Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (19 page)

While they waited to be repatriated, DPs were transported to large assembly centres, and funnelled off in their different national groups to DP camps throughout Germany, Austria and Italy. These tended to be either former military barracks or sectioned-off areas of towns. Some of them were specially constructed to house DPs; but others were former labour camps or even concentration camps. In a continent where shelter was in desperately short supply the Allies had to make use of whatever buildings they could find. It was with some dismay that many ex-prisoners found themselves being deloused, shaven and put back into the very concentration camps from which they had so recently escaped.
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It is clear from the official reports of the time, as well as the many memoirs and diaries written by ordinary soldiers, that the Allied authorities were far more wary of DPs than they were of the Germans. Over the coming months they began to fear the resentment and desperation of people who, far from being liberated, continued to live in exile, under guard and under military rule. In August the British began to enlist policemen from amongst the Polish DPs to keep their countrymen in order, on the grounds that there were not enough Allied soldiers to control them, and that German police would not be respected.
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By November both the British and the Americans were considering rearming the German police in areas ‘where displaced persons activities have been a menace’.
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A Joint Intelligence Committee report on possible dangers to the Allies in the coming winter spelled out Allied fears in plain terms: ‘If the harder conditions of winter affect the living conditions of the DPs, they are likely to cause more trouble than the Germans as they are banded together in camps and may, unlike the Germans, have access to arms in some quantity.’
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There is perhaps an element of alarmism in reports like this. The director of UNRRA in western Germany certainly believed that ‘the displaced persons under UNRRA administration are [not] more notable for riotous behaviour than other sections of the populace’.
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There is a huge amount of anecdotal evidence that DPs were frequently blamed for instances of looting that were in fact carried out by the Germans themselves,
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and official reports indeed show that crime levels remained high long after the majority of DPs had been sent home.
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In the words of one military government officer, ‘DPs were outcasts … All and every trouble was put down to DPs.’
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Now that the war was over, DPs were in danger of becoming characterized as the new enemy.

4. Displaced Persons camps in Germany, Austria and Northern Italy

The ‘Liberation Complex’

Given the situation the DPs found themselves in after their liberation, it is hardly surprising that their initial euphoria soon gave way to disillusionment. One of the first people to observe large groups of DPs in Germany was Marta Korwin, a Polish social worker who followed a British military government team into Bocholt in April 1945. According to conversations and assessments she made at the time, many of these people had survived the war by

counterbalancing the reality that was always extremely hard, and often sordid and horrible, by calling up daydreams of their past life, until they were almost certain that, the moment they were liberated, they would find themselves in the same happy, beautiful world they knew before the war. All their past difficulties would be forgotten, freedom would take them back to a world where nothing had ever gone wrong … a paradise in which all people were good … and all homes beautiful.

But instead of returning to this ‘paradise’ they found themselves ‘being herded into camps in which, in many cases … they found themselves in worse conditions than before their liberation’. Worse still, long periods of inactivity gave them the chance to reflect on the fact that the paradise they had dreamed of no longer existed: in the ruins that surrounded them they saw only ‘their hopes for a better future destroyed’.
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Marta Korwin’s observations were backed up by larger-scale studies conducted by international agencies. In June 1945 an Inter-Allied Psychological Study Group, under the supervision of UNRRA, produced a report on the DPs’ state of mind. Far from being glad to be free, the report noted, many DPs were merely bitter and touchy. The gratitude that many Allied soldiers expected was also absent: instead there was an ‘increased restlessness’, ‘complete apathy’, ‘loss of initiative’ and ‘a great and sullen suspicion … towards all authority’. Indeed, many DPs had become so cynical that ‘nothing that is done even by helpful people is regarded as genuine or sincere’. Such attitudes were what some Allied officers began to call the ‘Liberation Complex’.
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The Allied armies were not exactly blameless in the creation of this complex. Despite the huge strides that British and American military personnel had made in relief work over the previous two years, most army officers still tended to regard DPs more as a logistical than a humanitarian problem. They saw huge numbers of people who needed to be registered, deloused, clothed, fed, categorized into their various nationalities, put to useful work and eventually repatriated. By 1945, all the Allied armies were extremely efficient at doing exactly this sort of work. What they were not good at, however, was what we would now call ‘people skills’. In their efforts to process DPs through the system, they often forgot that they were dealing with traumatized human beings.

Humanitarian workers were often dismayed by the insensitivity that military personnel displayed towards DPs. One British employee of UNRRA lost her temper when an American lieutenant ordered a large group of women and children to be moved without any notice whatsoever. ‘I hate the army,’ she found herself shouting at him. ‘Why don’t you go and fight someone? Why do you meddle with civilians, with peaceable human beings? They are counters to you – you think you can move mothers and babies and sick people as you move companies and batteries in the war. Why don’t you stick to something you understand?’
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When DPs were weary or apathetic, the military invariably fell back on an inflexible and heavy-handed authoritarianism to try and goad them into action. In response to the squalid conditions at the Jewish DP camp at Landsberg, for example, one American officer suggested that hygiene rules and regulations should be enforced ‘by coercive or disciplinary action’.
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Such officers did not seem to comprehend that military discipline, while suitable for knocking army recruits into shape, was hardly appropriate for Holocaust survivors recovering from years of dehumanization and abuse.

