Refugee crises · CHAPTER 1 ·
Refugee crisis in Europe after WW2
Chapter 1 of Uprooted: Refugees in Europe 1945–1960 and Indochina 1975–1990: “Europe Uprooted”
In May 1945 more than 40 million Europeans were away from home. About 11 million were ‘displaced persons’, civilians stranded outside their own country, 7 to 8 million of them in Germany, which had run its war economy on seized labour. From January 1945 millions of German civilians also fled west ahead of the Red Army.
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The map above is the world of Refugees in Europe, May 1945 — The Reich surrenders.
Every state on the map that year: The world in 1945 · Europe in 1945.
Part of IB History: Refugees in Europe and Indochina →
SHORT EXPLANATION
When the fighting ended in May 1945, Europe faced a question that victory alone could not answer: where were the millions of people driven from home to live? A later estimate by the UN refugee agency put the number away from home above 40 million, without the Germans about to be driven west. About 11 million were displaced persons, or DPs, civilians stranded outside their own countries by the war. Seven to eight million were in Germany, many taken there to work for the Nazi war economy.
The map brings several journeys into view at once. The thick red arrow from Ukraine and Poland to the Ruhr follows forced labor into Germany; the Baltic arrows show German civilians fleeing the Soviet advance by land and sea. The charcoal block marks Germany in its 1937 borders, now occupied by the Allies. At Yalta, the victors had agreed to return liberated citizens and move Poland’s borders west. The war had scattered people across Europe; the peace would decide where many could go and set millions more in motion.
The full story
The Allies found millions of foreign workers in Germany because the Nazi economy had brought them there. In August 1944 the labor offices of the Reich, as Nazi Germany called itself, counted about 7.6 million foreign civilian workers and prisoners of war, over a quarter of the German workforce. Some 2.8 million came from the Soviet Union. Many had been seized in occupied Poland, Ukraine and Belarus and sent to farms, mines and arms factories, including those of the Ruhr. When Allied armies arrived, liberation ended their forced work, but it did not feed them or bring them home. Officers grouped civilians stranded outside their countries by the war as ‘displaced persons’, or DPs. The category made it possible to organize relief and return for a vast population whose members had suffered different crimes.
At the same time, German civilians were moving west. From January 1945 millions fled the Red Army, the Soviet armed forces, often after dangerous delays. Nazi officials, among them East Prussia’s party chief Erich Koch, had forbidden evacuation as defeatism. The Baltic arrows trace people crossing the frozen Vistula Lagoon and the navy’s evacuations from ports such as Pillau. One ship, the liner Wilhelm Gustloff, sank with an estimated 4,800 to 9,400 deaths. German refugees fell outside the Allied DP category and received no international aid. The 1951 Refugee Convention later addressed people who enjoyed the rights of nationals in their country of residence, a legal question distinct from the wartime classification.
Return appeared to offer an answer for those the Allies recognized as DPs. At Yalta in Crimea in February 1945, Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin had signed accords to return one another’s liberated citizens. They also agreed to move Poland’s eastern border west to roughly the Curzon Line, first proposed in 1919, compensating Poland with German land. In the five months after surrender Allied armies sent nearly six million DPs home from Germany’s western zones. Repatriation meant return to the country of citizenship, but that destination was not a welcome home for everyone. More than a million remained, including Poles, Ukrainians and Balts unwilling to live under Soviet rule and Jewish survivors whose homes and communities had been destroyed. The victors’ decisions about borders and nationality would shape the choices left to them.
FULL EXPLANATION
Why nobody could count the uprooted
How many people had been uprooted? The answer depends on who was counted. Army officers and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), founded by 44 Allied nations in November 1943, counted the people for whom each had responsibility. Their DP category covered Allied citizens, excluding Germans, Austrians and eastern Europe’s German minorities, and its boundaries changed with policy. Louise Holborn’s official history of the International Refugee Organization (1956) used about 11 million displaced civilians in liberated Europe; Gerard Daniel Cohen’s In War’s Wake (2012) gives “close to eight million” on German soil. UNHCR’s 2000 estimate of more than 40 million uprooted Europeans covers a wider population, yet still omits German expellees. Registration could not keep pace with movement: nearly six million went home within five months, and some people were counted twice. The totals give orders of magnitude rather than interchangeable answers. The categories also had practical consequences, helping determine who received food, shelter and a voice.
Forced labour as the root of the DP problem
The labor system that produced the DP crisis had itself enforced Nazi racial distinctions. In Hitler’s Foreign Workers (1985; English 1997), Ulrich Herbert shows that western European workers retained some wages and legal rights, while special decrees imposed lower rations and curfews on Poles and Soviet “eastern workers”. Sexual relations with Germans could bring a death sentence. By 1944 foreign labor supplied more than a quarter of the workforce; German agriculture and armaments depended on it. After liberation the Allies sorted workers by nationality to hasten their return, but nationality was not always simple: a Ukrainian from Lwów might be classified as Polish, Soviet or neither. Hungry former workers looted in spring 1945, and German civilians exaggerated the looting. It helped convince occupiers to concentrate DPs in camps intended for weeks that became homes for years. Ben Shephard’s The Long Road Home (2010) argues that soldiers prepared for logistics instead encountered trauma, and that their improvised arrangements set the tone of relief.
