Bierut Decrees

Bierut Decrees is a direct translation of a German-coined political phrase Bierut-Dekrete, used only in Germany by bodies representative of the cross-border interests of the ethnic Germans expelled from Poland in the aftermath of the Second World War. The term is referring incorrectly to a series of decrees, laws and regulations enacted by the Provisional Government of National Unity between 1945 and 1946 concerning the expulsions and the property issues arising from them. The "Bierut Decrees" are named after Bolesław Bierut, installed by the occupying Soviet forces as the leader of communist government of Poland between 1944 and his death in Moscow in 1956. The term also presents a conscious echo of the Beneš decrees which have been seen by critics as providing a blue print for the ethnic cleansing of German and Hungarian minorities from Czechoslovakia between 1945 and 1948. Bierut functioned as head of the Provisional National Council, a Soviet influenced quasi-parliament (Krajowa Rada Narodowa), from 1944 to 1947.

Following German defeat in May 1945, political leaders from the allied powers met at Potsdam between July 17 and August 2 in order to progress agreement on the post-war settlement. Russian plans for Germany and Poland involved reducing Germany and forcible annexation of the eastern half of the prewar Poland into the outlying republics of the Soviet Union. The Soviet acquisitions first proposed in the 1939 agreement with Adolf Hitler, were defined by the terms of the secret protocol of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (in 1945 for most purposes the Nazi-Soviet agreement was still a secret). On the western side of Poland the border was to be moved westward at the expense of Germany, to a new frontier following the Rivers Oder and Neisse. By the time of the Potsdam conference, Poland and eastern Germany were already occupied by Russian troops. A puppet government, loyal to Moscow, was well advanced with the systematic consolidation of control over Poland as defined according to the new de facto frontiers. The westward relocation of Poland became part of the agreed approach of the Potsdam conference.

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