How old is this border?
Not so old! 1945!
The Oder-Neisse line is the arbitrary border drawn up and agreed at the Potsdam Conference (17 July to 2 August 1945). The physical geography suggesting this border involves two rivers, the Oder and Lusatian Neisse rivers.
The Oder–Neisse line (Polish:
granica na Odrze i Nysie Łużyckiej, German: Oder-Neiße-Grenze) is the
international border between Germany and Poland. It was drawn at the
Potsdam Conference in the aftermath of the Second World War and is
primarily delineated along the Oder and Lusatian Neisse rivers in
Central Europe, meeting the Baltic Sea to the north, just west of the
Polish seaports of Szczecin and Świnoujście (German: Stettin and
Swinemünde).
All
prewar German territory east of the line and within the 1937 German
boundaries (23.8% of the former Weimar Republic) were placed under
International Law Administrative status, with most of it being made part
of newly-Communist Poland. The small remainder, consisting of the
territory surrounding the German city of Königsberg (now renamed
Kaliningrad, in honour of Soviet head of state Mikhail Kalinin) in
northern East Prussia, was allocated to the Soviet Union (as Kaliningrad
Oblast of the Russian SFSR, today the Russian Federation) after the war
(pending the final World War II peace treaty for Germany). The vast
majority of the native German population in these territories fled, or
were killed or expelled by force.
The
Oder–Neisse line marked the border between the German Democratic
Republic (East Germany) and Poland from 1950 to 1990. East Germany
confirmed the border with Poland in 1950, while West Germany, after a
period of refusal, finally accepted the border (with reservations) in
1970.
The bridges were burned
Now it's your turn, to cry
Cry me a river
The
aftermath of World War in Europe included elements that are a strange
mix of both punishment and re-construction of Germany. For the Soviet
Union this was a sweet revenge. The new border meant a huge part of
German territory became Poland. At the same time the eastern part of
Poland, the Polish Ukraine, had been taken by the USSR.
Borderlands
Incidentally, one of the possible origins for the word Ukraine is that it comes from slavic root words that translate as "borderlands".
The territorial changes of Poland
The
territorial changes of Poland immediately after World War II were very
extensive. In 1945, after the defeat of Nazi Germany, Poland's borders
were redrawn in accordance with the decisions made first by the Allies
at the Tehran Conference of 1943 where the Soviet Union demanded the
recognition of the military outcome of the top secret Nazi-Soviet Pact
of 1939 of which the West was unaware.
The
same Soviet stance was repeated by Josef Stalin again at the Yalta
Conference with Roosevelt and Churchill in February 1945, but a lot more
forcefully in the face of the looming German defeat. The new borders
were ratified at the Potsdam Conference of August 1945 exactly as
proposed by Stalin who already controlled the whole of East-central
Europe.
Borders moving west . . .
The
prewar eastern Polish territories of Kresy, which the Red Army had
overrun during the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939 (excluding the
Białystok region) were permanently annexed by the USSR, and most of
their Polish inhabitants expelled. As a result of the Potsdam agreement
to which Poland's government-in-exile was not invited, Poland lost
179,000 km2 (45%) of prewar territories in the east, including over 12
million citizens of whom 4,3 million were ethnically the speakers of
Polish. Today, these territories are part of sovereign Belarus, Ukraine,
and Lithuania.
In
turn, postwar Poland was assigned considerably smaller territories to
the west including the prewar Free City of Danzig and the former
territory of Nazi Germany east of the Oder-Neisse line, consisting of
the southern portion of East Prussia and most of Pomerania, Neumark
(East Brandenburg), and German Silesia. The German population fled or
was forcibly expelled before these Recovered Territories (official term)
were repopulated with Poles expelled from the eastern regions and those
from central Poland. The small area of Zaolzie, which had been annexed
by Poland in late 1938, was returned to Czechoslovakia on Stalin's
orders.
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