Word: oder
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...heart of the matter are the "lost territories" east of the Oder and Neisse rivers-a 44,130-sq.-mi. chunk of prewar Germany that was ceded to Poland in 1945 by the victors of World War II. In the process, nearly 12 million Germans were uprooted and sent streaming westward in an apocalyptic migration that took 2,000,000 lives. Some 8,000,000 "expellees" remain in West Germany today, and though many have lost much of their fierce irredentist zeal, their presence is a constant reminder to the German government of the need to regain the lost territories...
Many West Germans see in the Oder-Neisse territories a high card that can be played in a deal with the Reds for reunification. The Bonn government, including Foreign Minister Gerhard Schroder, would like to use them as a bargaining lever for establishment of an all-German government and the convening of a peace conference. But the Poles-who have moved 8,500,000 migrants of their own into the lost territories-are equally adamant that formal recognition of the Oder-Neisse boundary must precede any settlement of the German question...
Last October the West German Evangelical Church, a 30 million-member amalgam of the nation's major Protestant churches, decided to blast the Oder-Neisse question off dead center. In a 44-page memorandum, the church argued that German legal claims to the lost territories were balanced by the "grave injustice" done to Poland by Nazi...
...insists, "When the time for a real détente comes, it is not America that can speak to Eastern Europe. Western Europe can. Look at the Poles! They're still frightened to death of the Germans. But which of the major powers in Europe have recognized the Oder-Neisse Line? Only the Russians-and the French...
...underdeveloped satellites would be a juicy market for Bonn's heavy industrial goods. But Communist Poland, for one, kept insisting on a major political surrender before any deal was signed: full diplomatic recognition of Wladyslaw Gomulka's Polish regime, and acceptance of Poland's Oder-Neisse western frontier, which includes a big chunk of pre-World War II Germany. With 14 million angry refugees from the East added to its population since the war, the Bonn government could hardly swallow that kind of proposition...