Schwerin border treaty

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The Stettiner Zipfel in the north of the Oder-Neisse border

The Schwerin Border Treaty was a Soviet-Polish agreement on the definition of Poland's western border in the Swinoujscie - Greifenhagen section . The agreement was signed in Schwerin on September 21, 1945 . This resulted in "a spatial definition of the demarcation between the Soviet occupation area on the one hand and the Polish administrative area on the other hand, which now pushed the borderline, encompassing the entire so-called ' Stettiner Zipfel ', far to the west". This agreement laid down the course of the northern part of the Oder-Neisse border .

history

Prime Minister and Minister of the " Regained Territories " Wladyslaw Gomulka (back, 2nd from right) at the airport near Stettin on April 20, 1947, with Leonard Borkowicz (2nd from left), Piotr Zaremba (1st from right).

The former New State House , in which Stettin was handed over to the Polish administration on July 5, 1945

Leonard Borkowicz (left) and Piotr Zaremba (right) 1987 in the documentary Pełnomocnik rządu (German government representatives)

Monument in honor of the deeds of Poles in Szczecin

The Polish endeavor to take power in Szczecin

During a visit to Warsaw on March 24, 1945, during which the engineer Piotr Zaremba asked permission to build the Technical University of Poznan in the offices of the Western Territories of the Presidium of the Council of Ministers , on March 28, 1945 he was appointed “Delegate of the Office for Reconstruction and planning of the Presidium of the Council of Ministers on the area around Pomerania and Szczecin ”. In the first months of 1945, Stettin was increasingly hit by air raids; in March the city was declared a fortress. On April 25, 1945, Stettin was surrendered by the Wehrmacht and the day after it was taken by the Red Army without a fight. On April 27th, Zaremba heard about the conquest of the city via a loudspeaker van of the Red Army and on April 28th, just two days after the Soviet troops took Szczecin, Piotr Zaremba visited the city with a driver and an adjutant. He reported on an empty city in which only 6,500 Germans lived. The rest had been evacuated by the German authorities. There he met the Soviet city commander of the Red Army, Colonel Alexander Alexandrowitsch Fiedotow, to whom he explained that from that moment (April 28, 1945, 2:15 p.m.) he was entitled to the civil power of Szczecin as a representative of the Polish authorities of the district of Western Pomerania . But the city commandant asked for a letter of credentials and rejected it for the time being. The embassy then went to Piła , where Zaremba received his confirmation as president of the city and an identity card from the Polish government on April 29th. After a second meeting, Fiedotow agreed to the demand. On April 30, Zaremba issued his first ordinance as President of the city on the installation of the Polish flag at 8:15 a.m. at the regional council of the former district of Szczecin on the hook terrace . This remained there until May 4 or 5, 1945. At the same time, on April 30, 1945 , the "Stettin Operations Group" was formed on behalf of Polski Związek Zachodni (Polish West Confederation, PZZ) in Poznan . In a hastily convened conference, the PZZ decided to throw 10,000 settlers from Poznan to Stettin, "which is a continuation of the military operation by peaceful means". As a result, an Extraordinary Migration Commission was set up in Poznan, but its incomplete list only showed 657 people. These were supplemented by units from the Poznan Milicja Obywatelska and the Poznan fire brigade, so that on May 4, 1945 - delayed by the war destruction of the infrastructure - around 1000 Poles from Poznan arrived in Stettin.

The German-Polish dispute over Stettin

But the day before, on May 3, 1945, the city commandant had appointed Erich Spiegel as mayor, who together with Ernst Rusch and Gustav Sobottka formed a German administration. From May 20 to June 10, 1945, the Soviet headquarters in Stettin published the Deutsche Zeitung as a daily newspaper. In the following weeks the "Operations Group Stettin" had to leave the city twice under pressure from the commandant's office, and German communists and their Polish "comrades" began to wrestle over Stettin. Both sides endeavored to build a city administration that was as extensive and well-organized as possible and to convince and win over the Soviet command for their cause.

On May 19, 1945, the commandant's office expelled Piotr Zaremba with the Polish new settlers and his administration, probably under the impression of an American protest note of May 8, 1945, from Stettin. This formed the "Stettin Operations Group" and on May 24, 1945 evaded to Köslin . On May 26, 1945, the commandant's office appointed Erich Wiesner Lord Mayor of Stettin. At that time, around 90,000 Germans and 1,600 Poles who had moved there were living in Stettin. The city's population grew by 3,000 to 4,000 people every day due to returning and migrating refugees.

