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Former eastern territories of Germany (Template:Lang-de) describes collectively those provinces or regions east of the Oder-Neisse line which were internationally recognised as part of Prussia and the territory of Germany after the formation of the German Empire in 1871. Due to Polish historical claims, following World War II, parts these regions were known as the Recovered Territories in Poland.

From 1919 till 1990 sovereignty over some or all of these territories was subject to much diplomatic activity. Between the two world wars, many in Germany claimed that the territories ceded by Germany in 1919 under the Treaty of Versailles should be returned to Germany. This claim was an important precursor to the Second World War. In 1939 after its invasion of Poland, Germany reoccupied and annexed these territories. Germany subsequently lost all territories east of the Oder-Neisse Line at the end of World War II in 1945, when international recognition of its right to jurisdiction over any of these territories was withdrawn.

After World War II, the so-called "German question" was an important factor of post-war German history and politics. The debate affected Cold War politics and diplomacy and played an important role in the negotiations leading up to the reunification of Germany in 1990. In 1990 Germany officially recognised its present eastern border at the time of its reunification, ending any residual claims to sovereignty that Germany may have had over any territory east of the Oder-Neisse line.

Usage

In the Potsdam Agreement the description of the territories transferred is "The former German territories ", and permutations on this description are the most commonly used to describe any former territories of Germany east of the Oder-Neisse line.

In English usage the term "(former) East Germany" denotes the five states that make up the old GDR region of the reunited Germany. In German language, some Germans use the term Ostdeutschland ("East Germany") to refer to the area east of Berlin, which had large settled German-speaking communities long before World War II, including those east of the Oder-Neisse rivers. The same people refer to the area from Berlin to the Elbe river, or possibly slightly further west, as Mitteldeutschland ("Middle Germany"). Some governmental institutions in Germany, like the Free State of Saxony, still use the term Middle Germany when referring to their territory. This can cause confusion when translated into English.

Eastern territories of Germany 1871-1945

Foundation of the German Empire

At the time of the foundation of the German Empire in 1871, Prussia was the largest and dominant part of the empire. Thus, the territories of East Brandenburg, Silesia, Pomerania and the provinces of Prussia and Posen were all integral parts of the initial territory that comprised the German Empire in 1871. Later, these territories would come to be called in Germany "Ostgebiete des deutschen Reiches" (Eastern territories of the German Empire).

In some areas, such as the Province of Posen or the southern part of Upper Silesia, the majority population was Polish, while in others it was predominantly German. Under Treaty of Versailles territories with Polish majority were ceded to Poland. However the demands of ethnic Germans in Poland would fuel an ongoing conflict over whether these territories should belong to Germany or Poland. This debate would continue for at least three quarters of a century and German expansion towards the East would be the reason of World War II.

Treaty of Versailles

The provisions of the Treaty of Versailles at the end of World War I obliged Germany to transfer some territory to other countries. In Central Europe, these included:

• Most of Greater Poland ("Province of Posen") and Pomerelia (parts of West Prussia), mostly what the Kingdom of Prussia had taken in the Partitions of Poland was handed over to the re-established Polish state after the Greater Poland Uprising (this land comprised an area of 53,800 km² 4,224,000 inhabitants (1931) including 510 km² and 26,000 inhabitants from Upper Silesia).
• The Hlučín Area of Moravian-Silesian Region to Czechoslovakia (316 or 333 km² and 49,000 people),
• The eastern part of Upper Silesia (including Katowice), to Poland (area 3,214 km² and 965,000 people),
• The area of Działdowo (Soldau) in East Prussia to Poland (area 492 km²),
• The northeastern part of East Prussia, named Memel Territory, which was placed under the control of France (and was later annexed by Lithuania, as the Klaipėda Region),
• A few villages in the eastern part of West Prussia and in the southern part of East Prussia (Warmia and Masuria) to Poland, after a plebiscite.
• The city of Danzig (Polish Gdańsk) with the delta of the Vistula river at the Baltic Sea, was made the Free City of Danzig under the League of Nations and partially Polish authority (area 1893 km², 408,000 inhabitants 1929).

German annexation of Hlučín Area and the Memel Territory

In October 1938 Hlučín Area (Hlučínsko in Czech, Hultschiner Ländchen in German) of Moravian-Silesian Region which had been ceded to Czechoslovakia under the Treaty of Versailles was annexed by the Third Reich as a part of areas lost by Czechoslovakia in accordance with the Munich agreement. However, as distinct from other lost Czechoslovakian domains, it was not attached to Sudetengau (administrative region covering Sudetenland) but to Prussia (Upper Silesia).

