With onset of war in 1914, for the purposes of securing Germany's eastern border against the Russian imperial army, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, the German chancellor, decided on the annexation of a specific strip of land from Congress Poland, known later on as the Polish Border Strip. In order to avoid adding the Polish population there to the population of imperial Germany, it was proposed that the Poles would be ethnically cleansed to a proposed new Polish state further east, while the strip would be resettled with the Germans.