[5] In the 1.2 million figure, approximately 850,000 were estimated for the Upper Silesian regions, 350,000 for southern East Prussia (Masuria) and 50,000 for the rest of the territories.

An additional 1,104,000 people had declared Polish nationality and were allowed to stay (851,000 of those in Upper Silesia), bringing up the number of Poles to 5,894,600 as of 1950.

[2] In 1938, many place names of Slavic or Old Prussian origin in East Prussia and Silesia were renamed to purely "German" toponyms by the Nazi-German administration.

[15] Hence the decisions of the committee were not always accepted by the local population, which sometimes protested against the new names with boycotts and even demolition of road signs.

[citation needed] In early April 1945, the Regional Bureau of the National Railway Administration in Poznań founded a commission for the standardization of place names along the Oder River.

This initiative was supported by the Western Institute and Poznań University, which in July 1945 published a bilingual Słowniczek nazw miejscowych (Small Dictionary of Place Names).

[15] It comprised a chair and 6 commission members, including three scholars and three officials of the Departments of Transportation, Posts and Defense.

The other commission members were the linguists Kazimierz Nitsch, Mikołaj Rudnicki, Stanisław Rospond and Witold Taszycki; a specialist in toponyms; and the historian Władysław Semkowicz.

Three regional subcommissions were founded, each responsible for a given area: The subcommissions prepared recommendations for the commission, which ultimately endorsed up to 98 per cent of their proposals, which were often based on prewar publications of the Western Institute, such as Stanisław Kozierowski's Atlas nazw geograficznych Słowiańszczyzny Zachodniej (Atlas of Geographical Names of Western Slavdom).