The Oder-Neisse Line: Ethnic cleansing, 1940s style

Postwar border change forces millions from their homes

By Bruce Kennedy
CNN Interactive Writer

It is a story that echoes recent headlines from Central Europe. Victorious wartime forces occupy a region, declare new borders and brutally drive out the defeated civilian population.

Episodes of so-called "ethnic cleansing" in Bosnia-Herzegovina drew international outrage. But the redrawing of Poland's borders, and the upheaval that followed it, took place with minimal condemnation from outside the Soviet bloc.

Just before the end of World War II, at the Yalta Conference, the three major Allied powers -- Britain, the United States and Soviet Union -- agreed to move Poland's eastern boundary with the U.S.S.R. westward. To offset this substantial loss of territory for Poland, the Allies further agreed to also move the western border of the re-established Polish state to the west -- at the expense of Germany.

At issue, however, was just where Poland's new western border should lie. The Soviets called for the so-called Oder-Neisse Line to be adopted -- a boundary established by the Oder and Neisse rivers, running from the city of Swinoujscie on the Baltic Sea south to the Czechoslovakian border.

Britain and the United States, realizing the numbers of Germans who would be displaced by the Soviet plan, suggested an alternative border that would have granted the Germans more territory. But by the end of the war, and the Potsdam Conference that followed in August 1945, the Red Army had already occupied all lands to the east of the Soviet-proposed line.

With this territorial "fait accompli" in mind, the Potsdam Conference concluded that Germans still remaining in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary should be transferred to Germany "in an orderly and humane manner."

But the expulsion of Germans across Eastern Europe was far from humane, or orderly. Estimates vary, but somewhere between 3.5 million and 9 million Germans were deported. Tens of thousands died from starvation, disease and violence, as the former victims of Nazi aggression took their revenge.

Norman Naimark, chairman of the history department at Stanford University and author of "The Russians in Germany," says a parallel can be drawn between the deportation of Germans in postwar Europe and the recent events in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

"Some people would argue that's not legitimate, that the Germans got what they deserved," he says, "that ethnic cleansing has certain moral connotations. They (the Germans) did horrible things to the Poles, so the Poles drove them out. But it is the same thing, to seize territory from people who might have a claim to it."

In 1950, East Germany signed a treaty with Warsaw recognizing the Oder-Neisse Line as its permanent eastern boundary with Poland. West Germany, however, viewed the actions of the rival eastern government with suspicion -- and called the line a temporary administrative border. Not until 1970, as West Germany worked to improve its relations with the Soviet bloc, did the Bonn government sign accords that acknowledged the Oder-Neisse Line as Poland's legitimate and inviolable border. And in 1991, a reunified Germany reaffirmed that border with Poland.

But the deportation of Germans still haunts many in Germany. Groups representing the so-called Sudeten Germans, who were thrown out of Czechoslovakia, remain influential in German politics. And relations between Germany and the Czech Republic have been strained in recent years over the issue of compensation for property and land confiscated from the Germans.

Herbert Hupka, deputy chairman of the German Union of the Expelled, was vilified for years by the Polish communist media as a historical revisionist who wanted to take back what are now Poland's western territories. Hupka has acknowledged that material compensation is not possible, but he adds the past cannot be ignored.

"Just as Poles have the right to point out past grievances, we also have the right to talk about things that hurt our interests," he said in a 1996 interview with a Polish periodical. "As a result of the events that transpired in 1989-90, we can finally communicate and present differing points of view. I'm convinced Poland and Germany will develop friendly relations, but it will take time."