Draft:Polonization of the Former Eastern Germany (1918-1990)

The Polonization of the Former Eastern Germany refers to extensive Polonization policies that rendered Eastern Germany an ethnically and culturally Polish region after 1945. Without consideration of self-determination, the Germans, who had inhabited the region for centuries since the Ostsiedlung, were expelled, subjected to collective guilt for the crimes of the Nazi German regime. The new Communist Polish regime did everything in their power to justify the Polonization as "ancient Polish lands", and downplayed, or sometimes even outright rejected the German heritage of the affected areas.



Interwar period
The German minority in Interwar Poland was subject to discrimination and Polonization attempts by the Polish government, during the first years of the Poland, a mass exodus of German speakers from the formerly German West Prussia, Posen, and Upper Silesia happened. Although the German minority in the pre-WW1 regions of Poland actually grew as a whole. The Germans minorities protected status was sealed when Poland signed the League of Nations Minority Treaty, also known as the Little Treaty of Versailles.

Upper Silesia
For Upper Silesia's mostly bilingual population, both German and Polish nationalisms remained largely foreign forces. After World War I, the region was divided in a German and a Polish part in the wake of the Silesian Uprisings. The so-called Silesian Uprisings involved clear intervention of the Polish military, so that calling them a Polish invasion is also justified.

The native Silesian mayor of Katowice  initially allowed the usage of both Polish and German in the administration, but when Michał Grażyński became the governor of the Silesian Voivodeship, he let go of non-Polish-speaking civil servants. He also pursued a policy of Polonizing place names and sometimes even family names.

This was part of a wider effort to Polonize Poland, undertaken during the Józef Piłsudski's administration. Though not much is known about Piłsudski's views on the German minority, he might've even been more tolerable towards them than previous leaders. Not much was done to combat discrimination and Polonization efforts undertaken by local administration against the German minority, especially in Upper Silesia.

As throughout the 19. century, in particular, during Bismarcks' Kulturkampf, the Catholic church opposed to projects for national segregation and continued to offer services in both German and Polish.

Plant mangers were always under pressure to Polonize the workforce and Grażyński intervened multiple times to remove German executives from companies. German firms were excluded from state contracts, even Polish firms, whose owners were "a Pole with German orientation", i.e. married a German, sent their children to Germans schools or spoke German at home were also watched, and were given lower preferences.

Background
In German-occupied Poland German-speaking population from Eastern Europe took homes and properties of Poles who were expelled to the east of occupied Poland. Ultimately, between 780,00-900,000 Poles were expelled. During World War II, 1,8-1,9 million non-Jewish Polish citizens were killed, and more than 3 million Jewish Polish citizens. The Nazi program to move Germans was tied to expulsion and murder of Poles and Jews. For Poland, the proportion of Nazi-caused dead was highest among all countries.

After 1944, with the Western Allies dependence on the Soviets who had occupied the Kresy, compensation of Poland with German land was put on the table, even though the Atlantic Charter renunced borer changes. Notably, the Kresy had been forcefully annexed by Poland in 1921, lying east of the closed Polish-speaking area. The Kresy had been absorbed into the Soviet Union in 1939 as the result of Soviet cooperation with the Nazi regime.

Initially, Polish annexation of Masuria and Upper Silesia, lands that had an autochthonous Polish-speaking population, was considered. Polish politicians shunned from demanding exclusively German-settled areas of Lower Silesia and Farther Pomerania because they expected the necessary expulsion of Germans would not be accepted by the Western Allies. However, over the war years, Polish ambition grew to also aspire for annexation of these overwhelming German-speaking areas. At the Tehran Conference, the Polish Government-in-Exile was promised ample compensation to lands at the Oder and the eastern Neisse. British prime minister Churchill hoped that by supporting the sweeping Polish claims, Poland could be held in the western sphere. In a speech, Winston Churchill announced that the principles of self-determination did not apply to Germany after unconditional surrender. British politics however shunned from granting the Lublin Poles the concessions of German lands.

