by Tony Judt
In late 1945 UNRRA was operating 227 camps and relief centers for displaced persons and refugees in Germany, with a further 25 in neighbouring Austria and a handful in France and the Benelux countries. By June 1947 it had 762 such units in Western Europe, the overwhelming majority in the Western Zones of Germany. At its peak, in September 1945, the number of liberated United Nations civilians (i.e. not including citizens of former Axis countries) being cared for or repatriated by UNRRA and other Allied agencies was 6,795,000—to whom should be added a further 7 million under Soviet authority and many millions of displaced Germans. In nationality the largest groups were from the Soviet Union: released prisoners and former forced labourers. Then came 2 million French (prisoners of war, labourers and deportees), 1.6 million Poles, 700,000 Italians, 350,000 Czechs, more than 300,000 Dutch, 300,000 Belgians and countless others.
UNRRA food supplies played a vital part in feeding Yugoslavia especially: without the agency’s contributions, many more people would have died in the years 1945-47. In Poland UNRRA helped maintain food consumption at 60 percent of pre-war levels, in Czechoslovakia at 80 percent. In Germany and Austria it shared responsibility for handling displaced persons and refugees with the International Refugee Organisation (IRO), whose statutes were approved by the General Assembly of the UN in December 1946.
The IRO, too, was largely funded from the Western allied powers. In its first (1947) budget the United States’ share was 46 percent, rising to 60 percent by 1949; the United Kingdom contributed 15 percent, France 4 percent. Because of disagreement between the Western allies and the Soviet Union over the issue of forced repatriations, the IRO was always regarded by the USSR (and later by the Soviet bloc) as a purely Western instrument and its services were thus confined to refugees in areas controlled by Western armies of occupation. Moreover, since it was devoted to servicing the needs of refugees, German displaced persons were also debarred from its benefits.
This distinction between displaced persons (assumed to have, somewhere, a home to go to) and refugees (who were classified as homeless) was just one of many nuances that were introduced in these years. People were treated differently depending on whether they were nationals of a wartime ally (Czechoslovakia, Poland, Belgium, etc) or a former enemy state (Germany, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, etc). This distinction was also invoked when establishing priorities for the repatriation of refugees. The first to be processed and sent home were UN nationals liberated from concentration camps; then came UN nationals who had been prisoners of war, followed by UN nationals who were displaced persons (former forced labourers in many cases), then displaced persons from Italy and finally the nationals of former enemy states. Germans were to be left in place and absorbed locally.
Returning French, Belgian, Dutch, British or Italian citizens to their country of origin was relatively straightforward and the only impediments were logistic: determining who had a right to go where and finding enough trains to take them there. By June 18th 1945, all but 40,550 of the 1.2 million French nationals found in Germany at the surrender a month earlier were back in France. Italians had to wait longer, as former enemy nationals and because the Italian government had no coordinated plan to repatriate its citizens. But even they were all home by 1947. In the east, however, there were two significant complications. Some displaced persons from eastern Europe were technically stateless and had no country to which to return. And many of them had no wish to go home. This puzzled Western administrators at first. Under an agreement signed at Halle, in Germany, in May 1945 all former prisoners of war and other citizens of the Soviet Union were to return home, and it was assumed that they would wish to do so. There was one exception: the western Allies did not recognize Stalin’s wartime absorption of the Baltic states into the USSR and Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians in displaced persons camps in the western zones of Germany and Austria were therefore to be given the option of returning east or finding new homes in the West.
But it was not just the Balts who did not wish to go back. A large number of former Soviet, Polish, Romanian and Yugoslav citizens also preferred to remain in temporary camps in Germany rather than return to their countries. In the case of Soviet citizens this reluctance often arose from a well-founded fear of reprisals against anyone who had spent time in the West, even if that time had been passed in a prison camp. In the case of Balts, Ukrainians, Croats and others there was a reluctance to return to countries now under Communist control in fact if not yet in name: in many cases this reluctance was prompted by fear of retribution for real or imputed war crimes, but it was also driven by a simple desire to escape west into a better life.
Throughout 1945 and 1946 Western authorities preferred to ignore such feelings on the whole and oblige Soviet and other east European citizens to return home, sometimes by force. With Soviet officials actively rounding up their own people from German camps, refugees from the East sought desperately to convince bemused French, American or British officials that they did not want to return ‘home’ and would rather stay in Germany—of all places. They were not always successful: between 1945 and 1947, 2,272,000 Soviet citizens were returned by the Western Allies.
There were terrible scenes of desperate struggle, particularly in the early postwar months, as Russian émigrés who had never been Soviet citizens, Ukrainian partisans and many others were rounded up by British or American troops and pushed—sometimes literally—across the border into the arms of the waiting NKVD.8 Once in Soviet hands they joined hundreds of thousands of other repatriated Soviet nationals, as well as Hungarians, Germans and other former enemies deported east by the Red Army. By 1953 a total of five and a half million Sovietnationals had been repatriated. One in five of them ended up shot or dispatched to the Gulag. Many more were sent directly into Siberian exile or else assigned to labour battalions.
