Refugee crises · EPILOGUE ·
Europe and Indochina refugee crises
Chapter 12 of Uprooted: Refugees in Europe 1945–1960 and Indochina 1975–1990: “Two Crises Compared”
After 1945 the victors moved borders and peoples in Europe, uprooting 12 to 14 million Germans and millions of Poles, Ukrainians, Finns and Italians. After 1975 Indochina’s new communist regimes targeted old enemies, social classes and the Hoa, and over three million fled. In both, the end of a war began the displacement.
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The map above is the world of Refugees in Europe, November 1990 — Germany united; border fixed.
Every state on the map that year: The world in 1990 · Europe in 1990.
Part of IB History: Refugees in Europe and Indochina →
SHORT EXPLANATION
The fighting ended before the displacement did. In Europe after 1945, the victors moved borders and populations in pursuit of a lasting peace. Between 12 and 14 million Germans and millions of Poles, Ukrainians, Finns and Italians were moved; about a million displaced persons, civilians stranded abroad by war, refused to return to countries now under communist rule. After 1975 more than three million people left Indochina—the former French colonies of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos—by land and sea. New communist governments treated former enemies, social classes and the Hoa, Vietnam’s ethnic Chinese, as obstacles to revolution. The victors’ plans shaped both exoduses, though their aims differed.
Citizenship and geography helped determine what happened next. European states absorbed most of their uprooted citizens; the International Refugee Organization, a UN agency active in 1947–52, resettled others, and the 1951 Convention defined who was a refugee. Most Southeast Asian first-asylum states, the first safe countries reached, had not joined the Convention. At Geneva in 1979 they offered temporary asylum in exchange for resettlement elsewhere; the 1989 plan added individual screening and return. The final map shows united Germany in November 1990, central Europe blue, and the Oder–Neisse border confirmed as permanent 45 years after Potsdam. Europe settled a border, while governments in Asia drew a line around eligibility for refugee protection.
The full story
A comparison begins with what the victors wanted to build. In Europe, Poland moved west and Germany lost territory. Removing minorities was meant to bring borders and national populations into closer alignment. Nazi Germany had already expelled populations; at Potsdam in 1945 the Allies endorsed transfers of Germans. In Indochina, the new rulers sought a social revolution. Re-education camps, collectivized trade and the emptying of cities targeted political enemies and classes, while Vietnam’s break with China made the Hoa a suspect minority.
These projects were not the same, but ethnicity mattered in both the German expulsions and the Hoa exodus. The Cold War, the rivalry between the American-led West and the Soviet bloc, gave people fleeing communism political significance in the West. Europe moved far more people. In both crises, deaths on the journeys remain contested ranges.
Where could the displaced go? For much of Europe’s uprooted population, citizenship supplied an answer. German expellees entered German states as Germans; Finland, Poland and Italy also received their own people. Integration within nation-states did much of the work. Others, including displaced persons who could not or would not return, needed an international response. Wartime relief through UNRRA gave way to resettlement by its successor, the IRO, and then to UNHCR and the 1951 Convention, with its refugee definition and ban on forced return.
Indochinese refugees generally needed another country to admit them. China took more than 250,000 Hoa, but many others depended first on neighboring states and then on distant resettlement countries. By 1995 about 2.5 million Indochinese had settled abroad, more than a million in the United States. Europe’s institutions were used in Asia through negotiated bargains and quotas, and eventually through individual screening.
Return makes the change visible. Forced return had been abandoned in Europe after 1947; Hong Kong resumed it in 1989. The CPA followed an individual status decision, whereas the Yalta agreements concerned the handover of citizens. The fairness of the status decision therefore mattered greatly: it could determine whether a person would be resettled or sent back.
Settlement did not end the argument over memory. German expellee associations kept their losses in public view, while relations with Poland and the Czech Republic raised the problem of remembering those losses alongside responsibility for Nazi crimes. The Czech–German Declaration of 1997 addressed both; Berlin’s Documentation Centre for Displacement, Expulsion, Reconciliation opened in June 2021. Italy has marked the Istrian exodus on 10 February since 2005, and Germany has commemorated flight and expulsion on 20 June, World Refugee Day, since 2015.