The first Polish claim of the later Oder-Neisse border during the war came out in 18 December 1944 by a Pravda article advocating that Poland receive Stettin and a border running along Oder and western Neisse to the Czechoslovak border. Polish communists assessed that the German territories, because of their high industrial development were far more useful for modernization than central Poland or the Kresy. Contrary to some German claims, Polish revisionist claims in the inter-war time had mainly targeted East Prussia, Danzig and Upper Silesia. Lower Silesia and Farther Pomerania had not been targets of Polish revisionist claims before World War II.



However, the seeming Western support for the Polish claims was readily exploited by the Soviet regime who sought to win support of nationalist Poles. Most of the Polish elite that survived the war were opponents of Communism. To win them over, the Communist regime portrayed itself as defender of the Polish national cause of retaking from Germany the "ancient Piast lands". The London Polish government however feared that the Oder Neisse border would bring Poland in lasting dependence on the Soviet Union to guarantee this border.

The Polish Communists aimed for a nationally homogeneous state. The losing of the Kresy which had a mixed population, actually helped this goal. As admitted by Bierut the lands of the Kresy had been a cause of unrest due to its foreign population. Hilary Minc rejoiced at Poland receiving a fully equipped territory, with a remnant of Germans which Poland had all rights to liquidate.

Eventually, in view of the Polish-soviet treaty of April 21, 1945, the Western Allies saw themselves confronted with a fait accompli, as U.S. President Truman reports in his memoirs.

Establishment of Polish rule
In February 1945, delegates of the Polish government began entering the German East with the aim of pressing the Western Allies to accept the verbal commitments made at Tehran and Yalta. In spring 1945 German administrations were functional in Sorau, Landsberg, Grünberg], Freystadt, Sagan, Sprottau, and [Glogów|Glogau]]. To take over administration, special operative groups were sent to these towns from central Poland. In some cases, competing Polish groups arrived and competed for influence.

Polish government was assumed in Upper Silesia on April 18, in Lower Silesia on May 10, and in South East Prussia on May 23. The territory of the Free City of Danzig was annexed on March 30. Finally, Polish rule over Stettin and Swinemünde was established in November 1945. The aim of Polish communists was to exchanged populations as much as possible before the Allies could take a decision on the German-Polish border.

After conclusion of the Potsdam Conference, concerns for the German civilians were raised by the Allies. The policy of the expelling countries was overshadowed by the fear that the Allies, in view of the tense situation in occupied western Germany might revise their promises. However, eventually, the expelling countries prevailed.

Execution of Ethnic cleansing
The Communists' goal was to engineer an ethnically homogeneous state within supposedly Medieval borders, which is a goal derived from Dmowski's nationalist Piast vision. The losing of the Kresy, which had a nationally mixed population, actually helped achieving this goal. In the former Eastern German lands, the Polish government proceeded with de-Germanization and Polonization at high priority because the Polish administration of the land was only de facto but not de jure recognized internationally. Foremost, elimination of the Germans mainly by ethnic cleansing and re-settlement by Polish people was mandated. The Polish authorities made a determined effort to establish a demographic fait accomplit before the Allies would take decisions on Germany's future.

Conviction of collective guilt of the German people derived from an allegedly inborn inclination for crime was widespread in Polish society. The longing for revenge was seen a legitimate stand. Polish communists and non-communists alike considered hate for Germans a positive trait.

Evictions
When the Soviet Union occupied Lower Silesia, they initially allowed the non-Nazi German administration and officials to stay, which went against the wishes of the Provisional Polish Government who wanted to claim Lower Silesia. Polish soldiers first set on the line Oder-Glatzer Neisse, then on June 10, on the line Oder-Lusatian Neisse.

When authority was transferred by the Soviet Union on 23 May 1945, the Polish administration gathered militiamen, to prepare for mass eviction of Germans nearest to the Oder-Neisse, in order to create a fait accompli for the Potsdam Conference in July. The first planned expulsions took place on June 20, when many Germans were ordered to vacate their homes without any prior notice, and were only given enough time to take the most essential possessions. The Polish army executed the expulsions by surrounding village by village and instructing all populace to leave. Germans were allowed to take with the only a minimal quantity of their possessions. However, Germans often returned and found their houses plundered. People looking to cross east of the Neisse were sometimes even shot by the Polish Army and Militias. Germans did in largely not resist and surrenderer to the orders of the Polish administration. Sometimes Germans were even "voluntarily" evicted, even when they still lived there, this meant they could be denied rations and employment, this made leaving the area for the Allied occupation zones more attractive. In these so-called wild expulsions, Germans were expelled without the Allies' consent. These actions were give a seeming legitimacy by the Act on Expulsion of Enemy Elements from Poland of May 3, 1945. After German capitulation on May 8/9, masses of evacuated Germans set in motion for their homes in Eastern Germany.

