Deserving victims

Several human silhouettes emerge on the corner of each street. They begin to shout with joy. Then, men and women, as if responding to a signal, spring forth from all over the place. Poles, Russians, Czechs, and French as well, all welcome us in their own language, greeting us after the fashion of their homeland. We thought we were entering an enemy town, but it is Babel that receives us as liberators. This war is rich in paradoxes.

– JD Couquet, Nous sommes les occupants, 1945, on the French liberation of a German town

Ten million displaced persons in Europe are stateless, homeless, and hopeless.

– YMCA, 1946.

Ivan and Nastasia, as part of the ragtag Cossack Army, were technically British prisoners. But after evading repatriation to the Soviet Union, they were transferred to a DP camp where they transitioned to political refugees and became potential migrant settlers to countries including Australia.

Displaced persons include disparate people (and stories): Ukrainian forced labourer Katherina, was taken by the Nazis at the age of 18 to work on a German farm; Russian– Estonian merchant banker Arved who moved his young family to Germany during the war because he feared the Soviets; Hungarian lawyer-turned-soldier Frank, was part of a defeated force that surrendered in Austria; and Jewish socialist Leo, was deported from Poland into the Soviet Union during the war and fled Soviet-controlled Poland in 1947. Jan, a (non-Jewish) Pole, was taken from his middle-class family at the age of 14 to work as a 'slave labourer' in a box factory in Germany; his older brother died in Auschwitz. Jan says: 'I was stubborn, I wanted to live.' In contrast, Hungarian student Joseph chose to leave Hungary in 1945 because: 'I didn't see myself fitting into the Communist system, so I packed up and left.' He initially saw the journey as an 'adventure: the world was sort of wide open'.

The term 'displaced persons' is now a generic name for everyone resettled by the International Refugee Organization after the Second World War. How did such a varied grouping – politically, culturally and socially – become, in contemporary representations, an 'anonymous mass', their individual stories erased in Cold War posturing. How did the displaced escape repatriation to become political refugees and then end up in such faraway places as Canada and Australia?

Displaced persons

The term 'displaced persons' entered international parlance in 1944 via the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), commanded by the United States general, Dwight D Eisenhower. SHAEF sought to categorise people displaced by the war, while avoiding the term 'refugee', which could imply a permanent rather than a temporary state. So Operation Overlord, the SHAEF Plan for the Allied invasion of Western Europe, separated displaced persons from refugees. Displaced persons specifically referred to people outside their national boundaries (refugees were displaced within their country) and who were either 'desirous' but 'unable to return to their home [...] without assistance' or who were to be returned to 'enemy or exenemy territory'. Displaced persons included 'evacuees, war or political fugitives, political prisoners, forced or voluntary workers, Todt workers [forced labourers], and former members of forces under German command, deportees, intruded persons, extruded persons, civilian internees, exprisoners of war, and stateless persons'.

The definition of displaced persons that emerged before the war ended predominantly related to people in Germany and Austria. They included concentration camp inmates, forced agricultural and factory workers, (non-German) soldiers in military units withdrawing westwards and civilian evacuees fleeing west from the oncoming Soviet Army. Voluntary workers and university students living in the Reich at the end of the war could also claim DP status. These disparate groups, both Jewish and non-Jewish, included Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Belarusians, Balts (Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians), Hungarians, Yugoslavs, and nationals of Romania, Bulgaria and Albania. Displaced ethnic Germans outside their state borders were the only group not included in the official category of displaced persons; they were collectively excluded from the group of deserving victims.

Notwithstanding the exclusion of ethnic Germans, the official numbers of displaced persons were staggering. In August 1944 there were 7.6 million foreign civilian labourers and prisoners-of-war working in Germany itself, comprising around 29 per cent of the Reich's industrial labour force and 20 per cent of its total labour force. Towards the end of the war an estimated 13.5 million foreigners worked in the German economy. At least 12 million were forced labourers; around 11 million survived the war (Germany's population in mid-1946 was around 66 million). In addition several hundred thousand foreigners had been imported into German-controlled territories and the Todt Organisation (a Third Reich civil and military engineering group) had more than a million forced labourers constructing coastal fortifications throughout Northern Europe and Southern France. In May 1945 up to 10 per cent of the 7.8 million troops wearing German uniforms were not in fact German.

In all, there were approximately 12 million displaced persons at the conclusion of the war in Europe in May 1945. Experiences were varied: survivors of death camps were counted in with so-called 'collaborators'. People who moved voluntarily to the Reich – for employment or to study at German universities – were added to forced labourers, who had been deported from their homes and subjected to grim conditions. Everyone was lumped together with the expectation they would all soon return home.

The displaced were a burden on the land, and on the economy. Some DPs, particularly forced labourers from the Soviet Union, were involved in acts of retribution towards the Germans. With agriculture disrupted, these former enemies, 'angry and hungry', let loose in a landscape of destruction taking farm machinery and livestock, perhaps seeing these as 'slave severance pay'. Representations of DPs in this immediate postwar period were uniformly negative. To the Germans who, in a continuation of National Socialist racial ideology, 'couldn't be bothered to try to accurately ascertain the nationalities of DPs', they were known as schlechte Ausländern (bad or dirty foreigners) and 'held in the greatest contempt'. They were 'adventurers and donothings, who are running the black market'. To Allied military authorities, they were 'surplus population' and 'a nuisance': kriegies (prisoners-of-war), 'goddam DPs' and 'lousy Poles'. Jewish displaced persons (and soon all Jewish survivors were officially categorised as DPs), who made up 20 per cent of the immediate postwar refugee population, were infamously described by US General George S Patton Jr in 1945 as 'lower than animals' and...