Vietnamese communities abroad mark 30 April as “Black April”; Canada made it Journey to Freedom Day in 2015. Memorials on Galang and Bidong have been removed and rebuilt amid disputes with Hanoi. In each setting the loss of home has become part of public memory, and the history that led to that loss remains a matter of dispute.
FULL EXPLANATION
Comparing the causes
Philipp Ther’s The Dark Side of Nation-States (2014) and Norman Naimark’s Fires of Hatred (2001) place the expulsions of 1944–48 in a longer European history of ethnic cleansing. Modern states had trains, card files and armies with which to remove whole peoples. Nazi Germany demonstrated what those means could accomplish before the Allies applied transfers to Germans. Peter Gatrell’s The Making of the Modern Refugee (2013) puts Indochina alongside Europe, examining revolutionary states that displaced people identified by class and ethnicity. The resemblance should not erase the different policies. Great powers agreed to the European transfers in advance, and they were largely completed within three years. Indochina’s outflow lasted longer and was never openly declared an expulsion policy. Hanoi said it was merely letting people leave, even as some officials organized paid departures. Nor were the people who moved simply passive recipients of decisions. Jewish survivors organized the Bricha; Polish easterners chose Wrocław over Soviet Lviv; Hmong veterans led villages to the Mekong; and Hoa families bought boats. Their choices mattered, even though the crises imposed the conditions within which they had to choose.
Comparing the responses
Gil Loescher’s The UNHCR and World Politics (2001) and W. Courtland Robinson’s Terms of Refuge (1998) show how an institution formed for Europe changed as it worked in Asia. The 1951 Convention looked back to earlier events and allowed states to adopt a European geographical limit. UNHCR itself was expected to close within three years. In 1956 the Hungarian crisis produced a response of group recognition, first asylum and rapid resettlement. A similar arrangement was brought to Southeast Asia in 1979 on a much larger scale. The same arrangement rested on different conditions. Austria was a small neutral European state receiving Europeans whom the West wanted to admit. Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia were developing states outside the Convention, concerned that arrivals would remain. The United States, which had not signed the Convention in 1951, became the leading resettlement country and incorporated the Convention definition into domestic law in 1980. Under the 1989 plan, individual screening and monitored return became central. This approach became a template for asylum systems in the 1990s: Europe supplied the rules, and Indochina helped shape their procedures.
Memory of two exoduses
Commemoration can also make a claim about responsibility. Germany’s Federation of Expellees long linked remembrance with claims on lost territories. Around 2000 its president, Erika Steinbach, proposed a Centre against Expulsions in Berlin. Critics in Poland feared a portrayal of German victims separated from the Nazi aggression that preceded their expulsion. The compromise was a federal foundation established in 2008. Its documentation center, opened in 2021, places the German expulsions in a European and global history of forced migration and in the context of the Nazi war. The Czech–German Declaration of 1997 paired German acknowledgment of Nazi crimes with Czech regret for injustices in the expulsions. For Vietnamese abroad, the boat journey became a foundation of diaspora identity. Hanoi long described the boat people as economic migrants or traitors and objected to memorials calling them refugees. Following Vietnamese protests, plaques on Galang and a memorial on Bidong were removed in 2005; a replica was later built on Bidong. People who became citizens elsewhere carried memories their former country and new homes could read very differently.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
Victors with plans. The end of war gave the victors power to pursue political programs: the Allies redrew central Europe in 1945, and communist parties undertook revolution in Indochina in 1975. These aims shaped who left and when, alongside destruction and flight already under way. For Paper 1, the victors’ plans provide a useful starting point for explaining postwar displacement.
Ethnicity as a target. A label could expose an entire population to pressure. Germans in Poland and Czechoslovakia were expelled as Germans regardless of individual conduct. After Vietnam’s break with Beijing, Hoa faced suspicion as Chinese as well as economic disruption. The policies differed, but both affected people with no personal connection to the war or the old regime.