By late 1938, Lithuania had lost control over the situation in the Memel Territory. In the early hours of 23 March 1939, after a political ultimatum hade made a Lithuanian delegation travel to Berlin, the Lithuanian Minister of Foreign Affairs Juozas Urbšys and his German counterpart Joachim von Ribbentrop signed the Treaty of the Cession of the Memel Territory to Germany in exchange for a Lithuanian Free Zone in the port of Memel, using the facilities erected in previous years.

World War II

With the defeat of Poland in 1939 in the beginning of World War II, Germany annexed eastern territories lost under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, and annexed other eastern territories. These territorial changes were not recognised by the Allied governments, that after the 1942 Declaration by the United Nations were also known as the United Nations.

After invading Poland in 1939, the Third Reich annexed the lands the German Empire had ceded to the Second Polish Republic in 1919-1922 by the Treaty of Versailles, including the "Polish Corridor", West Prussia, the Province of Posen, and parts of eastern Upper Silesia. The council of the Free City of Danzig voted to become a part of Germany again, although Poles and Jews were deprived of their voting rights and all non-Nazi political parties were banned. Parts of Poland that had not been part of the German Empire were also incorporated into the Third Reich.

Two decrees by Adolf Hitler (October 8 and October 12, 1939) provided for the division of the annexed areas of Poland into the following administrative units:

• Reichsgau Wartheland (initially Reichsgau Posen), which included the entire Poznań Voivodeship, most of the Łódź Voivodeship, five counties of the Pomeranian Voivodeship, and one county of the Warszawa Voivodeship;
• Reichsgau Danzig-West Prussia (initially Reichsgau West Prussia), which consisted of the remaining area of the Pomeranian Voivodeship and the Free City of Danzig;
• Ciechanów District (Regierungsbezirk Zichenau), consisting of the five northern counties of Warszawa Voivodeship (Płock, Płońsk, Sierpc, Ciechanów, and Mława), which became a part of East Prussia;
• Katowice District (Regierungsbezirk Kattowitz), or unofficially East Upper Silesia (Ost-Oberschlesien), which included Sosnowiec, Będzin, Chrzanów, and Zawiercie Counties, and parts of Olkusz and Żywiec Counties.

These territories had an area of 94,000 km² and a population of 10,000,000 people. The remainder of the Polish territory was annexed by the Soviet Union (see Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) or made into the German-controlled General Government occupation zone.

After the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, the district of Białystok, which included the Białystok, Bielsk Podlaski, Grajewo, Łomża, Sokółka, Volkovysk, and Grodno Counties, was "attached to" (not incorporated into) East Prussia.

Potsdam Conference

After World War II, as agreed at the Potsdam Conference (which met from 17 July until 2 August, 1945), all of the areas east of the Oder-Neisse line, whether recognised by the international community as part of Germany until 1939 or occupied by Germany during World War II, were placed under the jurisdiction of other countries. The relevant paragraphs in the Potsdam Agreement are:

V. City of Koenigsberg and the adjacent area.

The Conference examined a proposal by the Soviet Government to the effect that pending the final determination of territorial questions at the peace settlement, the section of the western frontier of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics which is adjacent to the Baltic Sea should pass from a point on the eastern shore of the Bay of Danzig to the east, north of Braunsberg-Goldap, to the meeting point of the frontiers of Lithuania, the Polish Republic and East Prussia.
The Conference has agreed in principle to the proposal of the Soviet Government concerning the ultimate transfer to the Soviet Union of the City of Koenigsberg and the area adjacent to it as described above subject to expert examination of the actual frontier.

The President of the United States and the British Prime Minister have declared that they will support the proposal of the Conference at the forthcoming peace settlement.

VIII. Poland.

...
The British and United States Governments have taken measures to protect the interest of the Polish Provisional Government of National Unity as the recognized government of the Polish State in the property belonging to the Polish State located in their territories and under their control, whatever the form of this property may be.
...
In conformity with the agreement on Poland reached at the Crimea Conference the three Heads of Government have sought the opinion of the Polish Provisional Government of National Unity in regard to the accession of territory in the north and west which Poland should receive. The President of the National Council of Poland and members of the Polish Provisional Government of National Unity have been received at the Conference and have fully presented their views. The three Heads of Government reaffirm their opinion that the final delimitation of the western frontier of Poland should await the peace settlement.

