Refugee crises · CHAPTER 3 ·
Polish population transfers
Chapter 3 of Uprooted: Refugees in Europe 1945–1960 and Indochina 1975–1990: “Borders Move, People Follow”
After the war Poland was moved about 200 kilometres west: the Soviet Union kept its eastern borderlands and Poland received German land. Under the Lublin agreements of September 1944, about 1.2 to 1.5 million Poles and Polish Jews left the Soviet republics, while about 482,000 Ukrainians were sent to Soviet Ukraine.
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The map above is the world of Refugees in Europe, April 1947 — Operation Vistula; Istria ceded.
Part of IB History: Refugees in Europe and Indochina →
BRIEF EXPLANATION — THE ESSENTIAL ARGUMENT
Poland was moved bodily about 200 kilometres to the west after the war, and the people of its borderlands were moved with it, because the Allies and the new communist governments believed that a stable border needed a single nation on each side. At Yalta, the Allied summit in the Crimea in February 1945, the Soviet Union kept the Kresy, the “borderlands” that made up nearly half of pre-war Poland, and Poland was compensated with German land in the west. Agreements signed at Lublin in September 1944 between Poland’s new communist authorities and the Soviet republics then arranged what they called “repatriation”, an exchange of populations that was voluntary on paper and coerced in practice, rather like a company that relocates its office and calls the staff transfer optional. About 1.2 to 1.5 million Poles and Polish Jews left the Soviet republics for Poland and about 482,000 Ukrainians went the other way, so each people’s departure made room for the other’s arrival.
The same logic was applied across the continent, and the hatching on this map marks each place it was used. In Finland about 410,000 Karelians, one Finn in nine, left the land ceded to the Soviet Union and were resettled at home. In Istria, ceded by Italy to Yugoslavia in 1947, between 250,000 and 350,000 people, most of them Italians, left by 1956. In 1947 the Polish army’s Operation Vistula deported about 140,000 Ukrainians and Lemkos, a Carpathian mountain people, from the south-east and scattered them across the former German lands. Behind it lay the ethnic war of 1943 in Volhynia, a region of today’s north-western Ukraine, where Ukrainian nationalist insurgents killed tens of thousands of Poles and Polish units retaliated. Borders drawn to end that violence were secured by completing the separation it had begun.
The full story
The new Polish state had to fill one territory while losing another, and the arrows from Lwów and Wilno toward Wrocław and Gdańsk show how it did both at once. Under the Lublin agreements of September 1944 between Poland’s communist authorities and three Soviet republics, Poles in the east could register for “evacuation” to Poland, and in practice Soviet pressure, the loss of farms to collectivisation, the merging of private farms into state-run collectives, and fear of Ukrainian insurgents left them little choice. About 780,000 came from Soviet Ukraine alone, and the survivors of Polish Jewry left with them, since the Holocaust had destroyed the communities they came from. Lwów’s university and its Ossolineum library moved to Wrocław, the German city of Breslau, emptied of nearly all its 600,000 Germans. Communist propaganda called the western lands the “Recovered Territories”, presenting them as medieval Polish land returned, so that a population transfer could be told as a homecoming.
The Ukrainians of south-eastern Poland were moved in the opposite direction twice, and the second time the move had no border to justify it. Between 1944 and 1946 about 482,000 Ukrainians were sent to Soviet Ukraine, at first by persuasion and then by force, while the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), a nationalist guerrilla army much like a wartime resistance movement, attacked Polish posts and villages, as it had done in Volhynia in 1943, when it massacred Polish civilians and Polish units took revenge. When UPA fighters killed the Polish deputy defence minister, General Karol Świerczewski, on 28 March 1947, the government launched Operation Vistula, the hatched strip on the map. Between April and July 1947 about 140,000 Ukrainians and Lemkos, a mountain people of the Carpathians, were deported to the former German north and west in small groups so that no community could re-form, and suspects were held in a camp at Jaworzno where 161 people died. The state was finishing, in peacetime and by administrative means, the separation that the war of 1943 had begun.
Finland and Istria show the same pressure meeting very different states. When the Moscow Armistice of September 1944, the ceasefire that took Finland out of the war, confirmed the loss of Karelia, almost all of its 410,000 inhabitants chose to leave. The Finnish parliament’s Land Acquisition Act of May 1945 then took land from the state, the church and large farms to give them new holdings, and the resettlement worked because the evacuees were citizens with a voice in politics. In Istria the Paris peace treaty of February 1947 handed most of the peninsula, with Fiume and Zara, to Yugoslavia, and the Italians left in waves; in Pola about 90 percent of residents departed in early 1947. Their flight followed two decades of Fascist rule that had banned Slovene and Croatian schools, an Italian wartime occupation that ran camps such as Rab, and the killings of 1943 and 1945, in which Yugoslav partisans threw several thousand people into the karst pits known as foibe. Each emptied borderland carried a long history of mutual violence, and each border settlement turned that history into a permanent ethnic map.