The Cold War frame. Western governments often treated those fleeing communism as evidence against their rivals, from 1947 in Europe and throughout the Indochinese crisis. Alongside humanitarian and other concerns, this helps explain support for the Convention’s persecution-based definition and resettlement in 1956 and 1979. It also helps explain declining generosity in the late 1980s, as the refugees’ political value fell.
Who signed the rules. European states helped write and joined the 1951 Convention; most Southeast Asian first-asylum states joined neither it nor the Protocol, although the Philippines joined in 1981. A legal commitment gave refugees grounds to argue for protection. Elsewhere, resettlement places and money helped secure first asylum. This difference and local politics matter when comparing Austria in 1956 with Malaysia in 1979.
THE TURNING POINT
Warsaw, 14 November 1990. On 14 November 1990, united Germany and Poland signed the treaty confirming the Oder–Neisse boundary. The border was formally settled 45 years after the expulsions, though memories and property claims remained contested. Meanwhile the CPA was screening Vietnamese boat arrivals in Hong Kong and Malaysia and arranging either resettlement or return. Governments were settling two different questions of belonging long after people had moved: the location of a border and eligibility for refugee protection.
What it changed
A global refugee regime. Europe’s postwar crisis produced UNHCR and the 1951 Convention, later extended by the 1967 Protocol into a worldwide framework. Indochina tested and developed tools including large-scale resettlement, orderly departure and individual screening. Later operations, from the Balkans in the 1990s to Syria and Ukraine in the 2010s and 2020s, drew on institutions shaped by both histories.
Resettlement and return as competing solutions. European policy after 1947 rejected forced return and relied on integration and resettlement. The CPA after 1989 combined resettlement for recognized refugees with monitored return for others. Experiences like these helped shape UNHCR’s three “durable solutions”: voluntary return, local integration and resettlement in a third country. The choice depends on circumstances and on the wishes and rights of those affected.
Memory and reconciliation. The expulsions still influence German relations with Poland and the Czech Republic, just as memories of the boat exodus shape Vietnamese communities abroad and their relations with Hanoi. Reconciliation asks people to acknowledge their own losses alongside wrongs committed by their own side. Both histories show how difficult that balance can be.
Echoes at sea. In May 2015 thousands of Rohingya and Bangladeshi migrants were stranded on boats in the Andaman Sea while Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia turned arrivals away. Malaysia and Indonesia eventually agreed to temporary shelter. The episode recalled June 1979: first asylum posed an immediate question, but the countries offering it also needed agreement over what would follow.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Compare and contrast the responses of states and international organisations to displacement in Europe between 1945 and 1960 and in Indochina between 1975 and 1990.
Both responses combined shelter in a neighboring or occupying state with resettlement farther away. UNHCR coordinated burden-sharing, and Cold War politics affected whom Western states welcomed. Yet citizenship changed the scale of the international task. Germany absorbed its own expellees, Europe’s largest displaced group, and Finland and other states integrated citizens too. Many Indochinese refugees depended on foreign hosts and resettlement countries. Europe built the legal refugee regime and recognized Hungarians as a group in 1956. Most Southeast Asian first-asylum states remained outside the Convention; the 1989 CPA instead screened individual claims and provided for resettlement or return. Forced return, abandoned in Europe after 1947, reappeared in Hong Kong in 1989. The system had become more legal in form, while states used the refugee definition to limit eligibility. Rules mattered, but protection also depended on receiving states’ willingness and capacity to act.
An interesting fact
UNHCR’s two Nobel Peace Prizes span both crises in this atlas. The agency was honored in 1954 chiefly for work with Europe’s postwar refugees, and again in 1981, when the Indochinese exodus dominated its work. Only the International Committee of the Red Cross has received the prize more often, three times. Fridtjof Nansen, the League of Nations’ first High Commissioner for Refugees, won it in 1922, tracing recognition of refugee protection from the aftermath of the First World War to the end of the Cold War.
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