Polish population transfers (1944–1946)

The Polish population transfers in 1944–46 from the eastern half of prewar Poland (also known as the expulsions of Poles from the Kresy macroregion), refer to the forced migrations of Poles towards the end – and in the aftermath – of World War II. Similar policy, enforced by the Soviet Union between 1939 and 1941, targeted ethnic Poles residing in the Soviet zone of occupation in the aftermath of the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland. The second wave of expulsions resulted from the retaking of Poland by the Red Army during the Soviet counter-offensive and subsequent territorial shift ratified by the Allies. The postwar population transfers targeting Polish nationals were part of an official Soviet policy which affected over a million Polish citizens removed in stages from the Polish areas annexed by the Soviet Union. After the war, following Soviet demands laid out during the Tehran Conference of 1943, the Kresy macroregion was formally incorporated into the Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian Republics of the Soviet Union as agreed at the Potsdam Conference of 1945 to which the acting Government of the Republic of Poland in exile was not invited.

The ethnic displacement of Poles was agreed to by the Allied leaders – Franklin D. Roosevelt of the U.S., Winston Churchill of the United Kingdom, and Joseph Stalin of the USSR – during the conferences at both Tehran and Yalta. In effect, it became one of the largest of several post-war expulsions in Central and Eastern Europe which displaced a total of about twenty million people. According to official data, during the state-controlled expulsion between 1945 and 1946, roughly 1,167,000 Poles left the westernmost republics of the Soviet Union, less than 50% of those who registered for population transfer. The next transfer took place after Stalin's death in 1955–59.

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