Fourth partition of Poland

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Various events in the 19th and 20th centuries are referred to as the fourth partition of Poland , based on the three partitions of Poland at the end of the 18th century:

Congress Poland

Duchy of Warsaw from 1807; after the Congress of Vienna in 1815 it became Congress Poland without Poznan and Krakow

After military defeats against revolutionary France, which led to the fall of the Holy Roman Empire and the reorganization of the states of Central Europe , Prussia and Austria lost their profits from the second and third partition in 1807 and 1809 to the Duchy of Warsaw , which was formed by Emperor Napoleon , which in 1815 , excluding the area around the cities of Poznan and Krakow, when Congress Poland ("Kingdom of Poland") fell to the Russian Empire in personal union. The eastern border was roughly on the later Curzon line .

After the failed November uprising of 1830/1831, the autonomous Congress Poland was incorporated directly into the Russian Empire as a dependent province , in breach of the Vienna Congress Act . After the January Uprising in 1867, Congress Poland finally became a province as the Weichselland .

The Austrian Empire followed the Russian example by annexing the Free Republic of Krakow after the Cracow uprising in 1846 . As part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire , Austria-Hungary the Poles in Galicia, however, was in 1867 a far-reaching autonomy granted. Its autonomy was restricted after the November uprising. From 1833 onwards, the election of the Senate President had to be approved by the three protecting powers, and at the same time the Cracow police were placed under Austrian control. The Senate was subjected to the instructions of the three powers, the independent jurisdiction of the city in political matters largely abolished.

The Kingdom of Prussia followed Austria and Russia in which, after an uprising in 1848 , it directly incorporated the Grand Duchy of Poznan as a dependent province. As in Krakow, the special position of the Grand Duchy within the Prussian state was largely eliminated as early as 1830.

The sovereign Second Polish Republic was only established in 1918 after the defeat of all three partitioning powers in the First World War .

Second World War

After the German-Soviet non-aggression pact and the German invasion of Poland as well as the Soviet occupation of Eastern Poland , the German Reich and the Soviet Union agreed in the German-Soviet border and friendship treaty the “fourth partition of Poland” along the Curzon Line under (pseudo) legitimation of the ethnographic principle.

In autumn 1939 the occupiers used mass terror to pacify and establish rule in their areas. They murdered, deported or imprisoned people who were considered dangerous for their own rule. These were primarily members of the Polish leadership in the broader sense. The persecution of the Polish Jews and their later murder arose from the Nazi racial ideology, which fundamentally saw a threat in all Jews. The Soviets defined their enemies according to class and social position. Since the Poles were considered to be the ruling class and the oppressors of the Belarusians and Ukrainians, the victims of the Soviet terror included a particularly large number of Poles, but also Belarusians, Jews and especially Ukrainians.

Incorporation into the Soviet Union

Partition of Poland in 1939

The occupied Polish eastern territories were an ethnically complex and complex area in which the second Polish republic, with its often brutal polonization policy , had contributed to tensions against the inhabitants of Polish origin. For the national minorities, the Soviet occupation initially brought the chance for change.

The Soviets deported the Polish ruling class to labor camps, and in sham democratic elections national assemblies were held on October 22, 1939 in Lviv for "Western Ukraine" and in Bialystok for "Western Belarus". At the request of these assemblies, in November the areas were incorporated into the Belarusian and Ukrainian SSR and Sovietized . Vilnius was handed over to Lithuania by the Soviet Union in October 1939, at the same time as the conclusion of a forced assistance pact . The Soviet Union fell to 201,000 km² with 13.2 million people who received Soviet citizenship in November. Ethnically it was about 40% Poles, 34.2% Ukrainians, 8.4% Belarusians, Lithuanians and others. Factories, houses and larger estates were nationalized under the goodwill of the poorer classes, political parties were banned, the Polish language was replaced in public life by Belarusian, Ukrainian and mostly Russian, the Catholic, Greek Orthodox and Jewish religious communities were expropriated and religious practice was hindered.

After the German attack on the Soviet Union, the Sikorski-Maiski Agreement was signed with the Soviet Union on July 30, 1941 by the Polish government in exile with British assistance . In it the Soviet Union declared to recognize that the German-Soviet treaties "concerning the territorial changes in Poland have ceased to be in force". The borderline for the post-war period was left open.

Integration into the German Reich

The part annexed by Germany was partially incorporated into the Reichsgauen Wartheland , Danzig-West Prussia , East Prussia and Upper Silesia at the beginning of October 1939 . In terms of area and population, this was almost double the former Prussian ceded areas. The part that was not incorporated, the General Government , received a German civil administration under Hans Frank . The Generalgouvernement was to be used for the "isolation" and exploitation of Poles and Jews and was intended as a catchment basin for the population-political resettlements from the extended Reich area. The total area occupied by the Third Reich comprised 188,000 km² on which 22 million Polish citizens (around 80% Poles, 10% Jews, as well as ethnic Germans, Belarusians and Ukrainians) lived.

