page_title: Oder–Neisse line
section_title: Division of cities
hierarchical_section_title: Oder–Neisse line / Other developments / Division of cities
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Altstadtbrücke in Görlitz
context_page_description: The Oder–Neisse line is the basis of the international border between Germany and Poland. It runs mainly along the Oder and Lusatian Neisse rivers and meets the Baltic Sea in the north, just west of the ports of Szczecin and Świnoujście.
  All prewar German territories east of the line and within the 1937 German boundaries – comprising nearly one quarter of the Weimar Republic – were annexed under border changes promulgated at the postwar Potsdam Conference, with most becoming part of Poland. The small remainder, consisting of northern East Prussia with the German city of Königsberg, was allocated to the Soviet Union as the Kaliningrad Oblast of the Russian SFSR. A part of the German population in these territories – estimated at approximately 12 million as of autumn 1944 – had fled the advance of the Red Army, while the larger part was later expelled by the new Polish Authorities in a grand-scale Ethnic cleansing.
  The Oder–Neisse line marked the border between East Germany and Poland from 1950 to 1990. Communist East Germany agreed to the border with Communist Poland in 1950, while West Germany, after a period of refusal, adhered to the border in 1970.
context_section_description: The border divided several cities into two parts – Görlitz/Zgorzelec, Guben/Gubin, Frankfurt/Słubice and Bad Muskau/Łęknica.
caption: The Lusatian Neisse dividing German Görlitz (right) from Polish Zgorzelec (left); formerly both constituted the city of Görlitz.
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