On June 6, 1945, the headquarters of the "Operations Group Stettin" allowed entry into the city again, which also returned on June 9. But there were violent clashes between Germans and Poles. Erich Wiesner declared it an untenable political situation that, in view of the dramatic food supply, a German mayor and a Polish city president continued to hinder each other. The Soviet commander Alexander Fedotow also agreed with this view, so that after just eight days on June 17, 1945, he again asked the Polish administration to leave the city within two days. On June 26, the Supreme Chief of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SMAD), Georgi Konstantinowitsch Schukow , assured Wiesner full support in setting up a food supply.

The turn of the SMAD in Berlin

On June 28, Wiesner was told by Alexander Fedotow that he had received instructions from Berlin, according to which he had to hand over the city to the Polish administration. On July 5, 1945 , after this phase of uncertainty and change, the Soviet Army finally handed the city of Szczecin over to the Polish administration under Piotr Zaremba . The handover took place at 6:00 p.m. on the same day in the staff building of Alexander Fedotow, the New State House , former seat of the Provincial Association of Pomerania and the Provincial Parliament of Pomerania on Quistorp Aue, in the former library hall on the second floor of the main wing. Piotr Zaremba, in his capacity as President of the city, had this success posted on July 9, 1945 by an audience:

“ Poland!
Our striving, work and effort have not been in vain. Since July 6th of this year the city of Szczecin has been part of the Polish Republic:
Szczecin is Polish!
We must now work for our future with greater zeal and enthusiasm, so that the power of the republic leads to the consolidation of its western frontier. All of our energies, thoughts and actions should be summed up in this historical moment. I am counting on your unreserved willingness to do so. Long live the Republic of Poland! Long live Polish Szczecin! Long live the government of national unity! "

- Signed Zaremba, President of the City of Szczecin

The behavior of the allies

Exactly on July 5, 1945, the USA and Great Britain withdrew diplomatic recognition from the Polish government- in- exile in London. As a special gesture of benevolence, the US intended to publicize its recognition of the new Polish government on July 4th, US Independence Day . Jan Ciechanowski , the Polish ambassador to the government-in-exile, was able to at least change this embarrassing act for his government so that it was postponed to the following day. One day later, on July 6, 1945, the Polish-Soviet evacuation treaty was signed. Just five days later, on July 10, 1945, the SMAD and the new city administration reached an agreement on a “provisional demarcation line”. This clung to the city's western border, three western parts of the city were still in the Soviet occupation zone .

After the Potsdam Conference with the Potsdam Agreement of August 2, 1945 issued a de facto blank check with regard to the spatial concretization of the border, a border treaty was concluded between Poland and the Soviet Union on August 16, 1945, which extended Poland's eastern border to the Curzon line moved back. This established a border that was more favorable to Poland than the 1939 demarcation line. Poland got a total of 22,000 km² more, especially in the north, where the Soviet concessions were significantly larger.

The border treaty

In the meantime, the towns in the former Randow County were equally occupied by Poles to create a fait accompli. There is still a telegram from September 4, 1945, in which the District Office in Pölitz Schwerin asks for help regarding the occupation of its premises by Poles. On September 19, 1945, the Polish Plenipotentiary of the People's Republic of Poland Leonard Borkowicz and the President of the City of Stettin Piotr Zaremba in Berlin were given by Georgi Konstantinowitsch Schukow a map on a scale of 1: 500,000 that had been brought from Moscow specifically for this purpose, which now completely shows the Szczecin corner moved to Poland. On September 20, 1945, Soviet topographers from the Soviet delegation in the presence of Polish delegates in Greifswald converted the border line into a 1: 100,000 staff map. Only minor corrections were made during a site visit in the afternoon. Zaremba tried in vain to bring the entire island of Usedom under Polish administration. It failed because of the categorical refusal on the part of Russia to deviate from the plan approved by Moscow. On September 21, 1945 the agreement was reached in Schwerin . Here the Polish side was able to push through improvements in their favor for traffic-related reasons. At 4 p.m., the agreement, which was written in Russian and was accompanied by a Polish translation, was signed. Contrary to Poland's demand for an immediate handover, the handover of the Stettiner Zipfel was set for October 4th, 1945.

consequences

In his capacity as president of the city, Piotr Zaremba issued the order to transport the remaining Germans to Greifswald by rail in November 1945.