West shift

West shift after 1945

At the Tehran Conference in 1943 and the follow-up conferences in Yalta and Potsdam, it was decided by the Allied Western Powers and the USSR that the state of Poland should be restored but permanently shifted to the west. The German population should be "resettled". At the Tehran Conference in 1943 , the Big Three did not refer to the Soviet Union's western border, which Churchill and Roosevelt were not yet familiar with, as laid down in the non-aggression pact, but rather to a proposal by former British Foreign Minister Curzon. The extensive correspondence between the Curzon Line of 1919 and the boundary between the spheres of interest of the 1939 Pact and the Soviet western border after 1945 led to different cultures of remembrance. Eastern Poland finally became part of the Soviet Union. Its Polish minority population was resettled in the formerly German areas. In the east, based on the borders of the Second Polish Republic recognized from 1918 to 1939, it was a matter of dividing the former national territory. To compensate, Poland should gain territory in the west.

The Oder-Neisse border as the new western border of Poland was intended to make the annexation of eastern Poland by the Soviet Union at the expense of the defeated German Reich more acceptable to the Polish side. From a German perspective, this was initially accepted by the GDR in a treaty with Poland in 1950 and was long controversial in the Federal Republic. It was not until 1970 in the Warsaw Treaty and in the course of German reunification in 1990 that there was a contractual arrangement with the whole of Germany.

literature

  • Felix Ackermann : The fourth partition of Poland? In: Hahn u. Traba (ed.): German-Polish places of memory . Volume 1, Schöningh 2015, ISBN 978-3-506-77338-8 , pp. 343-358.
  • Martin Broszat : National Socialist Poland Policy 1939-1945 . Fischer 1965.
  • Bogdan Musial : The "fourth partition of Poland" - Poland under German and Soviet occupation 1939-1945 . In: The military resistance against Hitler in the light of new controversies . Ed .: Manuel Becker, LIT-Verlag 2010, ISBN 978-3-8258-1768-8 .

Single receipts

  1. ↑ So z. B. Robert Bideleux, Ian Jeffries: A history of Eastern Europe. Crisis and change . Routledge, London 1998, ISBN 0-415-16111-8 , p. 168.
  2. ↑ Ingeborg Fleischhauer: The German-Soviet border and friendship treaty of September 28, 1939. The German records of the negotiations between Stalin, Molotov and Ribbentrop in Moscow . P. 451 f.
  3. ↑ Bogdan Musial: The "fourth partition of Poland" - Poland under German and Soviet occupation 1939-1945 . P. 47 f.
  4. ↑ Wanda Krystyna Roman: The Soviet occupation of the Polish eastern territories 1939 to 1941 . In: Bernhard Chiari (ed.): The Polish Home Army: History and myth of the Armia Krajowa since the Second World War . Oldenbourg 2009, ISBN 3-486-56715-2 , p. 89.
  5. ^ David R. Marples: Russia in the Twentieth Century: The quest for stability . Routledge, ISBN 978-1-4082-2822-7 , pp. 125 ff.
  6. ↑ Joachim Tauber: The history of the Baltic states until 1945 . In: The Political Systems of the Baltic States: An Introduction . Ed .: Michèle Knodt, Sigita Urdze, Springer 2012, ISBN 978-3-531-19555-1 , p. 25.
  7. ↑ Bogdan Musial: The "fourth partition of Poland" - Poland under German and Soviet occupation 1939-1945 . P. 26.
  8. ↑ Wanda Krystyna Roman: The Soviet occupation of the Polish eastern territories 1939 to 1941 . P. 97 ff.
  9. ↑ Agreement between the government of the USSR and the Polish government in: Journal for Foreign Public Law and International Law , Vol. 11 1942/43, p. 100: Documents relating to the Soviet-Russian-Polish Agreement of July 30, 1941 online .
  10. ↑ Bernd Ebersold: Decline of Power and Power Consciousness: British Peace and Conflict Resolution Strategies 1918–1956 . Oldenbourg 1992, ISBN 3-486-55881-1 , p. 62 ff.
  11. ^ Martin Broszat: National Socialist Poland Policy 1939-1945 . De Gruyter 1961, p. 34.
  12. ^ Martin Broszat: National Socialist Poland Policy 1939-1945 . De Gruyter 1961, p. 31 f.
  13. ↑ Bogdan Musial: The "fourth partition of Poland" - Poland under German and Soviet occupation 1939-1945 . P. 25 f.
  14. ↑ Wolfram von Scheliha: The pact and its forgers . In: The Hitler-Stalin Pact 1939 in the cultures of remembrance of the Europeans . Wallstein, Göttingen 2011, ISBN 978-3-8353-0937-1 , p. 177.