Poland did reasonably well in land terms out of the postwar settlement

Nope, you misunderstood me.

Gdansk as other cites and citizens of the Teutonic Order, "voted" to become subject of the king of Poland.
They never decided to join Prussia they were taken by force. From 1793 to 1918 they were subject to rules, laws and schools of Prussia.
What Polonization ? Gdansk was Polish city, partitions should be nullified, that all I'm saying. That part about Gdansk being multicultural city wasn't an argument, I was showing off.


No, the Commonwealth was murdered by conspiracy and force.


It debatable and I beg to differ.
I do not contest allegiance of Germans in Gdansk in 1918. I just say that doesn't matter in my opinion as Gdansk was Polish city regardless. They would have to decide for themselves. The partition of Poland had consequents for Germans as well as for Poles.

"Unpleasant" for Poles:
- they lost their country
"Pleasant" for Germans:
- Prussia became power and unified German states.
After Poland reemerged there was few "unpleasant" issues for Germans, mostly paid by Germans living in borderlands. I'm not saying that it was nice but it was only fair.

After all loosing ones statehood is much more "unpleasant" on so many levels than loosing one city or province that wasn't rightly yours in the first place.

A state cannot be murdered because it is not a living being, besides that the violent European history is full of "conspiracies" and "murders", but surely the partition of Poland-Lithuania was one of the biggest legal wrongs of the 18th century, I won't argue that.

Look how many times the German states were attacked and raped from foreign forces in the recent Millenium. Existing as a state in Central Europe is just dangerous because you simply have too many neighbours that look jealously what you have on your table.

This is why the European Union is so important!


Looks like we are never going to find an amicable arrangement here, because it's my opinion that you cannot nullify injustice that happened six or seven generations before. Injustice expires after a couple of generations otherwise no American of European descent would be rightfully live in the Americas. Good thing is we don't have to find an agreement here, so let's just leave it.


Except for the latter part "that wasn't rightfully yours" that I don't accept in regard of Danzig, I agree with you in that point!

The German government was pretty stupid not to accept the Polish-German border of 1923. Exept for the special case of Upper Silesia the historic border between the Holy Roman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonweath was never violated from the Polish side. Even former Greater Polish cities like Fraustadt/Wschowa, Schneidemühl/Piła, Deutsch Krone/Wałcz and Meseritz/Międzyrzecz remained in the Weimar Republic.

The creation of the Free City of Danzig could have been a great gift for the inhabitants of Danzig, if they had used their possibilites wisely, but the Danzigers refused to accept this great chance. Now in the European Union a small statelet like the Free City of Danzig would bring only pros to its inhabitants. Look what influence Luxembourg has in the EU, a former bone of contention between Germany and France with less than 500.000 residents.

So....current Polish inhabitants of Gdansk would benefit from separating Gdansk from Poland ... great .... and Poland would benefit as well, or it's
irrelevant?
Look, Germany started two world wars. Poland has been devastated in both, especially Warszawa in WWII, first 25% in 39, then 70% in 44.
As result of these wars Germany lost eastern provinces by no decision of Poland that didn't even exist before WWI and was a loser in WWII, despite

having 'right' legal treaties and and hundreds of thousands soldiers fighting 'on the right side'.
Polish people want to live in peace with its neighbors. If Germany takes ownership of nazism and 'Polish concentration and death camps', if they
pay reparations for 50 years of occupation, for physical and human costs (I cannot even start to think about this), if Polish cities of Lwow and Wilno

can somehow become Polish again, then we can talk about anything and I can assure you we want Germans to feel justice. However, since such

probability is nill for the next 100 years, let's forget this subject. Let's just say that Germany losing of Gdansk and Wroclaw was the price for returning

to sanity. They needed help, and this was the price. And lasting benefit is that they see what can/will happen if they lose sanity again.

I was talking about the situation of 1920 and just pretended WWII would have never happened, pal!
Please read my posts properly. I never doubted the Polishness of Gdansk, Wroclaw or Szczecin since 1945 in any of my posts!
Besides that: Yes! The Polish inhabitants of Gdansk would benefit a great deal, if Gdansk would be an independet state, embedded within the EU. But this in never going to happen because the EU has too many states already.


