 However, they could not return and those who had stayed, were expelled and new Polish population from Central Poland, or themselves forcibly re-settled from the Soviet Union took their place.After 1945 and in 1946, nearly all of the 4.5 million Silesians of German descent fled, or were interned in camps and forcibly expelled, including some thousand German Jews who survived the Holocaust and had returned to Silesia; 634,106 Silesians died in the expulsion, nearly 14% of the population.The newly formed Polish United Workers' Party created a Ministry of the Recovered Territories that claimed half of the available arable land for state-run collectivized farms.