Refugees, Expulsion and Postwar Displacement

As the German front collapsed in 1944 and 1945, many civilians fled the fighting while millions of foreign workers, prisoners and concentration-camp survivors remained scattered across Germany and occupied Europe. Liberation brought these groups into the same damaged transport network, but their journeys and legal positions were different. A Polish forced labourer taken to Germany might wish to return home; a Jewish survivor might find that the family and community to which they hoped to return no longer existed; an ethnic German fleeing the Soviet advance might be barred from returning to a town that was now administered by Poland.

The westward movement of Poland created a second displacement alongside the flight of Germans. The Soviet Union retained much of the eastern territory of prewar Poland, while Poland took administration of lands west and north of its former frontier. Polish families from the east were moved or resettled in places whose German residents had fled or been expelled. Moving a border on a diplomatic map involved years of railway journeys, disputes over property and the rebuilding of local institutions.

The UNHCR historical survey estimated more than 40 million displaced people in Europe in May 1945, expressly excluding Germans who had fled the Soviet armies and foreign forced labourers in Germany. A narrower accounting used by the National WWII Museum identifies roughly 11 million displaced persons at the end of the war, including around eight million in Germany. These measures have different definitions and cannot be combined or substituted for one another.

On 11 February 1945 American and Soviet representatives at Yalta signed an agreement for the care and return of their citizens liberated by one another’s armies. That administrative commitment helped shape military repatriation policy when Germany surrendered. It did not account adequately for the position of people who feared political investigation, punishment or persecution upon return. Western forces organised assembly centres and transport while Soviet representatives pressed for the transfer of Soviet citizens. The willingness of individuals to go home became a major dispute.

At Potsdam, the three governments accepted that the removal to Germany of ethnic German populations remaining in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary would take place. Article XIII specified that transfers should be conducted in an orderly and humane fashion and asked the authorities concerned to suspend further expulsions pending Allied Control Council arrangements. The agreement followed months of flight and violent expulsions; it did not create those movements or guarantee compliance with its humanitarian language.

The governments issuing orders were not the only authorities directing events. Allied commanders, Polish and Czechoslovak administrators, local police, railway departments, the Soviet repatriation services, UNRRA staff and relief organisations made decisions about registration, food, shelter and movement. Their priorities sometimes conflicted, and the experiences of families differed widely across occupation zones and frontiers.

The Soviet offensive of January 1945 accelerated flight from East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia. Civilians travelled by road, rail and sea in winter conditions; advancing armies, failing transport and blocked roads separated many families. Some refugees escaped combat while others experienced assault, robbery or death during flight. The subsequent arrival of millions in occupied Germany added to housing shortages in towns already damaged by bombing.

After Germany surrendered, expulsions and local reprisals affected Germans still living in Poland and Czechoslovakia. One early action began at Brno at the end of May 1945, when thousands of German inhabitants, many of them women, children and older people, were driven south toward the Austrian frontier. Conditions and death counts remain disputed, but the expulsion was one part of a larger pattern of coercion and collective punishment.

During 1946, governments organised further transfers by rail under occupation oversight. The movement was often described in official paperwork as resettlement or population transfer; for those compelled to leave, it meant loss of residence, property and local community. Diplomatic reporting in 1947 described roughly 1.5 million Germans transferred from Poland to Germany by the end of 1946. That country-specific administrative figure is not the same as the total number who fled or were expelled across eastern Europe.

In April 1945 the U.S. Army recorded displaced people living in crowded facilities at Trier and Wittlich. The British-run centre at Hamburg Zoo registered new arrivals, treated them against lice, and placed them in temporary accommodation before transfer to national reception camps. Such centres were established in barracks, former labour camps and other buildings because normal civilian housing and hospitals were scarce.

Repatriation moved rapidly in the first months after the surrender. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum reports that more than seven million had returned by the end of July 1945. Many went voluntarily, while some Soviet citizens and others faced compulsory transfers. By late September about 1.2 million displaced people still in Germany were unwilling to return to their countries of origin, according to the National WWII Museum’s reconstruction.

