Debate 80th Anniversary of the return of the Regained Lands to Poland

Are you happy that the Regained Lands are Polish?

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Tomenable

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Interesting.
I've always been curious about what happened to ethnic Poles and Germans after the dramatic changes in the borders of Poland and Germany after the end of World War II. This thread of yours has piqued my curiosity again and I asked ChatGPT the following questions:

What happened to the Germans who lived in Eastern Pomerania and Silesia after World War II?
After World War II, the Germans who lived in Eastern Pomerania and Silesia—regions that became part of Poland—experienced one of the largest forced migrations in modern history.

Here’s what happened:

1. Territorial Changes
• At the end of WWII, the Allied powers agreed at the Potsdam Conference (July-August 1945) to shift Poland’s borders westward.
• As a result, Eastern Pomerania and most of Silesia, which had been German territories, were transferred to Poland.
• The former German population of these areas was to be “transferred” to Germany.

2. Expulsions
• Between 1945 and 1950, an estimated 12 to 14 million ethnic Germans were expelled or fled from Eastern Europe.
• In Eastern Pomerania and Silesia, millions of Germans were forced to leave.
• The expulsions were often violent and chaotic. Many were conducted before any formal agreements, by advancing Soviet troops or Polish militias.
• Deaths occurred due to harsh conditions, attacks, hunger, disease, and exposure—estimates of the death toll range from 400,000 to over 2 million, depending on the source and method.

3. Resettlement and Repatriation
• Those expelled were resettled in West and East Germany, which were devastated and overcrowded.
• Their property was confiscated, and Polish settlers—many of whom had themselves been displaced from what had become Soviet Ukraine—took their place.

4. Long-Term Impact
• The expulsions drastically changed the ethnic makeup of Central and Eastern Europe.
• These events remain a sensitive and controversial topic in Polish-German relations.
• Many of the expelled Germans and their descendants still retain a strong cultural memory of their ancestral homes.

What happened to the Poles who lived in the territories that were incorporated into the USSR after the end of World War II?
The fate of the Poles who lived in the eastern territories of pre-war Poland (often referred to as the Kresy, including parts of what are now Western Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania) after WWII was closely tied to the massive border changes and population shifts imposed by the Soviet Union and the Allied powers.

Here’s what happened:

1. Territorial Changes
• After WWII, the Soviet Union annexed the eastern third of pre-war Poland (Kresy), in line with Stalin’s demands at the Yalta and Tehran Conferences.
• These lands became parts of the Ukrainian SSR, Belarusian SSR, and Lithuanian SSR.
• In compensation, Poland was given former German territories to the west, like Silesia, Pomerania, and East Prussia.

2. Forced Repatriation (Expulsions) of Poles
• Between 1944 and 1946, and again in 1955–1959, approximately 1.5 to 2 million ethnic Poles were forced to leave the annexed eastern territories.
• These people were resettled in the new Polish western and northern territories—often in homes formerly occupied by expelled Germans.
• The process was framed as “repatriation,” though for most of these Poles, it meant leaving ancestral homes and starting anew under extremely difficult circumstances.

3. Sovietization and Suppression
• Poles who remained in the USSR were often subject to Soviet repression:
• Many were arrested, deported to Siberia or Central Asia, or executed, especially those associated with the Polish military, intelligentsia, or resistance.
• Efforts were made to suppress Polish language, culture, and religion, especially in Ukraine and Belarus.

4. Impact and Legacy
• The population transfers erased much of the Polish presence in the Kresy, ending centuries of Polish cultural and demographic influence in those regions.
• These events have left deep emotional and historical scars, and the memory of Kresy remains a powerful part of Polish national identity and diaspora culture.

Let me know if you’d like a map showing these border changes or population movements—it really helps visualize how dramatic these shifts were.
 
BTW, Germans call this region Hinterpommern ("Rear Pomerania") but Poles call it Western Pomerania.

East Pomerania for Poles is what Germans call Pommerellen and it was already part of Poland before WW2.

=====

Here is a map showing the population in 1950 according to where these people lived back in August 1939:

(V. stands for Voivodeship)


KHp7P3Q.png


The source of this data is actually the December 1950 Polish census (not "own elaboration").
 
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I will attach here the publication "Political migrations in Poland" by Piotr Eberhardt.

You can find there exact data, for example here is Table 18. from this publication:

797MASJ.png
 

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Tomenable said:
BTW, Germans call this region Hinterpommern ("Rear Pomerania") but Poles call it Western Pomerania.

East Pomerania for Poles is what Germans call Pommerellen and it was already part of Poland before WW2.

