were closed down by the German police and Gestapo, and the assets of the local Polish bank were confiscated. On September 13 and October 4, 1939, arrested Poles were deported from the city to concentration camps, men to Buchenwald and women to Ravensbrück. Some local Poles avoided arrest by escaping earlier to Poland. The German 10th Army and 14th Army attacked Poland from the city, and the Einsatzgruppe I and II followed the armies from Opole to various Polish cities to commit crimes against the Polish people. After the defeat of Poland, Polish Eastern Upper Silesia was re-annexed to the Province of Upper Silesia and Oppeln lost its status as provincial capital to German-occupied Katowice (renamed Kattowitz). Polish prisoners from the city co-founded the secret resistance movement in Buchenwald, while Polish escapees from the city participated in the Polish resistance in occupied Poland. Local members of the Polish resistance were expelled from the city. During the war, the Nazis operated thirteen forced labour subcamps of the Stalag VIII-B/344 prisoner-of-war camp for Allied POWs in the city, and two in the present-day district of Groszowice. In modern Poland After the end of the Second World War in 1945, Oppeln was transferred from Germany to Poland, pursuant to the agreements of the Potsdam Conference, and given its original Slavic name of Opole. Opole became part of the Katowice Voivodeship from 1946–1950, after which it became part of the Opole Voivodeship. Unlike other parts of the so-called Recovered Territories, Opole and the surrounding region's indigenous population remained and was not expelled as elsewhere. Over 1 million Silesians who considered themselves Poles or were treated as such by the authorities due to their language and customs were allowed to stay after they were verified as Poles in a special verification process. It involved declaring Polish nationality and an oath of allegiance to the Polish nation. In the later years however many of them left to West Germany to flee the communist Eastern Bloc (see Emigration from Poland to Germany after World War II). Today Opole, along with the surrounding region, is known as a centre of the German minority in Poland that recruits mainly from the descendants of the positively verified autochthons. In the city itself however only 2.46% of the inhabitants declared German nationality according to the last national census of 2002. On January 1, 2017, Borki, Chmielowice, Czarnowąsy, Krzanowice, Sławice, Świerkle, Winów,