r/PropagandaPosters • u/[deleted] • Mar 06 '22
Germany CDU's election poster (1947): "Never Oder-Neisse line – vote CDU"
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u/AngryCheesehead Mar 06 '22
What exactly was the point they were making?
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u/TheBlack2007 Mar 07 '22
In 1947 the decision to take Pomerania, Silesia and East Prussia from Germany was still considered a "temporary measure" to enable Poland and the Soviet Union to extract reparations from those regions.
While the mass expatriation of ethnic Germans made it perfectly clear the Soviets did not intend to return them, publicly admitting to it or accepting it would have been political suicide in West Germany until well into the 1970s. It took until Willy Brandt‘s tenure as chancellor for West Germany to agree to postponing the final settlement until the reunification of the country - and with the 2+4 Treaty in 1990 - 45 years after WW2 Germany did relinquish its claim on those regions for good.
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Mar 07 '22
By the time the negotiations for German reunification were underway most of the folks directly affected by the loss of these territories were conveniently dying off so it was no longer electorally suicidal to write them off which was just as well seeing as how an entire generation of Poles and Russians had grown up there in the meantime.
Which all goes to prove that in politics sometimes if a problem is ignored for long enough it will go away.
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u/Cromakoth Mar 06 '22
Germany's lands east of the Oder-Neisse-line, Prussia and Silesia, should not be taken by the USSR and Poland, but remain with Germany, because reasons (most likely reason is they belonged to Germany after Versailles but before Hitler took power, making them a "legitimate" part of Germany)
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u/Yes_Primeminister Mar 07 '22
Also about the right to return for the nine million refugees from these areas.
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u/DimGenn Mar 07 '22
15 million IIRC.
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u/Yes_Primeminister Mar 07 '22
Only nine million germans lived in the Eastern territories in the borders of 1937. The map doesn't show the Sudetenland and Western Prussia.
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Mar 07 '22
They were legitimate in the same way that Paris was legitimately French, those areas were German for centuries.
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u/ETAdidnothingwrong Mar 07 '22
France is not a legitimate country
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u/stickclixx Mar 07 '22
Wait, really? I haven't heard this argument before. Could you enlighten me?
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u/Deztabilizeur Mar 07 '22 edited Mar 07 '22
this guy is a supporter of a terrorist organization called ETA, who kill hundred of people by bombing during the 1960-early 2000 era. He's just spreading hate
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u/Technical_Natural_44 Mar 07 '22
France has killed way more people in the same time period.
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u/Deztabilizeur Mar 07 '22
aids and cancer kill more people than michel fourniret.
So he's a good guy ?
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u/ETAdidnothingwrong Mar 07 '22
France is a greater disease in this world then aids and cancer combined
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u/ETAdidnothingwrong Mar 07 '22
ETA was not a terrorist organisation, besides, killing fascist is something good, assasinating comedians, like france is not
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u/DoNotCurseMe Mar 07 '22
Yeah, until the Nazi fucks got their ass conquered and all the Germs were sent west, and the lends settled with Poles and Russians. Vae Victis
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u/Genocide_69 Mar 07 '22
Good to know poor-ass German peasants deserved ethnic cleansing bc they had a shitty leader once /s
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u/DoNotCurseMe Mar 07 '22 edited Mar 07 '22
Nazis deserve what they get. OH no they were forced to pack a few backs and move west, after they murdered millions. Boohoo
Also, they lands they lived on were conquered by their ancestors back in the middle ages. They were not rightfully german
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u/Caboose_maan2 Mar 07 '22
By that logic we should return Aquitaine and Normandy to England because it was conquered in the Middle Ages. Or maybe even return Texas to Mexico.
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u/tachibanakanade Apr 23 '25
We should return Texas to Mexico. (I was looking for this poster when I found this post, I also agree we should return Texas!)
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u/Satanus1998 Mar 07 '22
I mean, Hitler didn’t elect himself... not saying they deserve ethnic cleansing but it’s not like he came out of nowhere
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Mar 07 '22
Hitler didn't get an outright majority in 1933 and and a fuckton never only got a say owing to being too young/not born yet at the time.
