The Oder-Neisse line and the expulsion of so many Germans that lived across it posed an acute dilemma for the nascent SED. On one hand, the SED leadership clearly recognized that the Soviets were calling the shots on this matter. Since Stalin had decided on the Oder-Neisse line, there was little the SED could do to agitate against this territorial readjustment. Conversely, the SED recognized that not only was adjustment unpopular among the general public, but it also denuded the Soviet zone and later the GDR of some prime economic real estate. This dilemma resulted in a somewhat bifurcated response in how the SED explained the partitions to its population.

The dominant tone in state media was that the Oder-Neisse line was it was a peaceful readjustment based on principles of socialist brotherhood between nations. The shrill tone of this agitprop often used the emerging expellee lobby within the Western zone as evidence that the West was a haven for reactionary, revanchist types. SED publications such as the paper Neues Deutschland would invariably portray the expellees as East Elbian Junker types. This discourse would merge both Marxist-Leninist concepts of class enemies with older stereotypes of war-mongering Prussians. Cartoons of the expellees in the SED press almost invariably portrayed them as rotund, Bismarck-types, with pickelhaube helmets or other markers for Prussian militarism and reaction. The message in this discourse was clear: the main forces openly opposing such revisions were part of the socioeconomic class that had driven Germany to ruin in the twentieth century.

But there was also a subtext that ran through this agitprop that occasionally came through in lower-level SED meetings. While the SED held that the current anti-readjustment line was just a stalking horse for a reactionary social class's warmongering, the emphasis on socialist brotherhood was notable. The official line precluded such agitation for territorial revision, but it did not completely take it off the table either. What is notable in this agitprop was not the anti-revisionism itself, but who was making it, ie allegedly reactionary types who were the antithesis of a socialist peasants and workers' state. Revision on behalf of those types was unthinkable, but there was a subtext that socialist brothers were a different matter.

Minutes from SED meetings with the rank-and-file show that this subtext sometimes became text. When lower-level party members carried the complaints over the revision and expulsions, their superiors reminded them to urge patience among the population. One of the common threads in these meetings was that the SED leadership urged that both the Poles and the Soviets needed to be shown that the Germans could be trusted. By accepting the Oder-Neisse line, attacking the Western expellees as reactionary fascists, and supporting the SED, the German population would demonstrate their commitment to Marxist-Leninism and their rejection of Germany's traditionally predatory behavior towards the Slavs. The internal memoranda produced by various agencies involved in the planned economy also bemoaned the lost productivity of Silesia under Polish management and entertained hopes that the region could be brought under proper, ie German, management to help the integrated Econocom zone. The SED did make overtures to have Stettin and other areas returned to German control in the 1950s. State-to-state negotiations between the GDR and Poland occasionally broached the topic of the Oder-Neisse and territorial re-revision. Walter Ulbricht made a request to Warsaw in 1950 that the GDR receive trade and economic concessions in Szczecin, which would undermine the sacrosanct nature of the Oder-Neisse line.

The problem with all of these tentative efforts of re-revision was that the SED had no reliable partner for them. The Soviets had little interest to revisit the Oder-Neisse line on behalf of the SED, especially as Moscow tended to see it as a bargaining chip with the West, not the SED. The Polish Polska Partia Robotnicza (the Polish Workers' Party/PPR- the main Polish communist party) was even less inclined to give up their German gains. The PPR had actively pushed for their piece of Germany. The PPR leadership knew from their connections to the Soviets that Stalin had decided to absorb a considerable chunk of Eastern Poland, but they were unsure exactly as to which parts. This made a number of PPR leaders anxious to push whatever advantage they could find in the Western border. PPR leader Władysław Gomułka in particular was anxious to acquire urban centers and their associated industries such as Breslau as well as Stettin in order to make up for the loss of the resources in Eastern Poland ceded to the USSR. The provisional Polish government thus became quite proactive in staking their turf inside these areas in what the PPR soon called the "recovered territories." The PPR set up de facto municipal administrations in these administrative centers and acted as if the territorial concessions were an established fact throughout early 1945. This was part of the reason why Stettin became Szczecin. The city's dockyards lay on the German side of the Oder, but the Poles were adamant that they should control the river's mouth. The Poles' position found a prominent patron in the form of Stalin who backed their claim for the entirety of the city at Potsdam. Ulbricht repeated his request for concessions in Szczecin again in 1956 when Gomułka returned to power after a brief period in internal political exile, but again this was a dead letter. The region had been sufficiently Polonized through settlement and the expulsion of Germans that to hand the city back to Germany would have entailed a similar pattern of resettlement. Gomułka was too politically vulnerable to stomach such and offer, nor was he personally inclined to countenance it.

The SED was acutely aware of the unpopularity of both the revisions and the expulsions among the wider German public in the SBZ/GDR. Its propaganda line tried to deal with this reality by alternating between tying the issue to the discredited politics of the Third Reich and Kaiserreich while keeping a sotto voce line that some of the revisions could be undone if Germany had the right politics in place. The problem for the SED was that had no partners either in Warsaw or Moscow for such a revision. So the SED ended up stuck with defending the Oder-Neisse line.

Sources

Allen, Debra J. The Oder-Neisse line: the United States, Poland, and Germany in the Cold War. Westport, Conn: Praeger, 2003.

Anderson, Sheldon R. A Cold War in the Soviet Bloc: Polish-East German Relations : 1945-1962. Boulder, Colo: Westview Press, 2001.

Heitmann, Clemens. "Die Stettin-Frage: Die KPD, die Sowjetunion und die deutsch-polnische Grenze 1945." Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung 51, no. 1 (2002): 25-63.

Thum, Gregor. Uprooted: How Breslau Became Wrocław During the Century of Expulsions. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.