Similarly, after a series of snap inspections of the Polish DP camp at Wildflecken in September 1945, American generals ordered that the camp be subject to military discipline. Henceforth any DP caught dropping litter in the streets, hanging washing between trees, or concealing rubbish in basement corners should be subject to immediate imprisonment. Any Pole who refused to work was to be arrested, and every woman in the camp was to be given an immediate examination for venereal disease. The democratically elected Polish camp committee should be disbanded, and the repatriation of 1,500 Poles each fortnight - by force, if necessary – should commence immediately.
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Needless to say, such edicts were greeted with great bitterness: after years of similar treatment at the hands of the Nazis, the last thing these DPs wanted was more of the same. ‘The Army’s talent for relief work,’ remarked one of the directors of the Wildflecken camp wryly, ‘could hardly be called top flight.’
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Relief and Rehabilitation

The Allied governments recognized very early on that military organizations were not best suited to this sort of work. It was for this reason that the day-to-day care of DPs was taken out of military hands and passed on to a new international humanitarian agency – the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, or UNRRA. This agency had been set up in 1943 to coordinate the distribution of food and medical aid throughout most of liberated Europe. At first its operations were confined to the Balkans, but by the spring of 1945 it was beginning to expand into much of the rest of Europe, particularly in the east. One of its most important responsibilities was the coordination of welfare amongst refugees and displaced persons throughout the continent.

Between 1945 and 1947 UNRRA tended to the needs of millions of displaced persons in camps across Germany, Austria and Italy. These needs were not only physical, but spiritual, social and emotional. Central to the UNRRA ethos was the idea that DPs should be given not only food, shelter and medical attention, but also opportunities for counselling, education, recreation and even political activity. This was not merely an exercise in redirecting their energies towards constructive ends: it was hoped that such activities would rebuild them as people, by giving them a renewed sense of self-worth.

UNRRA staff embraced this programme of ‘helping others to help themselves’ with wholehearted enthusiasm.
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Almost the first thing that was set up in most DP camps was a school. This not only provided children with the education they had been deprived of, but also gave them a sense of structure and normality, sometimes for the first time in years. According to an American army report in April 1946 attendance rates at DP schools were as high as 90 per cent. Scouting groups and youth clubs also were enormously popular, since they removed children from the unhealthy, aggressive and immoral atmosphere that pervaded in some of the camps.
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DPs were encouraged to set up their own churches and religious groups in an attempt to dampen down some of the worst excesses, and also to provide the demoralized men and women with some much-needed spiritual succour. Officials went to great lengths to secure newsprint so that DPs could produce their own newspapers, which UNRRA made a point of leaving uncensored. Cultural activities such as concerts and plays were also encouraged, as was adult education of every kind. DPs created their own apprenticeship schemes, and even started a DP university in Munich.
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From the very beginning both the Allied military and UNRRA tried to encourage self-government in the DP camps. Elections were held in most camps, and DPs also set up their own courts and police forces to deal with unruly elements. Such camp institutions were not always wholly trustworthy. In the Polish camp at Wildflecken, for example, UNRRA staff noted the irony of seeing camp councillors make ‘impassioned speeches which promised suppression of Black Market, of schnapps stills, of cattle-rustling and hen-house marauding’, even while they sat around a table laden with roast beef, chicken and brandy bottles.
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There was also a worrying trend in some camps of the formation of extremist, and especially nationalist, political groups. But, as camp staff realized, the control of criminal and extremist behaviour was always likely to be a losing battle. What was important was to give DPs something that they had been lacking throughout their ordeal: a sense of direction and self-worth.

Unfortunately UNRRA’s generosity was wide open to abuse. DPs often used UNRRA supplies to turn their camps into centres of black-market activity. At the Wildflecken camp the entire Polish police force had to be dismissed and replaced because of corruption – not once, but five times in the first eighteen months.
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Theft, extortion, illegal distillation of alcohol were so widespread that people began to joke that UNRRA’s acronym stood for ‘You Never Really Rehabilitate Anyone’.
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It was for reasons like this that the agency began to get a reputation as an organization of incompetent do-gooders. Critics appeared at the very highest levels. The British military governor in Germany, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, believed from the start that UNRRA was ‘quite unable’ to do the job, and was only convinced to hand over responsibility for DPs because his government could no longer afford to finance relief work by the British army. American politicians, resentful of the fact that they were providing almost three-quarters of UNRRA’s budget, were incensed by the organization’s wastefulness, financial mismanagement and corruption. Some even accused it of being ‘an international racket’, whose main purpose was not the relief of DPs but the ‘sustenance of armies or political groups’ such as the Communists.
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