IB History Displaced Persons Camps, Migration, Emigration and Repatriation Notes

Displacement in Germany: Die Stunde Null

1. For Germans, die Stunde Null ("Zero Hour") refers to 8 May 1945, the day Victory in Europe Day (VE Day) was declared and Germany's surrender took effect, not Hitler's suicide on 30 April 1945, which had occurred earlier as Soviet troops closed in on Berlin. Germany surrendered unconditionally, first at Reims on 7 May and again at Soviet headquarters in Berlin on 9 May at Stalin's insistence.
2. The hours around VE Day saw the German government collapse entirely. Some soldiers tried to fight the Allies, while others abandoned their uniforms and slipped into civilian crowds. The German uniform became something to be disposed of, burned or destroyed.
3. Senior officials killed themselves rather than face accountability. People broke into food stores and abandoned apartments looking for food and shelter.
4. The end of the war did not end the bloodshed for Germans.
5. As many as 16.5 million Germans were driven from their homes, and an estimated 250,000 died during their expulsions from southern and Eastern Europe. Some historians put this figure at over 2 million.
6. About 6% of Europe's population had been killed.

Austria After the War: Four-Zone Occupation

1. Germany annexed Austria in 1938 in the Anschluss, as part of Hitler's drive to unite ethnic Germans in one Reich. Nazi policies were immediately applied, and the country saw rising antisemitism and repression of dissent.
2. At the Moscow Conference in October 1943, the Allies agreed to treat Austria as a separate country from Germany but held it responsible for its actions under the Nazis.
3. At Yalta in February 1945, they agreed to divide Austria into four zones, each administered by one of the Allies. Vienna was also divided into four zones.
4. The Red Army entered Austria in March 1945 and took Vienna by 13 April. The Viennese initially welcomed liberation, but the process was chaotic. Systematic looting, food shortages, and sexual violence were reported.
5. As the Germans withdrew, they took their police, and law and order broke down completely. Nazi offices and buildings were looted. People foraged in woods and streams for food.
6. Vienna sustained heavy damage. More than 80,000 homes were partially or completely destroyed, leaving at least 35,000 people homeless. Large parts of the city had no gas, electricity, or telephones.
7. Rationing was introduced and continued in the Soviet zone into the 1960s. Food scarcity worsened when ethnic Germans expelled from Czechoslovakia arrived.
8. By 1947, Austria was still coping with about 600,000 DPs, including 170,000 Jewish people.

Displaced Persons Camps: Types and Conditions

1. Millions of displaced people needed immediate help: medical care, food, shelter, and eventually relocation or repatriation.
2. Allied troops were ill-prepared for this. The end of combat transformed their role overnight from fighting to maintaining law and order, preventing violence, and dealing with millions of traumatized, homeless people.
3. Several types of camps were set up to manage the crisis. They served different purposes and were run by different organizations, including Allied military forces, UNRRA, and later the IRO. Some camps served multiple purposes, making them hard to classify.
   1. DP camps housed civilians displaced by the war, including concentration camp survivors, forced labourers, and former prisoners. Run by Allied forces and UNRRA, later by the IRO.
   2. POW camps held captured soldiers from the Axis forces, run by Allied and Soviet military.
   3. Stalags were German POW camps where Allied POWs had been held. They continued holding prisoners briefly after hostilities ended.
   4. Internment camps held civilians considered a threat, such as collaborators, who were screened for possible war crimes trials.
   5. Repatriation and transit camps processed people on their way back to their country of origin, providing health services and help with transport and documentation.
4. Most camps were in the US, French, and British zones of Germany, but others existed in Austria, Italy, and elsewhere. Buildings included former concentration camps (which was traumatizing for survivors), army barracks, schools, churches, and makeshift tented camps.
5. The camps were eventually organized by religion and ethnicity to address the needs of specific groups.

Aid in the Camps: Who Helped and How

1. Aid was provided by the governments of occupying countries as well as agencies such as UNRRA and the International Red Cross. Governments often missed the human element of what people had endured, focusing on logistics rather than trauma.
2. Governments cooperated to set up aid organizations (UNRRA, the IRO), establish DP camps, create legislation giving refugees legal protections, provide financial aid, and pass laws allowing migration to various countries.
3. Independent organizations also played a major role.
4. The Organization for Rehabilitation through Training (ORT) provided schooling for children and vocational training for adults so DPs could emigrate and build new lives.
5. The Hebrew Immigration Aid Society (HIAS) tried to track down missing families and helped Jewish DPs with paperwork, transportation, and sponsorship in the immigration process.

Relocation and Migration: Yalta and Potsdam

1. The Yalta and Potsdam agreements shaped the mass migration that followed the war.
2. At Yalta in February 1945, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin agreed on the post-war reorganization of Europe. At Potsdam in July-August 1945, the three countries met again to formalize their plans.
3. The agreements redrew borders. Poland shifted westward, gaining territory from eastern Germany. The Soviet Union gained territory that had been eastern Poland.
4. Soviet occupation of much of Eastern Europe was confirmed.
5. The Potsdam agreement specified that millions of ethnic Germans should be relocated from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and elsewhere into Germany. This population transfer was the largest forced relocation in European history.
6. The Allies sanctioned these relocations to make European countries more ethnically homogeneous. The relocations themselves were often chaotic and marked by suffering.
7. The Yalta agreement also committed the Allies to the "orderly return" or repatriation of all liberated and displaced persons to their country of origin. This included civilians, forced labourers, military forces, Soviet citizens, Jewish survivors, Poles, and Balts.
8. By the time of the Potsdam agreement, it was clear that many people would resist repatriation, complicating the process considerably.

