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Poland Ethnic Groups
During most of its history, Poland was a multiethnic
society
that included substantial numbers of Belarusians (prior to
1992
known as Belorussians), Germans, Jews, and Ukrainians.
This
ethnic diversity was reduced sharply by World War II and
the
migrations that followed it. The Jewish population, which
in the
interwar period was over 10 percent of Poland's total and
over 30
percent of Warsaw's, was reduced by about 3 million in the
Holocaust. Postwar resettlement and adjustment of borders
sent
about 2 million Germans from Polish territory westward and
awarded the Polish territory inhabited by 500,000
Ukrainians,
Belarusians, and Lithuanians to the Soviet Union. These
multiethnic émigrés were replaced by an estimated 3
million
ethnic Poles repatriated from the Soviet Union and by
thousands
of others who returned from emigration or combat in the
West.
(Poland's communist governments, which consistently
emphasized
ethnic homogeneity, had not differentiated ethnic groups
in
official census statistics.) As a result of this process,
in 1990
an estimated 98 percent of Poland's population was
ethnically
Polish.
Data as of October 1992
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