Refugee crises · CHAPTER 4 ·
Displaced persons camps after WW2
Chapter 4 of Uprooted: Refugees in Europe 1945–1960 and Indochina 1975–1990: “The DP Camps”
Camps for displaced persons were meant to be waiting rooms for a few weeks but became communities for years. By late September 1945 nearly six million people had left the western zones, and the Soviet Union recovered about 5.35 million citizens, some by force. About a million people were still in the camps in 1947.
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The map above is the world of Refugees in Europe, July 1947 — The IRO; the Exodus turned back.
Part of IB History: Refugees in Europe and Indochina →
BRIEF EXPLANATION — THE ESSENTIAL ARGUMENT
The camps for displaced persons (DPs), the civilians the war had stranded outside their own countries, from forced labourers to camp survivors, were meant to be waiting rooms for a few weeks. They became communities for years because repatriation, the Allies’ plan to send everyone home, failed for the people who most needed protection. In 1945 the armies and UNRRA, an Allied relief agency founded in 1943 that worked much like a modern international aid charity, sent nearly six million DPs home from the western zones; the thick charcoal arrows on the map show them. The Soviet Union recovered about 5.35 million of its citizens, some by force under the Yalta accords agreed at the Allied summit in the Crimea. At Lienz British soldiers handed over Cossacks, Russian frontier horsemen who had fought for the Germans, with their families, and at Dachau American guards forced former Soviet soldiers onto trains. Scenes of people choosing death over return persuaded Western commanders that repatriation could itself be persecution, much as a court today may refuse to deport someone to a country where they would face torture.
The million or so who stayed were mostly Poles, Ukrainians and Balts who would not live under communism and Jews who had nowhere to go. In August 1945 the American lawyer Earl Harrison reported to President Truman that Jewish survivors were still held behind barbed wire, sometimes beside former collaborators, and Eisenhower then ordered separate Jewish camps across the zone on the model of Feldafing. After the Kielce pogrom of July 1946, a mob attack on Jewish survivors, some 90,000 to 100,000 more Jews fled Poland for the American zone, and many tried to reach Palestine, then a British-ruled territory, where British warships intercepted vessels such as the Exodus. The camps turned a humanitarian emergency into a political question that would define the refugee regime: who has the right to refuse to go home, and where may they go instead?
The full story
Repatriation, the return of people to their country of citizenship, was the Allies’ answer to displacement, and for most displaced persons (DPs), the civilians stranded abroad by the war, it worked quickly. French, Belgian and Dutch workers went home within weeks, and by the end of September 1945 nearly six million people had left the western zones. The Soviet case was different, because the Yalta accords of February 1945, signed at the Allied summit in the Crimea, bound Britain and the United States to return Soviet citizens and Stalin treated anyone who had lived under German rule as suspect. At Lienz on 1 June 1945 British troops forced Cossacks, Russian frontier horsemen who had fought for Germany, and their families onto lorries for handover to the Soviets, and at Dachau in January 1946 eleven of 399 former Soviet soldiers killed themselves rather than board a train. Such scenes pushed Western governments to narrow and then abandon forced return, and the right not to be sent back began as a lesson learned in these camps.
The camps became small nations in exile for the million or so people who still remained in them by 1947. Wildflecken in Bavaria held about 20,000 Poles at its peak, and other camps were Ukrainian, Latvian, Lithuanian or Estonian, each with its own priests, schools, newspapers and elected committees. UNRRA, the UN relief agency, ran food, health and welfare under army control, screened residents to remove collaborators and war criminals, and helped families search for each other through the tracing centre that became the archive at Arolsen. German neighbours often resented the DPs as privileged foreigners on Allied rations. For the residents, refusing repatriation was a political act, a statement that their country was now ruled by a regime they rejected.
Jewish survivors posed the hardest question, because no home remained for most of them to return to. The Harrison Report of August 1945 told Truman that “we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them”, and it urged separate camps and recognition of Jews as a group in their own right, and backed the request of the Jewish Agency, the body that represented Jews in Palestine, that 100,000 be admitted there. After the Kielce pogrom of 4 July 1946, a mob attack in which at least 42 Jews were killed, the Bricha, a Hebrew word for “flight” and the name of an underground network run by survivors much like an organised escape route, moved tens of thousands from Poland through Czechoslovakia and Austria to the American zone, the arrow on the map. By 1947 about 250,000 Jewish DPs waited in Germany, Austria and Italy. Britain, which governed Palestine under a League of Nations mandate, a form of international trusteeship, admitted only about 1,500 Jews a month, so clandestine ships sailed from Italian and French ports; the Exodus 1947 was seized off Haifa and its passengers forced ashore in Hamburg, and about 52,000 others were interned on Cyprus. The DPs had made the destination of refugees a question of world politics.
