Introduction
After six years of war Europe was in ruins. The length and ferocity of the fighting, including the damage caused by the bombing campaigns, had reduced many cities and towns to rubble and made millions of people homeless. Vast areas of farmland had also been destroyed by the large armies that had criss-crossed the continent since 1939. As a result there was a desperate shortage of housing and food. The scale of the crisis was enormous and complex.
The Legacy of War
The Nazi and Soviet regimes deported, expelled, and dispersed about 30 million people between 1939 and 1943. After 1943 the course of the war changed as the Nazis began to retreat and the Red Army and Western Allies to advance. As Nazi-occupied lands were liberated, forced and slave labourers, prisoners of war and concentration camp survivors were freed. But most of these Displaced Persons (DPs) had no means of returning home. Some, fearing they would be punished for being held captive by the Nazis, did not want to go back to their homes in the Soviet Union. Many of the camp survivors were so ill as a result of their maltreatment that they needed intensive medical care.
‘the largest refugee crisis in European history’
Liberation
The Red Army ‘liberation’ was so brutal that it created even more refugees from early 1944 onwards. As they advanced through central Europe and into Germany, Soviet soldiers ransacked, looted, and raped as they went, causing millions more to flee their homes. Balts, Poles, Romanians and Hungarians were some of the nationalities that fled westwards. Germans also fled west, fearing retribution for Nazi crimes.
Post-war Borders
Millions more people were displaced by the border changes agreed at the Yalta and Potsdam Conferences of 1945. The Polish borders were changed at the Yalta Conference (in February 1945) by moving them westwards. German lands in Silesia and East Prussia, where seven million Germans lived, were to become part of Poland after the war. At the Potsdam Conference, in July 1945, post-war borders were shaped by the Red Army occupation of most of east-central Europe. It was agreed that Germans would be expelled from the post-war states of Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. This amounted to about 13 million Germans in total.
Repatriation
Stalin insisted that every Soviet citizen should be returned – ‘repatriated’ – home. This included men and women whose homes had been in states that were independent before the war, but were under Soviet occupation by 1945. Allied authorities organised this process, returning over two million people to the Soviet Union and eastern Europe between 1945-1947. They were treated with suspicion by the Soviet and communist authorities. As many as one in five of them were shot or sent to the gulag. Some had actually fought against the Soviets during the war. But most were treated as traitors simply because they had served in the armed forces of the Western Allies, or been taken to Germany as slave workers, or held in prisoner of war camps in the West. The Allies stopped forcibly repatriating people in 1947.
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