=====

Here is a map showing the population in 1950 according to where these people lived back in August 1939:

(V. stands for Voivodeship)


KHp7P3Q.png


The source of this data is actually the December 1950 Polish census (not "own elaboration").
Click to expand...
Thank you for the clarification regarding the territories that made up the historical region of Pomerania before the outbreak of World War II. The Pomeranians in Brazil define themselves as descendants of German immigrants from the region of ancient Pomerania who arrived in the country in the 19th century, mainly in the southern states of Brazil and the state of Espírito Santo. Currently, it is estimated that there are around 300,000 Pomeranians in Brazil, with the largest concentration in the state of Espírito Santo. I know many Pomeranians from the state of Espírito Santo. I redid the questions on ChatGPT and got the following answers:

What happened to the ethnic Germans living in Western Pomerania, Silesia and East Prussia after the end of World War II and what happened to the ethnic Poles living in the territories annexed by the USSR after the end of World War II?

After the end of World War II in 1945, massive forced population transfers occurred across Central and Eastern Europe, fundamentally reshaping the ethnic landscape. Here’s what happened to both groups you mentioned:

⸻

Ethnic Germans in Western Pomerania, Silesia, and East Prussia:

These regions, formerly part of Germany, were transferred to Poland and the Soviet Union as part of the post-war Potsdam Agreement. Here’s what followed:
1. Forced Expulsions:
Between 1945 and 1950, millions of ethnic Germans (estimates range from 12 to 14 million overall from Central and Eastern Europe) were forcibly expelled from territories like Western Pomerania, Silesia, and East Prussia, which had been reassigned to Poland and the USSR.
2. Violence and Hardship:
The expulsions were often violent and chaotic, involving massacres, looting, and harsh transport conditions. Hundreds of thousands died due to starvation, disease, exposure, or violence.
3. Resettlement in Germany:
The majority of these Germans ended up in West and East Germany as refugees or expellees (“Heimatvertriebene”). They faced significant hardship initially, but over time were integrated into German society.

⸻

Ethnic Poles in Former Polish Territories Annexed by the USSR:

These areas, often referred to as the “Kresy” (eastern borderlands), included parts of modern-day Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania.
1. Annexation by the USSR:
The Soviet Union retained control of eastern Polish territories it had seized in 1939 under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, despite Polish opposition.
2. Forced Resettlement:
Around 1.5 to 2 million ethnic Poles were forcibly resettled from the Kresy to the newly acquired “Recovered Territories” in the west, including Silesia, Western Pomerania, and parts of East Prussia—essentially taking the place of expelled Germans.
3. Sovietization of Remaining Poles:
Some ethnic Poles who remained in Soviet territory were subject to Russification, deportations to Siberia, or persecution under Stalinist policies.

⸻

In Summary:
• Germans were expelled from the east and moved west into post-war Germany.
• Poles from the east were moved west into the newly acquired former German lands.
• These moves were part of a broader strategy to create more ethnically homogeneous nation-states, though they came at great human cost and were often carried out brutally.
 
Interesting that ChatGPT mentions 14 million while according to Eberhardt only 3,271,655 Germans were deported from Poland:

bhHtINx.png


And the total German population in this territory in 1939 was 8,582,900. So 5 million Germans fled on their own in 1944 & 1945.
 
Tomenable said:
Interesting that ChatGPT mentions 14 million while according to Eberhardt only 3,271,655 Germans were deported from Poland:

bhHtINx.png


And the total German population in this territory in 1939 was 8,582,900. So 5 million Germans fled on their own in 1944 & 1945.
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ChatGPT is still a kind of teenager in its infancy. Sometimes there are contradictory responses, with incomplete or even incorrect information. I don't know how the quality control of the content learned by the AI works, but I assume there is some control to prevent this increasingly consulted source of information from becoming a kind of X, Facebook, Discord, Instagram, TIK Tok, among other less voted apps, true sources of lies, chaos and misinformation. So far I like ChatGPT, but I recognize that the responses given when are analyzed by people who understand the subject seem them simple and often incomplete.
 
ChatGPT said:

"estimates of the death toll range from 400,000 to over 2 million, depending on the source and method"

I find it hard to believe that the death toll was even as high as 400,000 let alone 2 million.

How exactly were these casualties calculated and what were the main causes of deaths?

A simple deportation by railway should not cause many deaths among those deported.

What was the comparable death toll among Poles expelled from Kresy to Western Poland?
 
Tomenable said:
ChatGPT said:

"estimates of the death toll range from 400,000 to over 2 million, depending on the source and method"

I find it hard to believe that the death toll was even as high as 400,000 let alone 2 million.

How exactly were these casualties calculated and what were the main causes of deaths?

