Post-War Displaced Persons — Europe's Refugees and the DP Camps
The end of World War II created the largest refugee crisis in European history: 11–12 million displaced persons (DPs) across Germany, Austria, and Italy by the summer of 1945. The majority were forced laborers whom the Nazi regime had brought to Germany from Eastern Europe (Ostarbeiter), POWs, and concentration camp survivors — most of whom were repatriated within months. The remainder — those who became the 'hard core' DP problem lasting into the late 1940s — were those who refused repatriation or could not return. These fell into three main groups. First: Poles, Ukrainians, and Baltic peoples (Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians) who had lived under Soviet occupation (1939–1941 and again 1944–) and refused return under Soviet rule, knowing what awaited them as 'collaborators,' nationalists, or simply as people with exposure to the West. The Yalta Agreement's repatriation clauses, controversially implemented by the Western Allies in 1945–46, forcibly repatriated Soviet citizens — including Cossacks who had fought for Germany and Vlasov's anti-Soviet Russian army — directly into Soviet custody, where many were executed or sent to the Gulag. Second: Holocaust survivors. Of the 6 million Jews murdered, approximately 300,000 survived the camps and the war in hiding or as partisans. Most had no homes to return to: their families were dead, their property seized, their communities destroyed. Anti-Jewish violence continued in postwar Poland (the Kielce pogrom, July 1946, killed 42 Jews). By 1946, 250,000 Jewish DPs were concentrated in the American Zone, demanding emigration to Palestine. The Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry (1946) and the Harrison Report (1945) documented their catastrophic conditions in DP camps that differed little from the Nazi camps — sometimes the same facilities. Third: Volksdeutsche — ethnic Germans expelled from Czechoslovakia (Sudeten Germans), Poland (Silesia, Danzig), Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia under the Potsdam Agreement's authorization of 'orderly and humane' population transfers. Approximately 12–14 million ethnic Germans were expelled in 1945–47; the expulsions were neither orderly nor humane — estimates of deaths during the expulsions range from 500,000 to 2 million. These expellees were absorbed into West Germany (and East Germany), where they constituted a politically significant minority — the BdV (Federation of Expellees) remains a political force in Germany to this day. The UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) and then the IRO (International Refugee Organization) managed 850 DP camps. The Displaced Persons Act (1948) admitted 400,000 DPs to the United States over four years, with preferences structured to favor Baltic and Eastern European DPs — and, critics charged, to disadvantage Jewish DPs through agricultural skill requirements and the cut-off date of December 22, 1945.
- Year: 1945 CE
- Category: Social
