviv/Lwów (German: Lemberg), Bialystok, and Litzmannstadt (). The colonisation of former Soviet territories would take place through forming three major "settlement marches" (German: Siedlungsmarken), alternatively also called Reichsmarken ("marches of the Reich"). Smaller "settlement points" (German: Siedlungsstützpunkte), Siedlungsmarken The settlement marches were to be separated from the civil administration of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories and Reichskommissariats and given to the custody of the Reichsführer-SS, who was to name an SS and Police Leader (German: SS- und Polizeiführer) for the region and also to distribute temporary and inheritable fiefs and even permanent land ownership for the settlers. A major autobahn system would connect the settlement strings, with new German cities planned for construction along the roadbeds of roughly every 100 km. Further extensions run in the direction of the Don and the Volga, and eventually towards the Ural mountains. The compulsory savings of the individual SS men would fund the foundation of the settlements. Each settlement was to be planned (Soviet villages emptied of their previous inhabitants were to be destroyed) and would comprise 30 to 40 farms, each of 121.5 hectares (300 acres); a Nazi Party headquarters; a manor house for the SS or party leader; an agricultural instruction centre; a house for a community nurse; and a cinema. The houses of the settlement were to be built "as in the old days" - two or three stone courses thick. He would also act as the military commander of a company-sized force consisting of the community's peasants, their sons, and labourers. Himmler stated that if the clergy were to acquire money to construct churches on their own in the settlements, the SS would later take the buildings over and transform them into "Germanic holy places". After twelve years of military service, soldiers from peasant families would receive completely-equipped farms located in the conquered East. It would also encourage large families. Thus, Hitler stated, "we shall again find in the countryside the blessing of numerous families. Whereas the present law of rural inheritance dispossesses the younger sons, in the future every peasant's son will be sure of having his patch of ground". The design was also to be used for defence purposes on Germany's "ultimate eastern border deep within Russia", where the easternmost Wehrbauer "settlement-pearl" villages would likely have grown up if the Axis powers had completely defeated the Soviets. There might have been the possibility either of remnant Soviet forces or of troops of the northwestern Siberian extremities of Imperial Japan's Co-Prosperity Sphere territories on the eastern side of such a frontier. ==See also==