What percentage of Masuria's and German Upper Silesia's population moved to Germany after 1945?

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What percentage of Masuria's and German Upper Silesia's population moved to Germany after 1945?

#1

Post by Futurist » 30 Apr 2020, 00:55

Does anyone here know what percentage of Masuria's (southern East Prussia's) and German Upper Silesia's population moved to Germany in the years and decades after 1945? I am asking about these two regions specifically because those two regions voted to remain part of Germany after WWI in spite of them having Polish majorities. So, I was wondering just how much of these two regions' Poles actually emigrated after these regions actually became part of Poland after the end of WWII.

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Re: What percentage of Masuria's and German Upper Silesia's population moved to Germany after 1945?

#2

Post by Steve » 02 May 2020, 05:04

Upper Silesia was divided between the eastern part that was part of Poland prior to 1939 and the western part that remained German after WW1. The WW1 border was ethnically based so the eastern part was mainly Polish and the western part mainly German. The expulsions and voluntary departures of Germans post WW2 came mostly from the western part.

Large numbers of Germans fled in 1945 but quite a few returned at the end of the war. Up to 90,000 Germans were deported to the Soviet Union in early 1945 being released in 1947. On release they could either go to East Germany or back to Silesia. It was not easy to define a large part of the population as either German or Polish. To quote a description from 1945 “The older generation speaks a beautiful dialect with elegant archaisms ….. (but) German vocabulary arises when they speak about administration and technical matters and occasionally when they speak about trade. Their command of writing Polish is worse ………… The number of German words and terms proliferates among the younger generation …….. Small children do not speak any Polish (dialect) whatsoever …….. The amount of German varies from village to village”.

It seems that only a fraction of the pre war western Upper Silesian population had regarded themselves as ethnically Polish. Those who could show that they were Polish perhaps because they had belonged to a pre war Polish cultural organisation were put in charge. They sat on “verification committees” which would judge whether someone was Polish and entitled to stay or German and expelled. People were tested on their command of the Polish language and maybe asked what they done done during the uprisings of 1919/21 etc. etc. Failing the test could get you deported but it seems to have often been applied leniently. If you did not apply for the test that showed you were not Polish and you would probably be deported. In 1947 the authorities decided to clamp down on Germans who had been verified as Poles. In the district of Opole by September 1948 882 were down for “repatriation” and this was done throughout western Upper Silesia.

It is estimated that in the second half of 1945 120,000 either voluntarily left western Upper Silesia or were deported. Between 1946 and 1949 about 165,000 were transported to Germany. A large part of these were from areas where most of the population were monolingual German speaking and so deported.

From – Germans To Poles by Hugo Service 2013.


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Re: What percentage of Masuria's and German Upper Silesia's population moved to Germany after 1945?

#3

Post by Futurist » 02 May 2020, 05:38

What pages of that book is this information from?

By the way, it's worth noting that the ethnic border in Upper Silesia actually ran farther west than the Polish-German border in Upper Silesia in the interwar era ran:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... h_1900.png

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You can see that the part of Upper Silesia that was given to Poland (around Kattowitz/Katowice) after WWI--visible on this map--was smaller than the total amount of Polish-majority territories in that region.

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Re: What percentage of Masuria's and German Upper Silesia's population moved to Germany after 1945?

#4

Post by Futurist » 02 May 2020, 05:44

You can see this in more detail on this map:

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy ... UEbIm5z_3c

Image

A small part of southern Upper Silesia, of course, was given to Czechoslovakia without a plebiscite--which strikes me as being rather unfair, as in the Poles having to actually work for their own part of Upper Silesia while the Czechs get their part for free.

The results of the 1921 Upper Silesia plebiscite were a mess but it's safe to say that the cities were largely pro-German whereas the rural areas were largely pro-Polish:

https://blogs.bl.uk/european/2014/11/si ... urope.html

Image

The final division of Upper Silesia was not ideal, of course, and the Poles certainly got a huge part (possibly most) of Upper Silesia's industries and natural resources since they, unlike Germany, were not a defeated country in World War I. Still, at least Germany got a huge chunk of Upper Silesia--which is much better than the nothing that it was originally slated to get there.

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Re: What percentage of Masuria's and German Upper Silesia's population moved to Germany after 1945?

