Liberation did not end the crisis for the survivors. Several hundred thousand Jewish survivors found themselves in the spring of 1945 without homes to return to, without families, and without legal status. The countries they had come from had been destroyed or had become hostile. The displaced persons camps in Allied-occupied Germany, Austria, and Italy became, for many, a protracted second ordeal: better than the camps they had survived, but a limbo that would not resolve for years.
The scale of the problem
By the end of 1945 there were around eight million displaced persons in the Western Allied zones of occupation in Germany and Austria. The great majority were forced labourers and prisoners of war from across occupied Europe. Most were repatriated to their home countries within the first year, many under the terms of the Yalta Agreement by which the Western Allies agreed to return Soviet citizens to the USSR, often against the individuals’ will and sometimes by force.
The Jewish displaced persons were a distinct case. Of approximately 250,000 Jewish survivors in the Western zones, most had no home to return to. Their pre-war communities had been destroyed. Their property had been seized. In Poland, returning survivors faced violence: the Kielce pogrom of July 1946, in which 42 Jewish survivors were murdered by their Polish neighbours, made it clear to most remaining Polish Jews that return was impossible. The DP camps became holding areas for people whose destination was unknown.
Conditions in the DP camps
Initial conditions in the displaced persons camps were poor. Jewish survivors were often housed in former concentration camps or in facilities with former Nazi collaborators from Eastern Europe who had also become displaced. The Harrison Report, commissioned by President Truman and delivered in August 1945, was blunt: “We appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them.” Truman used the report to pressure Eisenhower to improve conditions and to separate Jewish DPs into their own facilities.
Conditions improved substantially after 1945. Jewish DP camps developed internal governance structures, schools, newspapers, political organisations, and cultural life. Zionist organisations operated openly, preparing emigrants for Palestine. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee provided substantial material support. The camps became, in effect, temporary communities rather than mere holding facilities, though the uncertainty about their inhabitants’ futures persisted for years.
The path out
The primary route out of the DP camps, for most Jewish survivors, was Palestine. The Bricha movement organised the illegal immigration of survivors through Europe to the Mediterranean coast and then to Palestine, in defiance of British immigration restrictions. After the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948 and the Israeli government’s declaration of open immigration, the Jewish DP population in Europe fell rapidly. The last Jewish DP camp in Germany, at Föhrenwald, closed in 1957. A smaller number of Jewish DPs emigrated to the United States, Canada, Australia, and South America, often after years of waiting for immigration quotas.
See also
Sources
- Yehuda Bauer, Out of the Ashes: The Impact of American Jews on Post-Holocaust European Jewry, Pergamon Press, 1989
- Zeev Mankowitz, Life Between Memory and Hope: The Survivors of the Holocaust in Occupied Germany, Cambridge University Press, 2002
- Leonard Dinnerstein, America and the Survivors of the Holocaust, Columbia University Press, 1982
- Earl Harrison, Report of Earl G. Harrison, submitted to President Truman, August 1945
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Displaced Persons, encyclopedia.ushmm.org