ON THIS DAY ·
SS Exodus
18 Jul 1947 — The Royal Navy boards a former Chesapeake Bay steamer carrying about 4,500 Jewish refugees off Haifa; three people are killed. The passengers are shipped back to France, refuse to land, and are forced ashore in Hamburg in September. The spectacle swayed opinion while the UN debated Palestine.
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The moment in context
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.
From Displaced persons camps after WW2, chapter 4 of Uprooted: Refugees in Europe 1945–1960 and Indochina 1975–1990 (1947).
The place: SS Exodus — map and full story →
Teach this in 5 minutes
- 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…
- The turn — 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…
- 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…
Then ask the room: Why did the Western Allies abandon forced repatriation by 1947, and what does the change reveal about how refugee protection is created? The argued answer is on the chapter page →
The atlas that shows it
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