DEEP EXPLANATION — EVIDENCE & INTERPRETATION
Forced return and the Yalta accords
Forced return began as the by-product of an agreement about prisoners of war. The repatriation agreements signed at Yalta on 11 February 1945 were meant to recover Allied prisoners held by the Germans in Soviet-occupied territory, and in exchange Britain and the United States promised to return Soviet citizens found in the West. By early 1946 the Soviet repatriation administration counted about 5.35 million citizens returned from all over Europe. Most went willingly, though returnees passed through filtration camps where security officers decided who would go home, who would join labour battalions and who would be sent to the Gulag, the Soviet system of forced-labour camps. The Lienz handovers became the most bitter controversy because many of the Cossacks there had left Russia after the civil war and had never been Soviet citizens, so even the Yalta terms did not cover them. Nikolai Tolstoy’s Victims of Yalta (1977) accused British officers of knowing deception, and the charge led to a libel case that Tolstoy lost in 1989. Mark Elliott’s Pawns of Yalta (1982) traced the American side, showing how Washington moved by 1947 from returning Soviet nationals by force to protecting those who refused. The episode is a founding text of the principle of non-refoulement, the rule against returning people to persecution.
Jewish DPs and the question of Palestine
Atina Grossmann’s Jews, Germans, and Allies (2007) shows how Jewish survivors in the American zone, who called themselves the She’erit Hapletah, the “surviving remnant”, rebuilt religious and political life in the land of their persecutors and made the camps a base for Zionist politics, the movement for a Jewish state in Palestine. Their numbers rose after liberation because of the Bricha: perhaps 250,000 people moved west through it between 1945 and 1948, most in the months after Kielce. Harrison’s report gave them a status defined by persecution, and the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry recommended in April 1946 that 100,000 enter Palestine; Britain, facing Arab opposition and a Jewish insurgency, refused. The Exodus affair of July to September 1947 became a public-relations disaster for Britain, since members of the UN Special Committee on Palestine saw the passengers transferred to deportation ships at Haifa. Historians debate how far the DP crisis caused the UN vote for partition in November 1947, but most agree that it gave the Zionist case a humanitarian urgency, and that the camps supplied many of Israel’s first soldiers and citizens.
The camps as societies in waiting
Historians of the camps now emphasise what the residents built as well as what they suffered. Anna Holian’s study of Munich, Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism (2011), shows Polish, Ukrainian, Russian and Jewish DPs using the camps to rebuild national communities, with schools taught in their own languages, theatres, sports clubs and political parties, often more strongly nationalist than the societies they had left. Self-government gave people agency after years of forced labour, yet it also hardened divisions, since camp leaders guarded their national claims and campaigned against repatriation. The relief workers who ran the camps, many of them women, came to see their work as social reconstruction as much as feeding. At the same time the system sorted people: screening boards checked documents and histories to separate genuine victims from collaborators who had fled the Soviet advance, and the boundary was often blurred. Ben Shephard and Gerard Daniel Cohen both argue that these camps were where the modern idea of the refugee, a person defined by political persecution and in need of resettlement, was first worked out in practice.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
Yalta’s promise of return. The Allies had agreed at Yalta to return each other’s citizens, and repatriation was the simplest way to empty Germany of millions of foreigners it could not feed. The policy succeeded for most western Europeans but bound the British and Americans to hand over Soviet citizens whatever their wishes. The coercion it required discredited forced return in Western eyes and turned refusal into a recognised category.
Soviet rule over the DPs’ homes. Many of the remaining DPs came from eastern Poland, the Baltic states and western Ukraine, lands the Soviet Union had annexed in 1939–40 and kept in 1945. For them going home meant becoming Soviet citizens under a regime that had deported their neighbours in 1940–41. Their refusal was rational, and it meant that the post-war border changes of chapter 3 were also the root of the “last million”.
