Polish Newsreel 1945: Our Western Lands

[Peterski]

Translation:

"(...) After centuries of foreign rule, our western borders have once again returned to the line of Odra [Oder] and Nysa [Neisse] rivers. Our western lands, liberated at the cost of many Polish lifes, are today under guard of the ones, who have winned them over. Old towers, coats of arms, villages and cemeteries have remained imperishable evidences of the Polishness of these lands. [close-up shots at some tombstones] A great work requires great sacrifices and great efforts. A great sacrifice of blood has already been made by the Polish Nation, but now we need to put into this work great endeavours and labor. (...) Thousands of Germans had to go back to where their grandparents came from. Not a single inscription in German is making our streets ugly anymore. These lands have been populated once again by Polish people. The government gave them farms, houses and jobs. They came from everywhere - from labor camps and death camps in Germany, from Central Poland, and from lands to the east of the Bug River. They came to stay here forever, to farm abandoned fields, to rebuild destroyed cities, to make damaged factories working again. There are also the ones who were born here: autochthonous West Poles, whose entire generations have managed to preserve their Polishness here under German rule. (...)"

[Peterski]

They were like American pioneers in the Wild West, moving into depopulated, devastated territories.

In America it was smallpox which depopulated them, in Poland it was the Nazis and the Red Army:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German...Eastern_Europe

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evacua...f_East_Prussia

[Ülev]

18:26
In 1965 in Poland still lived about 2 millions of Germans, unofficially, they were forced to took polish surnames

[Rethel]

Tylko szkoda, że Polaków wygnano...

[Rethel]

they were forced to took polish surnames

Rather were written normally, according to polish azbuka.
Insted of Johann - Jan, insted of weirdly Pietschka - Pieczka.
Especially, that many of them if not majority were Poles, wannabe Germans.
Repolonization would be good for them.

It is sad, that for example Kroll and Klose were not repolinized enaugh...

[Peterski]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFCsnWALq9E

Translation:

"(...) After centuries of foreign rule, our western borders have once again returned to the line of Odra [Oder] and Nysa [Neisse] rivers. Our western lands, liberated at the cost of many Polish lifes, are today under guard of the ones, who have won them over. Old towers, coats of arms, villages and cemeteries have remained imperishable evidences of the Polishness of these lands.

^^^ Polish borders before the 1300s were indeed very similar to modern borders:

Poland in 1138 and in 1250:





Map from Piotr Eberhardt's article about Poland's western border after WW2:

https://www.geographiapolonica.pl/ar...item/9928.html

http://rcin.org.pl/Content/53298/WA5...-Eberhardt.pdf

These lands have been populated once again by Polish people. The government gave them farms, houses and jobs. They came from everywhere - from labor camps and death camps in Germany, from Central Poland, and from lands to the east of the Bug River. They came to stay here forever, to farm abandoned fields, to rebuild destroyed cities, to make damaged factories working again. There are also the ones who were born here: autochthonous West Poles, whose entire generations have managed to preserve their Polishness here under German rule. (...)"

Distribution of ethnic Polish population in the early 1900s:



^^^
Large part of Eastern Poles were either killed or deported to Western Poland during and after WW2.

Distribution in modern Poland (by region) of Poles with ancestry from former Polish Eastern Lands:



Sources: a 2012 survey by CBOS, 1950 census and Leszek Kosiński's publications from the 1960s.

=====

Massacres against local ethnic Poles took place in what is today Western Ukraine:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massac...astern_Galicia

Lithuanian Nazi collaborators and Germans also killed many Poles and Polish Jews:

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

That said, there are still large Polish minorities in modern Belarus and Lithuania.

18:26
In 1965 in Poland still lived about 2 millions of Germans, unofficially, they were forced to took polish surnames

Officially there were no any Germans in Poland after 1950.

These 2 million are ethnic Polish population who had German citizenship before WW2. Most of them always had Slavic surnames.

Some data on ethnic Polish minority in pre-1939 Germany:

https://jbc.bj.uj.edu.pl/Content/360...39_004_005.pdf

[Nomadian90']

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