Germans who remained or had returned were classified by the Polish in several categories: those of category 1 could be replaced by Polish workers quickly, those of category 2 were forced to first train a Polish before being expelled, while those of category 3 were specialists whose expulsion had to be authorized by the government. In August and September 1945, the Polish government began confining, expelling of Germans en masse from Upper Silesia. The same policy was applied in October and November in Eastern Pomerania and southern East Prussia. During 1945 over 200,000 German were expelled from Danzig alone. In traditionally bi-cultural Upper Silesia, many German-speakers and an age-old bilingual local heritage managed to keep their language and culture.

The situation in the newly Polish areas has been described as a Wild-West situation where Germans were outlawed in their native region, to be attacked, humiliated, beaten, or murdered. Under Polish rule, Germans had to move to certain quarters of towns. Stores banned Germans from buying anything. These policies resulted in a wave of German suicides. Gangs of marauders, usually from central Poland, stole as much as they could from the Germans. Rape and pillage were common, and it made no difference whether the Germans were antifascists or not.

In several regions, Germans were forced to wear a sign carrying an "N" marking them as Germans. Often, German civilians of working age were assign as auxiliary workers to Polish state farms, while prisoners of war were exploited under harsh conditions in mining. As soon as a Polish worker arrived to replace the German, the latter would be evicted immediately. For German families without a working family member, the economic situation was even more harsh as they had to pay even for medical treatment with the result of a large infant mortality.

Allied reception centers in western Germany often reported that the German expellees to be registered there had undergone systematic maltreatment. However, on Polish request, the daily rate of transfers was even increased from 5,000 to 8,000. Former German Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz Birkenau, Lamsdorf, Jaworzno, Swietochlowice, and Potulice were turned into labor camps for Germans. The violence endured by the Germans in the camps was also due to the facts that camp personnel were not paid and tried to extract payment from the inmates.

However, in view of the necessity to quickly make industry, mining, transportation in the acquired lands useful for Poland, a more liberal definition of nationality was applied when deciding who was a German. Mazurians, Silesians, Kashubians were designated as Germanized Poles and were encouraged to "re-Polonize". In addition, Germans critical for running the region's economy were allowed to stay.

Replacement of the clergy and ecclesiastical administration
The Polish church obtained large parts of the German dioceses of Breslau, the diocese of Allenstein, parts of the dioceses of Berlin and Meißen. Church structures had to be formed completely new to play a large part in Polonization of the region. Because the local German populace had been mostly Protestant, this also meant a recatholization. The exodus of Protestant ministers documents the totality of expulsions - in 1939 there were 990 Protestant ministers in Silesia, by 1945 there were 160, in 1947 there were six, and by 1948 there were none in Polish Silesia.

Circumstances were also complicated in that the Vatican did not take definite decisions in view of the preliminary nature of the new border. On July 8 1945, August Cardinal Hlond obtained special permit to administrate the area ecclestically by the Polish Church.

See Lower Silesia: From Nazi Germany To Communist Poland 1942-49 by Sebastian Siebel-Achenbach, chapter 8: The Politics of Lower Silesia. And The Seeds of Triumph: Church and State in Gomulka's Poland. Accessible through the Wikipedia Library. Local society and the authorities cooperated worked to convert Protestant churches into Catholic places of worship and ensure a Catholic religious presence for Polish colonists in Ziemia Lubuska. The Catholic newspaper Głos Katolicki, rejected much of the new regime’s social and ideological program but also staunchly supported the party-state’s anti-German policies.

Western protest


The unilateral Polish actions to occupy German soil by Poland raised British and American protest. The British Ambassador in the Soviet Union raises concerns that the concession of government to Poland risks future relations. The Polish London government raised concerns that the border shift would exacerbate Polish dependence on the Soviet Union.

