refugees

refugees were one of the consequences of the war. From its very first day, a trickle of refugees began: Poles whose houses had been destroyed by German bombs or gunfire, and who set off—on horseback or on foot, perhaps with a cart or handcart or perambulator full of belongings—away from where they supposed the enemy to be. Some headed for distant friends or relatives, some simply took fright and fled. In Belgium and in France in May and June 1940, the trickle became a flood: most of the motorcar-owning population of Brussels, Lille, and Paris fled south-westwards in turn, jamming the roads (to the exasperation of the Allied armies) and subsisting as best they could.

By midwinter 1944–5, with the Allied armies closing in on Germany from east, south, and west, millions of Germans too had become refugees. The upper and middle classes in eastern Germany, in particular, were reluctant to come under the aegis of the advancing communist forces. The peasantry and the urban working class had doubts as well: hordes moved westwards. All over Germany, those who had been compelled to work as forced labour seized any chance that offered to escape, and became refugees themselves. By the end of the fighting in Europe in May 1945, with the railway system disrupted by bombing, and the road network broken up by shellfire and demolitions, with even the German state machine in disarray and many newly liberated territories close to anarchy, refugees could be numbered in tens of millions. Henri Michel, a sober and discriminating historian, reckoned them at about 30,000,000.

The newly founded United Nations organization (see San Francisco conference) set up the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, usually known by its acronym of UNRRA, to try to resettle those refugees who were outside the boundaries of the USSR, where they were retained as labourers. Bureaucrats labelled them ‘displaced persons’ (DPs); ‘DP camps’ sprouted on the edges of large towns all over western and central Europe. Volunteers did what they could—often they could do very little—to provide medical aid, clothing, even elementary sanitation; UNRRA did what it could to collect and distribute aid. It handed out some 25,000,000 tons of food in seventeen different countries in 1945–7.

Gradually, some DPs became reunited with missing members of their own families; some managed to get work; some, lucky ones, were granted citizenship of a new country. The skilled craftsmen among them were welcome enough in states that were trying to reconstruct themselves after the desolation of war; the rest endured, sometimes for years. See also demography and deportations.

M. R. D. Foot