Union of Poles in Germany - World War II and After

World War II and After

Even before the German invasion of Poland, leading anti-Nazi members of the Polish minority were deported to concentration camps; some were executed at the Piaśnica murder site. The Union was outlawed by the Nazi government in August, 1939.

Members of the Polish minority who held German citizenship were subject to obligatory military service in the German regular Armed Forced; those who did not, were obliged to forced labor or emigration into the Government General of occupied Poland. In 1945, most of areas populated by the Polish minorities were located inside the new post-War Polish border, the Oder-Neisse line.

After the war, many members found it difficult to be recognised as ethnic Poles by the new Communist authorities, as some - like the Kashubians (grandfather of Donald Tusk is an example) - had served as "Germans" in the German Wehrmacht. Moreover, along with most Poles, they were unsympathetic to the Communist ideology of the new government. Unlike most of Polish society, the native Poles in former German territory sometimes had no experience of a Polish state concept, other than under Communism. Some of them, who had held German citizenship prior to 1945, emigrated en masse into West Germany subsequently, during the Communist regime in the People's Republic of Poland. (As did numerous Kashubians and nearly all Lutheran Protestant, pro-Prussian Masurians of southern East Prussia.)

Despite the war ended in 1945, the German government never cancelled the Nazi regulations outlawing the union and denying Poles living in Germany their minority rights, and despite being now a signatory to the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, continues to deny them.