Post-war displacement in Europe — conditions

By May 1945, the Second World War in Europe was over. But for millions of people, the moving had barely stopped.

Historians estimate that around 40 million people were displaced across Europe by the war's end. This inquiry asks: what were the conditions that led to this mass displacement?

Three conditions, one crisis: This micro covers three overlapping causes: (1) combat operations and the Allied victory itself, (2) persecution and fear of reprisals, and (3) economic collapse. Sources on displacement usually show more than one of these at once — that overlap is exactly what Paper 1 questions test.

A displaced person (DP) in 1945 might be a former slave labourer, a concentration-camp survivor, a soldier who refused to go home, or a family fleeing revenge attacks. Each had a different reason for being on the road.

Read the source for MORE than one cause: A photograph of refugees on a road in 1945 could be illustrating combat destruction, fear of Soviet troops, or hunger — often all three. When you use a source's content for Q1, name the specific detail (ruined buildings, exhausted faces, direction of travel) that supports the cause you're arguing for, rather than just saying 'the source shows displacement.'

The war itself created displacement in two waves. First, while the fighting was happening. Second, in the chaotic months right after it ended.

During the war, Nazi Germany had forced around 8 million foreign workers — from Poland, the Soviet Union, France and elsewhere — into Germany as forced labour. Millions more had been marched out of their homes by retreating or advancing armies, or fled ahead of the fighting to escape bombing and battle.

Then came the Allied victory. As Allied troops swept across Germany in 1944–1945, they liberated Nazi concentration camps and forced-labour sites. Suddenly, millions of survivors — malnourished, often stateless, with homes destroyed or now behind a new Soviet border — had nowhere obvious to go.

Reading a liberation photograph: Imagine a source: a 1945 photograph of former camp prisoners standing outside a liberated site in Germany, taken by a British army photographer. Its content shows thin, exhausted people with no possessions — direct evidence of the human cost of Nazi forced labour and imprisonment. Its context matters too: a British military photographer likely intended to document Nazi crimes for the Allied public, which shapes what the photo includes and how it should be used as evidence.

Not everyone who moved in 1945 was fleeing bombs. Many were fleeing people — and fleeing what might happen next.

Holocaust survivors faced an agonising problem: going home often meant returning to towns where their families had been murdered, their property taken, and where local antisemitism sometimes continued. Many refused to return to Poland or other eastern countries and instead stayed in DP camps, hoping to emigrate to Palestine or elsewhere.

Ethnic Germans faced the opposite persecution. As the war ended, around 12 million ethnic Germans were expelled from Poland, Czechoslovakia and other Eastern European states — driven out in revenge for Nazi occupation, often in brutal conditions, with many dying on the journey west.

A third group feared the future rather than the past: people in Eastern Europe who dreaded living under Soviet rule. As the Red Army occupied Eastern Europe and installed communist governments, many civilians — and soldiers who had fought alongside Germany against the USSR — fled west rather than risk arrest, forced labour in the USSR, or political persecution.

Economic collapse pushed too, not just pulled: Even people with no direct reason to fear persecution often had to move. Allied bombing had flattened cities like Berlin, Warsaw and Dresden. Farmland was cratered, railways were wrecked, and the 1945–46 harvest failed in parts of Europe. With no housing, no food supply and no jobs, staying put was often not an option — economic collapse displaced people just as surely as violence did.