The German planners wanted to annex around 30,000 square kilometers of the territory of former Congress Poland and carry out ethnic cleansing up to 3 million Poles and Jews to make room for German colonists in the so called Polish Border Strip plan. The German government used punitive threats to force Polish landowners living in the German-occupied Baltic states to relocate and sell their Baltic property to the Germans in exchange for entry to Poland. Parallel efforts were made to remove Poles from Polish territories of the Prussian Partition.