Wednesday, June 23, 1971. The UK goes forward into the EEC and Poland goes east and back to the pre Reformation.

On this day in 1971 the European Economic Community came to a resolution with the United Kingdom on terms for the UK to enter the EEC and its Common Market. The principal point of the resolution involved payments to the EEC by the UK.

And they all lived happily ever after. . . right?

Poland turned over 6,900 former German Churches, many of which had been Lutheran Churches, to the Catholic Church.  This came about due to protests that occurred in Poland in December 1970.

This may seem odd, but at the end of the Second World War the Soviets had moved the German population east, clearing out much of eastern Prussia and all of East Prussia from its German residents.  Many had already fled the advancing Red Army in 1944 and 1945 in any event, and many who remained were killed by the Soviets.  The Soviets also, in turn, shoved the Polish population in eastern Poland west.  Effectively the Russians redrew the map tin the way that they favored it and those borders have since stuck.  While the forced resettlements may seem barbarous, and really were, they did have the effect of concentrating the populations in a fashion that involved a clearer ethnic concentration than they had previously.

As a Catholic jurisdictional matter, it's always the case that a Catholic diocese includes, from a Catholic prospective, all of the souls within its territorial boundary, and the Parish Priest is responsible for all of them.  In Poland's case, nearly 100% of the population were and are observant Catholics. While there were Polish communists, the movement had never been very popular in Poland and such Polish communists as existed tended to have ended up in the USSR in the post World War One period.  Catholics resisted the Nazi and Soviet occupation of 1939-1941, the Nazi occupation of 1941-45 ,and the Soviet occupation thereafter and the Church remained a strong force even in Communist Poland.  As the Church needed Church buildings, the transfer made sense. Additionally, as a practical matter, many churches in northern and eastern Europe were for Catholic congregations at the time they were built, so the transfer was effectively a reversion to their original status.

As a final note, since fall of the Soviet Union and the reunification of Germany, there has been a tourist phenomenon of Germans revising their former homes in what is now Poland. They're generally unwelcome.