ON THIS DAY · 14 NOVEMBER 1990

German–Polish Border Treaty

14 Nov 1990 — In Warsaw the foreign ministers of united Germany and Poland sign a treaty confirming the Oder–Neisse line as their permanent border. Forty-five years after Potsdam, the frontier that had uprooted millions became final in international law.

The moment in context

The causes of displacement were alike in mechanism and different in kind. In both regions victorious powers acted on plans for the societies they now controlled, and those plans decided who had to leave. In Europe the plan was territorial and national: Poland was moved west, Germany was cut back, and states removed minorities to make borders and nations match, a project Nazi Germany had begun with its own expulsions and the Allies endorsed at Potsdam, their conference of 1945. In Indochina, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, the plan was social and revolutionary: re-education camps, collectivised trade and the emptying of cities targeted classes and political enemies, and the break with China turned the Hoa, Vietnam’s ethnic Chinese, into a suspect minority. Ethnicity ran through both, as the expulsion of Germans and the departures of the Hoa show, and so did the Cold War, the rivalry of the American-led West and the Soviet bloc, which turned people fleeing communism into evidence for the West. The European case moved far more people, and in both the dead of the journey can be counted only as contested ranges.

From Europe and Indochina refugee crises, chapter 12 of Uprooted: Refugees in Europe 1945–1960 and Indochina 1975–1990 (1990).

The place: German–Polish Border Treaty — map and full story →

The atlas that shows it

Uprooted: Refugees in Europe 1945–1960 and Indochina 1975–1990

12 CHAPTERS · AN INTERACTIVE SITUATION MAP