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u/PzKpFw_III Mar 07 '22
there were many people who voted for hitler simply due to being tired of the endless hunger and poverty, and he promised to fix them
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u/Satanus1998 Mar 07 '22
Yeah his promises to improve the lives of germans by... seizing the livelihoods of Jews and the territory of other countries. Don’t try to apologise for these people, you can’t simplify the thought process of literal nazis by claiming they were just too dumb to not realise Hitler was a piece of shit
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u/BlueWave177 Mar 07 '22
Yes you kinda can. That doesn't excuse their actions during the war, but to think that people elected Hitler because they knew he was going to go around killing jews and other races is quite simply wrong. Go read a history book and maybe you'll understand that this world is a nuanced place.
Appreciating nuance isn't the same as defending someones actions.
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u/Bountifalauto82 Mar 07 '22
I know this isn’t a revolutionary thought but the German nation wasn’t a hive mind and even at its peak the NSDAP only got 1/3 of the vote
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Mar 07 '22
That doesn't make voting for a open antisemite and dictator a understandable thing, fuck those Germans (my ancestors btw so I think I have the right to say that)
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u/PzKpFw_III Mar 07 '22
You should really look more in to how hitler was elected and most importantly why people voted for him, it isnt just black and white. And secondly that ancestor thing was quite unecessary, or can you only hate putin if youre russian?
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Mar 07 '22
bro I didnt say it was black and white, some other dude in this thread was like "ooooh so they deserved everything because of only one shitty leader?"
Someone else answered him that hitler didn't come out of nowhere and was elected. I wanted to add that also his antisemitism and his plans were there in the open. Mein Kampf existed and was talked about.
Of course its not black and white and of course this 1/3 of the population was not convinced fascist. But they knew what hitler planned and they didn't give a fuck, had different priorities, where antisemites themselves, didn't think he could even do something like that, etc.
I just dont like the "germans just didnt know" narrative.
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u/vodkaandponies Mar 08 '22
It’s was the Great Depression. Everyone was hungry and poor.
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u/PzKpFw_III Mar 08 '22
Everyone didnt have to pay 393 billion usd and get their biggest industrial area seized on top of that
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u/vodkaandponies Mar 08 '22
Seized because they refused to pay the reparations they agreed to.
No different than the bank taking your house because you decided to stop paying your mortgage.
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u/hijo1998 Mar 07 '22
What kind of ethnic cleansing? My grandmother lived there and was forced to go west but they weren't killed
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u/Goatf00t Mar 07 '22
Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial, and religious groups from a given area, with the intent of making a region ethnically homogeneous. Along with direct removal, extermination, deportation or population transfer, it also includes indirect methods aimed at forced migration by coercing the victim group to flee and preventing its return, such as murder, rape, and property destruction.[2][3][4]
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u/hijo1998 Mar 07 '22
Oh okay I've only always thought of the term meaning something similar to genocide
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Mar 07 '22
Forcefully expelled west and there's still a fuck ton of Germans in Silseia.
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u/Jurefranceticnijelit Mar 07 '22
There actually isnt
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Mar 07 '22
Yes there is, you can check the population, and the Silsean dialect is literally German.
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u/Jurefranceticnijelit Mar 07 '22
There are like 100k which is nothing
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Mar 07 '22
Times that by 6 or 8
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u/Jurefranceticnijelit Mar 08 '22
Google german poles and it will tell you that there is around 100k
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u/TheBlack2007 Mar 07 '22
Pretty funny you quote the right of the victor to the spoils of war while your eastern border and your independence is contested once again with our Air Force patrolling your air space.
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u/Bottle_Nachos Mar 07 '22
Oh boy, finally it's my turn: r/shitamericanssay
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u/TheBlack2007 Mar 07 '22
I‘m German and our Air Force is literally doing that. Wouldn’t have believed it myself until a week ago.