What Happened After Relocation

1. When people were forced to relocate, they were often rounded up, allowed to take few belongings, and loaded onto overcrowded trains or wagons. Many died on the journey from starvation, exposure, or disease.
2. Those who arrived found conditions that were not much better. Locals did not always welcome the influx of newcomers because food and accommodation were scarce.
3. The relocations made many European countries much more ethnically homogeneous. Some historians have criticized them as a form of ethnic cleansing that reinforced the idea that a stable state should exist for just one ethnic group.
4. Over time, many DPs were integrated into new societies, although the effects of relocation lasted for generations.

Emigration: Those Who Left Europe Entirely

1. Many DPs were not resettled in their country of origin or their ethnic homeland. Instead, they emigrated, assisted by organizations such as the Allied military, UNRRA, and the IRO.
2. Emigrants included Holocaust survivors (especially Jewish people), DPs and political refugees from Eastern Europe who did not want to return to Soviet-controlled countries, ethnic Germans expelled from Central and Eastern Europe, and survivors of forced labour camps or POWs who no longer had homes.

The Last Million

1. The majority of DPs returned home or were resettled willingly, but a large number refused to move.
2. They were known as the "Last Million" because the rest of the DPs had been resettled. They remained in DP camps for years, claiming that they were refugees who would be in danger if sent back.
   1. At the time, there was no internationally recognized definition of "refugee," but the Allies recognized them as a special group that should not be relocated by force.
3. Between 1947 and 1952, most of the Last Million emigrated to the United States, Canada, Australia, Brazil, and Israel with the help of the IRO. Some remained in Germany or Austria because no host country would accept them.
   1. From 1947, the IRO shifted policy toward individual screening and formal resettlement, and it ended operations in 1952 after resettling more than one million people.

Repatriation: Returning People to Their Countries of Origin

1. Repatriation was the large-scale, often involuntary movement of people back to their countries of origin. It was managed by the Allies through organizations such as UNRRA and later the IRO, using military personnel, transport, and camp facilities.
2. The international response to the DP crisis took both legal and organizational form.
3. In 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights guaranteed the right to seek asylum from persecution and forbade arbitrary deprivation of nationality.
4. In 1951, the Geneva Convention on Refugees defined refugees, accorded them specific rights, and prohibited their refoulement (forcible return to a country where they are at risk of harm).
5. Three key organizations were founded to manage the crisis: UNRRA (1943), the IRO (1946), and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR, 1950). These organizations played a central role in repatriating DPs, but they were plagued by political conflict and the tensions of the developing Cold War.
6. The Western Allies emphasized individual rights and voluntary repatriation, while the Soviet Union pushed for the forced return of its citizens.

Repatriation of Soviet Citizens

1. Displaced Soviet citizens were returned by the Western Allies to areas under Soviet control. They were moved in batches, generally in return for equivalent numbers of Western citizens.
2. Many of the Soviets departed willingly, but others did not, and their forcible return conflicted with the non-refoulement principle.
3. The Allied powers, under pressure from the Soviets, rounded up and returned millions of Soviet citizens using trucks, trains, and military facilities. When they arrived, many were treated as traitors, denied civil rights, and sent to labour camps.
4. The Allies faced severe criticism for sending them back.

Ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia

1. In 1938, Germany annexed the Sudetenland, a region of Czechoslovakia with a predominantly German population. This annexation led to the persecution of Czechoslovak Jews and anti-Nazi Germans.
2. The Czechoslovak government in exile planned to remove all or most ethnic Germans once the war ended. At the war's end, these Germans were expelled by force and subjected to terrible violence. They were stripped of citizenship, rights, and property.
3. The Benes decrees of May-October 1945, issued by President Edvard Benes, declared all citizens identifying as German to be "non-trustworthy."
4. About 3 million Sudeten Germans had their property confiscated and were forcibly evicted.
5. An estimated 30,000 Germans were killed in the first months of the expulsions. After the Potsdam conference in July 1945, the expulsions were carried out more systematically, but 3 million Germans were still expelled and their property expropriated by Czech and Slovak states, continuing until late October 1946.

People Who Refused Repatriation

1. Many people from Eastern Europe did not wish to return to countries now occupied by or aligned with the Soviet Union.
2. Their reasons varied:
3. Latvians, Lithuanians, and Estonians had been independent after World War I but were now occupied by the Soviet Union. Some had collaborated with Germany during the war and feared reprisals.
4. Ukrainians did not wish to return to life under Soviet rule. Some had collaborated with the occupying German army and feared reprisals.
5. Poles faced a country that had lost 20% of its territory to the Soviet Union, with a pro-communist government sanctioned at Yalta. Many were initially keen to return but increasingly feared communist repression and worsening economic conditions.
6. Jewish DPs found their homes and communities destroyed. Many did not feel safe returning to places where their neighbours had allowed or collaborated in their attempted extermination.
7. In August 1945, the UNRRA General Council resolved to suspend assistance to DPs who refused repatriation and close the camps within six months.
8. But forcibly repatriating the remaining DPs proved nearly impossible, and after six months there were still almost one million people in DP camps.

Integration of Refugees in Their New Countries

1. Expelled refugees arrived in a war-ravaged Germany and faced enormous hardships. Most were granted asylum in West Germany. Those who fled from Moravia and South Bohemia sought asylum in Austria.
2. The experience was traumatic: they received no compensation for the properties, businesses, and communities they had lost.
3. In West Germany, associations like the Sudetenland Patriotic Association were formed to represent the deportees.
4. A West German law passed in May 1952 provided a right to compensation for losses suffered. In pro-Soviet East Germany, there was no possibility of compensation.
5. The integration of millions of refugees into European states already struggling with reconstruction was slow and difficult. European states were preoccupied with their own citizens' suffering and had limited resources to spare.