Did war or peace cause Europe’s refugee crisis of 1945?

The short answer

• 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.

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.