Pioneers of the Wild West, 1945-1948:
Propaganda, Mythand Memory in the Polish ‘Reclaimed Lands’
Draft: do not cite without the author’s permission
Tomasz Blusiewicz
Harvard University
- The Polish ‘Reclaimed Lands’ in 1945 –an overview
The ‘Reclaimed Lands’ (Ziemie Odzyskane) was a term first coinedin Poland to refer to the territory incorporated at the expense of Czechoslovakia on October 1, 1938. The contested Cieszyn Silesia region was a source of tensions between the two states after it had been split after the 1920 plebiscite and then annexed by Poland while the world’s attentionfocused on the Sudetenland crisis. It is questionable whether the addition of approximately 230 000 new citizens and 800km2of the Zaolzie area was worth the reputational damage that the country has suffered as a willing accomplice of Hitler’s aggression. Nonetheless, the annexation was hailed as a historic victory and exploited for propagandistic legitimacy purposes domestically. President Ignacy Mościcki proudly spoke of‘the Reclaimed Lands of the Cieszyn Silesia’ and appropriate festivities had been arranged in the town of Cieszyn. Local ethnic Poles and soldiers marched through a triumphal arch thatannounced that they had been waiting for Polandto return for the past six hundred years.
The Zaolziereturned to Czechoslovakiain 1945 and Poland faced new‘Reclaimed Lands’ -now on a much grander scale. More than100 000 km2of prewar German territoryhas been awarded to Poland at the Yalta and Potsdam conferences. The transfer of thisterritorywas officially presented as a just compensation for the Polish eastern Kresy borderlandsthat the Soviet Union invaded in agreement with the provisions of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and kept after 1945. It was a necessary ‘living space’for the several million Poles who were about to be expelled from their homeland and ‘repatriated’ west.The historic task of reintegrating the Reclaimed Lands (further in the paper:RLs) had been transformed into a propagandistic cornerstone of national mobilization by the new regime. The issue wasexploited by the communist-dominated Lublin Government to buttress its legitimacy, win over support from at least a fraction of the Polish society and eventually – to establish a monopoly of communist power in Poland. Succinctlyput by the communist Vice Prime Minister Władysław Gomułka - “the Western territories will tie the nation to the system.”[1]Stalin thought along parallel lines – Poland will not be able to stand on its own feet without Soviet support because it will be threatened too severely by the prospect of German revanchism.
An unprecedented propaganda machine was assembled and put into operation to explain the necessity and the significance of reintegrating the RLs both to domestic and international audiences. The questionable origin of the term in the now-decried imperialist interwar Poland was not seen as a problem.Why did the communists consider itnecessary to make as wide an audience as possible sympathetic to the cause of making the RLs permanently Polish? Most importantly, it was agreed at the Yalta Conference that some eastern Germany territory was to betemporarilyrun by the Polish administration in cooperation with the Red Army until a definitive border treaty would be signed at thepeace conference[2]. The Lublin Government could count on Stalin’s support in pushing the border all the way west to the Oder-Neisse line, but at the time it was not yet evident that Stalin’s support was all that was requiredto secure such an outcome. The American and British (in particular) positions were ambiguous and increasingly pro-German.In addition, the London Government in exilewas still operating and of a very differentopinion regarding Poland’s new borders. In light of those circumstances, the new regime thought it highly desirable to present the Western powers with a fait accompli – the RLs already with Polish population and administration in place at the time of the peace conference[3]. Thefirst ‘settlers’ followed literally hours behind the Red Army as it approached Berlin in the final months of the war.
Domestically,the RLs were exploited as a nation-unifying cause to win popular support for the Lublin Government and the Soviet supported Polish Workers’ Party (PWP). Friendship with the now brotherly USSR was explicitly presented as the sole guarantor of the new border and the PWP as the sole political party that could foster such friendship[4]. The abandoned German property and land in the RLs offered an opportunity to proceed rapidly with the communist policy agenda–nationalization of industry and trade and agricultural collectivization, initially euphemized as ‘land reform’. The success of those hallmark policies was in turn to present a model for the rest of the old country, where such radical changes were tactically undesirable initially[5]. Furthermore, the anti-German sentiment was a convenient card to play. The reunification with‘the cradle of the Slavic peoples’ was a project that nopatriotic Pole could oppose. The Lublin Government, by portraying itself as the sole guarantor and executioner of the historic mission, was waging a battle for the hearts and minds of the Polish society. It was a difficult battle in a country were communism had negligible grassroots support, a country invaded and occupied from the east in 1920, 1939 and 1944, with its elites either buried in the Katyń forest, Kazakh steppe or Syberian taigaand the lucky survivors on their long way back from various parts of the Eurasian landmass.
