The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (43 page)

and gave me this dress I am now wearing.’” This girl, prematurely aged, her eyes staring out of gray sockets, her limbs as fragile as dried stalks, looked happily at her uncle and said, “’so you are UNRRA. I am so glad. I love them so much. They were the first people to be nice to me.’”
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7: “A Tidal Wave of Nomad Peoples”: Europe’s Displaced Persons

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N THE SPRING of 1945, as the Allied armies bore into the heart of the Third Reich, millions of captive people inside Germany—prisoners of war, political prisoners, and forced laborers—slipped out of their work camps, prisons, factories, farms, barracks, and shelters and began searching for a path homeward. This sudden flood of civilians rushing along the roads and rails features as one of the largest and swiftest mass migrations in history, described by one awed ob- server as “a tidal wave of nomad peoples.”
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The Allied military authorities had devised elaborate logistical schemes to channel, register, shelter, and repatriate these millions of people, yet little prepared them for the scale of the problem. Nor were they fully prepared to deal with the acute social and human consequences

of such catastrophic displacement.

Over the years, scholars have produced various esti- mates of the numbers of displaced persons in Germany at war’s end. Though the precise numbers can never fully be known, the historian Ulrich Herbert, among others, has given us a detailed accounting of the for- eign labor force based on German records. These show that as of August 1944, 5.7 million foreign civilians were

toiling in Germany, one-third of whom were women. In addition, the Germans compelled some 1.9 million POWs to work. This labor force was a valuable asset, making up 26 percent of the total German workforce. Foreigners worked in all sectors of the economy, from agriculture to mining, metallurgy, chemicals, con- struction, and transport. The bulk of the laborers came from the east: 2.7 million Soviets, 1.6 million Poles, half a million Yugoslavs, and 280,000 Czechoslovaks. Yet the Germans had enlisted 1.3 million French workers, half of them POWs, in German war industries, while 500,000 Belgians and a similar number of Dutch had also been pressed into servitude during the war. More than half a million Italians, mostly POWs taken by the Germans after Italy’s switch to the Allied side in Oc- tober 1943, also languished in work camps.
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Herbert’s total figure of 7.6 million forced workers in Germany would appear to be a minimum; other contemporary sources suggest the number was closer to 8.6 million. If we add to this the numbers of prisoners of war who were not laborers, and other political prisoners of the Nazis, it is clear that about 11 million people inside Ger- many were set free by the collapse of the Third Reich.
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Technically, the Allied armies differentiated between civilians and RAMPs—”recovered Allied military personnel”—who were to be turned over directly to

military liaison officers from their own respective na- tions. In practice, of course, it was often hard to sustain the distinction, since captured members of the French, Polish, Soviet, and other armies had long since been compelled to work in camps on behalf of the German war effort. Nonetheless, the U.S. Army stood by these definitions: refugees were “civilians not outside the na- tional boundaries of their country, who desire to return to their homes”—that is, internally displaced due to war operations; this category was broad enough to include the fleeing and expelled Germans from the east who were now choking roads and railway stations across Germany. The DPs, by contrast, were defined as “civil- ians outside the national boundaries of their country by reason of war” who wished to be repatriated. Those who did not wish to return to their homelands—and there were many—were deemed “stateless,” and this was a category used to indicate chiefly Jews but also those Poles whose hometowns were, after the crude surgery of Yalta, now part of the Soviet Union.
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The Anglo-American military authorities saw the DP problem chiefly as one of security and order: millions of angry foreign workers rampaging through a prostrate Germany could engage Allied soldiers in massive polic- ing efforts, something that would take away valuable resources from the war effort. DPs might also present

a large public health problem: planners assumed that DPs would be ill with contagious diseases, certainly hungry, possibly deranged. In addition to these prac- tical objectives, the Army and UNRRA assumed that these millions of DPs had been so traumatized by their harsh experience in the war that they might well have lost the basic social habits that bind societies together. The Army believed that, after years of mistreatment at the hands of the Germans, the DPs might have been warped and twisted, becoming a potentially harmful mass of people. If not properly healed and recivilized, they might act like some malignant agent released into a vulnerable European body politic. They had to be cleaned, repaired, morally as well as physically disin- fected, before they could be reintroduced into society. Without an aggressive policy toward DPs, the whole liberation project might be placed in jeopardy.

