The settlements listed in the Polish language, including major cities, had all been renamed after the 1939 joint invasion of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union. Renaming everything in their own image had been one way in which the invaders sought to redraw Europe's political map. All Polish territories were assigned as either Nazi zones of occupation (i.e. Bezirk Bialystok, Provinz Ostpreußen, etc.), or annexed by the Soviet Union, soon to be overrun again in Operation Barbarossa. The Soviet Ukraine and Byelorussia witnessed the "Polish Operation" of the NKVD, resulting in the virtual absence of ethnic Poles in the USSR along the pre-war border with Poland since the Great Purge.