Zagadnienie Własności Jako Nierozwiązany Problem Prawny I Polityczny. O Podejściu Do Kwestii Mienia Żydowskiego W Polsce Po 1945 Roku
The Ownership Of Property As A Legal And Political Issue: Regarding Jewish Property In Poland After 1945

Summary/Abstract: Although much has been written in recent years about forced migrations from Eastern Europe after World War II, the process of dispossession and expulsion has not yet been properly analyzed in connection with system transformation within the context of overcoming wartime destruction as well as population segregation in Central and Eastern Europe. We still do not know enough about the implementation of the policy of dispossession, disfranchisement as well as the changes in the legal system of the postwar socialist Eastern European states. With an institution-based approach the paper examines the practices of expropriation and reallocation in Polish society during the immediate post-war years. Hence we have to deal with a series of developments concerning not only property but also with the treatment of the different groups of inhabitants in general. On this point the article focuses explicitly on the handling of property belonging to Jewish citizens of the interwar Polish republic, who survived the war, as well as the property of former Jewish citizens of the Reich. An important institutional actor in these cases was the Main Office of Liquidation (Główny Urząd Likwidacyjny), which had numerous branches all over the country. It was concerned with the transfer of the property of Christian and Jewish Germans to Polish public or private property as well as the securing and return of the stolen property of Polish citizens (Jews and non-Jews). Until now the extensive files of the Main Liquidation Office have not been subjected to systematic research. I intend to demonstrate how legal culture in postwar Poland was influenced by the synchronicity of building a new system on the one hand and coming to terms with the racist legacies of Germany on the other hand. The aim of the article is to ascertain concrete problems at a time of re-defining property rights by nationalizing, retransferring and reallocating different groups of assets. Special attention is given to the economic importance of the Main Office of Liquidation but also to its influence on the legal mindset and the legal culture of a society that had just overcome the brutal Nazi occupation. The political culture in post-war Poland cannot be understood without considering legal practices within the context of total war and revolution.

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