DEEP EXPLANATION — EVIDENCE & INTERPRETATION
One process from Volhynia to Vistula
Timothy Snyder’s The Reconstruction of Nations (2003) argues that the massacres of 1943, the exchanges of 1944–46 and Operation Vistula belong to a single process by which Poles and Ukrainians were separated into two homogeneous nations, begun by nationalist insurgents and completed by communist states. In 1943 the Ukrainian Insurgent Army killed Polish civilians in Volhynia to remove them from land it claimed, with most historians estimating 40,000 to 60,000 Polish dead there and up to 100,000 including eastern Galicia, while Polish reprisals killed perhaps 2,000 to 3,000 Ukrainians in Volhynia and, by Grzegorz Motyka’s estimate, 10,000 to 15,000 across all the contested lands between 1943 and 1947. Stalin and the Polish communists then adopted the goal of separation as policy and carried it out with trains and soldiers. Memory remains bitterly divided between the two nations: the Polish Senate condemned Operation Vistula in 1990, and in 2016 the Sejm declared 11 July a day of remembrance for the victims of what it called genocide by Ukrainian nationalists, a term many Ukrainian historians reject. Snyder’s framework helps students see that the communist regimes inherited nationalist aims and gave them the power of the state.
Making Breslau Polish
Gregor Thum’s Uprooted: How Breslau Became Wrocław (2011) shows how a city of more than 600,000 Germans was emptied and refilled within three years, and how the new population lived for decades with the fear that the change was temporary. The settlers came from war-ravaged central Poland and from the lost eastern provinces, and the state gave them a story to live in: the “Recovered Territories” were said to have been Polish under the medieval Piast dynasty, German street names and monuments were removed, and Lwów’s institutions were transplanted. About 1.1 million local people classed as “autochthons”, such as Masurians and Upper Silesians of mixed or Slavic background, were allowed to stay if they declared themselves Polish, and many of them later emigrated to West Germany. Historians describe a “suitcase mentality”, a reluctance to invest in houses that might be lost, which eased only after West Germany recognised the Oder–Neisse line in 1970 and united Germany confirmed it in 1990. The case shows that the transfer of people was only the start of a transfer of identity that took two generations.
Istria: numbers, motives and memory
The Istrian exodus is a test case in how numbers follow politics. Italian exile associations and some Italian historians give up to 350,000 departures between 1943 and 1956, the historians Marina Cattaruzza and Egidio Ivetić estimate about 270,000 to 300,000, and Yugoslav accounts were lower, partly because they counted Slovenes, Croats and “optants” differently; an optant was a resident who used the treaty’s right to choose Italian citizenship and so had to leave. Motives were mixed: fear after the foibe killings, which the historians Raoul Pupo and Roberto Spazzali put at about 4,000 to 5,000 including deaths in camps, hostility to communist rule and collectivisation, and the pull of Italian national identity. Yugoslav memory presented the leavers as Fascists or collaborators, and in Italy the subject was politically awkward during the Cold War, so Pamela Ballinger’s History in Exile (2003) describes a community whose memory survived in associations and the old port of Trieste. Since 2005, under a law of 2004, Italy has marked a Day of Remembrance each 10 February, and critics note that official memory often leaves out Fascist and Italian wartime crimes against Slovenes and Croats, such as the Rab camp, where at least 1,500 people died. Memory of the exodus, like the exodus itself, has tended to follow national lines.
Key places on the map
Why it happened
Poland’s border moved to the Curzon Line. Stalin insisted on keeping the eastern Polish lands the Soviet Union had seized in 1939, and at Yalta Roosevelt and Churchill accepted a border close to the Curzon Line with compensation in the west. Nearly half of pre-war Poland changed hands, including the Polish cities of Lwów and Wilno. Once the line was fixed, the people on the wrong side of it became a problem that both governments chose to solve by moving them.
The war of 1943 in Volhynia. Wartime ethnic violence destroyed belief in coexistence. In 1943–44 Ukrainian nationalist insurgents killed tens of thousands of Polish civilians in Volhynia and eastern Galicia, and Polish units killed thousands of Ukrainians in reprisal. The violence convinced both peoples, and the authorities that now ruled them, that coexistence had failed. Population exchange looked like the humane alternative to more massacres, which is why even many victims of forced removal saw it as a kind of safety.