The three Heads of Government agree that, pending the final determination of Poland's western frontier, the former German territories cast of a line running from the Baltic Sea immediately west of Swinamunde, and thence along the Oder River to the confluence of the western Neisse River and along the Western Neisse to the Czechoslovak frontier, including that portion of East Prussia not placed under the administration of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in accordance with the understanding reached at this conference and including the area of the former free city of Danzig, shall be under the administration of the Polish State and for such purposes should not be considered as part of the Soviet zone of occupation in Germany. (Emphasis added)

The Allies also agreed that:

XII. Orderly transfer of German populations.

The Three Governments , having considered the question in all its aspects, recognize that the transfer to Germany of German populations, or elements thereof, remaining in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, will have to be undertaken. They agree that any transfers that take place should be effected in an orderly and humane manner.

because in the words of Winston Churchill

Expulsion is the method which, in so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble

Post World War II

Between 1945 and 1990, the dispute over the final disposition of these territories was the subject of contentious international debate that extended even to the very naming of the territories. To refer to these territories as "former eastern German territories" ("ehemalige deutsche Ostgebiete") was considered by Poles and other Europeans as a suggestion that these territories could in fact revert to Germany at some future point in time (presumably at the final settlement of the border between Germany and Poland).

The government of West Germany preferred to use the phrase "former German territories temporarily under Polish and Soviet administration". This was the wording used in the Potsdam Agreement, but was used only by the Federal Republic of Germany because the Polish and Soviet governments refused to use it, objecting to the obvious implication that these territories should someday revert to Germany.

The Polish government preferred to use the phrase Recovered Territories to assert that these territories had been Polish prior to World War II and had been "recovered" from Nazi Germany after 1945.

Transfer to Germany of German populations

The majority of the German-speaking population east of the Oder–Neisse line that had not already been evacuated by Nazi authorities or fled from the advancing Red Army in the winter of 1944–1945 was expelled with no consideration as to whether their families had lived in the region for centuries or were recent settlers who moved there during the World War II. At the same time, several million Poles similarly expelled from former Polish land annexed by the USSR were settled there. Although in the post-war period earlier German sources often cited the number of evacuated and expelled Germans at 16 million and the death toll at between 1.7 and 2.5 million, the numbers are considered by some historians to be exaggerated. Some present-day estimates place the numbers of German refugees at 14 million of which about half a million died during the evacuations and expulsions.. The exact number of civilian casualties therefore remains disputed.

Ostpolitik

During the 1970s while Willy Brandt was chancellor of the FRG, the FRG followed a foreign relations policy of Ostpolitik abandoning elements of the Hallstein Doctrine. The FRG "abandoned, at least for the time being, its claims with respect to German self-determination and reunification, recognising de facto the existence of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Oder-Neisse Line." Subsequently, between 1970 and 1973, the FRG concluded friendship treaties with, successively, the Soviet Union (The Treaty of Moscow), Poland (The Treaty of Warsaw), the GDR (The Basic Treaty) and Czechoslovakia (The Treaty of Prague), thereby accommodating the European order that existed in the 1970s.

Reunification and finalisation of the status of the eastern territories

Over the last twenty years, the "German question" has been muted by three related phenomena:

• The passage of time means that there are fewer and fewer people left who have firsthand experience of living in these regions under German jurisdiction.
• Until the Treaty on the Final Settlement With Respect to Germany, the official German government position on the status of areas vacated by settled German communities east of the Oder and Neisse rivers was that the areas were "temporarily under Polish administration." In 1990 the German political establishment recognised the "facts on the ground" and accepted clauses in the Treaty on the Final Settlement whereby Germany renounced all claims to territory east of the Oder-Neisse line. Germany's recognition of the border was formalised in the German-Polish Border Treaty on November 14, 1990.
• The eastern expansion of the European Union (EU) which occurred on May 1, 2004 means that any German who wishes to live and work in Poland, and thus east of the Oder and Neisse rivers, may do so without requiring a permit. Some restrictions on the purchase of land and buildings will be in place for a period of a few years. However, German expellees and refugees are now free to visit their former homes without difficulty. Poland is expected to have the Schengen Agreement provisions implemented in 2008 and all border controls on its border with Germany will be eliminated, making movement across the border even easier.

In the course of the German reunification process, Chancellor Helmut Kohl accepted the territorial changes made after the Second World War. This caused some outrage among the Federation of Expellees. Some Poles were concerned about a possible revival of their 1939 trauma through a second German invasion, this time with the Germans buying back their land, which was cheaply available at the time. This happened on a smaller scale than many expected, and since the Baltic Sea coast in Poland has become popular with German tourists, Germans are now frequent and welcome guests. The so-called "homesickness-tourism" which was often perceived as quite aggressive well into the 1990s now tends to be viewed as a good-natured nostalgia tour rather than an expression of anger and desire for the return of the lost territories.

