At the end of World War II, at the insistence of Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union during the 1943 Tehran Conference, Poland's borders were redrawn by the Allies.

They were a result of several cross-national conflicts including Polish–Ukrainian War (November 1918 – July 1919) and the Greater Poland Uprising (December 1918 – February 1919).

The newly re-established sovereign Poland created Wołyń Voivodeship as one of the 16 main administrative divisions of the country.

Around 1925 telephone and telegraph lines were built, connecting post offices across the entire voivodeship area, making possible also the wider distribution of the press.

[3] Wołyń Voivodeship was overrun by the Wehrmacht in July 1941 during the German attack on the Soviet positions in eastern Poland.

The Lutsk Ghetto was set up in the capital by the German occupation authorities,[4] and sealed from the outside in December 1941 with the provision of only starvation food rations.

[5] During a four-day period in mid August 1942 about 17,000 Jews were rounded up by Orpo and the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police,[6] and taken in lorries along with women and children to the Górka Połonka forest.

[12] As a result, the total area of the Wołyń Voivodeship increased to 35,754 km², making it Poland's second largest province.

In the north, there was a flat strip of land called Volhynian Polesie, which extended some 200 kilometres from the Southern Bug river to the Polish-Soviet border.

The landscape in the south was more hilly, especially in the extreme south-east corner around the historical town of Krzemieniec, in the Gologory mountains.

[13] It was initially divided into the counties of Dubno, Horochow, Kowel, Krzemieniec, Luboml, Łuck, Ostróg, Równe and Włodzimierz Wołyński.

It consisted of 11 powiats (counties), 22 larger towns, 103 villages and literally thousands of smaller communities and khutors (Polish: futory, kolonie), with clusters of farms unable to offer any form of resistance against future military attacks.

[16] The primary religions practised in the area were Eastern Orthodox Christian (69.8%), Roman Catholic (15.7%) as well Judaism by the Jews (10%), Protestantism (2.6%) and the Islamic faith by the Tatars.

[20] Such actions were condemned by the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky, who claimed that these acts would "destroy in the souls of our non-united Orthodox brothers the very thought of any possible reunion.

[22] The results of the 1931 census (questions about mother tongue and about religion) are presented in the table below: The Wołyń Voivodeship was located in the so-called Poland "B".

Decades of Russian imperial rule had left Volhynia in a state of economic catalepsy, but the agricultural output following the rebirth of Poland quickly grew.

The tensions between Jewish and Ukrainian shopkeepers increased greatly after the introduction of cooperative stores, which undermined Jewish-run private enterprises.

By spring of 1939, a 30,000 volt power plant was built in Krzemieniec, which provided light and electricity for towns and villages five counties.

In order to fight illiteracy, Volhynian authorities organized a network of the so-called moving libraries, which in 1939 consisted of 300 vehicles and 25,000 volumes.