Ziemie Odzyskane
On the 20th and 21st day of January in 1945, residents of the town of Opole (then called Oppeln) were forced to leave their homes. Most travelled by foot or horse-cart in the frigid winter in temperatures that dipped below 0. A resident of a nearby village recalled an ‘endless stream’ of evacuated Opole residents flooding the road between Opole and Nysa (then called Neisse) as the street grew ‘clogged with fleeing civilians’.
This was a common scene for hundreds of towns in former eastern German lands. Towards the end of WWII as the Soviet army advanced on Nazi territory, German citizens abandoned their homes. People who lived for generations in these cities left their lives behind within a span of two days. Almost 50 years later, I was born in that city once called Neisse, and much of my family today lives in the town formerly known as Oppeln. Today, people live in the same buildings others were forced to abandon 75 years ago.
Between WWI and WWII, the borders of Germany and Poland looked very different than they do today. Here is a map of how the borders looked in 1931:
1931 Borders 
15 years later, Poland’s borders shifted west after WWII. Native Germans were expelled from the towns in what was Germany’s former eastern territory. Poles—some voluntarily, some forcibly—migrated into these lands. These territories were labeled “Recovered Territories”. This wording was carefully chosen by the new communist Polish government. The official government position was to maintain that these lands were not given but “returned”. As we overlay the modern Polish borders atop the pre-WWII German borders, we are left with this image:
Historical German - Modern Polish Border Overlap 
Polish families—most of whom were devastated by the destruction of the war and were often homeless—heard of the opportunity to build a new life in the West and made the journey. Though on different sides of the war, the Germans who were forced to leave suffered the same hardships of migration as the Poles who set off to build new lives in foreign lands. Gradually, as Germans were expelled and Poles newly immigrated, life and governance resumed again.
Today, many gloss over this mass migration. WWII was itself such a momentous event that many don’t consider the logistics of its immediate aftermath. Rearranged borders displaced millions of Germans while the war’s destruction left countless Polish families homeless and destitute. By some estimates, 3 million Germans were expelled from these lands while 5 million Poles (mainly from the Kresy regions of Poland’s former eastern borders) repopulated them. Those who consider these past borders a historical relic underestimate their importance today. While they are no longer demarcated or patrolled, the legacy of these borders lives on:
German Borders Legacy 
The Formation of Poland A & B
I’ve written previously about this phenomenon. The phenomenon of “Poland A & B” (with Poland A corresponding roughly to the northwest and Poland B roughly the southeast) is well-known and often mentioned in Polish popular culture. It is of course over-simplified, and many who seek to complicate the matter talk about a “Poland A, B & C”. Regardless, it is evident that differences between regions persist.
Recently, Polish activists compiled a dataset on regions in Poland in which elected officials declared their jurisdictions “anti-lgbt” zones. They have deemed this dataset Atlas Nienawiści (Atlas of Hate) and published it online. To the extent that political and social views are intertwined, these data reflect the current state of ideological division in Poland.