Those who remained did not simply wait. Survivors in the camps organised schools, religious congregations, newspapers, theatres, political committees and systems for tracing missing relatives. Some settlements became recognisable communities with births, marriages and leadership chosen by residents. Returning home or choosing a new country could take years, even after a person had been formally released from captivity.

Jewish survivors faced a particular problem: liberation did not restore destroyed families, confiscated property or murdered communities. Earl Harrison’s investigation of camps in Germany and Austria in the summer of 1945 found that the military’s practice of registering residents mainly by nationality left many Jewish survivors without adequate protection. His report urged distinct accommodation, better conditions and possibilities for emigration. Eisenhower’s command began altering Jewish DP administration that autumn.

The return of survivors to eastern Europe was also met in places by hostility and violence. On 4 July 1946 civilians, soldiers and police murdered at least 42 Jews in Kielce, Poland. The attack intensified the westward flight already organised through the Brihah network. By 1947 Jewish displaced people in Germany, Austria and Italy numbered about a quarter of a million; the population included people who had returned from wartime refuge in the Soviet Union and then left Poland again.

A refugee ship illustrated the constraints of this movement. Exodus 1947 reached Haifa in July carrying roughly 4,500 Jewish passengers from Europe, but British forces intercepted it under immigration restrictions then in force in Mandatory Palestine. The passengers were subsequently returned to Europe. The voyage made visible the gulf between the wishes of survivors to leave and the controls imposed by governments determining their destinations.

The Preparatory Commission of the International Refugee Organization took over responsibility for many eligible displaced persons in July 1947, replacing much of UNRRA’s work. Its records counted more than 705,000 people then in care or maintenance. Repatriation continued for some, while others were screened for overseas resettlement; eligibility, health requirements, employment and immigration quotas often decided which country could accept a family.

In June 1948 President Truman signed the United States Displaced Persons Act despite objecting that its eligibility cutoff excluded many Jews who had fled eastern Europe after December 1945. The law initially provided for 200,000 admissions in two years. Amendments enacted in June 1950 removed some of those restrictions and widened eligibility. Canada, Australia and other states also admitted postwar migrants, often through labour and sponsorship programmes.

The international machinery lasted beyond the first emergency. On 14 December 1950 the UN General Assembly adopted the statute of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, intended to provide protection and seek durable solutions. Its creation marked a shift from military transport and short-term relief to long-term obligations concerning people who lacked a safe country to which to return.

The UNHCR estimate of more than forty million people displaced in Europe in May 1945 excludes additional major groups named in its own account. It also refers to people displaced at a moment in time, whereas the approximately thirteen million ethnic Germans expelled or driven west in the postwar years are a cumulative population movement. Adding those headline totals would count overlapping groups and different periods together.

The National WWII Museum’s estimate of about eleven million end-of-war displaced persons uses a narrower administrative category and gives approximately eight million in Germany. The seven-million-plus early repatriation count is a flow out of camps, while the 1.2 million still in Germany by late September is a remaining population. The IRO’s mid-1947 care figure is another point-in-time administrative measure.

Mortality during forced marches, sea evacuations, expulsion transports and early refugee settlement was not recorded consistently. The number of deaths attributed to flight and expulsion remains disputed, and comparisons require clarity about the dates, territory and definition of expulsion-related mortality. Archival registers and contemporary policy documents can show who moved through a particular camp or train even where overall figures remain uncertain.

The UNHCR historical survey provides the broad continental estimate and identifies groups excluded from its count. The National WWII Museum reviews the narrower displaced-person population and the contested repatriations. U.S. government diplomatic collections preserve the Yalta repatriation agreement and the Potsdam provisions on German transfers, while the United Nations yearbook records the IRO’s assumption of relief responsibilities.

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum reconstructs the experience of Jewish displaced people through camp administrations, survivor testimony and the Harrison Report. Truman’s original presidential statements document the restrictions of the 1948 Displaced Persons Act and its 1950 revision. The dated photographs used in this chronology come from identifiable U.S. Army, Imperial War Museums, Bundesarchiv and British Admiralty records; photos of conditions in a camp are distinguished from photographs of a later diplomatic decision.