Given such profound suspicions, it is perhaps not sur- prising that the liberators did not develop a warm and tender relationship with DPs. Although the United States military and UNRRA had given the DP problem a good deal of thought, most of their planning focused on transportation, shelter, feeding, and registration: the bureaucratic control of humans that the U.S. Army, by 1945, was very good at. Less thought, it seems, went into the human element. Army officers in the field readily

acknowledged this important shortcoming. “Implicit in the planning for care and control of DPs,” one re- port from the field concluded, was the assumption that the individuals would be tractable, grateful, and pow- erless, after their domination from two to five years as the objects of German slave policies. They were none of these things. Their intractability took the form of what was referred to repeatedly by officers in contact with them as “Liberation Complex.” This involved revenge, hunger, and exultation, which three qualities com- bined to make DPs, when newly liberated, a problem as to behavior and conduct, as well as for care, feeding, disinfection, registration and repatriation.
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Dealing with the liberated, it turned out, would not be easy.

The Army and UNRRA officials were not wholly unpre- pared for the “Liberation Complex.” In August 1944, the European Regional Office of UNRRA formed an Inter-Allied Psychological Study Group, and charged it to investigate the likely state of mind of the newly freed DPs. The committee that authored the study comprised Dutch, British, Czech, and American members, includ- ing Edward A. Shils, a University of Chicago scholar on loan from the Office of Strategic Services who, in the postwar years, became a world-renowned sociolo-

gist. Their June 1945 report, “Psychological Problems of Displaced Persons,” reveals much about the place DPs occupied in the minds of their liberators. Basing their report on evidence gathered by former POWs and forced workers, as well as almost a year of experience in southern Europe and in France, the authors argued that the multiple traumas DPs had experienced—de- portation, enslavement, forced labor, humiliation, ser- vitude, extreme violence, loss of family ties—tended to reduce a normally functioning adult to the level of an intemperate, irrational child. “People who have been displaced from their social background…tend to return at least in part to the dependent attitudes of childhood,” the report claimed. DPs developed “a deep, unreasonable sense of having been cast out of society, hence of being suspect and unloved by their own com- munity.” This created in them a powerful conflict “be- tween the primitive need for affection on the one hand and on the other hand the dread of further rejection by a world which has already shown hostility.”

In explaining the downright nastiness DPs often showed toward their liberators, the report noted that “allied to the sense of unworthiness and increased lawless aggressiveness there are other common reac- tions, of which perhaps the most obvious are bitter- ness and touchiness. Once this state of mind is estab-

lished, nothing that is done even by helpful people is regarded as genuine or sincere.” The constant theme here was the DPs’ reversion to infancy: “such peoples’ demands become insatiable, like a greedy baby’s…. It will be found out that, coupled with their gratitude and welcome, there will be a curious undercurrent of hostility and suspicion which may surprise us un- less we realize that we are dealing with ‘hurt children’ whose world has let them down.” DPs had fallen back “to earlier, more primitive and, for example, infantile habits.” They “do not restrain themselves anymore; the brakes have been taken off.” Their symptoms included “increased restlessness,” lack of intellectual interests, no attachment to community, “complete apathy,” and “loss of initiative.” Most troubling, “a great and sullen suspicion has arisen towards all authority. No one is trusted any longer.”

If the DPs had become children, the occupation au- thorities felt obliged to play the role of parents. In sex- ual matters especially, the report expressed the opin- ion that European DPs would have to be reschooled. “ Young girls and women have been forced into pros- titution by the usurper, led behind the fronts and de- based into mechanical lust-gratification machines. Young men have been dragged to Germany and forced to impregnate German women. They have all been