A simple deportation by railway should not cause many deaths among those deported.

What was the comparable death toll among Poles expelled from Kresy to Western Poland?
Click to expand...
ChatGPT answers me about the sources.

You would be able to provide me with the sources from which you extract the answers to my previous question?

Certainly! Here are some key sources that provide detailed information on the post-World War II population transfers involving ethnic Germans and Poles:

⸻

📚 Ethnic Germans in Western Pomerania, Silesia, and East Prussia
1. Wikipedia – Flight and Expulsion of Germans (1944–1950):
This comprehensive article outlines the forced migrations of ethnic Germans from Eastern and Central Europe, including regions like Silesia and East Prussia, detailing the scale, causes, and consequences of these expulsions.
2. Wikipedia – Flight and Expulsion of Germans from Poland During and After World War II:
Focuses specifically on the expulsions from Polish territories, providing demographic estimates and discussing the policies implemented during this period.
3. Wikipedia – Evacuation of East Prussia:
Details the evacuation efforts and the subsequent fate of the German population in East Prussia during the final stages of the war.
4. Wikipedia – Silesia:
Provides historical context on Silesia, including the post-war expulsions of Germans and the repopulation efforts by Polish settlers.

⸻

📚 Ethnic Poles in Former Polish Territories Annexed by the USSR
1. Wikipedia – Polish Population Transfers in 1944–1946:
Discusses the forced migrations of Poles from the eastern regions annexed by the Soviet Union, detailing the numbers affected and the resettlement processes.
2. Wikipedia – Population Exchange Between Poland and Soviet Ukraine:
Covers the agreements and implementation of population exchanges between Poland and Soviet republics, including Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania.
3. Memory of Nations – Poles in Regained Lands, 1945–1956:
Features personal testimonies and experiences of Poles who were resettled from the Kresy regions to the so-called “Regained Lands” in the west.

⸻

If you’re interested in more in-depth scholarly works or personal narratives on these topics, feel free to ask!
 
Tomenable said:
ChatGPT said:

"estimates of the death toll range from 400,000 to over 2 million, depending on the source and method"

I find it hard to believe that the death toll was even as high as 400,000 let alone 2 million.

How exactly were these casualties calculated and what were the main causes of deaths?

A simple deportation by railway should not cause many deaths among those deported.

What was the comparable death toll among Poles expelled from Kresy to Western Poland?
Click to expand...

Have a look at this: https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP7.HTM
 
Here you can see how different were initial German figures for Czechoslovakia compared to what was confirmed in the end:

Expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

"The West German government in 1958 estimated the ethnic German death toll during the expulsion period to be about 270,000,[9] a figure that has been cited in historical literature since then.[10] Research by a joint German and Czech commission of historians in 1995 found that the previous demographic estimates of 220,000 to 270,000 deaths were overstated and based on faulty information; they concluded that the actual death toll was at least 15,000 persons, and that it could range up to a maximum of 30,000 dead if one assumes that some deaths were not reported. The Commission statement also said that German records show 18,889 confirmed deaths including 3,411 suicides. Czech records indicated 22,247 deaths including 6,667 unexplained cases or suicides.[11][12][13][14][15][16][17]

The German Church Search Service was able to confirm the deaths of 14,215 persons during the expulsions from Czechoslovakia (6,316 violent deaths, 6,989 in internment camps and 907 in the USSR as forced laborers).[18]"

As far as I know similar verification has not yet been done for Poland.
 
Tomenable said:
I think these estimates are exaggerated just like the 270,000 estimate for Czechoslovakia was.

As you can see after verification the new estimate for Czechoslovakia is 10 or more times lower.
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There is a big difference between proven deaths and people that just disappeared with no trace.

Current Poland territory had about 9 million Germans before the war. Post-war German counts of refugees/expellees were about 7 million. What happened to the 2 million?
 
traveller said:
There is a big difference between proven deaths and people that just disappeared with no trace. Current Poland territory had about 9 million Germans before the war. Post-war German counts of refugees/expellees were about 7 million. What happened to the 2 million?
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Wikipedia says that there were actually 8,129,800 refugees/expellees from Poland, not 7 million.

And 1,165,632 former German citizens were naturalized as Polish citizens and stayed in Poland.

So you get 9 million if you add these two numbers.

Also by the way a lot of Germans died during World War 2 (both military and civilian deaths).
 
Tomenable said:
ChatGPT said:

"estimates of the death toll range from 400,000 to over 2 million, depending on the source and method"

I find it hard to believe that the death toll was even as high as 400,000 let alone 2 million.