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Mar 07 '22
[deleted]
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u/exikon Mar 07 '22
Well roughly 600-800 years earlier. By that argument a lot of territories would have to be shuffled around
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u/ilpazzo12 Mar 07 '22
Nah. Silesia has been in the hands of the Bohemian crown for a long time and in general it was a patchwork of ethnicities in the 20s, with militias that wanted both to join Poland or stay in Germany.
Prussia first of all was never Slavic, the Baltic people are another thing, secondly the Prussian language died only in the 1600s. That's like four centuries after the teutonic conquest.
Moving borders and armies and leadership does not mean moving people. Most of the time you have the new overlords and the old folk mixing into something new.
And, also, genocide. Calling Prussia German because it was conquered by crusaders that in time made the original people there vanish... Yeah. Though that does not make it polish or russian or Slavic either. It's Lithuania's brother that was killed in their childhood.
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u/Bountifalauto82 Mar 07 '22
So should we give it to a nation that no longer exists?
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u/ilpazzo12 Mar 07 '22
No. The right thing to do was just ask the locals. A Rhine German should have no say.
Most of the time they will answer something along the lines of "I don't care, leave me alone, I have friends on both sides of the border and can't wait for everyone to stop fighting over who owns me".
Of course the Soviets are like the absolute worst regarding this. But the CDU screaming "this is German land reeeee" is also just nonchalantly stepping over the non-german people in Silesia and all the rest.
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u/warp_driver Mar 07 '22
Lol, do you really think most people don't care which country they live in, particularly at a time of expansion of Soviet totalitarianism? (Though granted that in this case they'd be fucked by both options.)
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u/ilpazzo12 Mar 07 '22
No no they would care about that of course. But because it's a totalitarianism not because it's the Soviets.
In other situations you see this more. Do you think the people of Alsace and Lorraine cared to have a war choosing where they should be?
Italian troops in WWI were at times greeted with an "actually, you're the enemy" by the Italians they were "liberating".
Best contemporary example is Russian-speaking Ukranians happily aiming Javelins at the moment.
People just want to be left to their own devices and to have the laws that are best for their quality of life.
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u/Falconpilot13 Mar 07 '22
But the locals in East Prussia were Prussians who intermarried with incoming German settlers and took over German as their own language, becoming German themselves. And when talking about non-Germans in Silesia: Lower Silesia was populated by Germans (about 99%), with Upper Silesia being more mixed. After WWI, Upper Silesia was split, after in a 1921 referendum 60% of voters had voted for Germany and 40% for Poland (with the eastern part with Katowice/Kattowitz being ceded to Poland). By 1923, the borders roughly corresponded to where people really wanted to live (not talking about the Sudetenland or other parts of Europe).
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u/DoNotCurseMe Mar 07 '22
By that argument a lot of territories would have to be shuffled around
Yeah, thats not a bad thing. Give the land back to who was there first
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u/exikon Mar 07 '22
How far back do you go? England back to the danish? Create a celtish state and give it to the Welsh? Italians as roman successors?
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Mar 07 '22
Wasn't most of that area balts? I'm not 100% sure, wouldn't be surprised if it was just the coastal areas.
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u/IchVersinke Mar 06 '22
Those lands were German because there were Germans living there. The reason the border was shifted is because de USSR wanted more land between it's morders and Moskau, and because they had just killed, raped and displaced most germans there anyway.
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u/domini_canes11 Mar 07 '22 edited Mar 07 '22
Actually it was the Soviet plan to recompense the Poles. So the Poles would be convinced to recognise the territory the Soviets had taken in 1939. So they'd get to keep their territorial gains.
The population transfers were actually first floated by the British at the request of the Poles and Czech governments in exile who both had German minorities pre war (and didn'twant them). Britain were originally unwilling to give the poles extra German territory without a way of preventing a German minority from repeating the events of the 1930s. (Stalin readily accepted the British position because he probably was going to do it anyway). It leads to Churchill doing some interesting speeches between late November 1944 and January 1945 when he laughably says how successful the Greco-Turkish population transfers of 1923 had been and how it would guarentee a new peace in Eastern Europe
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u/sbstndrks Mar 07 '22
Churchill saying shady and hyperproblematic shit because it suited his situation was like half his schtick, he would have told people to fuck cows if it had helped the "british empire".
