Recovered Territories

"Recovered Territories", "Regained Territories" or "Western and Northern Territories" (Polish: Ziemie Odzyskane, Ziemie Zachodnie i Północne) 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 either fled or 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 affirmed by the re-united Germany in the German-Polish Border Treaty (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 being seized by the Holy Roman Empire and its German successor states, in particular Prussia.

Origin of the term

The term was introduced by Polish communist authorities, with the 'recovered' being a reference to earlier territories of Polish state from the Middle Ages under the Piast dynasty, whose borders were similar to the ones achieved in 1945, but which fell out of the sphere of Polish influence during after fragmentation of Poland or later.^[1]

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.^{[citation needed]} 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 ^[2]).

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.

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" are the terms with clear meaning in Polish historiography, they are not widely used in English-speaking countries, where the alternative 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

Prehistory

The areas of today's Poland, including the "Recovered Territories", was populated by Germanic tribes and also Baltic peoples in the North - East. Around 500 AD Slavic peoples settled the area.

Beginning of Polish state

Polish duke Mieszko I conquered territories of various neighboring West Slav tribes in the second half of the 10th century and placed them under control of Polish gentry.

Poland before the german colonization in the year 1020 (shadowed - today borders)

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.

However, in the course of pagan uprisings 1005-1038 that state fell apart only a few decades after it was founded.

Teutonic Knights

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.

German migration (Ostsiedlung)

In the course of the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries, large numbers of German and Flamish settlers moved into Middle and Eastern Europe. Their influx in Pomerania, Brandenburg, East Prussia and Silesia was so intense, that the former West Slav or Balt population were outnumbered except for some enclaves and the population turned into an ethnically German one, assimilating most of the former non-German inhabitants, whereas in Poland and Pomerelia (West Prussia) German settlers formed a minority.

Poland fragmented and re-united

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

Poland, like many other countries in Europe, was fragmented in the 12th-13th centuries into several semi-independent duchies. These duchies were ruled by the Piast dukes, who were often in conflict with each other. When the duchies were reunited as the Kingdom of Poland from 1306 to 1320 by King Władysław I the Elbow-high, not all provinces once conquered by Mieszko I. were 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 dukes had allied with the Crown of Bohemia (at that time the Bohemian kings held claims to the Polish Crown).

Expansion of Brandenburg-Prussia

The kingdom of Brandenburg-Prussia gradually annexed Pomerania over the following centuries, starting in 1648 and ending in 1815. In 1742, during the Silesian Wars, Silesia—until then part of the Habsburg Monarchy—came under the rule of the Prussian King Frederick II. Prussia also took part in the Partitions of Poland of the late 18th century, 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. Russia and Prussia had devised a 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. The Austrians, French, and British were vehemently opposed to this, to the point of war if necessary. In the end an amicable settlement was reached, by which Russia received most of the Napoleonic Duchy of Warsaw as the "Kingdom of Poland" (called Congress Poland), but not the district of Poznań (Grand Duchy of Poznań), nor Kraków. The former was given to Prussia (which only received 40% of Saxony), and the latter 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 re-established 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, and half of Upper Silesia.

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 is now know as the 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. After the former population was gone, the areas were resettled by Poles from former Eastern Poland and Central Poland. Today the area is predominantly Polish, though a small German minority still exists in many places including Olsztyn (German: Allenstein), Masuria, and Upper Silesia.

During the Cold War the official position in First World was that the concluding document of the Potsdam Conference was not an international 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 status of the German state and therefor its territories were subject to a separate peace treaty between Germany and the Allies of World War II. 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.

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 "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. The same year as the Final Settlement came into effect, 1990, Germany signed a separate treaty with Poland, the German-Polish Border Treaty confirming the two countries’ present borders.

References

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