Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.
Concept
Commission for the Determination of Place Names
Summary
The Commission for the Determination of Place Names (Komisja Ustalania Nazw Miejscowości) was a commission of the Polish Department of Public Administration, founded in January 1946. Its mission was the establishment of toponyms for places, villages, towns and cities in the former eastern territories of Germany (then known in Poland as the Regained Territories).
Former eastern territories of Germany and Recovered Territories
According to the decisions of the Potsdam Conference most of the former German territories east of the Oder-Neisse line were placed under Polish administration and most of the remaining German population was expelled. Some of those territories had historical ties with Poland, dating to the medieval fragmentation of Poland in the Duchy of Silesia, but were also populated by German-speaking inhabitants for many centuries.
According to the 1939 German census, the territories were inhabited by 8,855,000 people, including a Polish minority in the territories' easternmost parts. The Polish minority included Masurs in Masuria (former southern East Prussia), Kashubians and Slovincians in Pomerania, and Silesians in Upper Silesia - these groups were referred to as "autochthons" after the war, and used to prove a "Polishness" of the territories. While the German census placed the number of Polish-speakers and bilinguals below 700,000 people, Polish demographers have estimated that the actual number of Poles in the former German East was between 1.2 and 1.3 million. In the 1.2 million figure, approximately 850,000 were estimated for the Upper Silesian regions, 350,000 for southern East Prussia (Masuria) and 50,000 for the rest of the territories.
While the Germans were interned and expelled, close to 5 million settlers were either attracted or forced to settle the areas between 1945 and 1950. An additional 1,104,000 people had declared Polish nationality and were allowed to stay (851,000 of those in Upper Silesia), bringing up the number of Poles to 5,894,600 as of 1950.
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.