Refugee crises · 1947
Why did the Allies abandon forced repatriation by 1947?
The seminar question: “Why did the Western Allies abandon forced repatriation by 1947, and what does the change reveal about how refugee protection is created?”
Camps for displaced persons were meant to be waiting rooms for a few weeks but became communities for years. By late September 1945 nearly six million people had left the western zones, and the Soviet Union recovered about 5.35 million citizens, some by force. About a million people were still in the camps in 1947.
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For millions of people, repatriation—the return to their country of citizenship—offered a quick end to displacement. French, Belgian and Dutch workers went home within weeks. By the end of September 1945 nearly six million people had left Germany’s western zones. Soviet citizens presented a harder problem. Britain and the United States had agreed at Yalta in February 1945 to return them, but Stalin regarded people who had lived under German rule with suspicion.
The short answer
- Yalta’s promise of return. The Allies’ Yalta agreement promised the return of one another’s citizens. Repatriation also seemed the practical answer to millions of foreigners in an occupied Germany unable to feed them. For most western Europeans it worked; for Britain and America it also meant handing over Soviet citizens regardless of their wishes. The coercion discredited forced return in Western eyes and made refusal a recognized category.
- Soviet rule over the DPs’ homes. Many of the remaining DPs came from eastern Poland, the Baltic states and western Ukraine, annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939–40 and retained in 1945. Their neighbors had been deported in 1940–41. To go home was to become a citizen of the regime responsible for those deportations. Their refusal was rational, and the border changes in chapter 3 helped produce the ‘last million’.
- The Holocaust and post-war antisemitism. The Holocaust had murdered about three million Polish Jews. Survivors returning to Poland found strangers in their homes and hostility in their towns. The July 1946 Kielce pogrom killed at least 42 Jews and convinced many that they had no future there. Flight to the American zone meant waiting for a home in Palestine or overseas; a year after the war, the camps filled again.
- Britain’s limits on Palestine. Britain’s 1939 White Paper capped Jewish immigration to Palestine at 75,000 over five years. After the war London allowed about 1,500 certificates a month, seeking to avoid inflaming Arab opinion. Many more survivors wanted to enter, and the gap produced clandestine immigration in 1945–48, interception at sea and internment on Cyprus.
THE TURNING POINT
The Harrison Report, August 1945. Nationality was an inadequate guide to what a Jewish survivor needed. A Polish Jew could be placed with Polish Catholics, some hostile, and expected to return to Poland. Earl Harrison asked officials to recognize the persecution Jewish survivors had suffered. Truman asked Eisenhower to act, and Feldafing, opened as an all-Jewish camp in May 1945, became a model for separate camps across the zone. The report changed the organization of aid there and anticipated an idea developed further in the 1951 Refugee Convention: protection could depend on persecution.
What it changed
Survivors to Israel. The end of the British Mandate in May 1948 opened a destination for Jewish DPs: the new State of Israel admitted them, and most of the camp population left within three years. The International Refugee Organization helped about 132,000 reach Israel. The same war displaced about 700,000 to 750,000 Palestinians; chapter 5 considers their parallel exodus and the limits of the new refugee regime.
From UNRRA to the IRO. UNRRA relied heavily on American funding, and Washington criticized it for helping repatriate people to communist states. In 1947 the International Refugee Organization replaced it; the Soviet bloc refused to join. Its emphasis on resettlement abroad acknowledged that many people would not go home. The Cold War made that change possible, as chapter 5 explains.
The right not to be returned. Article 33 of the 1951 Convention prohibits returning a refugee to territories where life or freedom would be threatened on specified grounds, subject to exceptions in the article. Forced return at Lienz and Dachau forms part of the history behind that protection. The rule against return does not itself identify a state obliged to admit the refugee, a gap later exposed in Southeast Asia.
An echo in Hong Kong. In 1989, forty-four years after Lienz, Hong Kong put screened-out Vietnamese on a dawn flight to Hanoi. Consent, persecution and host states’ duties were again at issue. Chapter 11 examines how refugee protection applied when authorities judged the people being returned to be migrants rather than refugees. The principle endured, while its application remained contested.
The full answer, argued
The decision to abandon forced repatriation grew from several pressures. At Lienz, Dachau and Plattling soldiers saw people kill themselves rather than return; officers and chaplains protested through their chain of command. Reports of executions and the Gulag gave Western governments further reason to take their fears seriously. But the timing also matters. By 1946–47 the wartime alliance was collapsing, and flight from Soviet rule supported the Western case in the Cold War. DP communities and their American diasporas added political pressure. Protection grew where principle and interest met. Neither revulsion in 1945 nor strategy alone would have overturned a signed agreement so quickly. Rights depend on political decisions as well as law, and can weaken when the interests supporting them fade, as the screening and return of Vietnamese in the late 1980s would show.
An interesting fact
Kathryn Hulme, an American who helped run Wildflecken for UNRRA, described the Bavarian camp in The Wild Place (1953), winner of the Atlantic non-fiction prize. There she befriended Marie Louise Habets, a Belgian nurse who had left a convent during the war. Habets’s life became the basis of Hulme’s The Nun’s Story (1956), filmed in 1959 with Audrey Hepburn. A friendship among Polish DPs in an army camp thus helped bring the story to millions of cinema-goers.
This is the study layer of Displaced persons camps after WW2, chapter 4 of Uprooted: Refugees in Europe 1945–1960 and Indochina 1975–1990; the full index of the atlas is here.
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