Ethnic Germans were evacuated from territories occupied by the Soviet Union in 1940, notably Bessarabia and the Baltic states of Estonia and Latvia, all of which traditionally had large ethnic German minorities. However the majority of the Baltic Germans had already been resettled in late 1939, prior to the occupation of Estonia and Latvia by the Soviet Union in June 1940. In most cases they were given farms taken from 110,000 Poles who were expelled from the area .