The Holocaust and post-war antisemitism. Jewish survivors found no future in post-war Poland. Some three million Polish Jews had been murdered in the Holocaust, and those who returned found strangers in their homes and hostility in their towns. The Kielce pogrom of July 1946, a mob attack in which at least 42 Jews were killed, convinced many that there was no future for them in Poland. Flight to the American zone was a choice to wait for a new home in Palestine or overseas, and the camps filled again a year after the war.
Britain’s limits on Palestine. British limits on entry to Palestine turned survivors into clandestine migrants. Britain’s White Paper of 1939 had capped Jewish immigration to Palestine at 75,000 over five years, and after the war London allowed only about 1,500 certificates a month to avoid inflaming Arab opinion. The gap between the number of survivors who wanted to go and the number allowed in created the illegal immigration of 1945–48, the interceptions at sea and the camps on Cyprus.
THE TURNING POINT
The Harrison Report, August 1945. Earl Harrison’s report is the hinge because it changed the basis on which help was given. Until August 1945 DPs were sorted by nationality, so a Polish Jew shared a camp with Polish Catholics, some of them hostile, and was expected to go home to Poland. Harrison argued that Jews must be recognised by what had been done to them, and Truman ordered Eisenhower to act; Feldafing, opened as an all-Jewish camp in May 1945, became the model for separate camps across the zone. Defining a group by its persecution was the idea that the 1951 Refugee Convention would later make universal, so a report about one group in one zone anticipated the core of modern refugee law.
What it changed
Survivors to Israel. The founding of Israel emptied the Jewish camps. When the British Mandate ended in May 1948, the new State of Israel opened its doors to the Jewish DPs, and most of the camp population left within three years; the International Refugee Organization alone helped about 132,000 to go. The same war displaced about 700,000 to 750,000 Palestinians, a parallel exodus that chapter 5 places within the limits of the new refugee regime.
From UNRRA to the IRO. UNRRA, dominated by American funding and criticised in Washington for helping repatriation to communist states, was wound up and replaced in 1947 by the International Refugee Organization, which the Soviet bloc refused to join. The new body’s main task was resettlement abroad, a change in purpose that the Cold War made possible and that chapter 5 follows. Relief had assumed that displacement was temporary; resettlement accepted that for many people it was permanent.
The right not to be returned. Western refusal to continue forced repatriation became the principle written into Article 33 of the 1951 Convention: no state may return a refugee to a territory where their life or freedom would be threatened. The experience of Lienz and Dachau sits behind that clause, which governs every case in this atlas. It protects people from return to danger, yet it says nothing about who must let them in, a gap that Southeast Asia would expose.
An echo in Hong Kong. Forty-four years after Lienz, Hong Kong put screened-out Vietnamese on a dawn flight to Hanoi, and the same arguments about consent, persecution and the duty of host states returned. Chapter 11 shows how the principle born in the DP camps was tested when the people returning were judged to be migrants instead of refugees. The comparison shows that the principle survived, while the definition of who it protected narrowed.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Why did the Western Allies abandon forced repatriation by 1947, and what does the change reveal about how refugee protection is created?
Moral revulsion mattered: soldiers at Lienz, Dachau and Plattling saw people kill themselves rather than return, and officers and chaplains protested through their own chain of command. Information mattered too, as reports of executions and the Gulag reached the West. Yet strategy explains the timing, because by 1946–47 the wartime alliance was collapsing and people fleeing Soviet rule began to look like evidence for the Western case in the Cold War. Lobbying by DP communities and their diasporas in America added political weight. The best answer therefore weighs principle against interest and concludes that protection grew where the two met, since neither revulsion alone in 1945 nor strategy alone would have overturned a signed agreement so quickly. The transferable insight is that refugee rights are rarely created by law alone: they emerge when a humanitarian scandal coincides with a political interest, and they weaken when the interest fades, as the screening and return of Vietnamese in the late 1980s would show.
An interesting fact
Wildflecken produced one of the best-known books of the 1950s. Kathryn Hulme, an American who helped run the camp for UNRRA, described it in The Wild Place (1953), which won the Atlantic non-fiction prize. There she befriended a Belgian nurse, Marie Louise Habets, who had left a convent during the war, and Hulme turned Habets’s life into the novel The Nun’s Story (1956). The book became the 1959 film starring Audrey Hepburn, so millions of cinema-goers met a story that had begun among Polish DPs in a Bavarian army camp.
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