#5

Post by Steve » 02 May 2020, 22:03

The information comes from pages 175 through to 205. Virtually all the German population of East Prussia fled starting in late 44 (see Nemmersdorf massacre) so the situation was different there. Up to 2 million were evacuated by sea in a huge operation. There were Germans still in Danzig and they were seemingly evacuated by train in 1945. I did find a record of one train that left Danzig on August the 24th arriving in Berlin on the 31st. It was carrying 325 patents and orphans packed into 5 cattle trucks from the Marien Hospital and Orphanage in the Weidlergasse.

The Polish delegation at the Potsdam conference in 1945 estimated that only 1.5 million Germans remained east of the Oder Neisse. Four months after the conference the Allied Control Council for Germany estimated there were 3.5 million Germans east of the O/N line. As expulsions had been going on since the end of the war there could have been over 4 million Germans east of the O/N at the end of the war. I read somewhere that in 1945 the situation east of the O/N was like the wild west. A wave of Poles from central Poland descended on the former German territory to loot abandoned property. There were also settlers arriving from the lost eastern territory. The Red Army was still there and many of the recently formed Polish militia/security personnel of the new Polish communist government behaved like bandits.

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Re: What percentage of Masuria's and German Upper Silesia's population moved to Germany after 1945?

#6

Post by Futurist » 02 May 2020, 22:47

I wonder if there was a similar atmosphere of chaos, lawlessness, and looting in the Memelland and in Kaliningrad Oblast (former northern East Prussia) right after the end of World War II. After all, both of those territories also involved the expulsions of a lot of Germans--except here the Germans were replaced with Lithuanians and Russians as opposed to Poles.

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Re: What percentage of Masuria's and German Upper Silesia's population moved to Germany after 1945?

#7

Post by Steve » 03 May 2020, 17:54

Interestingly the Soviets had a different policy than the Poles towards the remaining German population in its part of East Prussia. It is estimated that about 10% of the pre war population of 1.25 million remained in the Soviet part now known as Kaliningrad Oblast. For at least a year no settlers were brought into the territory. The remaining Germans were kept because the Soviets wanted their labour presumably to clear up all the war damage. There was a complete collapse of the economy with malnutrition and disease. As a result it is estimated that 30% of the remaining German population died. Some did manage to cross over into Polish territory and get to Germany. Starting in 1947 small numbers was allowed to leave for East Germany. Then in October 1947 it was decided to expel all Germans and 97,284 left in 48 cargo trains in three waves.

From – Germans To Poles by Hugo Service pages 336 337.

The Poles also did not immediately expel all Germans but the ones they kept were skilled workers needed to maintain industrial machinery etc. etc. It would appear from the map Futurist has provided that there was a Polish and Lithuanian minority in East Prussia in 1900. Perhaps someone can shed some light on what happened to them.

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Re: What percentage of Masuria's and German Upper Silesia's population moved to Germany after 1945?

#8

Post by Futurist » 04 May 2020, 02:13

The Lithuanian minority was primarily concentrated in the Memelland, which was a part of Germany until 1919 and became a Danzig-like free state/free territory in 1919, then got annexed to Lithuania following the Klaipeda Revolt in 1923, then got re-annexed by Nazi Germany in early 1939, and then got annexed by Soviet Lithuania after the end of World War II. The Lithuanians there I'm presuming stayed where they were up to the present-day (including their descendants, obviously) but the Germans there were presumably expelled en masse after the end of World War II.

The Poles in southern East Prussia were called Masurians and I mentioned them in my original post here. Interestingly enough, they were overwhelmingly pro-German in terms of political orientation and were also at least mostly Protestant:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masurians

They voted overwhelmingly in favor of remaining part of Germany back in 1920:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1920_East ... plebiscite

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... 920-en.png

Image

I know that many and perhaps even most of them emigrated from Poland after 1956 when they were finally allowed to do so but knowing exact percentages would be really nice in regards to this.

Interestingly enough, even though Masurians were considered (loyal) Poles in the German Empire, the remaining Masurians at least sometimes appear to be considered Germans in Poland today:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_mi ... land_today

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... rmland.png

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Last edited by Futurist on 04 May 2020, 02:19, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: What percentage of Masuria's and German Upper Silesia's population moved to Germany after 1945?

