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Stor stark7 (talk | contribs) →World War II aftermath: 1939 data is referenced only for total population numbers, where source is given for polish percentage it refers to the census of 1914,1923,1925. |
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Winston Churchill was not present at the end of the Conference, since the results of the [[United Kingdom general election, 1945|British elections]] had made it clear that he had been defeated. Churchill later claimed that he would never have agreed to the Oder–Western Neisse line, and in his famous [[Iron Curtain]] speech declared that <blockquote><p>"The Russian-dominated Polish Government has been encouraged to make enormous and wrongful inroads upon Germany, and mass expulsions of millions of Germans on a scale grievous and undreamed-of are now taking place."<ref>[http://www.historyguide.org/europe/churchill.html ''Churchill's Iron Curtain'', On expulsion of ethnic Germans - historyguide.org]</ref></p></blockquote>
[[Image:Vertreibungsgebiet.jpg|240px|thumb|left|US Department of State Demographics map from January 10, 1945 Germany - Poland Proposed Territorial Changes, based in part on German pre-war population census. Was used for border discussions at the [[Potsdam conference]] later in 1945.
Not only were the German territorial changes of the [[Nazi]]s reversed, but the border was moved westward, deep into territory which had been in 1937 part of Germany with a majority German population and a Polish minority. The new line placed almost all of [[Silesia]], more than half of [[Pomerania]], the eastern portion of [[Brandenburg]], a small area of [[Saxony]], the former Free City of Danzig and the southern two-thirds of [[East Prussia]] ([[Masuria]] and [[Warmia]]) within Poland (see [[Former eastern territories of Germany]]). The north eastern third of East Prussia was directly annexed by the [[Soviet Union]], with the [[Memelland]] becoming part of the [[Lithuanian SSR]] and the bulk of the territory forming the new [[Kaliningrad Oblast]] of the [[Russian SFSR]].
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