Poles
Polish people are the sixth largest national group in the European Union. Estimates vary depending on source, though available data suggest a total number of around 60 million people worldwide (with roughly 21 million living outside of Poland, many of whom are not of Polish ethnicity, but Polish nationals). There are almost 38 million Poles in Poland alone. There are also Polish minorities in the surrounding countries including (Germany), and indigenous minorities in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, northern and eastern Lithuania, western Ukraine, and western Belarus. There are some smaller indigenous minorities in nearby countries such as Moldova. There is also a Polish minority in Russia which includes indigenous Poles as well as those forcibly deported during and after World War II; the total number of Poles in what was the former Soviet Union is estimated at up to 3 million.
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.