Refugees and Displaced Persons After WWII

A Continent in Motion

When the guns fell silent in May 1945, Europe contained an estimated 40 million displaced persons — people who were not where they belonged and, in many cases, had nowhere to go back to. This was the largest forced migration in human history. The displaced included concentration camp survivors, forced laborers brought to Germany from across occupied Europe, prisoners of war, ethnic Germans expelled from Eastern Europe, and millions of civilians who had fled advancing armies.

The scale was overwhelming. In Germany alone, the Western Allies found approximately 11 million displaced persons at war's end. UNRRA (the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration), established in 1943, coordinated the initial response, setting up hundreds of DP (displaced persons) camps across Germany, Austria, and Italy. Most displaced people were repatriated relatively quickly — Poles to Poland, French to France, Belgians to Belgium. By September 1945, over 6 million people had been returned home.

But for roughly one million people, repatriation was impossible or dangerous. Jewish survivors of the Holocaust had no homes to return to — their communities had been destroyed, their property seized, and in many cases, anti-Semitic violence continued even after liberation. In the Kielce pogrom of July 1946, Polish mobs killed 42 Jewish Holocaust survivors who had returned to their hometown. Hundreds of thousands of Poles, Balts, and Ukrainians refused to return to countries now under Soviet control, fearing persecution.

Life in the DP Camps

For those who could not go home, the DP camps became a prolonged purgatory. Some camps occupied the very same sites as former concentration camps, with Jewish survivors housed behind the same barbed wire that had imprisoned them under the Nazis. A 1945 report by Earl Harrison to President Truman was scathing: 'As matters now stand, we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them.' The report led to improved conditions, with Jewish DPs eventually receiving separate camps and greater autonomy.

Despite their grim circumstances, the DP camps became vibrant communities. Survivors established schools, newspapers, theaters, political organizations, and religious institutions. Marriage rates in Jewish DP camps were remarkably high, as survivors sought to rebuild families and affirm life after the Holocaust. The camps also became centers of Zionist organizing, as the question of where Jewish DPs would go became one of the most politically charged issues of the postwar period.

The creation of the State of Israel in May 1948 opened the door for mass Jewish emigration from Europe, and by 1951, most Jewish DP camps had closed. Others were resettled in the United States (after the Displaced Persons Act of 1948), Canada, Australia, and Latin America. The last DP camp in Germany, Foehrenwald, did not close until 1957 — twelve years after the war ended.

A New Framework for Refugees

The postwar refugee crisis fundamentally reshaped international law and institutions. The failure to protect refugees before the war — most notoriously at the 1938 Evian Conference, where 32 nations declined to accept significant numbers of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany — created a moral imperative for a new framework. The International Refugee Organization (IRO), which succeeded UNRRA in 1947, was the first international body specifically mandated to address refugee protection.

In 1950, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was established, and in 1951, the UN Refugee Convention defined who qualifies as a refugee and established the principle of non-refoulement — the obligation not to return refugees to countries where they face persecution. These institutions and legal principles, born directly from the WWII experience, remain the foundation of international refugee protection today. The contemporary refugee regime — with all its strengths and limitations — is a direct legacy of the postwar displaced persons crisis.