Introduction

Abstract

Germany paid a heavy price for defeat in the Second World War. Besides the human losses much territory had to be surrendered. The Elbe became the dividing line between East and West just as it had been the frontier between Germans and Slavs many centuries ago. East Prussia was lost to the Soviet Union and Poland and Silesia and Pomerania also went to Poland. Had these territories remained part of Germany they would have formed part of the Soviet zone of occupation. Together with what later became the GDR they would have formed the nucleus of a potentially powerful state with its own raw materials base in Silesia and fertile land in Pomerania. Given the refusal of the Polish nation to accept a communist government bound to the Soviet Union in eternal marriage and the willingness of the GDR population to accept such a state of affairs as a fait accompli, the Soviet Union may be having second thoughts about the wisdom of the settlement arrived at in 1945. Poles and Germans shared some common beginnings in 1945. Neither people had liberated itself from fascism and this permitted the occupying power to impose a political system of its liking. Poland had lost her sovereignty in 1939 as a result of German and Soviet aggression and longed for independence once again in 1945.