Demographics of Poland
According to GUS, about 38,325,000 people live in Poland, however, the same report states that the number of residents living in the country all the time is approximately 37,200,000; with 1,125,000 people living abroad for 6 to 7 months or more. It means that the permanent population may be correspondingly smaller.
Demographics of Poland
The population of Poland decreased by about six million due to the losses sustained during the Holocaust and German occupation during World War II (1939-1945), and Poland became one of the most ethnically homogeneous areas in Europe (next to the populations of Slovakia and the Czech Republic) as a result of radically altered borders and population expulsions at the end of and after the war. The post-war population movements were accompanied by two waves of forced migrations ordered by the Soviet and Polish communist authorities, including the transfers of sizable Polish populations (1944-1946) from the pre-war territories of Eastern Poland, which today form parts of Lithuania, of Belarus and of Ukraine, the transfer of ethnic Ukrainians back to the USSR (1944-1946), and the expulsion of Germans (1945-1950) to Germany from German provinces which fell into the Soviet Zone of Occupation and which the Soviets then awarded to the communist government in Poland.