The reintegration of the RLs before the peace conference was extremely difficult to carry out in practice. The biggest city of the region – Breslau – was turned into a fortress not to be surrendered until May 7, 1945. Stettin and DiePommernstellung were among the most bitterly defended parts of the Reich since they were the gateway to Berlin. Furthermore, out of approximately9 million people living in the RLs in 1939, at best 1million could beconsideredto some degree Polish[6]. The Polish officials estimated that about six million Germans who lived in the RLs in 1939 had either perished or escaped in direct consequence of military operations. It meant that there were still about three million that “would have to be removed”[7]. The transport capacity at hand was extremely limitedwith most of the rolling stock either destroyed or operated by the Red Army[8]. Most majorbridges and strategic railway hubs linking Central Poland with the RLs were gone[9]. The imposition of communist rule in Poland was not a foregone conclusion until 1948.In this context, organizing the greatest single population transfer in history[10]was not an easy task. As it was put by a prominent communist Edward Ochab, initially put in charge of the operation, it had “gigantic proportions”[11] that would pose a challenge for any government in any country even under more peaceful conditions.
- The pioneer mythand a historiographical intervention
In fact, the new regime was unable to launch anything resembling an organized population transfer until 1946 and the process had not been completed until the late 1950s. Yetaround 1.7 million ‘settlers’ found themselves in the RLs by the end of 1945[12]. How did they get there? To answer this question in detail one would have to describe each individual journey and most of them supplied enough material for an adventure novel. A train trip from Warsaw to Szczecin (350 miles) could take up to a month and involved: numerous stops and transfers, marches, travelling on train roofs and in coal wagons, high risk of being robbed or assaulted not to mention the hunger, thirst, physical discomfort and the usually extremely scant knowledge of one’s destination. In general, the first wave of settlement was based on a voluntary, spontaneous and individual decision of each person or family to go and remain in the RLs. In other words, while the government launched a massive propaganda campaign to encourage Poles to settle in the RLs already in the early months of 1945, it lacked the resources to centrally plan, conduct and secure on operation of dimensions so vast. It had to rely on each person’s private willingness and initiative to leave his or her home, embark on a risky journey and settle in a foreign no-man’s land.
The veracity of the contextsketched above is confirmed by a speech by Bolesław Rumiński, an official from the Ministry of Industry, in the Krajowa Rada Narodowa - the provisional parliament. On 5th May, 1945, Rumiński said:
“East Prussia – now it is nothing but dead cities with no inhabitants, no livestock; but whatever is still there is a great treasure for us, it has to be integrated with the national economy. […] We have to take control of it, the faster the better. Don’t wait for instructions, proclamations. The plan is simple. We have to takecontrol by means of sending at least 10 percent of the population from just across the old border – without waiting for those who will come from behind the Bug River [from the Kresy] to conduct the proper colonization. At this moment, this process of colonization, this march of the peasants, is underway. The realistic plan. Several thousand peasants have marched since May 1. The peasant understands that it has to done quickly, without waiting for the State Repatriation Agency; we have to push toward these lands like to the Promised Land.”[13]
All those who followed similar appealswere soon to be immortalized in the so-called pioneer myth. The word myth does not dismiss the reality of the endeavor, to the contrary – the evidence of this paper makes the heroic nature of the pioneers’ experience manifest. But the main focusis slightly different.I examine the deliberation process that preceded the pioneers’decisions to move to the RLs. What motivated them to make it in the context of all the serious risksthat it entailed?Where did they find the courage tosustain it? What were the most common reasonsfor and against considered and which among them were decisive? These questions combine into the central problem of the paper: what was the relative weight of the impact of the official propaganda campaign and other measures undertaken by the government compared to exogenous factors not related to government action?
An evaluation of the influence of government supplied information on collective behavior is an elusive undertaking under any conditions. The inherent limitations of such a pursuit are in this context aggrandized by the fact that not everything could be said in Poland after 1945 and that the important things were often said between the lines. Nevertheless, an investigation of diaries, memoirs and correspondence, both contemporary and written in the severaldecades that followed, combined with an analysis of the methods of state propagandabringscertain patterns, hitherto largely neglected in historiography[14], to light. The impact of propaganda’s language on how people narrated their stories of the early pioneer daysin the RLs is well visible and quite specific. The official rhetoric provided a façade of patriotic phraseology, historicand epic causes behind which a diverse set of existential reasons rooted in the dramatic postwar conditions emerge as more plausible explanations for why the pioneerssettled in the RLs. More specifically – I argue that one has to consider the state of the society after six years of war and occupation to understand why there were so many volunteers.All kinds of actions undertakenby the state encouraging to settle in the RLs might be perceived as attempt to channel the grassroots mobility potential, but not in terms of a ‘primary mover’ or ‘totalitarian control’ . What is meant by the term ‘the state of the society’ will became clearer by the end of the paper, but the annihilation of residential property and arable land, loss of family members and other traumatic experiences that can subsumed under a general category of uprootednesshelp to explain why there existed such a large pool of people looking for a new start in the new Poland of 1945.