Only in 1947 did forced repatriation cease, with the onset of the Cold War and a new willingness to treat displaced persons from the Soviet bloc as political refugees (the 50,000 Czech nationals still in Germany and Austria at the time of the February 1948 Communist coup in Prague were immediately accorded this status). A total of one and a half million Poles, Hungarians, Bulgarians, Romanians, Yugoslavs, Soviet nationals and Jews thus successfully resisted repatriation. Together with Balts these formed the overwhelming majority of displaced persons left in the western zones of Germany and Austria, and in Italy. In 1951 the European Convention on Human Rights would codify the protection to which such displaced aliens were entitled, and finally guarantee them against forcible return to persecution.
The question remained, however: what was to become of them? The refugees and DPs themselves were in no doubt. In the words of Genêt (Janet Flanner), writing in The New Yorker in October 1948, ‘[The displaced persons] are willing to go anywhere on earth except home.’ But who would take them? West European states, short of labour and in the midst of economic and material reconstruction, were initially quite open to importing certain categories of stateless person. Belgium, France and Britain especially needed coalminers, construction workers and agricultural labourers. In 1946-47 Belgium took in 22,000 displaced persons (along with their families) to work in the mines of Wallonia. France took in 38,000 people for manual employment of various kinds. Britain took 86,000 persons in this way, including many veterans of the Polish army and Ukrainians who had fought in the Waffen SS ‘Halychnya’ Division.9
The criteria for admission were simple—western European states were interested in strong (male) manual workers, and were not embarrassed to favour Balts, Poles and Ukrainians on those grounds, whatever their wartime record. Single women were welcome as manual workers or domestics—but the Canadian Labor Department in 1948 rejected girls and women applying to emigrate to Canada for jobs in domestic service if there was any sign that they had education beyond secondary school. And no-one wanted older people, orphans or single women with children. Refugees in general, then, were not met with open arms—post-war polls in the US and western Europe revealed
very little sympathy for their plight. Most people expressed a desire to see immigration reduced rather than increased.
The problem of the Jews was distinctive. At first the Western authorities treated Jewish DPs like any other, corralling them in camps in Germany alongside many of their former persecutors. But in August 1945 President Truman announced that separate facilities should be provided for all Jewish DPs in the American Zone of Germany: in the words of a report the President had commissioned to look into the problem, the previously integrated camps and centers were ‘a distinctly unrealistic approach to the problem. Refusal to recognize the Jews as such has the effect . . . of closing one’s eyes to their former and more barbaric persecution.’ By the end of September 1945, all Jews in the US Zone were being cared for separately.
There had never been any question of returning Jews to the east—no-one in the Soviet Union, Poland or anywhere else evinced the slightest interest in having them back. Nor were Jews particularly welcome in the west, especially if educated or qualified in non-manual professions. And so they remained, ironically enough, in Germany. The difficulty of ‘placing’ the Jews of Europe was only solved by the creation of the state of Israel: between 1948 and 1951 332,000 European Jews left for Israel, either from IRO centers in Germany or else directly from Romania, Poland and elsewhere, in the case of those still left in these countries. A further 165,000 eventually left for France, Britain, Australia and North or South America.
There they would be joined by the remaining displaced persons and refugees from World War Two, to whom should be added a new generation of political refugees from east-central European countries in the years 1947-49. Overall the US admitted 400,000 people in these years, with another 185,000 arriving in the course of the years 1953-57. Canada allowed in a total of 157,000 refugees and DPs, Australia took 182,000 (among them 60,000 Poles and 36,000 Balts).
The scale of this achievement needs to be emphasized. Some people, notably certain categories of ethnic Germans from Yugoslavia and Romania, were left in limbo because the Potsdam agreements did not cover their case. But in the course of half a dozen years, operating in a scarred, embittered and impoverished continent emerging from six years of terrible war and already anticipating the divisions of the Cold War, the Allied Military Governments and the UN civilian agencies succeeded in repatriating, integrating or resettling unprecedented numbers—many millions—of desperate people from all across the continent and dozens of different nations and communities. By the end of 1951, when UNRRA and the IRO were replaced by the newly-established United Nations High Commission for Refugees, there were just 177,000 people left in displaced persons camps in Europe—mostly the aged and the infirm, because no-one wanted them. The last DP camp in Germany, at Foehrenwald in Bavaria, closed in 1957.
The displaced persons and refugees of Europe had survived not just a general war but a whole series of local, civil wars. Indeed, from 1934 through 1949, Europe saw an unprecedented sequence of murderous civil conflicts within the boundaries of existing states. In many cases subsequent foreign occupation—whether by Germans, Italians or Russians—served above all to facilitate and legitimize the pursuit of pre-war political agendas and antagonisms by new and violent means. The occupiers were not neutral, of course. Typically they joined forces with factions within the occupied nation to fight a common foe. In this way, a political tendency or ethnic minority that had been at a disadvantage in peacetime politics was able to exploit the altered circumstances to settle local scores. The Germans, especially, were pleased to mobilize and exploit such sentiments not merely to divide and thus more easily conquer, but also to reduce the trouble and cost of administering and policing their conquered territories: they could rely on local collaborators to do it for them.
