After World War II, the former eastern part of Germany

The government of West Germany (Federal Republic of Germany) tends to use "the former German territory under the rule of Poland and the Soviet Union". This is the wording used in the Potsdam Agreement, but it is only used by the Federal Republic of Germany, because the Polish and Soviet governments refused to use it because it implied that these territories would be returned to Germany one day.

The preferred wording of the Polish government is to recover territories, emphasizing that these territories once belonged to Poland and were recovered from Nazi Germany in 1945.

Most of the German-speaking peoples who did not flee (1944-1945 in winter) were unconditionally expelled by the Soviet Red Army, regardless of whether they lived here for centuries or were new immigrants in World War II. At the same time, millions of Poles were also filled into this region from the former eastern territory of Poland which was merged into the Soviet Union. In the early post-war period, the data of Germans who retreated and expelled were usually quoted in German data as160,000.