At the Potsdam Conference, the Polish administration of the lands was presented by Stalin as a fait accomplit. The Western Powers refrained from any clean stance on the new border, but took offence at the unauthorized proceeding. However, the facts created were accepted by as a preliminary settlement the Western Allies, hoping to save their relation with the Soviet Union in the beginnings of the Cold War.

British foreign minister Ernest Bevin confided in 1946 that their acceptance of the Oder-Neisse boundary at Potsdam was an error. The US Secretary of State George C. Marshall by 1947 rejected the Oder-Neisse line, refuting Polish arguments as ungrounded.

Polish resettlement and acculturation
To settle the newly Polish areas, the number of Polish expellees did not suffice. To attract re-settlers from central Poland, the annexed areas were framed as a promised land finally returning to the motherland after allegedly 1000 years of struggle against German aggression. This pattern of imagination has been linked to the Polish plight during the time of division. By many, the west-shift was seen as a final step of Polish re-establishment, although the lands won in 1945 overwhelmingly had not been part of partitioned Poland. Extremely right-wing authors of the Obóz Narodowo Radykalny - Skaniec called for bloody revenge on the Germans who must be exterminated.

However, despite propagandistic claims that the areas were root Polish, most of the land was completely foreign to the Polish immigrants. Nature, topography, manners of cultivation, and housing were unknown to the new settlers. As a result, after the expulsion of the natives, in a historically unprecedented situation, a new Polish Communist society was to be constructed from ground up. Eventually, settlers from Poznania and central Poland reached leading positions in the newly formed society due to their large number. In the first years life the new inhabitants of the often destroyed towns tried to make ends meet. The time was marked by a lack of security and by an overarching expectation that Polish settlement was not to be permanent.

Distribution of German property
The distribution of German property was likened to a big game of Monopoly. Moving in the houses was easy because Germans had been order to leave the keys in the lock, on the outside.

The houses assigned to the new settlers often had a very foreign feeling to them. Most often, the houses were devastated, not by war, but by plundering bands or Soviet soldiers. In many cases, in the assigned houses, their German inhabitants still lived there, waiting for their expulsion. German and Polish innhabitants often lived there together for quite some time, sometimes on friendl terms.

There was no tradition of Polish names in the region. A Commission for the Determination of Place Names was set up to decide on place names. As a result e.g. Lower Silesia has been describes as a region of ruined place names.

Degermanization
The Polish Communists initiated grassroots actions for de-Germanization, removing street names, and German signs. Polish authorities sought to implant a selected history of the Piast past and deny the locals their history. German books were collected to be burnt, German inscriptions were chiselled off buildings, churches, graves, and even at home, e.g. on pictures. Graveyards were destroyed for gravestones to be used for paving of streets. Documents on the de-Germanization have been reported as missing from the archives despite being organized by the Polish administration. Speaking German even in private was banned and even Yiddish-speakers were harassed to speaking their language.

Such erasure of German traces was in part the result of the need to answer German charges about the legitimacy of Poland’s hold on the lands. The ethnic erasure of places and things was an aggressive mutual effort of the Polish regime, its people, and the Catholic Church to overwrite the region’s German history and forge a Polish past—not only in the abstract sphere of Polish memories, but in the realm of physical objects.

A memorandum of 1947 justified revocation of Polish citizenship on grounds of speaking German in public or at home, or reading German books. Officials were ordered to investigate behavior which indicated a German national orientation. Even the 850'000 people who were politically termed "autochthons" and spared expulsion were forbidden to speak German, even if they had little command of Polish.

The imposition of a Polish national identity on the remaining population clashed with relations to Germans. The local Slavic population such as Upper Silesians, Kashubians, and Mazurians, often had more in common with their fellow Germans than with the newcomers from East and Central Poland. In Mazuria and Upper Silesia, the preferential treatment of Polish new settlers who treated the natives as being almost Germans lead to negative stance against the Poliush states, even those who had formerly had yearned for Poland as the promised land. The justification of Polish rule over the acquired lands rested on the presence of a Slavic population. However, paradoxically, the Polish authorities only showed but mistrust to this population. As a result, the remaining autochthonous population became socially and politically isolated in their own homeland.

