The murder of Polish Jews by the National Socialists, along with the flight, expulsion, and resettlement of Germans and Ukrainians, as well as the loss of the highly multinational areas east of the Curzon Line, resulted in a Polish state after World War II that was inhabited 98% by Poles, of whom 97% belonged to the Catholic faith. However, the architectural heritage of the former multi-ethnic state was preserved by the nation-state of Poland.

In the post-war reconstruction, the focus was less on a conservative approach and more on emphasizing a purely Polish history. The multicultural heritage, which could have provided access to the multifaceted past of the Polish state, was thus reshaped nationally.

The way post-war Poland dealt with the heritage perceived as German is illustrated by the city of Szczecin: While propaganda spoke of a departure from the evidence of centuries of foreign rule, many urban planning concepts from the pre-war period were still utilized. In contrast, the example of the city of Lublin shows that the heritage referred to as pozydowski (after the Jews) was completely erased from the urban landscape without being addressed. The area of the Jewish town was entirely reshaped in an ahistorical manner: A castle square created in the 1950s with pseudo-Renaissance architecture gives the art-historical layperson an illusion of continuity in the city structure.

This also explains why the efforts to rediscover the multicultural heritage in the formerly German areas have progressed much further than the handling of the Jewish past in eastern Poland.