Refugee crises · CHAPTER 1 ·
Refugee crisis in Europe after WW2
Chapter 1 of Uprooted: Refugees in Europe 1945–1960 and Indochina 1975–1990: “Europe Uprooted”
In May 1945 more than 40 million Europeans were away from home. About 11 million were ‘displaced persons’, civilians stranded outside their own country, 7 to 8 million of them in Germany, which had run its war economy on seized labour. From January 1945 millions of German civilians also fled west ahead of the Red Army.
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The map above is the world of Refugees in Europe, May 1945 — The Reich surrenders.
Part of IB History: Refugees in Europe and Indochina →
BRIEF EXPLANATION — THE ESSENTIAL ARGUMENT
The central question of this atlas is what forced people from their homes after conflict, and how states and the international system responded. In Europe the answer begins with a paradox, which is that the end of the Second World War set more people moving than the war had ever settled. In May 1945 more than 40 million Europeans were away from home, by the later reckoning of the UN refugee agency, and that total leaves out the Germans who were about to be driven west. About 11 million of the uprooted were what Allied officers called “displaced persons”, or DPs, meaning civilians stranded outside their own country by the war, much as a traveller is stranded abroad when borders suddenly close, except that most of them had been taken there by force. Between 7 and 8 million DPs were on German soil, because Nazi Germany had run its war economy on labour seized from the countries it occupied.
Three movements met at the surrender, and the map shows each of them. The thick red arrow from Ukraine and Poland to the Ruhr records the forced labour that brought the DPs into Germany; the arrows along the Baltic coast trace German civilians fleeing the Soviet army by land and sea; and the charcoal block is the defeated German state in its 1937 borders, now under Allied occupation. At Yalta, in the Crimea, the Allied leaders had already agreed to send liberated citizens home and to move Poland’s borders west. Displacement in 1945 was therefore both a legacy of the war and a project of the peace, and the peace would turn out to move even more people than the fighting had.
The full story
The largest group of uprooted people in May 1945 had been brought into Germany on purpose, which is why the problem the Allies inherited was a product of Nazi policy before it was a product of battle. By August 1944 the labour offices of the Reich, as Nazi Germany called itself, counted about 7.6 million foreign civilian workers and prisoners of war, more than a quarter of everyone working in the German economy, and some 2.8 million of them came from the Soviet Union. Most had been rounded up in occupied Poland, Ukraine and Belarus and set to work in mines, farms and arms factories such as those of the Ruhr, the marker in the west. When Allied armies overran Germany these workers were suddenly free, hungry and far from home. Allied planners grouped them under a new label, “displaced persons” or DPs, meaning civilians outside their own country because of the war, much as an aid agency today separates people stranded abroad from people uprooted inside their own state. The label turned a crime into a logistics problem, and that framing shaped what the Allies did next.
A second movement ran in the opposite direction, and within a year it would dwarf the first. From January 1945 millions of German civilians fled west ahead of the Red Army, the Soviet armed forces, often far too late because Nazi officials such as Erich Koch, the party chief of East Prussia, had banned evacuation as defeatism. The arrows along the Baltic coast trace the treks across the frozen Vistula Lagoon and the navy’s evacuation by sea from ports such as Pillau; the sinking of the liner Wilhelm Gustloff alone killed somewhere between about 4,800 and 9,400 people. These refugees were citizens of the defeated state, so the Allies did not count them as DPs and gave them no international aid. That exclusion of uprooted people who held the citizenship of the state they reached became a rule written into the 1951 Refugee Convention, the treaty that still defines who counts as a refugee in international law.
The third force was a set of decisions the victors had already taken, and they ensured that the end of the war opened a new round of displacement. At Yalta, the Allied summit held in the Crimea in February 1945, Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin agreed that Poland’s eastern border would move west to roughly the Curzon Line, a frontier first proposed in 1919, with Poland compensated by German land, and they signed accords to return each other’s liberated citizens. Repatriation, meaning return to the country of one’s citizenship, looked like the natural end of displacement, and in the five months after the surrender the Allied armies sent nearly six million DPs home from the western zones of Germany. Yet more than a million refused to go, chiefly Poles, Ukrainians and Balts who would not live under Soviet rule and Jewish survivors who had no home left to return to. The war had uprooted these people, but the peace decided where they could live, and that question runs through the next five chapters.
