Post-war displacement in Europe — different groups' experiences

By May 1945, roughly 11 million people were displaced across Europe. Most were sent home within months. But a hard core of people had no home to go back to — or refused to go back at all.

These people became known as DPs. They lived in camps run by the Allied armies and later by UNRRA.

Why some refugees were truly stateless: Many Eastern Europeans refused repatriation because their homelands were now under Soviet control. Return could mean arrest, forced labour, or execution as a suspected collaborator. Others were stateless — their pre-war country no longer existed, or had stripped them of citizenship, so no state would issue them papers.

By 1947 around one million DPs remained in camps in Germany, Austria and Italy. Western governments were reluctant to take large numbers of refugees, fearing unemployment and social strain. The 1948 International Refugee Organization and later resettlement schemes to the USA, Australia and Canada slowly emptied the camps, but some DP camps stayed open into the 1950s.

How to read a source on DP camps: A 1947 UNRRA camp report listing nationalities and 'reasons for non-return' has direct content value — it tells a historian how many people were stateless and why. Its context matters too: UNRRA staff wrote it to justify continued funding, so it may stress the scale of need rather than camp conditions.

Survivors of Nazi concentration and death camps faced a different kind of displacement. Liberation did not mean going home — for many, home no longer existed.

Jewish survivors often found their communities destroyed and their property taken by neighbours. Returning to Poland was especially dangerous: the July 1946 Kielce pogrom showed that antisemitism had not ended with the war. As a result, most Jewish DPs refused repatriation and instead waited in camps, hoping to reach Palestine or the USA.

Roma survivors were often overlooked: The Roma had also been targeted for genocide by the Nazis (the Porajmos), yet postwar relief agencies rarely recorded them as a distinct group. This makes Roma experiences much harder for historians to trace — a gap in the source record itself is historically significant.

Former prisoners of war (POWs) added to the crowds of the displaced. Millions of German soldiers were held in Allied and especially Soviet POW camps after 1945; many were used as forced labour and were not released for years — the last Soviet-held German POWs only came home in 1955–56.

Perspectives differ by who is writing: A survivor's testimony, a DP camp administrator's report, and a government resettlement policy will each describe the 'same' displacement differently — one from lived experience, one from bureaucratic need, one from political self-interest. Q3 rewards you for spotting this.

A smaller but tricky group of displaced people were soldiers from occupied or Axis-allied nations who had fought under German command — some by conviction, many by coercion, forced conscription, or as collaborators avoiding a worse fate.

This included Soviet citizens who had joined anti-Soviet units (such as the ROA under General Vlasov), Cossack units, and men from the Baltic states and Ukraine drafted into German-controlled forces.

Why their repatriation was so difficult: Under the 1945 Yalta agreements, the Western Allies agreed to hand Soviet citizens back to the USSR — including those who had fought for Germany. Many were forcibly repatriated even though they knew this meant likely execution or the Gulag. This became known as Operation Keelhaul, and it remains controversial precisely because Allied forces used force against people fleeing a wartime ally.

How context changes a source's use: A British officer's 1945 memo objecting to forced handovers is a powerful source on this issue — but its context (a serving officer, writing during the operation, possibly defending his own conduct) shapes how far a historian can generalise from it to the whole Allied policy.