Eighty years ago this week colonialism in reverse gear

 

The evacuation of 1.5m Germans from Poland began under an agreement between Britain and Poland which implemented one of the decisions at the Potsdam conference. These first people were to be settled in the British zone of Germany. Many Germans had already fled the advancing Soviets and many more were to  follow. Practically the entire enclave of East Prussia was to become a purely Polish zone. The partitions of Poland at the end of the eighteenth were unwound. As had happened to the Sudeten Germans of Czechoslovakia a root cause of Nazi German expansion was being extirpated. 

The Soviet Union delivered the first veto on a UN Security Council decision. It prevented the Council recording a formal decison on the Soviet attempt to force withdrawal from Syria and Lebanon of French and  British forces which were blocking nationalist movements. In practice this was mere diplomatic manoeuvering; neither power was commited to long term occupation.

A three man delegation of the British Cabinet was nominated for a mission to India to establish a path to independence in a way which would preserve the unity of the sub-continent. They would have to overcome Hindu/Moslem tensions. It included Sir Stafford Cripps who had vainly attempted something similar in 1942. The initiative came from prime minister Clem Attlee who had been the Labour represenative on the Simon Commission to India in the late 1920s. This expereince had made him sympathetic to Indian independence and correspondingly sceptical  of the raj.