By the end of September, however, 1.2 million displaced persons remained in Germany and refused to return home. Others were forcibly repatriated at the hands of Soviet authorities.
Additionally, thousands of anticommunists and former Nazi collaborators from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia fled the Red Army as it reconquered Eastern Europe.īetween May and September 1945, most displaced persons willingly returned home, with Allied military personnel overseeing the departure of an estimated 33,000 DPs per day. They included about six million civilian volunteer and forced laborers, two million prisoners of war, and 700,000 surviving concentration camp prisoners. When the war ended there were approximately 11 million displaced persons (DPs) in Europe, eight million of which were located in Germany. World War II uprooted and dislocated an unprecedented number of people-some 55 million in Europe alone. “A new type of political refugee is appearing,” she observed in January 1946, “people who have been against present governments and if they stay at home or go home will probably be killed.” Roosevelt predicted in October 1939, “there may be not one million but ten million or twenty million men, women, and children… who will enter into the wide picture-the problem of the human refugee.” Eleanor Roosevelt echoed her husband’s forecast six years later, when she personally became involved in aiding the postwar refugee crisis. “When this ghastly war ends,” Franklin D.
Top image: Ukrainian DPs in Camp Barracks in Germany, photo is property of the author.
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