One more thing: And there no longer is a logical basis for making Gdansk an independent city. The situation was much different in 1920. At that time there really was a chance for Danzig/Gdansk to become an independent state between Germany and Poland.

I see nobody in Germany, besides a few bumblebrains in the far right, that seriously challenges the current border to Poland. Even most of the refugees and their decendents have made their peace with the past a long time ago. Also, at least this is my impression, most of them have understood it was only logical and fair in the big scale of the picture, that the attempt of Nazi Germany not only to destroy the Polish state but also the Polish nation and culture would take a tribute or a payback from Germany. Some of them are still sorry it was them that payed the price and not others and this is just comprehensible.

I second that.


Indeed.

ph.news.yahoo/photos/german-chancellor-merkel-interior-mini ster-friedrich-bdv-president-photo-192056854.html

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich and President of the German Federal Association of Expellees (BdV) Erika Steinbach look at an interactive map as they visit the exhibition "Heimat Weh" (Aching for the Home Country) before the BdV annual congress in Berlin, March 20, 2012. REUTERS

Aching for the home country? A few bumblebrains?

But even the "Bund der Vertriebenen" does not challenge the Oder-Neisse border any longer since the year 1990.

I haven't seen this exhibition yet, but I know it does not concentrate on German expellees only, but tries to put a focus on the 20th century as the "century of ethnic cleansing and mass expulsions", beginning with the genocide on the Armenians in 1915, the expulsion of Greeks from Anatolia in 1922... ending with the expulsions of Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs in former Yugoslavia 1992 to 1995 and the Kosovo war of 1999.

Did you see the exhibition? Is the current German-Polish border questioned there? Does the exhibition misappropriate that the Nazis started to move millions of people around Europe if they didn't kill them in the first place. Doesn't the exhibition inform the auditors that the Nazis and their terror regime are the reason for the German exodus from Central and Eastern Europe in the years from 1944 to 1948? If not then I don't see a big problem in that exhibition.

It's gonna serve nobody if the agony of Germans east of Oder-Neisse in 1945 is tabooed, as long as it's made clear this mischief did not fall from the sky on Germans but was a reaction of mischiefs that occurred before.

Yeah, for tax reasons (and other issues).
That doesn't mean they were Polish or wanted to be Polish, especially later during the age of romantic nationalism.

And contrary to the principle of self-determination after WW1 many areas were wrongly added to Poland without plebiscite. Same as what happened to those Hungarians who were forced to join Slovakia and Romania.


I beg to differ.

WW1 was triggered by the conflict between Austria-Hungary and Serbia over the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and his wife.
Russia felt obligated to help Serbia.
Germany felt obligated to help Austria.
France had a treaty with Russia and anyway wanted revenge against Germany for 1870.
UK wanted to get rid of the emerging competitor Germany.
Turkey wanted revenge against Russia.
Everybody wanted to redraw some borders.

WW2 was essentially triggered by the British-French guarantee for Poland. This guarantee made Poland confident enough to declare war against Germany in March 1939. More on that in Poland and Britain started WW2


On the contrary, in the peace offer of Hitler to Churchill after Dunkirk 1940 an independent Polish state was part of the offer.

However, after that offer was rejected (see e.g. bbc.co.uk/history/events/churchill_decides_to_fight_on) the decision was made to change the Generalgouvernement into something like

English-Ireland,
French-Algeria,
American-Hawaii,
Russian-Kazakhstan or
Chinese-Uyghuristan.

See, there we have the five United Nations Security Council veto powers. They did/do EXACTLY THE SAME what Germany was accused of: incorporating another nation.

This double-standard is just not right.

That's a new one on me. Where did you dream up this fantasy?

LMFAO.
Oh Boy. You are insane.
Not even the most barmy Irish nationalist would compare conditions in Ireland to those in occupied Poland.

