Emigration From Poland To Germany After World War II - Evacuation, Flight and Expulsions of Germans From Poland

Evacuation, Flight and Expulsions of Germans From Poland

Main article: Flight and expulsion of Germans from Poland during and after World War II See also: Expulsion of Germans after World War II and Repatriation of Poles (1944–1946)

After 1945, ethnic deportation was used as a tool to create a homogenous nation within the new borders of the People's Republic of Poland, which contained a large amount of territory that was once part of Germany. The Masses of people were forced to move: ethnic Germans and Germans from what became Western Poland (the so-called Recovered Territories) to the post-war Allied Occupation Zones in Germany; ethnic Ukrainians from eastern regions of Poland to the USSR or to the Recovered Territories.

The decision to move the Polish border westward was made by the Allies of World War II during the wartime Tehran and Yalta Conferences, and fixed in the post-war Potsdam Agreement, which also provided for the expulsion of German citizens to Allied occupation zones. Though the Potsdam agreement left the final decision about the border shift, and thus the extent of the expulsions, to a future peace treaty, the Polish administration, who had already worked toward a fait accompli with its pre-Potsdam ("wild") expulsions from the territories adjacent to the Oder-Neisse line, interpreted the agreement as final decision which would only be formally confirmed in the projected peace treaty. Since the peace treaty looked like it would never take place (it didn't until the early 1990s, see Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany), the Potsdam Agreement de facto took its place. The status of the expellees in post-war West Germany, who granted a right of return to the German diaspora, was legally defined in the Federal Expellee Law of 1953.

The deportations of people considered German stopped in 1950 (in 1945–1950 almost 3.2 million Germans were ousted). From that time on, the authorities officially conceded that there were at most a few thousand ethnic Germans living in Poland. These numbers included the ethnic Germans among the Mazurians, Silesians and Kashubs. Practically all through the years until the Polish communist regime was ousted, the existence of Germans remaining in Poland was denied. Polish prime minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki, in office 1989–91, was the first to recognize the German minority officially.

In the same period regained territories were resettled by Poles coming from various locations. Around 155,000 men from the Kresy (the former Polish territories east of the Curzon line) who in 1944 were conscripted to the Polish army, were after the war settled in the West. Around 2.9 million came from central Poland. Up to two million had been freed from forced labor in Nazi Germany. 1.126 million were expelled from the former Polish territories in the east. However, despite the repatriation, it is estimated that over 525,000 Poles remained in those territories after the war.