Found a 1950s map of Europe that still showed 'East Prussia' as a real place

I was digging through a stack of old textbooks at a thrift store in Cleveland last Saturday and pulled out this geography book from 1953. The map inside had East Prussia clearly labeled right where Poland and Russia are today. It even had Siam instead of Thailand and called Myanmar by its old name Burma. I spent like 20 minutes just comparing it to a modern map on my phone. Has anyone else found a map that made you realize how fast borders shifted after WWII?

2 comments

2 Comments

diana_flores251mo ago

Oh man, maps from that era always mess with my head. Found a similar one at a garage sale a few years back - same deal with East Prussia and Siam. It's wild because I grew up learning one set of borders in school, and then you see this old map and realize how much of what we think of as permanent is really just temporary. My dad was stationed in West Germany in the 60s, so I sent him a photo of the map and he just laughed and said "yeah, that's how things looked when I was a kid." It really makes you wonder what kids 50 years from now will think when they look at our maps, you know?

charlie_roberts871mo ago

That whole thing about how fast borders changed after WWII is something I read about in a book about the Potsdam Conference a few years back. Apparently the way they redrew everything was incredibly rushed, like they were literally using maps from the 1800s in some cases to decide where new borders should go. The craziest part I remember is that they moved Poland's entire western border like 150 miles to the west overnight basically, and just told millions of people they were now living in a different country. So finding maps like that from the 50s must be weird because they were still trying to make sense of what had just happened, and a lot of those old names and regions hadn't fully faded from the textbooks yet. It makes you realize how much of modern history is just someone with a pencil drawing a line on a piece of paper and calling it finished.