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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, [1] resulting in gaining the Recovered Territories from Germany.
In 1795, Poland's territory was completely partitioned among the Kingdom of Prussia, the Russian Empire, and Austria. Poland regained its independence as the Second Polish Republic in 1918 after World War I, but lost it in World War II through occupation by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
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.
None of the Nazi-ordered territorial changes were recognised by the Allies of World War II, and the annexed territories became the centre of the People's Republic of Poland after World War II. Germans living in the formerly annexed territories fled or were expelled to post-war Germany.
Tadeusz Piotrowski, Professor of Sociology at the University of New Hampshire has provided a reassessment of Poland's losses in World War II. Polish war dead included 5,150,000 victims of Nazi crimes against ethnic Poles and the Holocaust, the treatment of Polish citizens by occupiers included 350,000 deaths during the Soviet occupation in 1940 ...
Map showing Poland's borders pre-1938 and post-1945. The Eastern Borderlands is in gray while the Recovered Territories are in pink.. The Recovered Territories or Regained Lands (Polish: Ziemie Odzyskane), also known as the Western Borderlands (Polish: Kresy Zachodnie), and previously as the Western and Northern Territories (Polish: Ziemie Zachodnie i Północne), Postulated Territories ...
Temporary borders created by advancing German and Soviet troops. The border was soon readjusted following diplomatic agreements. Seventeen days after the German invasion of Poland in 1939, which marked the beginning of the Second World War, the Soviet Union entered the eastern regions of Poland (known as the Kresy) and annexed territories totalling 201,015 square kilometres (77,612 sq mi) with ...
Starting in December, the Polish-Ukrainian War expanded the Polish republic's territory to include Volhynia and parts of eastern Galicia, while at the same time the German Province of Posen (where even according to the German made 1910 census 61.5% of the population was Polish) was severed by the Greater Poland uprising, which succeeded in ...