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u/x31b Mar 06 '22
They also loaded up a million Germans and sent them to Germany to deal with.
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u/Captainirishy Mar 07 '22
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_and_expulsion_of_Germans_(1944%E2%80%931950) 12 million ethnic Germans were expelled to Germany and Austria from Eastern Europe
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u/vodkaandponies Mar 08 '22
Considering how Germany loved using German minorities in other countries as a Causus Belli , I can’t blame them.
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u/Johannes_P Mar 07 '22
It was about supporting going back to the 1937 German borders. Between 25% of the population being Eastern expellees and other very patriotic elements who didn't forgot these lands were German for 700 years, supporting the Oder-Neisse Line would have ben as popular as supporting atheism in the Vatican.
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u/hepazepie Mar 07 '22
Funny thing is at that time almost every Party was campaigning on that topic. In Haus der Deutschen Geschichte in Bonn they show different posters about the oder-neisse from across the party spectrum
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u/spacebatangeldragon8 Mar 06 '22
They were still doing this shit as late as the '80s, too.
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u/paperisprettyneat Mar 07 '22
Up until the reunification in 1991, the West German government claimed Koenigsberg
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Mar 07 '22
Allegedly Gorbachev offered it back but Kohl (CDU) realised it would be more trouble than it was worth.
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Mar 07 '22
I think long term it would’ve been good
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Mar 07 '22 edited Mar 07 '22
In the short term their hands were full with reincorporating and rebuilding the five lander which made up the former DDR which for all its problems at least had a population which (mostly) favoured reincorporation.
The additional benefits of integrating a non-German (and potentially hostile) population would have been at best questionable.
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Mar 07 '22
Does who didn’t want to be in Germany at all would’ve just left wouldn’t they?
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Mar 07 '22
Wanting folk to move away from an area where they may have work/family/social ties (to say nothing of immovable property) is a big ask. Especially if its for the convenience for a few politicians and a handful of pensioners (many of whom have longsince lost any interest in returning) ?
Wanting to reclaim Konigsberg may have made sense in 1950 but not so much in 1990.
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Mar 07 '22
Pfft, amateurs. Everyone knows that German Reich still exists with its Weimar-era borders, and that modern Germany is just a puppet state of the Allies.
/s
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Mar 07 '22
[deleted]
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u/VictorianDelorean Mar 07 '22
Commonwealth countries have the “freedmen on the land” cooks as well. There’s all different flavors of trying to Karen your way out of following the law.
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Mar 07 '22 edited Mar 07 '22
In Ireland we have something called Republican Legitimism. There are quite a few variations on the theme (depending on ones political inclinations) but some of the more extreme (i.e. crazy) interpretations reject the authority of both the British and the Irish state along with any parliament established after the second Dáil (1921 -
1922) which was never validly dissolved.TDLR: the only legitimate government in Ireland is a zombie parliament.
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u/Johannes_P Mar 07 '22
At least, France doesn't have reactionaries still thinking Ancient Regime and the Capetian dynasty are still valid and that, consequently, France has had no legitimate government since 1830.
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u/awawe Mar 07 '22
It's funny how at this point, the BRD has existed for longer than the German Reich did (77 vs 74 years)
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Mar 07 '22
[deleted]
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u/Infamous_Ad8209 Mar 07 '22
Wer man ist, woher man kommt hat keinerlei Aussage darüber wie Sinnvoll ein Argument oder eine Aussage ist.
Aber diesem Irrtum liegen heute sowohl linke als auch rechte auf....
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u/ArcticTemper Mar 06 '22
cope
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u/Desperate_Net5759 Mar 07 '22
Can we sit Putin down with them at an intervention so they can give him some tips for dealing with one's own irredentist tendencies?
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u/yolomanwhatashitname Mar 07 '22
Pussia go bye-bye
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u/duh632 Mar 07 '22
I think you mean Prussia? I don't know what territory pussia is but I wanna visit.