DEEP EXPLANATION — EVIDENCE & INTERPRETATION
Why nobody could count the uprooted
Every figure in this chapter is an estimate, and the reasons for the uncertainty are part of the history. The people counting in 1945 were army staff officers and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), an aid agency founded by 44 Allied nations in November 1943, and each counted only the people it was responsible for. Their category “displaced person” covered citizens of Allied countries and excluded Germans, Austrians and the German minorities of eastern Europe, and it shifted as policy shifted. The best-known totals therefore measure different things: about 11 million displaced civilians in liberated Europe, the figure used in Louise Holborn’s official history of the International Refugee Organization (1956); “close to eight million” on German soil in Gerard Daniel Cohen’s In War’s Wake (2012); and more than 40 million uprooted Europeans in all, a floor given by UNHCR in 2000 that still omits the German expellees. People also moved faster than clerks could register them, since nearly six million went home within five months and many were counted twice. Historians now read the totals as orders of magnitude, and they treat the categories themselves as evidence, because deciding who counted as a DP decided who received food, shelter and a voice.
Forced labour as the root of the DP problem
Ulrich Herbert’s study of foreign labour in the Third Reich, Hitler’s Foreign Workers (1985; English 1997), showed that the regime built its racial hierarchy into the labour system itself. Workers from western Europe kept some legal rights and wages, while Poles and Soviet “eastern workers” lived under special decrees that fixed lower rations, curfews and the death penalty for sexual relations with Germans. The system grew because the war economy demanded it: by 1944 foreign labour made up more than a quarter of the workforce, and German agriculture and armaments could not have run without it. Liberation did not erase the hierarchy. Allied officers sorted DPs by nationality to speed repatriation and soon found nationality contested, since a Ukrainian from Lwów could be classed as a Pole, a Soviet citizen or neither. Looting by hungry former workers in the spring of 1945, which German civilians exaggerated, convinced the occupiers to concentrate DPs in camps, and camps meant for weeks became homes for years. Ben Shephard’s The Long Road Home (2010) argues that this improvised order, run by soldiers who had planned for logistics and met trauma, set the tone of the whole relief effort.
Flight before expulsion
German memory joined two different events under one phrase, “Flucht und Vertreibung”, flight and expulsion, and historians separate them because the distinction changes both the explanation and the death toll. The flight of January to May 1945 was a wartime evacuation and panic: civilians fled the front, often in winter and under fire, because Nazi officials had forbidden timely evacuation and because news of Soviet reprisals spread ahead of the troops. The violence was real and has been documented carefully, including the mass rape of German women that Norman Naimark analysed in The Russians in Germany (1995). It also had a context that German post-war memory often left out: the German war of annihilation in the East had already killed millions of Soviet and Polish civilians and prisoners of war. The expulsions that followed the surrender, the subject of the next chapter, were peacetime policy carried out by governments. Counting the dead of both together, as West German statistics did in the 1950s, produced larger totals and blurred responsibility, while separating them shows that the deadliest weeks for German civilians came before any expulsion order was signed.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
An economy run on foreign labour. Nazi Germany fought its war with workers taken from the countries it occupied. By August 1944 about 7.6 million foreign civilians and prisoners of war worked in the Reich, more than a quarter of its labour force, and most had been brought by force from Poland and the Soviet Union. The arrangement made the DP crisis inevitable, because a defeat would free millions of people hundreds of kilometres from home at once, in a country with no food to spare.
Nazi population engineering in the East. The regime treated people as movable parts of a racial plan. It expelled about 920,000 Poles from the western Polish lands annexed in 1939 and settled more than 300,000 ethnic Germans from the Baltic states, eastern Poland and Romania in their homes and farms by 1941. Moving peoples to make borders match nations was therefore a Nazi practice before it became an Allied one, and many of the settlers were among the first Germans to flee in 1945.