Communist nation-building. The new communist government in Warsaw lacked popular legitimacy and sought it in nationalism, presenting itself as the builder of a Poland for Poles alone. Ethnic homogeneity fitted Stalin’s preference for clear borders and loyal populations, and it gave the regime land to distribute to settlers. Removing Germans in the west and Ukrainians in the south-east served the same project of a state whose nation and territory finally coincided.
Treaties that ceded land. Peace treaties gave borderland people a choice that most resolved by leaving. Finland lost Karelia under the Moscow Armistice of 1944 and the Paris treaty of 1947, and Italy lost Istria, Fiume and Zara to Yugoslavia under its own Paris treaty that February. Neither treaty required anyone to leave, but both gave people a choice between a new state and their home. The scale of departure in each case shows how few people believed they could remain safely as minorities under a victorious neighbour.
THE TURNING POINT
Operation Vistula, 28 April 1947. Operation Vistula is the hinge of this chapter because no border moved and no treaty required it, yet the Polish state deported about 140,000 of its own citizens two years after the war had ended. The killing of General Świerczewski supplied a pretext, but the plan to disperse Ukrainians so thinly that they could never again form a community went far beyond fighting an insurgency. The operation shows that the logic of 1945 had become self-sustaining: once states believed that security meant homogeneity, they continued to move people even when no outside power asked them to.
What it changed
A Poland of Poles. Poland emerged as one of the most ethnically uniform states in Europe, although before the war about a third of its citizens had not been Poles. The cost was paid by Germans, Ukrainians, Lemkos and Polish easterners alike, and by the destruction of multi-ethnic cities such as Lwów and Wilno. When the 1990 border treaty that closes this atlas made the result permanent, it also ended any hope among the uprooted of reclaiming their old homes.
Integration at home as a model. Finland’s resettlement of 410,000 Karelians within a few years, paid for by its own landowners and taxpayers, showed that a poor state could absorb a huge displaced population if it treated them as citizens with claims. West Germany’s Equalisation of Burdens law of 1952 applied similar thinking on a far larger scale, as chapter 6 shows. Integration at home was the solution Europe found for its citizens, and it was not on offer to stateless DPs.
Exiles in Trieste and beyond. Many Istrian exiles waited for years in camps around Trieste and in Italian cities before resettling in Italy or emigrating to Australia, the Americas and elsewhere. The Free Territory of Trieste, divided between Allied and Yugoslav administration, was settled only in 1954, when Italy took the city and Yugoslavia the hinterland, setting off a last wave of departures from the Yugoslav zone. Magazzino 18, a warehouse in Trieste’s old port, still holds the furniture many of them never reclaimed.
Displaced persons who would not go east. Many of the Ukrainians, Poles and Balts already in German camps in 1945 came from the very regions now annexed by the Soviet Union. Since their homes now lay inside the USSR, “going home” meant becoming Soviet citizens, and most refused. Their refusal shaped the DP camps and the Cold War politics of asylum described in chapter 4, where the right to refuse return became the core of refugee protection.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Did the population transfers of 1944–1947 end ethnic conflict in east-central Europe, or did they complete it by other means?
The case that transfers ended conflict is that the borders drawn in 1945 have held: Poles and Ukrainians, Finns and Russians, Italians and Yugoslavs did not fight over these lands again, and Finland showed that resettlement could be humane when the state treated evacuees as citizens. The case that transfers completed the conflict is that they achieved the goal the 1943 massacres in Volhynia had pursued, which was a territory cleared of the other nation, and that Operation Vistula moved people with no war or treaty to require it. Snyder’s reading suggests both are true, since peace came through the success of separation. That conclusion is uncomfortable, because it implies that ethnic cleansing can produce stability, and historians answer it by counting the cost in lives, property and destroyed communities and by noting that the peace also rested on Soviet power. The insight for Paper 1 is that “solving” displacement by drawing new borders tends to create the next displaced population.
An interesting fact
Lwów carried one of its most famous objects west with it. The Racławice Panorama, a circular painting about 15 metres high and 114 metres long completed in 1894 to mark the centenary of Tadeusz Kościuszko’s victory over Russian troops in 1794, was shipped from Lwów to Wrocław in 1946. Communist authorities, wary of a patriotic picture of Poles defeating Russians, kept it rolled up in storage for almost four decades. It went on public display in a purpose-built rotunda in Wrocław only in 1985, and it remains one of the city’s most visited sights.
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