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Concept
Territorial changes of Poland immediately after World War II
Summary
At the end of World War II, Poland underwent major changes to the location of its international border. In 1945, after the defeat of Nazi Germany, the Oder–Neisse line became its western border, resulting in gaining the Recovered Territories from Germany. The Curzon Line became its eastern border, resulting in the loss of the Eastern Borderlands to the Soviet Union.
These decisions were 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 line proposed by British Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon in 1920.
The same Soviet stance was repeated by Joseph Stalin again at the Yalta Conference with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in February 1945, but much 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. Harry Truman remembered:
I remember at Potsdam, we got to discussing a matter in eastern Poland, and it was remarked by the Prime Minister of Great Britain that the Pope would not be happy over the arrangement of that Catholic end of Poland. And the Generalissimo, the Prime Minister of Russia leaned on the table, and he pulled his mustache like that, and looked over to Mr. Churchill and said: Mr. Churchill, Mr. Prime Minister, how many divisions did you say the Pope had?
Large territories of Polish Second Republic were ceded to the Soviet Union by the Moscow-backed Polish government, and today form part of Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine. Poland was instead given the Free State of Danzig and the German areas east of the rivers Oder and Neisse (see Recovered Territories), pending a final peace conference with Germany. Since a peace conference never took place, the lands were effectively ceded by Germany.
The population transfer of both Polish and Germans 1945–46 included many millions of people. The Polish territory in 1919–39 covered an area of .
Official source
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