forced into a world where there can be no feeling of affection or responsibility towards the object of erotic interest. They were humiliated, robbed of their ideals as well as becoming physically diseased.” The stakes were enormously high, UNRRA believed. These millions of sexually debased and depraved peoples presented a moral and social threat to the stabilization of the con- tinent. In responding to this human crisis, the report called for “patience.” Occupation officials should “ar- range for the development of sincere human relations which contain elements of genuine affection and ten- derness. This must be done against a serious internal barrier in the women concerned; but if and when this can be overcome, recovery is likely to happen to an ex- tent and to a degree which may well be surprising…. Assisted by our knowledge of what has been inflicted upon these people, we must try to see them as human beings, as personalities, who react to the events of life in varied ways.”
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If UNRRA adopted the language of rehabilitation when considering DPs, the U.S. Army was more blunt. Its guide for handling DPs simply stressed that “speedy repatriation remains the chief objective.” Those who could not be repatriated immediately would have to be kept in assembly centers, which meant improvised collection points and often camps—sometimes the

very same camps that had been used by the Germans. The DPs would likely be “difficult to control; they may have little initiative; their desire to take revenge may result in looting and general lawlessness.” Such prob- lems could be minimized, the Army believed, if DPs were kept in national groups, and if they were allowed to select leaders to speak for them. In addition, fami- lies should be kept together and DPs should be allowed to carry personal possessions. The Army envisioned a team of three officers, eight enlisted personnel, and one UNRRA staff member as a sufficient team to super- vise a DP camp of 3,000 people; it was expected that UNRRA teams would take control as soon as possible. The chief goal of the assembly centers, then, was not to house but to process DPs. The Army guidelines in- cluded a “Flow Chart” illustrated in a manner remi- niscent of plumbing, in which a series of pipes carried DPs along six stages. These included arrival and the receipt of a DP card; assignment of accommodations; registration and division into categories; verification of nationality (here DPs might be siphoned off via various tubes to prisoner of war camps if they were determined to be ex-enemy nationals). In the fifth stage, DPs were gathered in a holding tank “awaiting disposal,” during which time they might be employed by the camp ad- ministration in useful work; and then the final stage, “disposal,” which meant repatriation or transfer to a

more permanent camp. The document left the im- pression that DPs were human refuse in need of waste treatment.
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These planning documents reveal the presence of a basic conflict among occupation officials. On the one hand, they understood that DPs were traumatized hu- man beings who needed care, treatment, and a great deal of empathy; on the other, the authorities viewed DPs with deep anxiety and concern, saw in them a threat to order, and desired that they be efficiently cleaned and then transported out of Germany as soon as possible. The tension between these two modes of handling DPs was never resolved.

Between March and June 1945, SHAEF began to imple- ment its plans for the DPs, but the scale of the crisis stunned and overwhelmed military planners. In March, as the Allied armies pushed onto German soil, they en- countered only small groups of foreign workers west of the Rhine, for the Germans had relocated most of the war industries toward the interior of the country. After crossing the Rhine in late March, the liberators began to see many more. On March 16, SHAEF counted 58,000 DPs under its control; by March 31, that num- ber swelled to 350,000; by April 14 the numbers held by SHAEF reached 1,072,000. Two days after the Ger-

man surrender, SHAEF reported that it held three and a half million DPs, of whom almost a million were Rus- sians. For a period of about twelve weeks, SHAEF tried with little success to impose order on this swift-run- ning tide of people. SHAEF’s DP Branch in mid-April conceded that “the handling of displaced persons may almost be described as chaotic.”
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Part of the problem in handling DPs was the speed of the Allied advance into Germany after early March; in the fluid conditions of combat, field commanders were frequently out of touch with headquarters for some time, and in any case they did not wish to use their troops to look after DPs in the midst of combat operations. Another problem was what SHAEF called “self-repatriation.” Hundreds of thousands of Western European DPs disregarded SHAEF’s stand-fast instructions and took to the road on their own accord. These marches homeward were frequently conducted in a “joyous atmosphere of hol- iday-making,” according to one account, and while there was looting, military observers noted that “much of the looting attributed to foreigners is actually be- ing carried on by the Germans themselves. In the de- stroyed areas of every city one sees German men and women carrying marketing bags filled with loot from the remains of other people’s homes or shops.” Even so, Germans constantly complained to occupation sol- diers about the rapacious looting of DPs.
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