How exactly were these casualties calculated and what were the main causes of deaths
A simple deportation by railway should not cause many deaths among those deported.
Click to expand...

An example:

> According to the Berlin correspondent of london The Times, in 1945 Poles transported one group of evicted Germans in cattle cars from Danzig without water, food, or even straw on which to lie. When they finally reached Berlin, twenty were dead out of the eighty-three jammed into two of the trucks.17

 
^^^
There are similar examples from Czechoslovakia, but as you can see the initial German estimate for Czechoslovakia was at least 10 times exaggerated, and possibly 20 times (instead of the 270,000 dead the real death toll was only 15,000 up to 30,000 dead).

For Poland nobody has carried out a similar verification of these early estimates as in case of Czechoslovakia.
 
Tomenable said:
Wikipedia says that there were actually 8,129,800 refugees/expellees from Poland, not 7 million.

And 1,165,632 former German citizens were naturalized as Polish citizens and stayed in Poland.
Click to expand...

That sounds like the number of Poles living on those territories, which is not included in those 9M.

Have a look at that source and the numbers.

Tomenable said:
So you get 9 million if you add these two numbers.

Also by the way a lot of Germans died during World War 2 (both military and civilian deaths).
Click to expand...

Certainly. And those killed by Soviets or perished fleeing the incoming front are included.

And as I understand about 6M Polish people died during WW2, about half of them Jews.
 
traveller said:
That sounds like the number of Poles living on those territories, which is not included in those 9M.
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Most of them were counted as Germans in the German census of 1939, but after 1945 they were "verified as Poles" by Poland.

BTW according to Piotr Eberhardt (see the Table which I posted above) there were only 8.5M Germans living there as of 1939.
 
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German Wikipedia says:

de.m.wikipedia.org

Flucht und Vertreibung Deutscher aus Mittel- und Osteuropa 1945–1950 – Wikipedia

de.m.wikipedia.org de.m.wikipedia.org

"The best-known figure in the literature on the expulsion states that around two million Germans perished as a result of the expulsion.[13] Hans-Ulrich Wehler estimates that 1.71 million Germans lost their lives during the flight, expulsion or forced resettlement. This figure does not include the Volga Germans, who were deported to Kazakhstan under Stalin with “huge losses”.[14]

This figure has been questioned by historians. Eva and Hans Henning Hahn see the “birth of the magic two-million figure” in a report by the Federal Statistical Office from 1958, in which it was assumed that people whose fate was still unclear at the time had fallen victim to expulsion, flight and deportation.[15] All unsolved cases were interpreted as deaths and all deaths as expulsion-related. As the basis was the arithmetical difference between the statistical data from 1939 and the data from 1948, this difference also included the Jews killed in the extermination camps.[16] In 1965 and 1974, the Church Tracing Service and the Federal Archives independently came up with 500,000 to 600,000 confirmed deaths as a direct result of the crimes in connection with the expulsions by researching individual cases.[17] The difference to older calculations is due to their method of comparing the population statistics of the pre-war period with the statistical data of the expellees of the 1950s. Unsolved cases were simply counted as deaths. Because the birth rate had fallen significantly in the years around the end of the war, the births that had not occurred (or more precisely: had been postponed) were mistakenly counted as unexplained cases and therefore as victims of expulsion. [18] The Freiburg historian Rüdiger Overmans also discovered that the number of fallen Wehrmacht soldiers from the eastern territories of the Reich had long been underestimated by 300,000, as no account had been taken of the fact that the number of war dead in the last two years of the war had been significantly higher than in the previous years. The difference had been attributed to unexplained cases and thus also to expulsion losses.[19]

For Czechoslovakia, the number of deaths as a result of flight and expulsion was long given as 130,000. In contrast, the German-Czech Historical Commission came up with 15,000-30,000 victims of expulsion.[20]

The figure of around 600,000 victims of expulsion determined by the Federal Archives and the Church Tracing Service is also cited today by the LeMO of the German Historical Museum.[21] However, the Association of Expellees has maintained the inflated number of victims of two million or more to the present day. Even higher figures can be found in literature belonging to the right-wing nationalist spectrum, such as Heinz Nawratil's Black Book of Expulsions, which claims that the number of expulsion victims is six to ten million higher than that of the Nazi regime.[22] Ingo Haar sees in this narrative an instrumentalization of the victims for the purpose of avoiding reparation obligations, a delegitimization of the newly created states of East Central Europe in 1945 or the revision of the Potsdam Agreement and the European post-war order established by it."
 
I'm currently on vacation on Wolin and a nearby smaller island is called Wyspa Chrząszczewska (Insel Gristow in German). Reminds me of this movie scene:

 
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