Territories Of Poland Annexed By The Soviet Union
Immediately after the German invasion of Poland in 1939, which marked the beginning of World War II, the Soviet Union invaded the eastern regions of the Second Polish Republic, which Poles referred to as the "Kresy," and annexed territories totaling 201,015 km² with a population of 13,299,000 inhabitants including Poles, Belorussians, Ukrainians, Jews, Czechs and others.
Most of these territories remained within the Soviet Union in 1945 as a consequence of European-wide territorial rearrangements configured during the Tehran Conference of 1943. Poland was compensated for this territorial loss with the prewar German eastern territories much of which had been devastated during the war, and had been looted and pillaged by the Red Army. The Communist Poland described the territories as the "Recovered Territories". The post-World War II territory of Poland was significantly smaller than the pre-1939 land areas, shrinking by some 77,000 square kilometers (roughly equaling that of the territories of Belgium and the Netherlands combined).
Read more about Territories Of Poland Annexed By The Soviet Union: Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Soviet Occupation of Poland, 1939–1941, German Occupation 1941–1944, Soviet Annexation
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