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.

Nazi Germany's Antarctic Colony

Today's post is a chance for me to point out one of my favorite snippets of Web-strangeness. Strange Maps has a wonderful 1930's map of Neu-Schwabenland.

The 1938-1939 expedition in which Germany surveyed and claimed this swath of the frozen southern continent has led many of the more conspiracy-minded to believe that the Third Reich lived on (and may yet still live on) in secret bases beneath Antarctic glaciers. Supposedly the massive 1946 survey and training exercise Operation Highjump was an effort by the United States to find and defeat these Aryan hold-outs.

Regardless of Nazi penguin aficionados, the Strange Maps site also holds several other WWII era gems, such as Nazi propaganda claiming secret plans to dismember post-war Germany, actual Dutch plans to expand into German territory, and the Czech aerial threat to the Nazi regime.