Editorial: the uprooted

19 November 1943

One of the most terrifying of the responsibilities that will face the United Nations as Germany is defeated will be that of the uprooted millions. It is a problem for which there is no parallel in history; past wars have seen the disbandment of great armies, the repatriation of masses of prisoners of war, and the return to their homes of those who had fled before invading armies. But there has been nothing like the mass migrations the Germans have caused. It was reported to the Atlantic City Conference on Wednesday that the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration estimated that there would be 21,000,000 displaced people in Europe. And in Asia the numbers are even bigger; the evacuees in China alone have been variously estimated to be between 30 and 60 million.

Up to 4.8m unauthorised immigrants in Europe in 2017 – study Read more

The figures – if we can grasp them – are some indication of the task of resettlement that lies before the Relief Administration. It is a problem to which the United Nations must give urgent study and which calls for immediate preparations in the training of staffs. The first requisite is a mapping out of the field. This has been done in a preliminary way for Europe by the International Labour Office, whose report (by Professor EM Kulischer) on The Displacement of Population in Europe has just been published here. No one can read it without shuddering at the thought of the human suffering that lies behind its facts and at the suffering that is to come before these victims of the war can find a useful settled life in a world at peace.

The ILO study shows that there a have been three great stages in this European revolution. First, between September 1939, and May 1940, came the flight of Polish refugees, followed by opposite movements as Poland was divided between Russia and Germany. The Germans pushed the Poles eastwards or transferred them to work in Germany; the Russians transferred Poles by the hundred thousand to Eastern Russia; the Germans sent to the annexed provinces Germans “repatriated” from the Baltic States. Germanisation was forced on Czechoslovakia. In Finland 420,000 were transferred from the regions annexed by the Russians. In all 3,800,000 persons were uprooted from their homes in eight months. May 1940, brought the great wave of refugees westward, sweeping some as far as America and Africa, and, when it receded, left in unoccupied France thousands of Belgians, Dutch, Alsace-Lorrainers, former German and Austrian refugees, and expelled Jews. Soon there began the transfer to Germany of French and Belgian prisoners of war and the first recruitments of civilian workers.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A large group of refugees fleeing Paris in anticipation of the German invasion, 1940. Photograph: FPG/Getty Images

At the other end of Europe new movements were set up by the frontier changes from the Baltic to the Black Sea and by the invasion of Greece and Yugoslavia. By the time the war against Russia began in June 1941, nearly four million people had been added to the uprooted. Since then the dislocations have been enormous. The refugees from invaded Russia flowed eastward before the German armies, 10 million in 1941, another two million in 1942. Behind the German lines the Germans shifted the people about to supply manpower in Germany or to fit in with their racial policies.

“In Europe as a whole nearly 23,000,000 people were transplanted, deported, or dispersed from the middle of 1941 up to the beginning of 1943.”

Now the movement on the fringes is reversed, but inside the German ring the shifts are likely to become more violent than ever.

The Germans themselves are the least of the problems; only some 2,500,000 have been moved into occupied countries since the war, displacing Czechs, Alsace-Lorrainers, and Poles. The most miserable class of all are the non-Germans who left their homes before the invaders were transferred wholesale, deported, or expelled. Poland, torn between Germany and Russia, her people the victim of both, baffles sober analysis or prophecy.

The ILO estimates that over four million Jews have been uprooted since the war began but does not attempt to guess how many have survived. Over a million were expelled or deported from Germany and her occupied or satellite countries, another two million were evacuated, fled, or emigrated (including those who went to Russia), and another million were Polish Jews deported eastward within Poland to ghettoes and special towns.

More than 70 million people now fleeing conflict and oppression worldwide Read more

The third great class are the prisoners of war and the foreign workers in Germany itself – 6,500,000 at the beginning of 1943 made up of 4,800,000 civilians and 1,750,000 war prisoners. Thus there were 1,500,000 Russian civilians and 500,000 prisoners, 1,300,000 Polish civilians and 56,000 prisoners, 1.150,000 French prisoners and 400,000 civilians, 300,000 Dutch workers, 300,000 Belgians, 350,000 Italians, 320,000 Czechs, and so on. When the German war machine runs down these masses will be without work and support. As the ILO report says,

Unless there is an organisation to provide these people with means of subsistence end to give them confidence that they have not been forgotten, the highways of Europe will be blocked by long processions of destitute exiles enduring every kind of privation in an effort to return unaided to their homes.

The dangers to health and to the maintenance of order are incalculable. To provide food and maintenance, to regulate the returning flow according to the transport available, and to direct the labour to where it has the best prospects demand something like an international employment service and the steady co-operation of all the United Nations. Essentially it is an international job and one of the biggest before us. The problem does not end with Europe. It raises also the whole question of overseas migration and international co-operation in migration policy. This touches American and Dominion politics closely.

The ILO report The Displacement of Population in Europe is published in this country by PS King and Staples at 6s.

***

As well as introducing the term displaced persons, population expert Eugene Kulischer employed the metaphor ‘flood’ in 1949 to characterise the movement of people across Eurasia at the end of the second world war in an article, Displaced persons in the modern world.