Refugee crises quiz: 8 questions

The figures measure different things: about 7–8 million DPs on German soil, about 11 million displaced civilians in liberated Europe, and over 40 million uprooted Europeans in all. Who counted as a DP decided who received help.

The phrase “orderly and humane” and the request for a pause were the only limits the Allies set. Expulsions had already begun, and the Allied Control Council’s plan of November 1945 then fixed quotas for 6.65 million people.

Dispersal was the point: families were spread thinly among Polish settlers in the lands taken from Germany. No border had moved, which shows how far the logic of homogeneity had gone by 1947.

Harrison found survivors still behind barbed wire and wrote that the Allies seemed to be treating Jews “as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them”. Truman ordered Eisenhower to act.

The time limit and the optional European limit kept commitments small. They were removed by the 1967 Protocol, which the first-asylum states of Southeast Asia never joined.

Economic policy and great-power rivalry overlapped. In 1978 about 70 percent of arrivals were of Chinese origin, and officials let many leave if they paid in gold.

Arrivals fell from more than 50,000 a month to about 9,000 by August. Critics noted the price: a state was preventing its own citizens from fleeing, while the Orderly Departure Program grew slowly.

Screening ended the presumption that every Vietnamese arrival was a refugee. Only about 28 percent were recognised overall, and more than 109,000 Vietnamese went home, most through a monitored voluntary programme.