Recovered Territories: Difference between revisions

NOTE: Although the terms "Recovered Territories", or "Regained Territories" have clear meanings in Poland and Polish historiography, they are not accepted terms or concepts outside of Poland, especially in Germany and the other German-speaking countries. In English-speaking countries the term is unknown. See Oder-Neisse line for details.

"Recovered Territories", "Regained Territories" or "Western and Northern Territories" (Template:Lang-pl) was a political and propaganda concept used by Communist Poland authorities to denote the territories gained by Poland from Nazi Germany after the Second World War. The term "Recovered Territories" was used on the basis that the territories, recorded as Pomerania, Silesia, Lubusz Land, and Warmia-Masuria, were held by various Polish dukes and kings from the 9th through the 13th centuries. Following World War II the area was occupied by Soviet Union, most Germans from those regions were expelled, and the land was transferred ("restored") to Poland, as sanctioned by the Allies of World War II. 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 post war Polish territory was moved west and also become nearly 20% smaller (389,000 km² ^[1]). The term was used immediately following the end of World War II but is no longer in use today.

The areas of today's Poland, including the "Recovered Territories", were under influence of Przeworsk and 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 this prehistoric 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.

The lands of Mieszko I, Piast of Poland, were described about 1080 in a note found in a cloister, which talks about the purported Dagome Iudex, through 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 Prussia (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.

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 incorporated into 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).

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.

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 had previously been an elective monarchy) was reestablished as the Second Polish Republic. Provisions of the Treaty of Versailles restored to Poland territories that had been acquired by Germany in the third partition of Poland. These territories included: Pomerelia (West Prussia), Greater Poland (Posen), 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.

In 1945 the population of the regions conquered by the Soviet Union and assigned to Poland after the Second World War consisted of a majority of Poles, but also numerous 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 (German: Allenstein), 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.