Doesn't seems to be the truth in the case of Poland. Germans are perusing their selfish interest and do not care much about interest of Poland, given their leading status in the EU it doesn't bid good for the future.


They didn't rebelled to become part of other country, so yes they wanted to be part of Poland and they had been from1466 to 1793. Romanticism wasn't even an infant then.


No area was added to Poland without plebiscite, What are you rubbishing about ?

I read your post several times because I thought I misread something in the latter part of your post. Do you really wanna say Hitler's intention was to make Poland a Dominion of Germany, just like Ireland was to England or Hawaii to the US? Even if Hitler should have made such an proposal to Churchill in June 1940 it is pretty obvious this was ludicrous attempt to led astray the Brits and the other Western allies, because the Western half of Poland was already annexed to Germany, and I don't mean the frontier of the year 1914 but also Greater Polish cities like Lodz were annexed to Germany. Millions of Poles were deprived of even the simplest human rights and being already expelled from their homes and deported to the "General Gouvernment", hundreds of thousands of members of the Polish elite were already killed. Which frontiers of Poland did Hitler guarantee to Churchill?

The occupation of Poland was something completely different from the Nazi German occupation of France, the Netherlands, Denmark or Norway, which was a rather classical occupation of defeated states during a war, except for the hundreds of thousands of Western and Northern European Jews of course.

What the Nazis did in Poland was not a normal occupation but a systematic program to annihilate the Polish nation and millions of Polish individuals. I don't wanna get too deep into that, but it appears to me you have a lack of knowledge what happened East of the German frontiers in the years 1939 to 1945, so would suggest you read a bit about what happened in the "Generalgouvernement", before you write nonsense like this, which is a slap in the faces of millions of victims and their kinsmen. Wikipedia might be a good start: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Government

-----------------------------------------

I agree with you that Germany is not the sole responsible nation for the outbreak of WWI, and that the inhabitants of Danzig were deprived of their right of self-determination in 1919 when the allies decided to create the Free City of Danzig. Obviously the Danzigers wanted to remain within Germany borders.


Ironside, I would have expected you know that the areas Prussia annexed from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: Greater Poland (Provinz Posen) and most parts of Royal Prussia (Westpreußen) were returned to Poland without a plebiscite. It is debatable if the majority of inhabitants of Westpreußen/Pomorze/Royal Prussia would have voted for Poland in 1919.

I know your opinion that you think injustice - as the destruction of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 18th century definitely was - does not expire and therefore the German inhabitants in these territories did not have the right of self determination.


Every nation if pursuing her own interests. This is not a secret. But the vast majority of Germans have learned that Germany needs to be well integrated into a European framework of co-operating states if Germany wants to be successful. Question is do Poland and Germany have the same interests. In a world where the European influence is shrinking rapidly I think the answer is yes.

nor should it be


States? Why then all this talk about political integration, about 'regionization', about national governments being to big to solve small problems, and too small to solve big problems?


Is European influence shrinking? It did after WWII, but now? It may be growing in some regions. Anyway, the common interest. After 50 years of occupation followed by 20 years of 'reformed communist' and foreign corporations' government is it hard to understand that Poles feel nervous about Germany? Not the government but German people? How do they feel about the terrible deal that Poland got after WWII, when Stalin took more than half of the country and shifted her borthers west?

The only winners of WW2 were the USSR and the USA; everybody else lost.

"Germany" can be seen as a metaphore for the German state, the German culture or for certain German regions. You are the one that sees Germany as the state only.


I think it does. The European population is shrinking in comparison with Asia, Africa and Latin America. The European economies are losing ground, too. China, the USA and most other states don't really care about Europe's opinion in world politics. But at least Europe is the only continent in the world that transports a new idea that never was there before: the idea that nations and states that were deadly enemies for centuries co-operate and try to form supra-national structures in order to use synergetic effects, because all states together are more powerful as every state for itself. This idea worked pretty well between Western European states. It is more difficult between Germany and its Eastern neighbours, which understandable after all that happened in the past, but do we have a viable alternative as to co-operate? I know trust needs its time but we need to work on that.

