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The borders of Poland resembled the borders of the German-Russian gains in World War 2, with the exception of the city of Bialystok. This is called the Curzon line. The small area of Trans-Olza, which had been annexed by Poland in late 1938, was returned to Czechoslovakia on Stalin's orders. [citation needed]
Germany repeatedly contested the interwar border and even Poland's existence itself, as stated by Chief of the German Army Hans von Seeckt already in 1922, [16] and it was the German invasion of Poland in 1939 that started World War II.
Initially, at the end of World War II in 1945, Poland also gained control of the current southern border strip of the Kaliningrad Oblast, with Polish administration organized in the towns of Gierdawy and Iławka, however, the area was eventually annexed by the Soviet Union and included within the Kaliningrad Oblast by December 1945. [129]
The Battle of the Border begun around 05:00, as German troops started crossing the Polish border in numerous places. [2] The Battle of Westerplatte, which is often described as having begun at 04:45 with the salvos of SMS Schleswig-Holstein on Polish coastal fortifications, is commonly described as the first battle of the war.
Westward shift of Poland after World War II. Blue line: Curzon Line of 8 December 1919. Pink areas: prewar German territory transferred to Poland after the war. Grey area: prewar Polish territory transferred to the Soviet Union after the war. The eventual border was not the most far-reaching territorial change that was proposed.
At the 1945 Potsdam Conference following the German defeat in World War II, Poland's borders were reorganized at the insistence of the Soviet Union, which occupied the entire area. Territories east of the Oder-Neisse line , including Danzig, were put under Polish administration.
The end of the war saw the USSR occupy all of Poland and most of eastern Germany. The Soviets gained recognition of their pre-1941 annexations of Polish territory; as compensation, substantial portions of eastern Germany were ceded to Poland, whose borders were significantly shifted westwards. [23]
By the end of the Polish Defensive War the Soviet Union had taken over 52.1% of the territory of Poland (circa 200,000 km 2), with over 13,700,000 people.The estimates vary; Professor Elżbieta Trela-Mazur gives the following numbers in regards to the ethnic composition of these areas: 38% Poles (ca. 5.1 million people), 37% Ukrainians, 14.5% Belarusians, 8.4% Jews, 0.9% Russians and 0.6% Germans.