By the eve of the First World War, the use of German was mandatory in public meetings throughout the Reich, and land laws were being reformed in such a way as to deprive the Poles of their fundamental economic rights.33 The notion that ethnic minorities were entitled to be treated with the same respect as the majority population was a view held only by a tiny and diminishing minority of Germans. Even the Social Democrats thought of Russia and the Slavic East as lands of backwardness and barbarism by 1914, and had little or no sympathy for the efforts of Polish-speaking workers in Germany to
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