Since 1945 the term ‘collaborators’ has acquired a distinctive and pejorative moral connotation. But wartime divisions and affiliations often carried local implications altogether more complicated and ambiguous than the simple post-war attributions—of ‘collaboration’ and ‘resistance’—would imply. Thus in occupied Belgium some Flemish-speakers, repeating a mistake they had already made in the First World War, were tempted by the promise of autonomy and a chance to break the French-speaking elite’s hold on the Belgian state, and welcomed German rule. Here as elsewhere the Nazis willingly played the communal card so long as it suited their purposes—Flemish-speaking Belgian prisoners of war were released in 1940 when hostilities ceased, whereas French-speaking Walloons remained in p-o-w camps throughout the war.
In France and Belgium, as also in Norway, resistance against the Germans was real, especially in the last two years of the occupation when Nazi efforts to press-gang young men into forced labour in Germany drove many of them to opt for the maquis (forests) as a lesser risk. But not until the very end of the occupation did the number of active resisters exceed the numbers of those who collaborated with the Nazis out of belief, venality or self-interest—in France it has been estimated that the likely numbers of fully engaged men and women was about the same on both sides, between 160,000-170,000 at most. And their main enemy, more often than not, was each other: the Germans were largely absent.
In Italy, circumstances were more complicated. The Fascists had been in power for twenty years when Mussolini was overthrown in a palace coup in July 1943. Perhaps for this reason, there was little local resistance to the regime; most active anti-Fascists were in exile. After September 1943, when the country officially became a ‘co-belligerent’ on the Allied side, the German-occupied north of the country was torn between a puppet regime—Mussolini’s ‘Republic of Salò’—and a small but courageous partisan resistance co-operating with and sometimes supported by the advancing Allied armies.
But here, too, what was presented by both camps as a majority of right-thinking Italians locked in conflict with a marginal band of murderous terrorists in league with a foreign power was actually, for the years 1943-45, a genuine civil war, with significant numbers of Italians engaged on either side. The Fascists of Salò were indeed the unrepresentative collaborators of a brutal occupier; but the domestic support they could count on at the time was not negligible, and certainly not obviously less than that of their most aggressive opponents, the Communist-led partisans. The anti-Fascist resistance was in reality one side in a struggle among Italians whose memory came to be conveniently occluded in the post-war decades.
In eastern Europe matters were more complicated still. Slovaks and Croats took advantage of the German presence to establish notionally independent states in accordance with the cherished projects of pre-war separatist parties. In Poland the Germans were not looking for collaborators; but further north—in the Baltic States and even Finland—the Wehrmacht was initially welcomed as an alternative to occupation and absorption by the Soviet Union. Ukrainians especially did their best to capitalize on German occupation after 1941 to secure their long-sought independence, and the lands of eastern Galicia and western Ukraine saw a murderous civil conflict between Ukrainian and Polish partisans under the aegis of both anti-Nazi and anti-Soviet partisan warfare. In these circumstances, fine distinctions between ideological warfare, inter-communal conflict and the battle for political independence lost their meaning: not least for the local populations, the primary victims in every case.
Poles and Ukrainians fought with or against the Wehrmacht, the Red Army and each other according to the moment and the place. In Poland this conflict, which after 1944 transmuted into guerilla warfare against the Communist state, took the lives of some 30,000 Poles in the years 1945-48. In the Soviet-occupied Ukraine, the last partisan commander, Roman Shukhevych, was killed near Lviv in 1950, though sporadic anti-Soviet activity persisted for a few years more in Ukraine and Estonia in particular.
It was in the Balkans, however, that the Second World War was experienced above all as a civil war, and a uniquely murderous one at that. In Yugoslavia the meaning of conventional labels—collaborator, resister—was particularly opaque. What was Draza Mih
ajlović, the Serb leader of the Chetnik10 partisans? A patriot? A resister? A collaborator? What was it that moved men to fight? Resistance against the (German, Italian) occupier? Revenge against domestic political enemies from the inter-war Yugoslav state? Inter-community conflicts among Serbs, Croats and Muslims? Pro- or anti-Communist goals? For many people more than one motive was in play.
Thus Ante Pavelic’s Ustase regime in the Croatian puppet state murdered Serbs (well over 200,000) and Muslims. But Mihajlović’s (mostly Serb) royalist partisans also killed Muslims. For this reason if no other the Muslims of Bosnia sometimes cooperated with the German armies in their own defence. Tito’s Communist partisans, despite their strategic goal of ridding Yugoslavia of German and Italian forces, devoted time and resources to destroying the Chetniks first—not least just because this was an objective within their reach. Writing a decade later and already disillusioned with the outcome of the battles between partisans and Chetniks in which he himself played a heroic role, Milovan Djilas bore witness to the real experience of war and resistance in occupied Yugoslavia: ‘For hours both armies clambered up rocky ravines to escape annihilation or to destroy a little group of their countrymen, often neighbours, on some jutting peak six thousand feet high, in a starving, bleeding, captive land. It came to mind that this was what had become of all our theories and visions of the workers’ and peasants’ struggle against the bourgeoisie.’