When history was revised

Garrett Van Reed - 14th January 2010

In 1948, Wrocław’s Centennial Hall (Hala Stulecia) played host to the largest, most organised propaganda event in Poland’s history: The Recovered Territories Exhibition. An official term coined by Poland’s post-war communist authorities, the ‘recovered territories’ denoted those lands reappropriated to Poland as compensation for territorial losses in the east which had been absorbed by the Soviet Union.

The Party’s underlying aim was to construe the country’s new western territorial acquisitions – of which Wrocław (formerly 'Breslau') was the largest city - as belonging to a Polish Piast tradition that dated to medieval times; centuries of German presence in Silesia was expl ...