Refugee crises · 1945
Did war or peace cause Europe’s refugee crisis of 1945?
The seminar question: “How did the war and the decisions made after it each contribute to Europe’s displacement crisis in 1945?”
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 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.
The short answer
- 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.
The full answer, argued
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.
This is the study layer of Refugee crisis in Europe after WW2, chapter 1 of Uprooted: Refugees in Europe 1945–1960 and Indochina 1975–1990; the full index of the atlas is here.
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