Görlitz Agreement

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Józef Cyrankiewicz and Otto Grotewohl go to the Kulturhaus to sign the border agreement, July 6, 1950

As Treaty of Zgorzelec (also Görlitz contract , Görlitz border treaty or agreement of Zgorzelec ) of the border treaty between being German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Polish People's Republic called on 6 July 1950 in Zgorzelec , which since 1945 the Polish part of Görlitz closed has been. He describes the Oder-Neisse line as the "state border between Germany and Poland".

Stamp issue for the 20th anniversary of the Görlitz Agreement (GDR 1970)
Görlitz Agreement: Wilhelm Pieck and Bolesław Bierut symbolically shake hands across the Oder-Neisse border.
Postage stamp of the GDR 1951

Part of the Potsdam resolutions of August 2, 1945 was a provisional "Agreement on Poland's western border" (IX. Poland point b), according to which the Oder-Neisse line was established as the border line between the Soviet occupation zone and Poland . In the run-up to this, Great Britain had accepted the Oder line including Stettin's to the Polish government-in-exile , without specifying the course in the southern part. The US, in turn, had decided to back any deal Poland, Britain and the Soviet Union might find. The Soviet Union insisted on the Lusatian Neisse , while Great Britain still insisted on the Yalta Conference on the Glatzer Neisse , which runs further east. At the instigation of Josef Stalin , the Lusatian Neisse became a border river. A borderline along the Oder and the Glatzer Neisse would have meant that large parts of Silesia would have remained with Germany: the cities of Grünberg , Waldenburg and Hirschberg would have remained German, only the northeast part of Breslau would have become Polish.

The Görlitz Agreement contradicted the decisions of Potsdam, which placed the German areas east of this Oder-Neisse line only under the administration of the Polish state, but reserved the final course of the Polish western border to a peace treaty. At that time, no German government and no single victorious power was allowed to determine the borders of Germany; under international law , this competence was still exclusively the responsibility of four powers .

At the Paris Peace Conference in 1946, the Foreign Ministers of the United States and Great Britain rejected the proposal by the Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov to occupy Germany for 40 years and to establish a centralized German unified state based on the model of the Soviet-occupied zone . On September 4, 1946, the military commanders merged their zones into a bizone . In a speech in Stuttgart on September 5, the American Secretary of State emphasized the provisional character of the Oder-Neisse Line. Molotov replied a few days later that the border regulation was final. The SED turned to the Soviet course. With the Görlitz Agreement, she recognized the Oder-Neisse Line as an “inviolable border of peace and friendship”.

On June 5 and 6, 1950, the GDR government sent a delegation led by Walter Ulbricht to Warsaw , which, together with the Polish government under Józef Cyrankiewicz , drafted a corresponding declaration on the border between the two states, the so-called Warsaw Declaration of June 6, 1950 The agreed declaration was signed after internal discussions under pressure from the Soviet Union. That border largely followed the Oder-Neisse line, hence later also the " Oder-Neisse border " or "Oder-Neisse peace border " in the official GDR language. In the Federal Republic of Germany, this was initially referred to as the demarcation line , as it was not a border recognized under international law. A month later, this border was recorded in the Görlitz Treaty, but the GDR government waived the right to make border corrections despite the initially unsolved problem on the island of Usedom . The division of various towns and villages along the were or and Neisse as Küstrin , Frankfurt (Oder) , Guben and Görlitz, as well as the loss of the western Oder city Szczecin , the Szczecin Strip and mostly west of the Swine town of Swinoujscie without Objection accepted.

The federal government has in fact no longer raised claims to the areas east of the Oder-Neisse Line since the Warsaw Treaty of 1970, but only finally recognized the border in the course of the two-plus-four talks about the reunification process between the two not to endanger German states. It was confirmed under international law on November 14, 1990 with the German-Polish border treaty . The worries of neighboring European countries about a regaining strength of Germany , especially in Poland , should also be allayed.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Article 1 of the agreement of July 6, 1950, see also Article 1 of the treaty between the Federal Republic of Germany and the Republic of Poland on the confirmation of the border between them of November 14, 1990 ( Federal Law Gazette 1991 II, p. 1329 f. )
  2. ^ DRA : Document of the month June / July 2000 - Oder-Neisse border between the GDR and Poland ( Memento from November 12, 2011 in the Internet Archive )

swell

  • Agreement between the German Democratic Republic and the Republic of Poland on the marking of the established and existing German-Polish state border of July 6, 1950 (Görlitz Treaty) , in: Ingo von Münch (ed.), Ostvertvertrag II. German-Polish treaties , Walter de Gruyter: Berlin 1971, pp. 115–118.

Web links

Commons : Görlitz Agreement  - collection of images, videos and audio files