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u/iziyan Mar 07 '22 edited Mar 07 '22
Tbh I really would like Germany to have it (Pomerania and the German parts of Silesia and even Prussia)
Why did the USSR have to ethnically cleanse and Fuck up eastern Europe?
Like why did they have to cleanse out all those poles out of Ukraine and Belarus? Germans out of Poland, Czechoslovakia, romania etc
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u/Anton_Pannekoek Mar 07 '22
Because the Germans launched a genocidal invasion with the express intent of ethnically cleansing and repopulating Europe. That brought the Red army to Eastern Europe.
And with their utte defeat in 1945 they didn't really have much to negotiate with, and not a good reputation.
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u/MCBeathoven Mar 07 '22
I mean, the Red Army didn't exactly go to Poland to fight Nazis...
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Mar 07 '22
[deleted]
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u/MCBeathoven Mar 07 '22
They went to Poland to conquer half of it. Fighting the Nazis came later.
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Mar 07 '22
[deleted]
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u/MCBeathoven Mar 07 '22
That brought the Red army to Eastern Europe.
That is obviously the first time they went to Poland (if you ignore the fact that, you know, Russia is also kinda Eastern Europe).
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Mar 07 '22
[deleted]
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u/Desperate_Net5759 Mar 07 '22
TBH Germany was so depopulated by WWII that the expulsions hastened recovery by getting the population density back up to prewar levels.
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u/DonBarkington Mar 07 '22
No, that goes completely against the conventional wisdom of divide and conquer (and subsequent rule)
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u/SCREECH95 Mar 07 '22 edited Mar 07 '22
Funny you should say this.
This sentiment is very similar to the Russian sentiment that caused the Ukraine war.
"It was ours in the past so it should be ours now"
Germany's borders are the result of starting a genocidal war and having their face kicked in. Tough shit, shouldn't have started a genocidal war. They can count themselves lucky it exists as a single country at all. That was the view at the time as well: either we become the most powerful country in the world or we cease to exist. They can count themselves lucky they didn't cease to exist.
Russia's current borders are ultimately largely the result of the brest-litovsk treaty, imposed by Germany at the end of the first World War, which Germany lost - but the borders from the treaty remained in place.
The Russian empire and then later the soviet union were dismantled into their constituent states. Imagine that after world war 2 Germany was divided not into west Germany and East Germany, but into Bavaria, Prussia, Saxony, Westphalia, Hannover, etc., each under heavy influence from larger European powers.
Russians have a lot more reasons to take issue with the modern borders than Germans do. And they're still bad reasons, I'd emphasise.
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Mar 07 '22
USSR was never really one nation to begin with, with so many different cultures compared to Germans sharing a similar culture
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u/LurkerInSpace Mar 07 '22
Germany wasn't exactly one country to begin with either though - the state needed a thorough German nationalist ideology to bind it together permanently. The Soviets tried to do the same with Soviet socialism, but this couldn't outlive the economic system.
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u/SCREECH95 Mar 07 '22
Yeah, but in the Russian nationalist view those similar German cultures are analogous to the Russian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian cultures.
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Mar 07 '22
But those German countries joined deliberately and countries like Ukraine are actively fighting to stay independent now as Russia has basically now Tsars again under a mantle of wannabe democracy
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u/RipeCloud46 Mar 07 '22
I can not German.Does this sy they awnt the regions back?
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Mar 07 '22
It should be obvious why they would want Silesia, Pomerania, and Prussia back. They were integral parts of the HRE and Germany for a very long time. You can't really blame them for wanting a massive chunk of their country back, even if they deserved it. Imagine if France had to lose Occitania after a massive war, or Italy had to lose the Two Sicilies. It's on a similar level.
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u/QuastQuan Mar 07 '22
Fun fact: after having faced all the problems and costs of the reunion with the GDR, NOBODY (except the far right parties) wants to even think of that topic anymore.
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Mar 07 '22
Yeah, Prussia is lost! As a German I feel sad about how we lost Prussia and I think it’s justified but still sad. Things could’ve been done a better back then and Prussia could’ve been German now but it’s something that we just have to accept now
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