The Soviet advance and the ban on evacuation. A ban on evacuation turned the Soviet advance into a disorderly mass flight. When the Red Army broke into East Prussia and Silesia in January 1945, Nazi party chiefs such as Erich Koch had forbidden civilians to leave, calling it defeatism. Evacuation therefore began late, in deep winter, along roads and across a frozen lagoon already under fire. Millions fled in conditions that killed tens of thousands, and whole districts emptied before any Allied decision about borders had been taken.
Decisions already taken at Yalta. Decisions taken before the war ended set the scale of the displacement that followed it. The Allied leaders met at Yalta in February 1945 and settled two questions that would uproot millions after the fighting stopped. They agreed that Poland’s eastern border would follow roughly the Curzon Line, with compensation in the west, and they signed accords to return each other’s liberated citizens. Both decisions treated people as following borders and nationality, and they turned the end of the war into the start of a second, planned displacement.
THE TURNING POINT
Berlin-Karlshorst, 8 May 1945. The surrender signed in a requisitioned officers’ mess in Karlshorst is the hinge of this chapter because it changed what millions of people were in law and in the eyes of their rulers. Overnight forced labourers, camp survivors and prisoners became “displaced persons”, people whom the victors were obliged to feed and eventually send somewhere, while German refugees became the defeated state’s own problem. From this moment displacement stopped being a by-product of the fighting and became a matter of policy, decided by governments that now controlled every border on the map, and the decisions they made would set the next ten years of movement.
What it changed
Germans next in line. The Germans who had stayed in the eastern territories, and the German minorities of Czechoslovakia and Hungary, became the next population to be moved. Within weeks of the surrender local authorities began driving them out, and in August 1945 the Allies at Potsdam accepted their “transfer” as policy. The next chapter follows the largest forced migration of the post-war period and asks who bears responsibility for it.
Repatriation and the last million. Repatriation succeeded on a huge scale and then stalled. Nearly six million DPs went home by the end of September 1945, but more than a million would not or could not, and Soviet demands for the return of its citizens collided with their refusal. The camps built for weeks of transit became communities that lasted for years, as chapter 4 shows.
Borders that people would follow. The Yalta formula moved Poland’s borders west and assumed that people would follow their nation. That assumption produced the population exchanges between Poland and Soviet Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania, and similar moves in Finland and Istria. Chapter 3 maps how a line on a conference table became millions of journeys, and how each journey made room for another.
A new relief bureaucracy. UNRRA, created in 1943 to feed liberated Europe, found itself running hundreds of camps under military control. Its successes and failures led directly to the International Refugee Organization in 1947 and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in 1950, the institutions whose rules later governed the Indochinese crisis. Each new body was given a narrower and more legal task than the last, moving from feeding people to defining who deserved protection.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Was Europe’s refugee crisis of 1945 created more by the war or by the peace that followed it?
The case for the war is strong for the people already uprooted by May 1945: about 7.6 million forced labourers and prisoners had been brought into the Reich by Nazi policy, and millions of Germans fled the front in the winter of 1945 because of the fighting itself. Yet the peace made decisions that moved even more people. The Yalta border formula, the Potsdam acceptance of “transfers” and the agreements to repatriate Soviet citizens turned displacement into deliberate policy, and the expulsion of Germans alone, at 12 to 14 million people, outnumbered the DPs of 1945. A balanced judgement is that the war created the emergency while the peace chose its scale and shape, since governments now decided who could return, who must leave and who would be counted as a refugee. The transferable insight, which the Indochina chapters confirm, is that the end of fighting rarely ends displacement, because victory hands borders and populations to new rulers with plans of their own.
An interesting fact
The labour that created the DP problem was paid for only fifty-five years later. In August 2000 the German parliament created the foundation Remembrance, Responsibility and Future, funded equally by the federal government and German companies with 10.1 billion marks. Between 2001 and 2007 it paid about 4.4 billion euros to more than 1.6 million surviving forced labourers in nearly a hundred countries, most of them in Poland, Ukraine, Russia and Belarus. Many applicants proved their claims with the identity papers and DP registration cards they had kept since 1945.
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