Recovered Territories

"Recovered Territories", "Regained Territories" or "Western and Northern Territories" (Template:Lang-pl) was a term used by Communist Poland's authorities to denote the territories, which form a part of Poland since the end of the Second World War. In the late stages of this war, the area was occupied by the Red Army. Following the Potsdam Agreement, the Territories were taken under Polish administration, and the ethnic German population was expelled. The new border was formally recognized by East Germany in the Treaty of Zgorzelec (1950), by West Germany in the Treaty of Warsaw (1970), and confirmed by the re-united Germany in 1990.

The purported rationale for use of the term "Recovered Territories" was that these territories, Pomerania, Silesia, the Lubusz Land, and Warmia-Masuria, had been under the rule of various Polish dukes and kings during the early to high Middle Ages before they became seized by the Holy Roman Empire and its German successor states in particular by Prussia.

Origin of the term

In post-war Communist propaganda, the term "Recovered Territories" was coined mainly in order to encourage reluctant people, especially from former Eastern Poland (Kresy) to settle down permanently in those areas. Kresy were in turn annexed by Soviet Union, and as the result the territory of post war Poland was moved west and also become nearly 20% smaller (389,000 km² ).

The Polish communists claimed that they were the only political power able to safeguard the newly acquired areas for the state and to protect them from any possible German aggression in the future. The anti-German argument was an important element for the communists to gain acceptance with the population, large parts of which were anti-communist.

Dominating nationalities in Poland around 1931.

The territorial and population-related reorganization was not to be called "Shift to the West", in the course of which the Soviet Union had acquired considerable territories that had formerly been Polish. Instead, the official policy was to speak about Poland's return to "traditionally Polish territory", which for a long time had only become the victim of forced Germanization. The communist position concerning the new territory gained in the north and in the west coincided with the nationality-related policy concepts devised by the bourgeois parties from before the war. This meant that soon there was a fairly broad consensus in society on the necessity of expelling the Germans and integrating the new (or rather "regained", as contemporary diction had it) territories into the Polish state.

Usage

The term was in use immediately following the end of World War II but seems to have been "officially" dropped from Polish Communist propaganda sometime in the 1950s. By the 1960s, it had clearly been dropped from official use but may have been used by the population for some time longer. However, it is no longer in common parlance today.

Although the terms "Recovered Territories", or "Regained Territories" have clear meanings in Poland and Polish historiography, they are not widely used terms or concepts in other countries since they imply a historiography which is not universally acknowledged outside of Poland. The more familiar term associated with these territories may be the Oder-Neisse line along which the border was drawn.

Brief history of Recovered Territories

Poland's old and new borders, 1945

"Recovered Territories" marked in yellow, "Lost Territories" marked in pink.

Prehistory

The areas of today's Poland, including the "Recovered Territories", were under influence of Przeworsk, Wielbark cultures and the Baltic people in the North - East.. It is also possible (based on Tacitus' Germania that Germanic tribes were also moving through these lands. According to some theories, what later became Poland was almost entirely deserted at the end of the prehistory period, and around 500 AD Slavic peoples from the east and Venedi from Sarmatia(south) settled the area. Alternative theories, particularly popular since the middle of the 10th century claim that Poland was the homeland of all Slavic peoples. The proportion of local and immigrant elements that formed the Polish nation of the early Middle Ages is subject to debate among historians. However, most agree that pre-966 Poland was the homeland of numerous peoples referred to as Slavic tribes.

Beginning of Polish state

960-992

The lands Mieszko I Piast of Poland, were described about 1080 in a note found in a cloister, which talks about the supposed Dagome Iudex, with which the land came under protection of the Pope.

In the year 1000 AD the Polish ruler Boleslaw I of Poland, the son of Mieszko I and Bohemian princess Dobrawa received recognition from the Holy Roman Empire at the Congress of Gniezno, where he was named as a friend and ally of the empire that represented Christian Europe.

During Christianization parts of non-Christian territories of Prussian (the Balts tribes) were conquered by the German-speaking Teutonic Knights. The Teutonic Knights had been employed by Konrad I Piast of Masovia in 1226, who initiated the Northern Crusades. In the following centuries, the Teutonic Knights became fierce enemies of the Polish Kingdom.

Poland fragmented and re-united

Medieval Kingdom of Poland in an map from 1917 showing it during the period of Fragmentation.

Map of Western Europe from 1911, depicting European territories around 1100.

