Most of the parishioners remaining in Polish-annexed Pomerania Province were expelled by Poland in the post-war period of expulsion of Germans between 1945 and 1948. With most of the territory, formerly comprised by the eastern ambit (Ostsprengel) of the Ecclesiastical Province of Pomerania, transferred to Poland, it expropriated all church property there, parochial and provincial alike, without compensation, with the church buildings mostly taken over by the Roman Catholic Church, and most Protestant cemeteries desecrated and devastated. The provincial church institutions were built up anew in Greifswald, while the Soviets handed over Stettin, the former seat, to Poland in July 1945.