Territorial Contraction: Germany's Coming to Terms with its Post-War Borders

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While territorial expansions and contractions have been the focus of increasing scholarly attention lately, one of the most intriguing and consequential changes of territorial policy remains understudied. Germany has lost almost one fourth of its territory in World War II (mainly to Poland). Up until the late 1960s, West Germany adamantly rejected calls for recognizing these new borders. This project looks at the motivations of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s policy which recognized the Oder-Neisse line as Poland’s western border and at the conditions and strategies that enabled such a remarkable policy change to be implemented and to gain overwhelming public support.

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