15 Apr 1945 — British troops reach Bergen-Belsen and find about 60,000 starving prisoners among thousands of unburied dead. Liberation came too late to save another 13,000 to 14,000 people, who died in the following weeks. Nearby, the British opened Hohne, which became Germany’s largest Jewish displaced persons’ camp. Remember them.
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15 APRIL 1945 · UPROOTED: REFUGEES IN EUROPE 1945–1960 AND INDOCHINA 1975–1990
The moment in context
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.
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…
The turn — 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…
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.…
