This monument was erected in 1953. The reason for this was that the city of Elmshorn took over the sponsorship of the displaced Stargarders.
At that time, around a third of the Elmshorn population were refugees and expellees from the formerly German or German-settled areas. At that time, many of them still had the hope of being able to return to their old homeland as soon as possible.
With the Potsdam Agreement of the allied victorious powers of 1945, the German eastern border was reorganized.
The Federal Republic's non-recognition of the Oder-Neisse line as Poland's western border had increasingly become a disturbing anachronism in the 1966s.
This strained relations with Poland heavily. It was only eliminated with the Warsaw Treaty in 1970 and finally after reunification in 1990. The two-plus-four treaty (FRG, DUR USSR, USA, GB, F) stipulated that the united Germany had “no territorial claims whatsoever against other states” and “will not raise any such claims in the future either”.
In the spirit of reconciliation, Elmshorn has been building contacts with the Polish population since the 1980s and on June 19, 1993 Elmshorn signed the town twinning with the Polish town of Stargard.