The clergy was called out not to accept German names at christening. Polonization of surnames was officially voluntary, but subject to various forms of pressure. The former German citizens "verified" as Poles had to attend "Repolonization" courses, because e.g. the Upper Silesian dialect was seen as Polish disfigured as the result of alleged German oppression. Literary and historical narratives taught in these courses portray Germans as outsiders transplanted to the lands, while "Poles" were the native population from ancient times.

As a result, prohibition of the German language made many Warmians and Masurians switch to German. Over 50 laws regulated how the new settlers had to deal with the former German property of their new homes. A special government agency was tasked with collecting pay from the new Polish house owners for the furniture they found in the houses.

In the later years, the Polish settlers often developed a close relation with artefacts of the former German house owners. Termed 'gotyks' they often became a treasured family inheritance, regarded as a gift of history. Often, the artefacts were seen as a way of legitimizing the inhabitants' stay in the region. A particular adjective of the Polish language arose: Poniemiecki, i.e. post-German. A similar words pożydowskie referred to property of Jewish owners killed by the Germans or emigrated.

This was not only limited to the former German populace, it also happened with the Romani, Ukrainians, Lemkos and other autochorous minorities, if they wanted to be a part of the new homogenous Polish culture and society, they had to conform to the new standardized Polish culture, and language, which left little room for local cultures and dialects. This was part of the highly nationalistic Communist myth of the "Recovered territories", which claimed the newer western parts of Poland as "Ancient Polish lands" and an ethnically, linguistically and religiously homogenous Polish state.

State sponsored plundering
In the areas taken over not only immobile cultural property as destroyed but also immobile propery. Many cultural objects today lack important parts, such as mouments and works o art whihc were transported to central Poland in 1945, even after the lands were assigned to Poland. Stanisław Lorentz saw these transferrals as covered by a moral Polish right for subsititution for artworks destroyed by the Germans during the war. For collecting the works of art, dedicated storehouses ("składnice muzealne") were erected in Eckersdorf, Heinrichau and Namslau. Manuscripts from Berlin, which had been evacuated to Lower Silesia, today form the Berlinka collection at the Jagiellonian Library in Kraków.

Effect on economy and society
There is a consensus that the German eastern provinces gained by Poland were economically better developed than the lost Kresy. A recent proposal for a macroeconomic calculation of the economic consequences of the westward Shift of Poland obtained, that the German eastern provinces were valued 25,8 billion International Dollars, while the whole of the Kresy was valued 9,4 billion International Dollars.

Significant was that the Polish economy obtained full access to the coal mines in Upper Silesia and the Sudetes, together with full access to the Oder and the seaport of Szczecin. Conversely, the economy of the remaining Soviet zone of Germany, East Germany, needed was deprived of the industrial region of Upper Silesia and the seaport of Berlin Stettin, which meant that whole economic networks had to be rebuilt.

In the spatial planning of new Poland, the vision of a Poland connected by the Vistula, Warta, and Odra replaced the vision of a Poland along Vistula, Bug and Dniepr, as soon as the German population was displaced from the shores of the Warta and Odra.

Scholar have pointed out that among the long-term effects of the ethnic cleansings is the existence of investor classes among both the expellers and the expellees. Those who benefited from the expulsions thus psychologically became interested, not only in maintaining the status quo, but in continuing their efforts at ethnic cleansing through the ongoing ethnic erasure of Germandom in Poland.{{{sfn|Curp|p= 189}}

In recent years, social researchers have uncovered an eerie visibility of the former German territories in mapping data. For example, the question of whether houses have bathrooms, and the average size of agricultural farms clearly align with the borders of 1914. Interestingly, the election results of the 2020 Polish presidential election show the country's division, possibly due to the age distribution which also aligns with the previous borders.

Polish Historiography
To justify the annexation, the lands were termed Recovered Territories. Although most of the lands had been Polish-ruled at some time point, almost none of it had been Polish following the restitution of the Polish state in the Middle Ages. However, Stettin and East Prussia had never been part of Poland before 1945. Polish historians who worked in the Slavic Committees, published books to try and justify the Recovered Territories, the new territories were portrayed as "age-old Polish and Slavic soil" which the German states had illegally seized.. Polish scholars collaborated with the regime to create a cult of the early Piast state, allegedly again realized by communists. Most academics did this not because they believed in the idea of the Recovered Territories, but rather to advance their careers and survive in Communist Poland. However, initially, only few Polish publications in regional studies of the acquired lands appear, espite utmost need - simply because there were no Polish experts on these lands. Zygmunt Wojciechowski edited a monography on the Recovered Territories and explicitly drew up a biasde interprettion of the local history to counterbalance German history.

