User talk:Brenton359

Welcome
Dear Skapperod, I am still working my way through the complexities of Wikipedia so I have no idea if you will receive this. I greatly appreciated your comments. We are both scorpios (30 Okt) and I would like to think that this might have something to do with the interest I have in your comments. Your connection with Pommerania also strikes a mutual cord. Many of the victims of the Vertreibung I have met in the United States have been from Pommerania. From the accounts they related and for everything I have read, it appears that some of the most hideous and unimaginable atrocities where committed by the Red Army on Pommerian soil. The loss of Stettin even though it is located on the western side of the Oder shows just how arbirarily decisions were made at that time. I have heard an 'explanation' that the Poles thought they were going to get Koenigsberg and northern Ostpreussen and when they didn't, the Russian gave them another large city Stettin as compensation. Do you think there could be any truth to this? I would like very much to hear from you. Mit besten Wuenschen, Peter (Brenton359)-- Brenton359 (talk) 17:43, 5 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Thank you. If you want to contact another wikipedia user, you look for his signature, and just behind the username you find (talk). Click on it, and you are on his talk page. If someone has new messages on his talk page, the wiki software will inform him by showing a notice on top of every page he watches as soon as he logs in, certainly you have received such a notice now you read this, too.
 * The most detailed scholary research available in respect to the fixing of the Oder-Neisse line and the subsequent expulsions is
 * Detlef Brandes, Der Weg zur Vertreibung 1938-1945: Pläne und Entscheidungen zum "Transfer" der Deutschen aus der Tschechoslowakei und aus Polen, 2nd edition, Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2005, ISBN 3486567314
 * It is written in German, and I don't know how familiar you are with this language. The respective quotes of the allied statesmen (and the book contains quite a few) are however given in English. You might want to have a look at google.com/books, where a limited preview is available. Look for pages 400 ff for the bargain for how much west one could expand a post-war Poland. Basically, noone was really in the position to bargain with Stalin who either had already or was about to occupy the areas in question. Stalin and pals just took as much as they were able to get away with without seriously endangering the anti-German alliance when victory was already in close reach. The Stettin-Königsberg bargain as well as the Breslau-Lemberg bargain were card games played by the Western Allies and Poland, but they were not in any way decisive. Churchill, who was eager to transfer substantial German territory to Poland was still talking about an enlarged Polish Corridor when Stalin had long set the Oder-Neisse as the final border, and the Polish militia started to ethnically cleanse the envisioned border strip as soon as they got a grip of it to ensure this border would not be questioned in the future Potsdam conference. Stalin and his pals reached out way too far west to have these gains fixed already in Potsdam, but they had created the facts on the ground in early 1945 already that noone would be able to change or even slightly adjust in the following.
 * See Oder-Neisse line, Flight and expulsion of Germans from Poland during and after World War II, History of Pomerania (1945-present), Recovered Territories, Former eastern territories of Germany for a start. Skäpperöd (talk) 06:12, 6 April 2009 (UTC)