Under the terms of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, two weeks after the German invasion of western Poland, the Soviet Union invaded the portions of eastern Poland assigned to it by the Pact, followed by co-ordination with German forces in Poland.
The Polish–Soviet border, as of 1939, had been determined in 1921 at the Treaty of Riga peace talks, which followed the Polish–Soviet War. Parts of prewar Poland invaded by the Nazis labeled area of state interests of Germany Soviet map of the newly expanded Byelorussian SSR (yellow), 1940. Soviet annexation of eastern Poland, 1939–1941 According to the secret protocol, Lithuania would retrieve its historical capital Vilnius, subjugated during the inter-war period by Poland. Lithuania, adjacent to East Prussia, would be in the German sphere of influence, although a second secret protocol agreed in September 1939 assigned the majority of Lithuania to the USSR.
Much of this rural territory had its own significant local non-Polish majority (Ukrainians in the south and Belarusians in the north).
#Hearts of iron iv poland series#
Initially annexed by Poland in a series of wars between 19 (primarily the Polish-Soviet War), these territories had mixed urban national populations with Poles and Ukrainians being the most numerous ethnic groups, with significant minorities of Belarusians and Jews. Poland was to be partitioned in the event of its "political rearrangement"-the areas east of the Narev, Vistula and San Rivers going to the Soviet Union while Germany would occupy the west. In the North, Finland, Estonia and Latvia were assigned to the Soviet sphere. Most notably, the pact contained a secret protocol, revealed only after Germany's defeat in 1945, according to which the states of Northern and Eastern Europe were divided into German and Soviet " spheres of influence". The post-World War II territory of Poland was significantly smaller than the pre-1939 land areas, shrinking by some 77,000 square kilometres (30,000 sq mi) (roughly equalling that of the territories of Belgium and the Netherlands combined).Įarly in the morning of August 24, 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed a 10-year non-aggression pact, called the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact. The number of Poles in the Kresy in the year 1939 was around 5.274 million, but after ethnic cleansing in 1939-1945 by Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and Ukrainian nationalist forces consisted of approximately 1.8 million inhabitants. The Polish People's Republic regime described the territories as the " Recovered Territories". Poland was "compensated" for this territorial loss with the pre-War German eastern territories, at the expense of losing its eastern regions. These annexed territories were subsequently incorporated into the Lithuanian, Byelorussian, and Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republics and remained within the Soviet Union in 1945 as a consequence of European-wide territorial rearrangements configured during the Tehran Conference of 1943 (see Western Betrayal). Inhabitants besides ethnic Poles included Belarusian and Ukrainian major population groups, and also Czechs, Lithuanians, Jews, and other minority groups. Seventeen days after the German invasion of Poland in 1939, which marked the beginning of the Second World War, the Soviet Union entered the eastern regions of Poland (known as the Kresy) and annexed territories totalling 201,015 square kilometres (77,612 sq mi) with a population of 13,299,000. The border was soon readjusted following diplomatic agreements. Temporary borders created by advancing German and Soviet troops.
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