The town in 1945 and the first Polish residents

According to Wikipedia, Świnoujście was destroyed mainly by the Allied air raids of 12 March and 16 April 1945, and the number of victims is said to have exceeded 23 thousand. The town surrendered to the Red Army on 5 May 1945. Earlier, in 1944-1945, according to the same entry it had about 40 thousand inhabitants, of whom about half were soldiers of the German naval base. During the raid of 16 April a British Lancaster bomber of No. 617 Squadron RAF, which was attacking the cruiser Lützow moored by the Piast Canal, came down on Karsibór. The place is commemorated by the RAF Airmen Monument.

According to Wikipedia, citing a study of Polish settlement in Wolin county, about 400 Poles had settled here spontaneously by the time the town was taken over by the Polish administration. Most residential buildings were occupied by the German population, and the properties in the seaside district by the Soviet military authorities. The Soviet authorities restarted, among other things, the repair shipyard for fishing cutters. On 16 October 1945 a delegation of four arrived to organise the county branch of the State Repatriation Office. The transit point in Świnoujście ceased to exist on 5 December 1947, and the State Repatriation Office post was closed on 1 August 1950.

In the winter of 1945/1946 killings of the remaining German population took place in the town. According to Wikipedia, which cites a study from 2008, the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) estimates the number of victims at more than 40, and the perpetrators were young officers of the Security Office and the Citizens' Militia. This figure comes from a single study.

The naval port and the 8th Coastal Defence Flotilla

According to Wikipedia, the first ships of the Republic of Poland entered the port in Świnoujście on 3 April 1946. They were four minesweepers: ORP Czajka, Mewa, Rybitwa and Żuraw, recovered from Germany in January 1946. According to that entry the naval port lies on the Zielina and Kosa peninsulas and is administratively separate from the civilian seaport. The Coal and South basins, which are occupied by the naval port, do not belong to the civilian Port of Świnoujście.

The post-war leadership of the navy changed its plans for Świnoujście. According to the entry on the 8th Coastal Defence Flotilla, in July 1949 the commander of the Navy proposed concentrating the main forces in Gdynia, because supplies and repairs in the distant Szczecin Coastal Area caused difficulties. On 21 December 1950 the new unit was given the name of the Naval Base in Świnoujście. In May 1965, after it was dissolved, the 8th Coastal Defence Flotilla was formed under an order of the commander of the Navy of 29 April 1965. In the same year the Naval Port Command was re-established and the 2nd Landing Ship Brigade was formed. The entry on the flotilla describes its origin in different ways: in the introduction it says that it arose from the Main Naval Base, and in the historical section that it arose after the dissolution of the Naval Base in Świnoujście.

According to Wikipedia, the initial task of the flotilla was the defence of the coast from the western border of the state to Jarosławiec. In 1989-1992 organisational changes took place, and on 12 July 1992 the 2nd Landing Ship Brigade was renamed the 2nd Transport and Minelaying Ship Brigade. In June 1994 the flotilla was given the name of Vice Admiral Kazimierz Porębski, and on 29 April its feast day was established.

Soviet troops in the town

According to Wikipedia, the spa part of Świnoujście was occupied by Soviet troops until 1957. Until the turn of the 1980s and 1990s there was a base of Soviet warships in the town, with its facilities. Wikipedia does not give the exact year of its closure.

The border on Uznam and the commercial port

The border on the island of Uznam ran through today's town. According to Wikipedia, on 27 November 1950 the government of the GDR agreed to hand over to Poland the water intake for the town on Lake Wolgast. In June 1951 an area of 76.5 ha with a water treatment station was incorporated into Poland, creating a salient projecting into Germany called the Bag (Worek). In exchange, Germany was granted a similar area on the Pomeranian Bay. In 1989 an agreement on the delimitation of maritime areas in the Pomeranian Bay was ratified, which fixed the maritime border in the Świnoujście area. Wikipedia also mentions the former Świnoujście-Ahlbeck border crossing, leading to the German locality on the other side of the border, and in 2011 the pedestrian and cycle Cross-Border Promenade to Heringsdorf was opened.

The port changed its purpose. In 1948, according to Wikipedia, the conversion of the port from a naval to a commercial and fishing port began, and three years later the Fishing Base was opened. In the 1960s and 1970s the seaport was built, which together with the one in Szczecin forms the Szczecin-Świnoujście port complex. In 1964 ferry services to Scandinavia were resumed. In December 2006 a decision was taken to build an LNG port terminal in Świnoujście on the island of Wolin. The island of Karsibór, which until 1945 bore the German name Kaseburg, is linked with Wolin by the Piast Bridge: the first one, opened in 1966, replaced a ferry, and the present one was opened on 6 December 2012.