Prussian Trust

The issue is still a sensitive one and a small pressure group in Germany called the Prussian Trust (or the Prussian Claims Society), that probably has less than a hundred members, re-opened the old dispute when in December 2006, it submitted 23 individual claims against the Polish government with the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg asking for compensation or return of property allegedly appropriated from its members at the end of World War II. An expert report jointly commissioned by the German and Polish governments from specialists in international law have confirmed that the proposed complaints by the Prussian Trust had little hope of success. But the German government can not prevent such requests being made and the Polish government has felt that the submissions warranted a comment by Anna Fotyga, the Polish Minister of the Foreign Affairs who "express deepest concern upon receiving the information about a claim against Poland submitted by the Prussian Trust to the European Court of Human Rights".

See also

• Ostsiedlung
• Congress of Vienna
• Treaty of Frankfurt (1871)
• Drang nach Osten German drive East-ward
• Medieval Colonisation of Eastern European territories by Germans
• Evacuation of East Prussia
• History of German settlement in Eastern Europe
• Kaliningrad oblast of Russia
• Klaipėda in Lithuania
• Kresy Zachodnie
• Partitions of Poland
• Territorial changes of Germany
• Treaty of Brest-Litovsk
• Recovered Territories of Poland

Notes and references

1. N.B. "jurisdiction", is not the same as "sovereignty". For example the United States Supreme Court ruled in Rasul v. Bush that "the US Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Naval Base, which the United States occupies under a lease and treaty recognizing Cuba's ultimate sovereignty, but giving this country complete jurisdiction and control for so long as it does not abandon the leased areas." (source: Rasul et al. v. Bush, President of the United States)
2. the German population in those areas in 1921 was 16.7% in the Poznań region (1910: 27.1%), and 18.8% in the area of Polish Pomorze (1910: 42.5%).
3. Clare Murphy WWII expulsions spectre lives on BBC online 2 August, 2004
4. Template:De icon Hans-Ulrich Wehler (2003). Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte Band 4: Vom Beginn des Ersten Weltkrieges bis zur Gründung der beiden deutschen Staaten 1914-1949. Munich: C.H. Beck Verlag. ISBN 3-406-32264-6.
5. Template:En icon Dagmar Barnouw (2005). The War in the Empty Air: Victims, Perpetrators, and Postwar Germans. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. p. 143. ISBN 0-253-34651-7.
6. ^ Template:En icon Frank Biess (2006). "Review of Dagmar Barnouw, The War in the Empty Air: Victims, Perpetrators, and Postwar Germans" (pdf). H-Net Reviews: 2. {{cite journal}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |month= (help)
7. Template:De icon Rüdiger Overmans (2004). Deutsche militärische Verluste im Zweiten Weltkrieg (German Military Losses in WWII). Munich: Oldenbourg. pp. 298–300. ISBN 3-486-56531-1.
8. ^ The Federal Republic of Germany’s Ostpolitik from the European Navigator
9. The problem with the status of these territories was that in 1945 the concluding document of the Potsdam Conference was not a legally binding treaty, but a memorandum between the USSR, the USA and the UK. It regulated the issue of the eastern German border, which was to be the Oder-Neisse line, but the final article of the memorandum said that the final decisions concerning Germany were subject to a separate peace treaty. This treaty was signed in 1990 under the name of "Treaty on the Final Settlement" by both the German states and ratified in 1991 by the united Germany. This ended the legal limbo state which meant that for 45 years, people on both sides of the border could not be sure whether the settlement reached in 1945 might be changed at some future date.
10. Klaus Ziemer. What Past, What Future? Social Science in Eastern Europe: News letter: Special Issue German-Polish Year 2005/2006, 2005 Issue 4, ISSN 1615-5459 pp. 4-11 (See page 4). Published by the Social Science Information Centre (see Archive)
11. Anna Fotyga, the Polish Minister of the Foreign Affairs "I express my deepest concern upon receiving the information about a claim against Poland submitted by the Prussian Trust to the European Court of Human Rights. ...". 21 December 2006

Further reading

• Emotions prevail in relations between Germans, Czechs, Poles -- poll, Czech Happenings, 21 December 2005
• Jose Ayala Lasso. Speech to the German expellees, Day of the Homeland, Berlin 6 August 2005 Lasso was the first United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (1994-1997)
• Ryszard W. Piotrowicz. The Status of Germany in International Law: Deutschland uber Deutschland? The International and Comparative Law Quarterly, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Jul., 1989), pp. 609-635 "The puropse of this article is to consider the legal status of Germany from 1945 to "

• History of Germany
• Partition
• Polish borders
• Polish historical regions