Postwar in no man's land : Germans, Poles, and Soviets in the rural communities of Poland's new territories, 1945-1948
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation examines what happened to the vast landed estates of Prussia's nobility in the former German territories assigned to Poland after Nazi Germany's defeat in 1945. I follow these estates and their villages from their occupation by the Red Army, to the expulsion of their German inhabitants, through the subsequent resettlement of the land by Poles. The transformation of these estates into Polish farms involved the forced resettlement of millions of Poles and Germans and an attempt by Polish authorities to convert large capitalist agricultural enterprises into smaller holdings or state farms expected to operate in the new country's socialist economy. While previous works have studied the transformation of western Poland's urban spaces, this study shows how rural communities and the land they depended on changed as a result of war, forced migration, and regime change. The forced migrations accompanying the end of World War II in Central Europe resulted from the Allies' decisions establishing the new postwar European order. During three separate conferences, the leaders of the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union decided to shift Poland's borders westwards by several hundred kilometers. This would allow the Soviet Union to keep former Polish lands in the east, which Stalin had first invaded in 1939, and would compensate Poland for that loss with German territory in the west. While the western Allies acceded to Soviet and Polish demands that the German population from these territories had to be transferred, they left the final decision on the exact run of the new Polish-German border to a future peace conference which never took place. While Polish authorities began to expel Germans from the lands provisionally placed under their administration, Polish settlers arriving in this territory from the center and former east of the country remained uncertain that their settlement would be permanent. The movement of millions of people in the aftermath of a destructive war did not happen overnight. Long after the fighting had ended hundreds of thousands of Germans continued to live and work on the large estates of Poland's sparsely populated northwestern countryside. As a result German citizens, Polish settlers, and Red Army soldiers lived alongside one another for at least four years following the war. Their everyday life in this contested space is the subject of this dissertation.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2015 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Matro, Katharina |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of History. |
| Primary advisor | Naimark, Norman M |
| Primary advisor | Sheehan, James J |
| Thesis advisor | Naimark, Norman M |
| Thesis advisor | Sheehan, James J |
| Thesis advisor | Jolluck, Katherine R |
| Thesis advisor | Weiner, Amir, 1961- |
| Advisor | Jolluck, Katherine R |
| Advisor | Weiner, Amir, 1961- |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Katharina Matro. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of History. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2015. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2015 by Katharina Matro
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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