Did Poland really make such a "terrible deal" when its borders were shifted west? Let's be honest: Poles were in the minority in the Kresy territories. The big cities like Wilno and Lwów had Polish majorites, but Belarusians, Ukrainians and Lithuanians formed an abundantly clear majority in most parts of the countryside. Also the former German territories were much more developed.

Don't get me wrong: Like most Germans I wouldn't have shifted the borders of Poland west in 1945, and I would appreciate if Breslau, Stettin, Liegnitz and Kolberg still were German cities. But the reality of the year 2012 is different from that and this has been finally accepted from the German side more than 20 years ago, legally binding! Stalin shifted Poland's border west because he had an evil plan: He wanted to keep half of Poland's interbellum territory for the Soviet Union and he thought that Germans would never accept the Polish border at the rivers Oder and Neisse. Therefore Poland had no other alternative but to stay an ally of Russia eternally. Let's not grant "Uncle Joe" this success.

that simply not true !


Hey, people who are nervous are those who remember the war.
The point is that Germany is building that pipe around Poland - very queer!
Also they seems to underestimate importance of Belarus and Ukraine. Also there is a big miscalculation among Germans politicians, they think they can ignore Russia or deal with Russia as if independent Poland still were there ! Blunder! If they ever be real leading country in the EU that should start dealing with Russia not from the Germany-only perspective.

Then please correct me with valuable data if I should be wrong. All the demographical data I find in the net says differently, Ironside. Like this ethnographical map that shows dominant languages within Poland in the year 1937: upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/60/Poland1937linguistic.jpg


When the Nordstream pipeline was planned the Polish-German relations under Schröder and Kaczynski were really bad, so Schröder made that egoistic move. The Polish fears to be encircled and isolated again were underestimated from the German side. Mistake! Probably not the last one in the Polish-German relationship.


Agreed! The problem is, believe it or not, Germans don't want to lead Europe! It was so easy to let the Americans, Brits and French do all the politics and Germans only do business.

I would put it down to Polish-German relationship at the time, Schroder got himself a cushy job with this move and given his history there could be something more in this.


It is not about feelings, its about reality do you think that Russia would invest monies to build that costly pipeline just for fun ?


They are in the position to do it whether they like it or not so they should be doing a good job or be a major screw up once again.


Wilno and area had indisputable Polish majority, Grodno and area I think still has, As for Lwow - in Ukraine Poles are were living in so called pockets, it means if you would drive from Przemysl to Kiev before the WWI you pas areas with majority of Poles than Ukrainians and again Poles and then Lwów (Poles) and than ........Zytomerz (Poles) and to Kiev. I hope you got the idea. Hence you see one of the reasons for difficulty with border not to mention that Ukrainians are one of the youngest nations in Europe without state till 1991.

So, such maps can are only approximative, east of the border there was significant number of Poles>
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/39/Mother_tongue_poland_1931_census.png/466px-Mother_tongue_poland_1931_census.png

Yes, but they were very attached to the kresy.





They still celebrate Poland's defense of the kresy.

So what about street names? Did you rename street names in Polish cities in order to honor your lost Kresy cities after 1990? I guess it was forbidden under the communists to remember the Kresy territories in public. In West Germany every major city has its Breslauer, Stettiner, Danziger and Königsberger Straße.

A world war 2 veteren literally two minutes ago sent me this ;

Angela Merkel visited Poland,
Immigration asked "Nationality?"
Angela answered "German",
Immigration asked "Occupation?"
Angela answered "No, just a long weeked....

Lols :)

In the majority of cases no, for the simple reason that cities like Breslau, already had names like Wroclaw etc, since some of those lands once belonged to Poland so they already had names. As for the places that didn't,I am not sure.

Recovered territories? Damn commie... ;)

BTW: even in the USA there's a Breslau and a Stettin...

placenames.com/us/p827629/
placenames.com/us/p1584221/

Of course for PR reasons there was no open declaration of war by the Polish government, but their behaviour was a de-facto declaration of war:

- making their military ready,
- outrageous provocations,
- refusal to negotiate.

