Go West, Old Country

I've written here before about the great finds published at Strange Maps. Today's entry covers the controversy over Poland's post-WWII borders. In short, Stalin insisted that the Soviet Union was not going to give up any of the territory it had gained through the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the 1939 partition of Poland. To compensate Poland for these loses, and to punish the Germans, the Polish western border was moved to the Oder-Neisse Line.

What Strange Maps has found and shared with us all is a map, marked in Stalin's hand-writing, marking the line along the more eastern "Glatzer Neisse, while the present-day border is composed of the Lausitzer (or Görlitzer) Neisse, 200 km to the west."

The more westerly border was eventually accepted which put Wroclaw (Breslau) fully within Polish territory. This may have helped lessen the loss of Lviv to Soviet Ukraine. An added bonus from Stalin's perspective is that a more westerly border would help keep Poland afraid of Germany and firmly within the Soviet orbit.