Flight before expulsion
“Flucht und Vertreibung” joins flight and expulsion in German memory. Separating the two helps us see why people moved and who was responsible. Between January and May 1945 civilians fled the front in winter and under fire, after Nazi officials had delayed evacuation and as news of Soviet reprisals spread. Norman Naimark’s The Russians in Germany (1995) documents violence including the mass rape of German women. German postwar memory often omitted the preceding war of annihilation in the East, in which Germany had killed millions of Soviet and Polish civilians and prisoners of war. After surrender, governments carried out expulsions as peacetime policy. West German statistics in the 1950s combined deaths from both movements, producing larger totals and blurring responsibility. Once the movements are separated, the deadliest weeks for German civilians fall before an expulsion order was signed.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
An economy run on foreign labour. The German war economy depended on people brought from occupied countries. By August 1944 the Reich employed about 7.6 million foreign civilians and prisoners of war, more than a quarter of its workforce; many had been taken by force from Poland and the Soviet Union. If Germany lost, millions would be freed at once, hundreds of kilometers from home, in a country short of food. The labor system made a vast relief crisis inevitable.
Nazi population engineering in the East. Long before the Allied peace, Nazi rulers moved populations to serve a racial plan. They expelled about 920,000 Poles from western Polish lands annexed in 1939, and by 1941 had settled more than 300,000 ethnic Germans from the Baltic states, eastern Poland and Romania in their homes and farms. Many settlers were among the Germans who fled in 1945.
The Soviet advance and the ban on evacuation. Party chiefs including Erich Koch called evacuation defeatism and forbade civilians to leave. When the Red Army entered East Prussia and Silesia in January 1945, people fled late, in deep winter, along exposed roads and across a frozen lagoon. Millions escaped west, tens of thousands died, and whole districts emptied before the Allies made their postwar border decisions.
Decisions already taken at Yalta. At Yalta in February 1945, Allied leaders agreed on a Polish eastern border roughly along the Curzon Line and compensation in the west. They also signed accords to return one another’s liberated citizens. These decisions made borders and nationality central to where people would go, helping set a new, planned displacement in motion after the fighting.
THE TURNING POINT
Berlin-Karlshorst, 8 May 1945. In a requisitioned officers’ mess at Berlin-Karlshorst, Germany signed its surrender. The end of fighting left millions needing food, shelter and a destination. The Allied DP category brought forced laborers, camp survivors and prisoners within a relief system, while German refugees fell outside it. Governments now controlled the borders and decided where people could or must go. Those decisions would shape movement for ten years.
What it changed
Germans next in line. Surrender brought no security of residence for Germans still in the eastern territories or for German minorities in Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Local authorities began driving them out within weeks; at Potsdam in August 1945 the Allies accepted their “transfer” as policy. Chapter 2 follows the largest forced migration of the postwar period and asks who bore responsibility.
Repatriation and the last million. By the end of September 1945 nearly six million DPs had returned home. More than a million could not or would not return, however, and Soviet demands for its citizens met their refusal. Transit camps intended to last weeks became communities for years. Chapter 4 follows those who remained.
Borders that people would follow. Moving Poland’s borders west under the Yalta formula carried an assumption that people would follow their nation. Exchanges between Poland and Soviet Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania followed, along with movements in Finland and Istria. Chapter 3 traces the journeys produced by border decisions, including how one departure could make room for another.
A new relief bureaucracy. Founded in 1943 to feed liberated Europe, UNRRA came to run hundreds of camps under military control. Its experience, both successes and failures, fed into the International Refugee Organization in 1947 and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in 1950. Relief institutions moved toward narrower legal questions about protection, and their rules later mattered in Indochina. Chapter 5 follows that development.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — How did the war and the decisions made after it each contribute to Europe’s displacement crisis in 1945?
The people already uprooted in May 1945 show the force of war itself. Nazi labor policy had brought millions of foreign workers and prisoners into Germany, and millions of German civilians had fled the advancing front. Yet peace also brought decisions about populations: the Yalta border formula, agreements to repatriate Soviet citizens and Potsdam’s acceptance of “transfers”. The 12 to 14 million Germans who fled or were expelled formed a larger group than the DPs counted in 1945, although these figures cover different movements and periods. War created the emergency; governments then shaped who could return, who had to leave and who received protection. The Indochina chapters likewise show how the end of fighting can give new rulers the power to set further populations in motion.
An interesting fact
The papers a forced laborer kept in 1945 could still matter more than half a century later. In August 2000 the German parliament created the foundation Remembrance, Responsibility and Future, funded equally by the federal government and German companies with 10.1 billion marks. From 2001 to 2007 it paid about 4.4 billion euros to more than 1.6 million surviving forced laborers in nearly a hundred countries, most in Poland, Ukraine, Russia and Belarus. Applicants could support their claims with identity papers and DP registration cards kept since the war.
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