"Migrations in the 20 th century and their consequences – ways forward for history lessons within a European context"

Appendix II
Population displacement and problems of integration in Poland
after the second world war
by Dr Monika Choros (Opole)
The century now coming to an end can rightly be referred to as, among other things, the century 
of expulsions, since more people have been (and are unfortunately still being) expelled from 
their homes in this period of history than ever before. The terms "expulsion", "resettlement", 
"evacuation", "repatriation", "forced displacement" all imply the same thing: the loss of one's 
home. However, they are understood and interpreted differently and have different emotional 
connotations. They remind people both in Germany and in Poland of suffering and injustice, 
trigger a heated and painful discussion and are linked to one of the most difficult chapters of our 
common history.
When reference is made, especially in Germany, to people fleeing or being expelled this is 
mainly taken to mean the compulsory displacement of Germans from the parts of eastern 
Germany lost in the war. Germans think of the suffering and injustice to which the German 
civilian population, especially women and children, were exposed. However, do they give any 
thought to the causes of the disaster, the shifting of the borders in large parts of Europe and the 
loss of their homes suffered by people of other nations?
Enforced population displacement as a political strategy is nothing new. People have been 
compelled to emigrate since the early years of the modern era. At that time, the usual reason 
was that they were of a different faith (Huguenots, Hussites and Protestants, some of whom 
found new homes in Silesia), but later grounds included their membership of the "wrong" 
nationality or ethnic group. As early as 1855, the German nationalist Paul de Lagarde 
expressed a view still held and acted upon today: 
It is doubtless wrong for one nation to exist 
within another; it is doubtless necessary to remove those who ... have encouraged decay. It is 
every people's right to be lord and master of its own territory and to live for itself and not for 
strangers
.
21
In the Balkans, forced mass migrations were already commonplace from the middle of the 19th 
century onwards. In 1913, after the Balkan wars, treaties were concluded on mutual transfers of 
populations, and in 1923, in the Treaty of Lausanne, population displacements were sanctioned 
for the first time by the international community. The next step on the way to the large-scale 
migration of peoples from East to West - which is the subject under discussion - was the 
German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of August 1939, in which eastern central Europe was 
divided into a German and a Soviet sphere of interest.
In 1939 and 1940, approximately half a million Germans living between the Baltic and the Black 
Sea were called "home to the Reich". They formed the vanguard of the millions who were 
compulsorily displaced, fled or were expelled during and at the end of the war.
When the protocol to the German-Soviet Border and Friendship Treaty was signed on 
28 September 1939, the planned compulsory displacement of Germans from Volhynia, Galicia, 
21
Quoted from Philipp Ther, "Deutsche und polnische Vertriebene", p. 31.

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Bessarabia, Dobruja, the Baltics and Bukovina began. Hundreds of thousands came "home to 
the Reich", that is to say to the newly formed Reich districts of Wartheland and Danzig-West 
Prussia. The resettlement plan stated: 
You Germans from Volhynia will be resettled in Poland 
in the new district of Warthegau. Your farms will be taken by Ukrainians returning from the 
Lublin and Kholm areas. The Poles, on the other hand, on whose farms you will be settled will