Bierut decrees

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" Bierut-Dekrete " is a term coined by representatives of the German expellee associations for the decrees, ordinances and laws issued by the Polish government in 1945 and 1946, the property and civil rights of Germans expelled from East Prussia , Pomerania , Silesia and East Brandenburg as well of ethnic Germans from the territory of Poland in the borders before September 1, 1939.

They were named after Bolesław Bierut - obviously based on the Czech Beneš decrees . For a long time the term only circulated in the expellees' press, but the term was later adopted by daily newspapers. In historical studies, however, the term is not used.

In the "Bierut Decrees" a distinction must be made between those provisions which concerned the Oder-Neisse areas that came under Polish sovereignty in 1945 and those which, from the Warsaw perspective, lay the legal basis for the expropriation and expulsion of members of the German minority in the Second Polish Republic created.

The term is not used in Poland. The term is probably used in the singular (“Bieruts Decree”), it describes the decree of October 25, 1945 “on the ownership and use of land in the area of ​​the capital Warsaw”, the subject of numerous controversies about reprivatisation after the political revolution and reform 1989/90 was.

Provisions for the expulsion of the German minority

The decree and law "on the expulsion of hostile elements from the Polish national community" of 1945 and the decree of 13 September 1946 on the "exclusion of persons of German nationality from the Polish national community" affected the German minority in the Second Polish Republic . As a result, they collectively lost their Polish citizenship without checking on a case-by-case basis.

Provisions for the expulsion of the Reich Germans

Since the inhabitants of the Oder-Neisse areas had never been Polish citizens , there was no need for an expatriation law. The "Law of May 6, 1945 on Abandoned and Abandoned Assets" and the "Decree of March 8, 1946 on Abandoned and Formerly German Assets", which concerned the eastern territories that came under Polish sovereignty, were based on the premise that assets had been "abandoned" or "given up" by the German population, but in fact meant the expropriation of the Germans expelled from there, whose return was prevented by the Red Army and Polish troops after the end of the fighting . In the opinion of all German federal governments, the expulsion was contrary to international law.

According to Polish legal opinion, the Potsdam Conference (July 17 - August 2, 1945) legally sanctioned the transition of the Oder-Neisse areas into the Republic of Poland. German legal experts pointed out that even according to this legal opinion, some of the decrees had no legal basis, as they had been issued in the months before. In terms of content, the laws and decrees of 1946 reinforce and supplement the legal acts from the first half of 1945.

Decrees in detail

  • Decree of the Council of Ministers of February 28, 1945 on the exclusion of hostile elements from the Polish national community.
  • Law of 6 May 1945 on the expulsion of hostile elements from the Polish community.
  • Law of May 6, 1945 on abandoned and abandoned property.
  • Law of January 3, 1946 concerning the takeover of the basic branches of the national economy into the property of the state.
  • Decree of March 8, 1946 on abandoned and formerly German assets.
  • Ordinance of the Minister for the Regained Territories of March 24, 1946 on the implementation of a registration of former German movable property.
  • Decree of September 13, 1946 on the expulsion of persons of German nationality from the Polish national community

Controversy of 2002

The Bavarian Prime Minister Edmund Stoiber , candidate for chancellor of the CDU and CSU in the federal election in 2002 , repeatedly demanded that Warsaw repeal the “Bierut Decrees”, which he said are not “compatible with the European legal order”. Stoiber's statements aroused unrest in Poland. The Polish historian Włodzimierz Borodziej then demonstrated that the controversial decrees had "long expired" and that they were no longer being applied. However, the administrative acts made on the basis of the decrees remained valid. In 2008, the European Court of Human Rights declared that it was not responsible for the requests for their repeal and thus sanctioned the consequences of the decrees.

literature

  • Włodzimierz Borodziej , Hans Lemberg (Ed.): The Germans east of Oder and Neisse 1945–1950. “Our homeland has become a foreign country to us” ... documents from Polish archives. Herder Institute, Marburg:
  • Sigrid Krülle: The Polish expropriation measures in the eastern areas of the German Reich, in Poland and the Free City of Danzig. Bonn 1993.
  • Niels von Redecker: The Polish expulsion decrees and the open property issues between Germany and Poland. Peter Lang Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2003, ISBN 3-631-50624-4 .
  • Arno Surminski : Flight and Expulsion. Europe between 1939 and 1948. Ellert & Richter, Hamburg 2004, ISBN 3-8319-0173-2 ( table of contents ).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Anna Wolff-Powęska, Dieter Bingen (ed.): Neighbors at a distance: Poles and Germans 1998-2004. Volume 19 of publications of the German Poland Institute Darmstadt, Harrassowitz, 2005, ISBN 3-447-05095-0 , p. 200. Brigitte Jäger-Dabek: Poland: a neighborhood customer for Germans. Ch. Links Verlag, 2006, ISBN 3-86153-407-X , p. 118.
  2. ↑ Klątwa Bieruta ciąży Warszawie. Rząd pomoże ją zdjąć? newsweek.pl , May 25, 2016.
  3. ↑ Decree z dnia 26 października 1945 r. o własności i użytkowaniu gruntów na obszarze m. st. Warszawy
  4. ↑ Józef Kokot / Gwidon Rysiak, Polish citizenship. Principles - acquisition - loss, in: citizenship, basic social rights, economic cooperation according to the law of the Federal Republic of Germany and the People's Republic of Poland. Edited by Józef Kokot / Krzysztof Skubiszewski . Opole 1976, p. 34.
  5. ↑ Sigrid Krülle: The Polish expropriation measures in the eastern territories of the German Empire, Poland and the Free City of Danzig. Volume 1. Bonn 1993, p. 10.
  6. ↑ The expulsion in German memory: legends, myth, history. Edited by Hans Henning Hahn , Eva Hahn . Paderborn / Vienna / Munich / Zurich, p. 586.
  7. ↑ Krzysztof Skubiszewski: Wysiedlenie Niemców z Polski po II wojnie światowej . Warsaw 1968, p. 7.
  8. ^ Peter Chmiel, The structure of the Polish administration in Upper Silesia after 1945, in: Contributions to the history of Silesia in the 19th and 20th centuries . Eds. Peter Chmiel, Helmut Neubach and Nikolaus Gussone. Dülmen 1987, pp. 118-133.
  9. ↑ Piotr M. Majewski, The main actors of the recent Polish debates on the subject of forced migration, in: Thomas Strobel / Robert Maier (Eds.): The subject of displacement and German-Polish relations in research, teaching and politics. Hanover 2008, p. 55.
  10. ↑ Włodzimierz Borodziej, Dekrety Bieruta? Ustawy dyskryminujące Niemców już dawno utraciły w Polsce moc prawną, in: Dialog. Magazyn polsko-niemiecki , 61 (2002), pp. 21-22.
  11. ↑ Does Poland exclude Germans from compensation? faz .net , April 15, 2008.
  12. ^ RM Douglas: "Orderly transfer": the expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War. Munich 2013, p. 423