#9

Post by Futurist » 04 May 2020, 02:16

Interestingly enough, Upper Silesia also has a sizable German minority nowadays--but much larger than Masuria's (this map is from the Wikipedia article already quoted right above):

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... ilesia.png

Image

I suspect that most of the remaining Germans in Poland nowadays were actually classified as Poles after the end of World War II and thus survived the Polonization verification process that the Polish government undoubtedly conducted in the Recovered Territories during this time in order to see who is allowed to stay and who should leave.

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Re: What percentage of Masuria's and German Upper Silesia's population moved to Germany after 1945?

#10

Post by Futurist » 04 May 2020, 02:18

Steve wrote:
03 May 2020, 17:54
Interestingly the Soviets had a different policy than the Poles towards the remaining German population in its part of East Prussia. It is estimated that about 10% of the pre war population of 1.25 million remained in the Soviet part now known as Kaliningrad Oblast. For at least a year no settlers were brought into the territory. The remaining Germans were kept because the Soviets wanted their labour presumably to clear up all the war damage. There was a complete collapse of the economy with malnutrition and disease. As a result it is estimated that 30% of the remaining German population died. Some did manage to cross over into Polish territory and get to Germany. Starting in 1947 small numbers was allowed to leave for East Germany. Then in October 1947 it was decided to expel all Germans and 97,284 left in 48 cargo trains in three waves.

From – Germans To Poles by Hugo Service pages 336 337.
That's really sad about 30% of the remaining Germans in Kaliningrad Oblast during from malnutrition and disease. :( Did the Soviets always plan to flood this territory with ethnic Russians or did they only adopt this policy in 1947?

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Re: What percentage of Masuria's and German Upper Silesia's population moved to Germany after 1945?

#11

Post by Steve » 04 May 2020, 21:27

According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica article on East Prussia “the northern part was incorporated into the Russian federation ……………………In the southern part about 400,000 indigenous Poles remained” It seems there never were many Poles in the northern part. In a Wikipedia article the population of East Prussia in 1939 is given as 2.49 million (I have also seen 2.2 million) with the number of Poles at about 300,000 to 350,000 from Polish estimates. From the map Futurist provided on mother language in 1910 we have 245,000 Polish speakers just in Allenstein. It has been suggested that the 1910 census classified 100,000 poles in East Prussia as Germans and not by mistake. The number of Polish speakers is likely to have fallen by WW2. However, many people probably rediscovered their Polish heritage in 1945 and bought a learn Polish in thirty days course so the figure of 400,000 could be correct.

Taken at face value these Poles did not vote to join Poland in the 1920 plebiscite but the plebiscite does seem to have been a long way away from free and fair. Apparently the Nazis did not evict them after 1939 as happened to Poles in Pomerelia which was next door to East Prussia. According to the Volksdeutsche list on Wikipedia the four categories in South East Prussia only come to 45,000 people. This suggests that the Nazis thought a large majority of these people were German or perhaps lapsed Germans who could become good Germans.

It would appear that the Masurians are not Poles though the Germans often considered them as Poles and the Poles often considered them as Germans. By en large they are Protestants which puts them closer to Germans in this respect. In the 1925 census only 40,869 people gave their language as Masurian.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksdeutsche

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Re: What percentage of Masuria's and German Upper Silesia's population moved to Germany after 1945?

#12

Post by Futurist » 05 May 2020, 03:05

Didn't the Nazis only evict Poles who moved into the relevant territories after 1918, though? In other words, if you were a Pole who lived in Posen or the Polish Corridor or Upper Silesia or East Prussia in 1918, then you were exempt from deportation under Nazi rule, no?

By the way, Poles can be Protestants--though you are correct that the overwhelming majority of Poles are Catholics.

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Re: What percentage of Masuria's and German Upper Silesia's population moved to Germany after 1945?

#13

Post by Steve » 05 May 2020, 18:36

According to this Wikipedia article (what would we do without it) the Germans expelled about 1.7 million Poles from various parts of Poland for various reasons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion ... by_Germany

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Re: What percentage of Masuria's and German Upper Silesia's population moved to Germany after 1945?

#14

Post by Futurist » 06 May 2020, 03:27

Thanks, Steve! :)

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