Recovered Territories - Origin and Use of The Term

Origin and Use of The Term

The term "Recovered Territories" was officially used for the first time in the Decree of the President of the Republic of 11 October 1938 after the annexation of Zaolzie by the Polish army. It became the official propaganda term coined in the aftermath of World War II to denote the former eastern territories of Germany that were being handed over to Poland. The underlying concept was to define post-war Poland as heir to the medieval Piasts' realm, which was simplified into a picture of an ethnically homogeneous state that matched post-war borders, as opposed to the later Jagiellon Poland, which was multi-ethnic and located further east. The argument that this territory in fact constituted "old Polish lands" seized on a pre-war concept developed by Polish right-wing circles attached to the SN.

One reason for post-war Poland's favoring a Piast rather than a Jagiellon tradition was Joseph Stalin's refusal to withdraw from the Curzon line and the Allies' readiness to satisfy Poland with German territory instead. The original argument for awarding formerly German territory to Poland – compensation – was complemented by the argument that this territory in fact constituted former areas of Poland. Dmitrow says that "in official justifications for the border shift, the decisive argument that it presented a compensation for the loss of the eastern half of the pre-war Polish territory to the USSR, was viewed as obnoxious and concealed. Instead, a historical argumentation was foregrounded with the dogma, Poland had just returned to 'ancient Piast lands.'" Objections to the Allies' decisions and criticism of the Polish politicians' role at Potsdam were censored.

Also, the Piasts were perceived to have defended Poland against the Germans, while the Jagiellons' main rival had been the growing Duchy of Moscow, making them a less suitable basis for post-war Poland's Soviet-dominated situation. The PRL and PPR thus supported the idea of Poland based on old Piast lands. In fact, the question of the Recovered Territories was one of the few issues that did not divide the Polish Communists and their opposition, and there was unanimity regarding the western border. Even the underground anti-Communist press called for the Piast borders, that would end Germanisation and Drang nach Osten.

Great efforts were made to propagate the view of recovered Piast territory, which were actively supported by the Catholic Church. The sciences were responsible for the development of this perception of history. In 1945 the Western Institute (Polish: Instytut Zachodni) was founded to coordinate the scientific activities. Its director, Zygmunt Wojciechowski, characterized his mission as an effort to present the Polish history of the region, and project current Polish reality of these countries upon a historical background. Historical scientists, archaeologists, linguists, art historians and ethnologists worked in an interdisciplinary effort to legitimize the new borders. Their findings were popularised in monographs, periodicals, schoolbooks, travel guides, broadcasts and exhibitions. Official maps were drawn showing that the Polish frontiers under the first known Piast princes matched the new ones. According to Norman Davies the young post war generation received education informing them about the fact that the boundaries of the People's Republic were the same as those on which the Polish nation had developed for centuries. Furthermore, they were instructed that the Polish "Motherland" has always been in the same location, even when occupied for long periods of time by foreigners or as political boundaries shifted. The official view was that the Poles had always had the inalienable and inevitable right to inhabit the Recovered Territories, even if prevented from doing so by foreign powers. As a consequence, the Piast concept was accepted by millions of Poles and is still believed by many. Furthermore, the Piast concept was used to persuade the Allied Powers, who found it difficult to define a Polish "ethnographic territory", to assume that it would be an intolerable injustice to not "give the territories back".

Due to fact that the Recovered Territories had been under German and Prussian rule for many centuries, many events of this history were perceived as part of "foreign" rather than "local" history in post-war Poland. Polish scholars thus concentrated on the Polish aspects of the territories: mediaeval Piast history of the region, the cultural, political and economic bonds to Poland, the history of the Polish-speaking population in Prussia and the "Drang nach Osten" as a historical constant since the Middle Ages.

By 1949 the term "Recovered Territories" had been dropped from Polish communist propaganda, but it is still used occasionally in common language. On the grounds that those areas should not be regarded as unique territories within the Polish state, the authorities began to refer to them instead as the "Western and Northern Territories". Wolff and Cordell say that that along with the debunking of communist historiography, "the 'recovered territories' thesis has been discarded", and that "it is freely admitted in some circles that on the whole 'the recovered territories' had a wholly German character", but that this view has not necessarily been transmitted to the whole of Polish society. The term was also used outside Poland. In 1962 pope John XXIII referred to those territories as the western lands after centuries recovered, and did not revise his statement, even under pressure of the German embassy. The term is still sometimes considered useful, due to the Polish existence in those lands that was still visible in 1945, by some prominent scholars, such as Krzysztof Kwaśniewski .

After at the end of the Second World War, the Soviet Union annexed the Polish territories in the east, and encouraged or forced the Polish population from the region to move west. In the framework of the campaign, the Soviets put up posters in public places with messages that promised a better life in the West