At the end of 1946 the city had 100,000 Polish and 17,000 German residents; Only in 1960 did Stettin regain the population size of 1939 with 380,000. The border was only corrected once on June 11, 1951 because of the Swinoujscie waterworks .

In Poland, like the conquest of Kolberg on March 18, 1945 and the marriage to the sea , the takeover of power in Szczecin is seen as a success of the independent Polish endeavors, which are remembered with pride. Andrzej Androchowicz made two documentaries: 1974 Szczecin - pierwsze dni ( Eng . "Stettin, the first day") and 1987 Pełnomocnik rządu ( Eng . "The Government Representatives "), in which Borkowicz and Zaremba also appeared. In 1999, Piotr Zaremba was voted the most popular Szczecin of the century by readers of the Szczecin edition of Gazeta Wyborcza .

Since 2013, July 5th has been officially recognized in Szczecin as the day of remembrance of the "seizure of power in Szczecin", which was attended by representatives of the church, the military, politics and society with a wreath-laying ceremony at the "Monument in honor of the deeds of the Poles in Szczecin", not far from the city administration, is thought.

literature

• Daniel-Erasmus Khan : The German state borders. Legal history basics and open legal questions . Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2004, ISBN 3-16-148403-7 (=  Jus Publicum , Volume 114, plus Habil.-Schr. , University of Munich, 2003)
• Jan Musekamp : Between Stettin and Szczecin: Metamorphoses of a City from 1945 to 2005 . (Publications of the German Poland Institute, Darmstadt), Darmstadt 2010, ISBN 3-447-06273-8 .
• Manfred Zeidler : End of the war in the east - The Red Army and the occupation of Germany east of Oder and Neisse 1944/45 . Verlag Oldenbourg, Munich 1996, ISBN 3-486-56187-1 .
• Stettin-Szczecin 1945–1946, Documents-Memories; published by the Ostsee-Akademie Lübeck-Travemünde and the Institute for the History of the University of Stettin; Hinstorff Verlag, Rostock 1994.
• Bernd Aischmann: Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, excluding the city of Stettin. A historical perspective . 2nd Edition. Thomas Helms Verlag, Schwerin 2009, ISBN 978-3-935749-89-3 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Quoted from Khan, Die deutscher Staatsgrenzen p. 327 .
2. ↑ Zaremba: Wspomnienia prezydenta Szczecina 1945–1950. P. 98
3. ↑ January Musekamp: between Szczecin and Szczecin , p.45
4. ^ End of the war in the east - The Red Army and the occupation of Germany east of Oder and Neisse 1944/45, p. 201
5. ↑ Final report from Mayor Erich Wiesner to the Central Committee of the KPD in Berlin on his work in Stettin from July 14, 1945 ( Memento of the original from May 10, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Stettin - Szczecin 1945–1946, Documents - Memoirs, Hinstorff Verlag 1994 
6. ↑ translated: Nasz wysiłek, nasza praca i trudy nie poszły na marne. W dniu 6 VII br. nastąpiło objęcie miasta Szczecina przez Rzeczpospolitą Polską.Szczecin jest polski! Tym większy zapał, tym większy entuzjazm winien nam wszystkim odtąd przyświecać w pracy nad utrwaleniem potęgi Rzeczypospolitej na Jej zachodnich rubieżach. Wszystkie nasze siły, nasze myśli i czyny winny być zespolone w tej historycznej chwili. Liczę na gotowość wszystkich do pracy nad zwiększeniem potęgi Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej. Niech żyje Rzeczpospolita Polska i Polski Szczecin! Niech żyje Rząd Jedności Narodowej. inż. Piotr Zaremba Prezydent Miasta Szczecina see: [1]
7. ↑ Jan Ciechanowski: In vain victory . Thomas Verlag, Zurich, p. 203
8. ↑ Bernd Aischmann, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, excluding the city of Stettin, p. 118.
9. ↑ In September 1945 in Stettin scientists from all over Poland laid down the guidelines for the Polish place names in the "regained areas" in a conference
10. ↑ The map had the Russian heading The border of Poland according to the Potsdam Conference, August 3, 1945 , and an authentication was noted in the lower right corner: Moscow, September 14, 1945
11. ↑ Bernd Aischmann: Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, excluding the city of Stettin , p. 118
12. ↑ It was about the country road from the village of Böck to the village of Stolzenburg , which stretches in an arc to the west and, after the Polish intervention, came to Poland in its entirety.
13. ↑ The Mayors of Stettin / Szczecin ( Memento of the original from December 19, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
14. ↑ wordpress