Did the 1944–47 population transfers end ethnic conflict?

The short answer

• Poland’s border moved to the Curzon Line. Stalin insisted on retaining the eastern Polish lands seized by the Soviet Union in 1939. At Yalta, Roosevelt and Churchill accepted a border close to the Curzon Line, with western land as compensation. Nearly half of prewar Poland, including Lwów and Wilno, changed hands. The line left people under a different state; the governments chose to move them across it.
• The war of 1943 in Volhynia. The massacres of 1943–44 made coexistence difficult to imagine. Ukrainian nationalist insurgents killed tens of thousands of Polish civilians in Volhynia and eastern Galicia, while Polish units killed thousands of Ukrainians in reprisal. Against the prospect of more massacres, population exchange could appear to authorities and many victims as a path to safety, even when removal was forced.
• Communist nation-building. Poland’s new communist government needed support it could not assume it possessed. Nationalism offered one claim to legitimacy: it could present itself as building a Poland for Poles. Homogeneity also suited Stalin’s preference for clear borders and loyal populations, and vacated western land could be distributed to settlers. Removing Germans and Ukrainians served the project of bringing nation and territory together.
• Treaties that ceded land. Finland lost Karelia under the 1944 Moscow Armistice and the 1947 Paris treaty. Italy’s treaty that February ceded Istria, Fiume and Zara to Yugoslavia. Neither required inhabitants to depart, but staying meant living under a new state. Most left, suggesting how few believed they could remain safely as minorities under a victorious neighbor.

What it changed

A Poland of Poles. Before the war roughly a third of Poland’s citizens were not Poles. War and forced movements left it among Europe’s most ethnically uniform states. Germans, Ukrainians, Lemkos and Polish easterners lost homes, while the multi-ethnic life of Lwów and Wilno was destroyed. The 1990 border treaty made the settlement permanent and ended uprooted people’s hopes of reclaiming their former homes.

Integration at home as a model. Finland’s 410,000 Karelians were resettled within a few years, with landowners and taxpayers contributing the resources. Even a poor state could absorb a large displaced population when it recognized them as citizens with claims. West Germany’s 1952 Equalisation of Burdens law applied similar thinking on a much larger scale, as chapter 6 explains. Stateless displaced persons had no home state from which to claim the same provision.

Exiles in Trieste and beyond. For many Istrian exiles, departure led first to years in camps near Trieste or in Italian cities, then to settlement in Italy or emigration to Australia, the Americas and elsewhere. The Free Territory of Trieste remained divided between Allied and Yugoslav administrations until 1954. Italy then took the city and Yugoslavia the hinterland, prompting a final departure from the Yugoslav zone. At Magazzino 18 in Trieste’s old port, furniture some exiles never reclaimed still remains.

Displaced persons who would not go east. Many Ukrainians, Poles and Balts in German DP camps in 1945 had homes in regions now annexed by the Soviet Union. Returning meant becoming Soviet citizens, and most refused. That decision shaped camp life and Cold War asylum politics; chapter 4 follows the right to refuse return as it became central to refugee protection.