Later, Polish scholars abandoned the politically charged term Recovered Territories and settled for the term "Ziemie Zachodnie i Północe" ("Western and Northern Lands") which desribe the land in geographic fscholarsterms.

Under the communist regime of Poland, the Myśl zachodnia (Polish Western Thought) was raised to a science to support the state, which, accordingly, provided funding for scholars. Polish scholars acted accordingly, eager to provide "facts" for proving the Slavic and Polish character of the acquired lands. In the Szczecin region, the appeal to the Piasts and, later, to the Griffin dynasty was particularly emphasized, even though this area was Polish for only a couple of decades in the early Middle Ages. Throughout the newly-Polish lands, streets and monuments have been named after the Piast rulers. The use of the Piast rulers has been described as a state-sponsored mythology.

Local history was told in a distorted manner, often by employing passive language for events during the 19th and 20th century, such as "was built". To gloss over the culture lost by the expulsion of the Germans, the re-settlers from the Kresy were given a prime place, paticularly in Wrocław, despite them being but a minority of the new settlers. Even after the fall of communism, the heroic circumstances of recovering the land by the first Polish settlers, the pionierzy are stressed.

Many monuments in the affected refer to the liberation of the area which is highly miselading. A recurring theme refers to the alleged ever-Polishness of the areas: Byliśmi, jesteśmy, będziemy. Other monuments refer to "return to the motherland" and to liberation, which however is difficult to apply to the region's Germans who lost their homes as the result of the alleged liberation.

A difficult debate is whether the region's cultural artefacts should be considered "European" heritage or rather "German heritage". This debate is very significant to Poland because Silesia, in particular, comprises a full third of Poland's historic artefacts.

Another debate among the Polish and the German sides is the Polish use of the term "autochthons" only for those German citizens of 1945. For Germans, people whose German ancestors have lived in the region since the Middle Ages must as well count as people rooted in the region.

Since 1990, the inhabitants of West and Northwest Poland increasingly honour the German past of the region. The works of authors such as Stefan Chin, Olga Tokarczuk, Artur Daniel Lisowacki, Pawel Huelle and Joanna Bator have raised the psychological situation of residents in the post-German areas to Polish literature.

Legal dispute
Appealing to the German borders of 1937 became a basic strategy of the Federal Republic. This construct appears in some Allied documents to emphasize that the term "Germany" does not recognize those territorial acquisitions that were carried out by force by the German Reich after 31 December 1937.

However, Polish authors point out that the Allied powers never committed themselves to supporting German unity within the borders of 1937. According to Polish authors, when assuming supreme power in Germany, the Allies acted both on their own behalf and on behalf of Germany. It is then beyond doubt that the Allies' agreements were an expression of Germany's responsibility under international law and hence predetermined its future fate and placed all of Germany under Allied sovereignty. Polish authors conclude that the expulsion of Germans was hence in accordance with international law at the time. Polish scholars rarely use the term wypędzenie for the Germans' expulsion. Polish authors even claim that the Potsdam Agreement were in the place of a peace treaty, when in fact only the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany of 1990 includes a final settlement of the border.

German authors concede that the territorial changes in the aftermath of the Second World War can be justified under international law of the time, but argue that the expulsions were in clear violation of the then applicable international law. The fact that the Allies themselves were not unaware of this contradiction between Article/PartXIII of the Potsdam Decisions and the international law in force at the time can be seen from the fact that the London Statute refers to an applicable ban on expulsion, while the Potsdam Agreement appears to deviate from precisely this.

Polish authors argue that Poland was no party at the Potsdam Conference and that thus, responsibility for the plight of the German civilians must be taken by the Allies. However, German authors point to the Polish-perpetrated wild expulsions before the Potsdam Conference, which were not spontaneous expression of popular anger to the Germans but rather were state-directed actions. The governments of Poland (and Czechoslovakia) were concerned with expulsions even before the Potsdam Conference to create irreversible facts to pressure the Allies to accept the new borders.