In 12th–13th centuries, Poland, as many other countries in Europe, was fragmented into several semi-independent duchies. Individual duchies were ruled by the Piast dukes, often fighting each other. When the duchies were reunited as the Kingdom of Poland in 1306–1320 by King Władysław I the Elbow-high, not all the provinces previously under Polish control were immediately included, with the duchies of Pomerania, Silesia, and Masovia remaining independent. At this time, the Baltic coast regions were ruled by the Teutonic Knights. Masovia was recovered by Poland in 1526 while many Silesian duchies had allied with the Crown of Bohemia (at that time the Bohemian kings held claims to the Polish Crown).

Expansion of Brandenburg-Prussia

Following are some partial, incomplete dates: Brandenburg-Prussia annexed Pomerania piece by piece over a few centuries (in 1648, 1657, 1720, 1772, and 1815). In 1742, during the Silesian Wars, Silesia, until then part of the Habsburg Monarchy, came under the rule of Prussian King Frederick II. the Kingdom of Prussia also took part in the Partitions of Poland (1772, 1793, 1795) and in the political reshuffle after the Congress of Vienna in 1815.

The most contentious subject at the Congress of Vienna was the so-called Polish-Saxon Crisis. The Austrians, French, and British agreed to go to war, if necessary, to prevent a Russian and Prussian plan in which Poland would become an independent kingdom in personal union with the Tsar of Russia. Tsar Alexander I would become King of Poland, in return for which the Prussians would receive all of Saxony as compensation. In the end an amicable settlement was worked out, by which Russia received most of the Napoleonic Duchy of Warsaw as the "Kingdom of Poland" (called Congress Poland), but did not receive the district of Poznań (Grand Duchy of Poznań), which was given to Prussia (Prussia only received 40% of Saxony), nor Cracow, which became a free city.

Poland restored and shifted

See also Treaty of Versailles (1919) and the short lived Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918)

After World War I, in 1918, the Polish state (which was previously an elective monarchy) was reestablished as the Second Polish Republic. Its territory included the territories that had been annexed by Prussia in the third partition of Poland. When Prussia became part of the German Empire in 1871, these territories were brought into the empire as well. The territories taken from Germany and ceded to the re-established Poland by the Treaty of Versailles were: Pomerelia (West Prussia), Greater Poland (Posen), and half of Upper Silesia.

At the beginning of World War II, Nazi Germany occupied all of Poland and annexed part of these territories.

At the Yalta Conference, towards the end of World War II, Joseph Stalin used the puppet Polish government to demand that Poland should receive the provinces of Western Pomerania, Lebus Land Lubusz Land, the remainder of Silesia, the Free City of Danzig (Gdańsk), and southern part of East-Prussia (the present Warmia-Masuria). Poland had to give up its Kresy territories (east of the Curzon Line) to the Soviet Union.

Potsdam conference aftermath

In 1945, the population of the regions occupied by the Polish and Soviet Armies, and assigned to Poland after the Second World War consisted of Poles, Germans, Ukrainians, Belarusians and Lithuanians. Initially, Poland was promised western areas of the Second Polish Republic as well as East Prussia, Upper Silesia, and most of Pomerania. At the Potsdam Conference, Poland's western borders were drawn along the Oder-Neisse line. Eventually, however, much of East Prussia was kept by Russia and formed the later Kaliningrad Oblast. The German inhabitants of the areas east of the line either fled westwards or were expelled, often violently, by Soviet forces and the newly installed Communist local Polish administration. Today the area is predominantly Polish, though a small German minority still exists in many places including Olsztyn (Template:Lang-de), Masuria, and Upper Silesia.

During the Cold War some in West Germany claimed that the concluding document of the Potsdam Conference was not a juristically binding treaty, but a mere memorandum. It regulated the issue of the German Eastern border, which was to be the Oder-Neisse line, but the final article of the memorandum said that the final regulations concerning Germany were subject to a separate peace treaty between Poland and Germany. A treaty was not signed until 1990 as the "Treaty on the Final Settlement With Respect to Germany". This meant that for 45 years, people on both sides of the border (and of the issue) could not be sure that the settlement reached in 1945 would not be changed at some future date. A fact convenient to Stalin, because that kind of uncertainty gave the Soviet Union the means to put a constant pressure on their communist satellites, especially Poland.

Until the Treaty on the Final Settlement, the West German government regarded the status of the German territories east of the Oder-Neisse rivers as that of areas under "temporarily under Polish [or Soviet] administration". To facilitate wide international acceptance of German reunification in 1990, the German political establishment recognized the "facts on the ground" and accepted the clauses in the Treaty on the Final Settlement whereby Germany renounced all claims to territory east of the Oder-Neisse line. This allowed the treaty to be negotiated quickly and for German unification of democratic West Germany and communist East Germany to go ahead quickly. Germany signed a separate treaty with Poland confirming the two countries’ present border the following year.