Former eastern territories of Germany

This article is about former territory east of the Oder–Neisse Line. For the parts of modern Germany that formerly made up East Germany, see New states of Germany.

Former eastern territories of Germany
  Lost in WWI
  Lost in WWII
  Remaining since 1945
Territorial evolution of Germany
in the 20th century
Pre-World War II
World War II
Post-World War II
Areas and issues
Adjacent countries

In present-day Germany, the former eastern territories of Germany (German: ehemalige deutsche Ostgebiete) refer to those territories east of the current eastern border of Germany, i.e. the Oder–Neisse line, which historically had been considered German and which were annexed by Poland and the Soviet Union after World War II. In contrast to the lands awarded to the restored Polish state by the Treaty of Versailles after World War I, the German territories lost with the post-World War II Potsdam Agreement were either almost exclusively inhabited by Germans before 1945 (the bulk of East Prussia, Lower Silesia, Farther Pomerania, and parts of Western Pomerania, Lusatia, and Neumark), mixed German–Polish with a German majority (the Posen–West Prussia Border March, Lauenburg and Bütow Land, the southern and western rim of East Prussia, Ermland, Western Upper Silesia, and the part of Lower Silesia east of the Oder), or mixed German–Czech with a German majority (Glatz).[1] Virtually the entire German population of the territories that did not flee voluntarily in the face of the Red Army advance of 1945, was violently expelled to Germany, with their possessions being looted and stolen.

The ceding of the east German lands to Poland was done in large part to compensate Poland for losing the Kresy lands east of the Curzon line, a region that was annexed by the Soviet Union after the German invasion of Poland in 1939. This territory had large populations of Ukrainians, Belarusians and Lithuanians – the main ethnic groups of three of the western republics of the Soviet Union – and many towns that were primarily inhabited by Poles and Jews. The Jewish communities in this region were mostly exterminated in the Holocaust and the Polish communities were mostly expelled to the restored Polish state after World War II, the communist ruled Polish People's Republic. Poles from the northern part of Kresy were primarily resettled in Pomerania and Poles from Galicia were primarily resettled in Silesia, e.g. the Ossolineum and the Jan Kazimierz University in Lwów were both relocated to Wrocław, the former Breslau.

The territories acquired by Poland after World War II are known there as the Recovered Territories.[2] The territories Poland annexed had been ruled as part of Poland by the Piast dynasty in the High Middle Ages, with the exception of southern East Prussia, which originally was inhabited by Old Prussians and came under Polish suzerainty in the Late Middle Ages. The northern part of East Prussia was annexed by the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic as the Kaliningrad Oblast, now forming a Russian exclave.

The post-war border between Germany and Poland along the Oder–Neisse line was defined in August 1945 by the Potsdam Agreement of the leaders of the three main Allies of World War II, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States; and was formally recognized by East Germany in 1950, by the Treaty of Zgorzelec, under pressure from Stalin. In 1952, recognition of the Oder–Neisse line as a permanent boundary was one of Stalin's conditions for the Soviet Union to agree to a reunification of Germany (see Stalin Note). The offer was rejected by Konrad Adenauer, Chancellor of West Germany, at least in part because one of Stalin's other conditions was for Germany to never join NATO (similarly to Austria). The then official West German government position on the status of the former territories of Germany east of the Oder and Neisse rivers was that the areas were "temporarily under Polish [or Soviet] administration", because the border regulation at the Potsdam Conference had been taken as preliminary provisions to be revisited at a final peace conference which, due to the Cold War, had been indefinitely postponed;[3] however, West Germany in 1972 recognised the Oder–Neisse line as the western boundary of Poland when the 1970 Treaty of Warsaw between West Germany and Poland took effect; and in 1973, the Federal Constitutional Court acknowledged the capability of East Germany to negotiate the Treaty of Zgorzelec as an international agreement binding as a legal definition of its boundaries. In signing the Helsinki Final Act in 1975, both West Germany and East Germany recognised the existing boundaries of post-war Europe, including the Oder–Neisse line, as valid in international law.

In 1990, as part of the reunification of Germany, both German countries accepted clauses in the peace treaty with the four countries representing the Allies (Treaty on the Final Settlement With Respect to Germany) to replace the Potsdam Agreement, whereby Germany renounced all claims to territory outside East and West Germany.[a] As the result of this treaty, Germany's recognition of the Oder–Neisse line as the border was formalised by the re-united Germany in the German–Polish Border Treaty on 14 November 1990 and by the repeal of Article 23 of the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany under which German states outside the Federal Republic could formerly have declared their accession. Germany went from a territory of 468,787 km2[4] before the 1938 annexation of Austria to 357,022 km2[5] after the 1990 reunification of Germany, a loss of 24%.[6] Despite its acquisition of the formerly German territory, the war also saw Poland's territory reduced by about 20% overall because of its losses in the east to the Soviets.

  1. ^ See for example msn encarta Archived 26 May 2011 at the Wayback Machine: "diejenigen Gebiete des Deutschen Reiches innerhalb der deutschen Grenzen von 1937", Meyers Lexikon online Archived 26 January 2009 at the Wayback Machine: "die Teile des ehemaligen deutschen Reichsgebietes zwischen der Oder-Neiße-Linie im Westen und der Reichsgrenze von 1937 im Osten".
  2. ^ Hammer, Eric (2013). "Ms. Livni, Remember the Recovered Territories. There is an historical precedent for a workable solution" – via Arutz Sheva.
  3. ^ Roberts, Geoffrey K.; Hogwood, Patricia (2013). The Politics Today Companion to West European Politics. Oxford University Press. p. 50. ISBN 978-1-8477-9032-3.; Wandycz, Piotr Stefan (1980). The United States and Poland. Harvard University Press. p. 303. ISBN 978-0-6749-2685-1.; Bühler, Phillip A. (1990). The Oder–Neisse Line: a reappraisal under international law. East European Monographs. p. 33. ISBN 978-0-8803-3174-6.
  4. ^ What Everyone Should Know about the Treaty of Peace: The Treaty of Versailles as Exemplified in 101 Demands. National Citizens' Council (Reichsbürgerrat). 1921.
  5. ^ OSCE Yearbook 2019: Yearbook on the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). Nomos. 2020. ISBN 978-3-7489-0642-1.
  6. ^ Meško, Gorazd; Fields, Charles B.; Lobnikar, Branko; Sotlar, Andrej (16 April 2013). Handbook on Policing in Central and Eastern Europe. Springer Science & Business Media. ISBN 978-1-4614-6720-5.


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