I am referring to the partly mobilisation of their military on on 23 March 1939 (completed on 30 August). Further Poland had refused to even negotiate over self-determination for the German city of Danzig. Further the growing Polish campaign of terror and dispossession against the one and a half million ethnic Germans under Polish rule (same for Lithuanians, Belarusians, Ukrainians, even until the 1950s public use of other languages than Polish was forbidden in Poland).

All of that escalated in March 39 because of the British/French guarantee.

FDR played also a big part in this.

bit.ly/tSWZCj

"Nine months before the outbreak of armed conflict, on 2 December 1938, Biddle told Burckhardt

'with remarkable satisfaction that the Poles were ready to wage war over Danzig. They would counter the motorized strength of the German army with agile maneuverability. 'In April,' he [Biddle] declared, 'a new crisis would break out. Not since the torpedoing of the Lusitania [in 1915] had such a religious hatred against Germany reigned in America as today! Chamberlain and Daladier [the moderate British and French leaders] would be blown away by public opinion. This was a holy war!,[21]'"

"In the West," the Ambassador told Szembek, "there are all kinds of elements openly pushing for war: the Jews, the super-capitalists, the arms dealers. Today they are all ready for a great business, because

they have found a place which can be set on fire: Danzig; and a nation that is ready to fight: Poland.

They want to do business on our backs. They are indifferent to the destruction of our country. Indeed, since everything will have to be rebuilt later on, they can profit from that as well."[30]

See also:

wintersonnenwende.com/scriptorium/english/archives/articles/wrsynopsis.html


LOL.
In the so-called corridor and in the area around Poznan there were no plebiscites. It was simply conquered.

Further in Działdowo (Soldau), Grudziądz (Graudenz), Chełmno (Kulm), Brodnica (Strasburg) and Toruń (Thorn) was no plebiscite even though all of these cities were clearly Old Prussian, not Polish.

In Upper Silesia was a plebiscite, when that was won by Germany the Allies took off Eastern Upper Silesia and added it to Poland.

Further let's talk about Southern Lithuania, Belarus and Western Ukraine. No plebiscite either, there areas were conquered by the Polish army and added into their state.


Check the timeline.
The first German peace offer was in early Sep 39. It included
- going back to status quo ante,
- Germany pays Poland for any war-related damages,
- Danzig is allowed to join Germany
- the railway/autobahn through the corridor (passing without interference by Polish officials)

This was rejected by Chamberlain.
THEN in Oct 39 Posen was annexed, and in November 39 Lodz was annexed - if for real or as bargaining chip - we will never know.

The next phase was after the Sitzkrieg, the occupation of Denmark, Norway, Benelux and France. Chamberlain resigned, Churchill became Prime MInister.
The new German peace offer still included an independent Polish state, but the Germans would probably not be satisfied with less than pre-1914 German borders. We will never know for sure because Churchill and Vansittart were strictly against any peace agreement with a strong Germany as result.

Only AFTER THAT British refusal the decision was made to make "old germanic Weichselland" (the remaining Generalgouvernement) a German province like Tibet or Hawaii.


That is what the victorious Allies are telling us. And they tell a lot of BS.

lol ?
You have been awarded a title of the PF most notorious trollop of trolling.
enjoy!

For the purpose of healing these historical issues I think there should be multilingual town signs:
Mulitlingual town signs LT, BY, UA

Doug, what is your connection to Poland. Are you just trolling because you crave contact with people, no matter what type of contact it is.

I think it is necessary to correct common historical falsehoods, as those are frequently used to dupe the public to support new wars. For instance "appeasement" is actually a good thing. When appeasement was abandoned war was the result.

As you know there are many Polish in Ireland, so far all I have met were decent people.

You don't need any Allies to tell you this. A visit at the WWII section of the Bundesarchiv in Berlin can help you.
And what happened to the millions of Poles that were alive before 1939 and dead after 1945? What is your explanation if they were not killed by Nazi Germans and Soviets?

They all wandered away, probaly went to Manchuria.