As East German Communist Boss Walter Ulbricht began a state visit to Poland last week, his special rolled into Warsaw 22 minutes late. “Polish sloppiness,” growled an outraged German Communist. No less sourly, many a citizen of Warsaw noted that the black-red-and-gold flags scattered throughout Warsaw in Ulbricht’s honor were the first German flags to fly over the city since Hitler’s occupation troops were driven out.
Awkward as all this was, State Visitor Ulbricht and his hosts did their dogged best to ignore the fact that even 13 years of joint servitude to Moscow has not wiped out the ancient hostility between Poles and Germans. Poland’s Wladyslaw Gomulka, bundled up against Warsaw’s icy wind, greeted Ulbricht with the promise that “we will do all in our power to strengthen the international position of the German Democratic Republic.” In return, Walter Ulbricht declared that he brought with him “the indestructible friendship of the German people.”
Behind this insincere reconciliation lay not the dream of Marxist brotherhood but power politics. What moved Gomulka to embrace Ulbricht’s seedy puppet regime was one of the most powerful levers in Central European diplomacy—the future of the Oder-Neisse frontier between Poland and Germany. It is a question that agitates both sides of the Iron Curtain, and will play a large part in any future Western dickering with Khrushchev.
Moving West. The exact shape of Poland today (as so often in the past) is not the result of nature or of justice, but of the machinations of outsiders. In the closing months of World War II, the Russians coolly announced that they intended to keep permanently the 68,667 sq. mi. of eastern Poland, beyond the so-called Curzon line, which they had grabbed in the piping days of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. As compensation, Stalin proposed to give the Poles large chunks of the provinces of East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia—all in all, some 38,660 sq. mi. of former German territory, including coal deposits richer than those of the Ruhr.
At Teheran and Yalta, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill gave their approval to the idea of “moving Poland West,” and when the Polish government in exile demurred, Churchill bluntly told the House of Commons that henceforth Poland “must honestly follow a policy friendly to Russia.” When protests were raised over Polish plans to expel the entire German population of the “recovered territories”—between 4,800,000 and 5,800,000 Germans were ultimately driven out of the area, mostly to West Germany—Labor Party Leader Clement Attlee declared that the Germans “are not entitled to appeal on the basis of moral laws that they have disregarded.”
But while Russia argued that Poland’s western frontier should run along the Oder and Western Neisse rivers, Britain and the U.S. held out for the Oder and Eastern Neisse. Unable to settle this detail, the Big Three agreed at Potsdam to postpone final determination of Poland’s border until the final peace treaty with Germany. In the meantime, they decided, Poland should have the real estate.
Ruling Obsession. The coming of the cold war, and of West Germany’s increasing importance in the Western alliance, has brought a shift in U.S. and British sympathies. Though Russia and all its satellites (including East Germany) have recognized the Oder-Neisse frontier as permanent, their recognition has no real validity—except that Poland has the land.
Washington and London stick to the letter of the Potsdam Agreement, insisting—with impeccable legality—that as long as there is no German peace treaty, Poland’s western border remains an open question. For Poland, which has moved about one-quarter of its population into the “recovered territories,” the Western stand raises nightmare possibilities. To win final international acceptance of the Oder-Neisse line has become a ruling obsession of Polish foreign policy.
Since Poland’s bloodless October 1956 rising, Moscow has brought Communist Wladyslaw Gomulka back into line, and Gomulka has worked to restore Communist control over his people. The Poles’ fear of Germany has been Moscow’s most effective weapon. Every so often Poles begin to fear that Khrushchev might rejigger the border in favor of East Germany. Under this kind of pressure, Gomulka noisily supports Russia’s current campaign against West Berlin. Playing skillfully on Poland’s fear of Germany, Visitor Walter Ulbricht declared last week: “As Hitler wanted to conquer Silesia, Danzig and other Polish territory, so Adenauer wants to remove the Oder-Neisse peace border.”
In fact, Adenauer’s government promises never to seek to recover Germany’s so-called “lost territories” by force. The millions of onetime refugees have been absorbed into prosperous West Germany. They talk less and less of returning to their old homes, and are no longer a disquieting factor in West German politics. Two years ago, new in his job, West German Foreign Minister Heinrich von Brentano casually told reporters in London that Bonn might be willing to renounce the eastern territories permanently, and was slapped down by Adenauer, who later said that German claims to the area “will never be surrendered.” But last year, hoping that West German diplomacy might be able to help shake the Soviet grip on Poland, Adenauer felt it politically safe to issue a public hint to the Poles that he did not intend to press for revision of the Oder-Neisse line.
If Poland does not yet have clear title to the Oder-Neisse frontier, the man most to blame is Gomulka himself. The U.S., Britain and Bonn have all weighed the cold war advantages of recognizing Polish claims, balancing the inevitable popular outcry in West Germany against the possibility of increasing Polish independence of Russia. Such a trump card might be a valuable one to play one day, but no one sees any reason to consider it now, while Gomulka shows a growing tendency to parrot all of Moscow’s foreign policy attitudes towards the West.
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