The City the Germans Left Behind

After the fighting ended in May 1945, Wrocław and the whole of Lower Silesia faced an unprecedented situation: territory where German-speaking people had lived for centuries was, within a few years, to change its population almost entirely. The territories attached to Poland at the time were still home to 7.1 million Germans and 1.3 million Poles. Left behind them was property of every possible kind - houses, flats, workshops, factories, farms, the fittings of shops and offices, and also shares in industrial and transport companies. Some of the German residents left the city even before the war ended, in a panicked flight from the approaching front - as early as the beginning of 1945, around 3.6 million people left in this way from territories that were soon to become part of Poland.

How the Polish State Took Over the Property

The legal basis for taking over the former German property was an agreement concluded on 16 August 1945 between the Provisional Government of National Unity and the Soviet Union. In it, the Soviet government waived, in Poland's favour, all claims to German property in the territories that had passed to Poland. The matter was handled by the newly created Ministry of the Recovered Territories, which operated from 1945 to 1949 under the leadership of Władysław Gomułka. The administration also carried out nationality verification of residents, which decided who could stay and who was subject to expulsion. Formal, organised expulsions of Germans from Lower Silesia began after the decision of the Allied Control Council for Germany of 20 November 1945 - earlier departures had been spontaneous in character. In total, from the territories attached to Poland, including Lower Silesia, around 3.5 million Germans had been expelled by the end of 1950.

Looting: the Scale and Mechanics of the Phenomenon

Alongside the organised takeover of property by the administration, the phenomenon of szaber - the plunder of abandoned property - went on in parallel, especially intense in 1945 and continuing on a smaller scale until the end of the 1940s. Looting occurred across the whole region attached to Poland at the time: in Lower Silesia, Opole Silesia, the Lubusz Land, Pomerania, and Warmia and Mazury. Various groups took part in it. The Red Army made use of the laws of war, which allowed it unrestricted use of the resources of the front-line zone, reaching up to a hundred kilometres behind the retreating German front. Separately, Soviet soldiers acted on their own account, treating valuable items as war booty. On top of this came domestic looters - people following in the wake of the army advancing westward in search of abandoned property, and in places also groups carrying out armed robberies against the German population still remaining.

In Wrocław a trace of this practice survives in the very name of one of the places in the city. Grunwaldzki Square, the city's former grand thoroughfare, previously known as Kaiserstraße, became for the first post-war years a centre for trading looted goods - pianos, furniture, tableware, clothing, bicycles, clocks and jewellery. Residents at the time simply called it the szaberplac (loot square), and the name remained in use in the city long after this kind of trade had ceased. The law formally treated szaber as theft of state property, threatening a prison sentence of up to 15 years under the criminal code of the time, though enforcing these regulations was hampered by the weakness of the post-war administration, the general breakdown of social norms after years of war, and - as the sources note - a tendency among part of the population toward retaliation against the former residents of these territories.

Demolishing the City for Building Materials

A separate, lesser-known chapter of post-war Wrocław was the deliberate demolition of surviving, though damaged, buildings - not to clear the city, but to recover building materials from them, chiefly brick. This process deepened the destruction the city had already suffered during the fighting itself, when around 70 per cent of the built-up area was damaged or completely ruined. The materials recovered this way went towards rebuilding other parts of the country, including cities that had been damaged during the war far more severely than Wrocław was in symbolic terms - this process formed part of the wider national effort to rebuild after wartime destruction, though its exact scale in relation to specific cities requires further documentation in specialist sources.

New Residents in Other People's Homes

The place of the expelled Germans was taken by settlers arriving from various parts of post-war Poland. According to data from the 1950 census, nearly 30 per cent of Wrocław's residents had come from territories incorporated into the USSR, mainly from Lviv and its surroundings, another sizeable group from the Poznań voivodeship, and another from Warsaw itself. These people, themselves often previously stripped of their own property as a result of resettlement from the east, moved into flats and houses left by former German owners, taking over with them furnishings, furniture, and sometimes whole workshop or farm equipment. Jewish people also settled in Dzierżoniów and Bielawa in Lower Silesia, survivors of the camps and returnees from repatriation transports from beyond the eastern border - in the period from February to July 1946 alone, around 75,000 people arrived in Lower Silesia this way.

Other People's Belongings, an Uncertain Place

This way of settling the Recovered Territories - living in someone else's houses, using someone else's fittings, working in factories set up by previous owners - cast a long shadow for years over the settlers' relationship with the place where they now found themselves living. A sense of impermanence, fear that the borders might be revised, and the awareness that the property around them had not been earned by their own work delayed the building of a lasting bond with their new place of residence. Wrocław and the whole region only came to be seen as fully their own after years had passed, with the generations that followed, who were born here and knew no other home. A symbol of this process was the Recovered Territories Exhibition, organised in 1948, visited by more than a million and a half people - a show meant to convince both the residents and the rest of the country that the rebuilt city was now a lasting part of Poland.