Here is map of the powiaty (essentially Polish counties) demarcated as lgbt-free zones mapped onto the same Recovered Territory borders:
Powiaty “Anti-LGBT” 
Here is a similar map, but which instead uses wojewódstwa (provinces) that passed anti-lgbt legislation:
Województwa “Anti-LGBT” 
It is evident that most of these powiaty are located well-within the region considered to be “Poland B”. A simple regression of electoral results on the presence of anti-lgbt legislation in a wojewódstwo reveals a positive coefficient on the percentage of votes for PIS (the current ruling party) in the last 2019 election. It also reveals a positive coefficient on the distance from the closest point on the former German borders:
##
## Call:
## glm(formula = lgbt_woj ~ X2019_parlia_pis_perc + distance, family = binomial(link = "logit"),
## data = regdf)
##
## Deviance Residuals:
## Min 1Q Median 3Q Max
## -2.1716 -0.4690 -0.2743 0.1538 2.5572
##
## Coefficients:
## Estimate Std. Error z value Pr(>|z|)
## (Intercept) -8.449589 0.906429 -9.322 < 2e-16 ***
## X2019_parlia_pis_perc 10.208943 1.602375 6.371 1.88e-10 ***
## distance 0.020525 0.002716 7.556 4.15e-14 ***
## ---
## Signif. codes: 0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
##
## (Dispersion parameter for binomial family taken to be 1)
##
## Null deviance: 454.79 on 378 degrees of freedom
## Residual deviance: 235.43 on 376 degrees of freedom
## AIC: 241.43
##
## Number of Fisher Scoring iterations: 6To anyone following Polish politics in recent months, it is no surprise to see PIS associated with anti-lgbt views. As one might guess, Poland A and B are divided on their support for PIS. Here is a map with parliamentary electoral results from each powiat for all elections since 2005. The deeper the color, the more often across the years that powiat voted for PIS:
PIS Voting Density 
This is a single contemporary example to illustrate how political and social values differ across these lines. However, causal theories about why we see such a phenomenon are rare. This is the area in which I hope to make progress.
My Research
My current research aims to shed light on why we see such differences in Poland. This work builds on a great deal of research on similar topics.
A paper by Grosfeld, et al. looks at the effects of the three empires that divided Poland and how such effects persist in contemporary Poland. The authors found several differences in terms of political leanings, social trust and religiosity between the territories that were governed by different empires.
Another paper by Grosfeld, et al. looks at Poles who moved into “Recovered Territories” and their educational attainment. The authors were interested in the effect of forced migration on human capital. They compiled and analyzed survey data to argue that those who were forced to migrate invested more than those who did not migrate in educational attainment and other “intangible goods” associated with human capital. The logic is that migrants who lived more turbulent lives invested more in human capital which could not be taken away.
Out of all the research I’ve read on this subject, these two papers come closest to addressing why we see Poland A and B emerge. My hypothesis builds on top of both of these papers. The legacies of empire, the specific characteristics of individuals who migrated to the “Recovered Territories”, and the impact of forced migration on human lives contributed in tandem to economic, political, and social-values disparities we see today in Poland.
However, this did not happen at once. Research suggests that communism truly did act as a great “flattener”. Previous work suggests that there are no great differences in educational outcomes before Poland turned to capitalism in the 1990’s. However, my hypothesis is that there were latent differences in human capital between regions in Poland even before the fall of communism. I postulate that in “Poland A” there was a greater sense of entrepreneurship and a greater focus on education and human capital investment than in “Poland B”.
The legacies of empire intensified these disparities. Differences in railroad infrastructure and greater urbanization put “Poland A” in a better position to capitalize on its industrial resources. These developmental differences compounded on differences in the workforce (which were largely latest under communism) which in turn created greater economic value under capitalism in Poland A than B. The foreign investment that entered the country flowed into the most productive regions of the country, creating a greater rift between Poland A and B that intensified in the late 90’s as the negative effects of shock therapy wore off and economic growth accelerated. These economic differences manifested politically, giving us the differences in political and social values we see today.
Of course, this is only my hypothesis. I intend to gather data and run analysis to gather evidence to reject or accept this theory. My theory gives rise to more questions such as:
- When do such differences really emerge? Was political fragmentation always a reality even in early elections after communism?
- Is this divide growing or slowing today?
- How much does the effect on infrastructure from the legacy of empire play versus the role of human capital differences between those in A and B?
- What impact does the individual’s behavior have? Is there a “pioneer” effect or otherwise special mindset that migrants have, and does it impact macro-level differences in populations?
To add some color to this last question, I intend to focus a future blogpost on my Babcia and Dziadek. They have disparate backgrounds but both shared a new life in the recovered territories. Their stories underscore the diversity of those who suddenly found themselves in the newly “recovered” territories.