German Poles (German: Deutsche Polen, Polish: Polacy pochodzenia niemieckiego) may refer to either Poles of German descent or sometimes to Polish citizens whose ancestors held German citizenship before World War II, regardless of their nationality.
After the flight and expulsion of Germans from Poland, the largest of a series of flights and expulsions of Germans in Europe during and after World War II, approximately 1,000,000 former citizens of Germany were neutralized and granted Polish citizenship. Some of them were forced to stay in Poland and some wanted to stay there, as it was their native territory. The lowest estimate by West German Schieder commission of 1953, is that 910,000 former German citizens were granted Polish citizenship by 1950. The highest estimate is that 1,043,550 were naturalized as Polish citizens by 1950.
However vast majority of those people were the so-called "autochthons" who were allowed to stay in post-war Poland after declaring Polish nationality in a special verification process. Therefore most of them were not ethnic Germans but Polish or "Wasserpolnisch" speaking inhabitants of the pre-war border regions of Upper Silesia and Warmia-Masuria. Despite their ethnic background, they were allowed to reclaim their former German citizenship on application and under German Basic Law were "considered as not having been deprived of their German citizenship if they have established their domicile in Germany after May 8, 1945 and have not expressed a contrary intention." Because of this fact many of them left People's Republic of Poland due to its undemocratic political system and constant economic problems.
It is estimated that, in the Cold War era, hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens decided to emigrate to West Germany and, to a lesser extent, to East Germany. Despite that, hundreds or tens of thousands of former German citizens remained in Poland. Some of them created a family with other Poles, who, in the vast majority, were settlers from central Poland or were resettled from the former eastern territories of Poland by the Soviets to the Recovered territories.
Read more about this topic: German Minority In Poland
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