Energetic Reconstruction: The Ruhr, Reparations, and Repatriation to Poland in the Early Post–World War II Period

This paper examines the efforts of officials in the Polish government to “repatriate” German citizens of Polish descent from the Ruhr region—continental Europe’s most productive coal-mining conurbation—to Poland's newly acquired western “Recovered Territories” between 1946 and 1949. Moreover, it investigates the debates that ensued between Polish bureaucrats, British authorities in occupied western Germany, and local officials in the Ruhr over the purported Polish identities of these so-called "Ruhrpolen” as well as coal production’s role in the energy landscape of early-postwar Central Europe. It is grounded in an analysis of Polish industrial board- and repatriation commission files, German labor office missives and interior ministry accounts, British military investigations and foreign office papers, and newspaper reports. Synthesizing works on post-WWII population transfers and twentieth-century energy politics, this article conceptualizes this repatriation drive and Polish officials’ concomitant desire to acquire raw materials and industrial products from the Ruhr as a campaign of “energy transfer.”

Polish officials, this paper contends, sought to enhance coal production and establish their state in post-war energy markets by drawing Ruhrpolen trained in mining and industrial work to Silesia. To further this mission, they presented the initial settlement of the Ruhrpolen in western Germany between the 1880s and 1910s as a “forced migration” necessitated by anti-Polish persecution and dire living standards in eastern Prussia. In so doing, they depicted this repatriation campaign to British and German officials as a reparatory act belonging to a larger program of “energy transfer”—one which combined the acquisition of materials from Germany and that of trained workers of Polish heritage deeply invested in strengthening Polish industry. British officials and German municipal authorities, however, severely limited this population transfer for fear of its negative impact on the Ruhr’s postwar industrial development and Central European stability, reflecting impending Cold War division.