The thesis developed above might appear too intuitive to be worth arguing. The enormous amount of destruction and dislocation in Europe and in Poland in particular has never been seriously questioned. However, there are several reasons why it is useful. First, there exists a tendency in the historiography of communist Eastern Europe to transpose the ‘totalitarian’ lens developed to understand the Stalinist period (1948-56) onto the immediate postwar years as well. The totalitarian perspective leads to a conceptual mistake of comprehending the entire Polish-German-Soviet population exchange process as initiated and executed exclusively by the state in which the importance of government control and orchestration was paramount[15]. Such a view is misleading because it minimizes the role of individual agency and spontaneous social organization and movement[16]. It also exaggerates the actual degree of control that the new Polish state possessed. Terms such as ‘forced migration’ or ‘population transfer’ widespread in literature[17]should be, I argue, used with caution and precise qualification. My research focuses on propaganda also because in the early postwar years the authorities were often not equipped with resources beyond ink, paper and words. Furthermore, most of the resources available were deployed in the literally existential struggle to establish a communist monopoly of power.A more nuanced view shouldthus be adopted in which conceptual distinctionsbetween voluntary/involuntary and organized/unorganized population transfers are seriously observed. These distinctions are necessary not only for an adequate understanding of what happened in postwar Europe, but also because the unorganized and voluntary movements preceded the organized and forced and thus presented the Polish communists witha fait accompli after they finally secured a firmer degree of control after 1948.[18]
Furthermore, among those historians who do divide the resettlement operation in the RLs into distinct phases, there is a tendency to attribute a decisive role to the effects of state incentivization[19]- from purely verbal, through material, legal and existential – as an explanatory factor behind the initial pioneer stage as well[20]. Some historians argue that the impact of information circulating in private networks could not have rivaled state propaganda in its scale and impact[21]. Such a conclusion could originate from the focus on the content of propaganda without a careful study of how it affected its audience. This is why a complimentary examination of personal accounts is necessary since it reveals the existence of considerations and sources of information independent of official propaganda and demonstratesthe vitalrole that they have played[22].
Last but not least, the sheer number of considerations in favor and against settling in the RLs and the immense complexity of the rapidly changing variables that a pioneer had to consider while making the decision is staggering. Some of the challenges are well-know to historians of e.g. the American West, but other such as political instability (two opposing governments), ambiguity surrounding the final shape of the border or the communist revolution in all aspects of social life occurring simultaneously, not to mention the six years of war and occupation, made for a decision making framework that can be merely fragmentarily captured by the word uncertainty. Due to its uniqueness and the momentous historic shifts visible in situ, this framework is worthy of a presentation for its own sake.
- Propaganda? Information?
Several book-length studies dedicated to the issue of propaganda surrounding the RLs are available[23]. Its basic outlines are mentioned in the opening paragraphs. On the international level, the goal was not only to secure a favorable peace settlement in Potsdam, but also to make the international opinion believe that Poland also held, in addition to the Red Army’s support, legitimate historical and legal claims on the RLs as well. All of the RLs were to varying degrees linked with Polish statehood, especially under the medieval Piast dynasty. The East Prussian Hohenzollerns were vassals to the Polish Crown until mid-seventeenth century and the Prince-Bishopric of Olsztyn was an integral part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth until the first partition of 1772. In terms of ethnography – about one million inhabitants of the region were brought under the heading of autochthones (non-German, Slavic natives) in 1945 – Masurians, Warmiaks, Silesians or Kashubians; most of them were somewhere on the spectrum between Polish and German. They were usuallyofficially framed as forcefully Germanized Poles. In addition, the Polish delegationin Potsdam claimed that most of the Germans living there had already escaped – an argument frequently deployed by Stalin as well[24].
The RLs were also claimed on moral grounds – as retribution for war damage; on economic grounds –the industrial areas of Lower Silesiarequired uninhibited access to the Baltic Sea for export purposes[25]; on geopolitical grounds – as the shortest border running along two big rivers making thenext German aggression unlikely, weakening the German war capacity and dealing away with the traditional breading ground of Prussian Junker militarism[26].The varying quality and credibility of justifications turned out to be largely irrelevant as long as Stalin supported the new border, which he did until his death in 1953. No Soviet official has ever officially questioned the finality of the Oder-Neisse border settlement.