DPs: Europe's Displaced Persons, 1945–51

By Mark Wyman

"Wyman's book is the only one that comprehensively, and sensitively, depicts the plight of the postwar refugees in Western Europe."—M. Mark Stolarik, University of Ottawa

"This is a fascinating and very moving book."—International Migration Review

"Wyman has written a highly readable account of the movement of diverse ethnic and cultural groups of Europe's displaced persons, 1945-1951. An analysis of the social, economic, and political circumstances within which relocation, resettlement, and repatriation of millions of people occurred, this study is equally a study in diplomacy, in international relations, and in social history.... A vivid and compassionate recreation of the events and circumstances within which displaced persons found themselves, of the strategies and means by which people survived or did not, and an account of the major powers in response to an unprecedented human crisis mark this as an important book."—Choice

"Wyman interviewed some eighty DPs as well as employees of various agencies who served them; he cites a broad range of published primary sources, secondary sources, and some archival material.... This book presents a useful overview and should stimulate further research."—Journal of American Ethnic History

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Jan 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9780801456039

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Introduction to the Cornell edition

REPUBLICATION of this book, which originally came out in 1989, provides an opportunity to revisit displaced persons themes in the post-Cold War era. Many of the topics covered in the book—the DPs’ pre-1945 routes, their creation of camp communities where ethnic cultures could be retained, their eventual leave-taking—were originally immersed in East-West tensions. To retain the spirit of those times before the Soviet Union’s demise, the book is here republished in its 1989 version, adding only this new introduction.

The rapidity of Eastern Europe’s transformation into market-oriented democracies, and the importance of former DPs in that transformation, are increasingly evident as the ’nineties progress, most notably with the early 1998 election of Valdas Adamkus—who had come to Chicago from the DP camps of Germany in 1949—as president of Lithuania. He was scarcely unique as a former DP moving into a prominent role in his homeland, for retired U.S. Army Gen. Alex Einsein had served as Estonia’s military commander in chief from 1993–95. By the midnineties, many top positions in business, government, and academic life in the former Soviet satellites were occupied by men and women who had once been Displaced Persons. The list included a cabinet minister who was formerly a Canadian businessman, a new university rector who once held a similar post in the United States, a Social Security official using his expertise in his former homeland, even a television talk-show host.

But if DPs are suddenly more noticeable because of the upheavals of the 1980s and 1990s, it is also true that the world refugee situation with which they were once involved has deteriorated. From this reality comes a need to examine the sweep of postwar refugee flows that began with the East Europeans’ refusals to return home in 1945. Much has changed, including some of the basics: the displaced persons of the post-World War II years were caught up inextricably in politics, in ideological controversies that both kept them from going home and helped assure them a welcome abroad. But as world refugee totals began to rise sharply during the closing agonies of the Cold War, new trends could be discerned; political migration, if not being replaced by migration stemming from economic pressures, environmental degradation, and ethnic rivalries, was at least sharing the stage with them. These are the root causes of the new refugee problems of the post-Cold War world, distant in more than years from the upheavals known by Europe’s postwar DPs.

Readers of this new edition should remember, however, that when the book was originally written the Soviet Union still reigned supreme over Eastern Europe and each refugee issue was examined, debated, and analyzed in terms of its effect on the Cold War. This had been true for some four decades, ever since 400,000 DPs had come out of the camps in Europe and found places in the United States and another 158,000 had been resettled in Canada. These and several thousand more who went to other countries were generally far from the Soviet grasp. But despite the DPs’ geographic separation from the Soviets, their great fear of Communism remained—a constant, nagging reality in the lives of those who fled homelands after the war. Up to 1989 many of these ex-DPs were receiving regular mailings from an East German Communist organization trying to lure them back to their homes inside the Soviet bloc. And they still faced frequent problems communicating with family members living under Communist regimes. The inescapable fact of life for DPs, wherever they lived up to 1989, was that the Cold War cast a continuing shadow over their lives.

Then the world changed. With the fall of Communism across Eastern Europe starting in 1989, the formal dissolution of the USSR in 1991, the subsequent splintering of the Soviet zone of control, and the rebirth of independent states in the satellite nations—life could begin anew for the peoples of Eastern Europe. But this meant not only that a burden was lifted: it also raised the possibility that many who left in the refugee exodus after World War II could now return.

It could be said that the DPs had predicted Communism’s fall. For these former refugees constituted continuing, living evidence of the fragility of the USSR’s ethnic makeup and appeal: after World War II they fled westward—men, women, and children—and chose life in desolate camps, scattered across the western zones of Germany and Austria as well as in Italy, rather than going back to their homelands now under Communist control. Their numbers included thousands of Ukrainians, Jews, Belarussians, and others from within the USSR’s borders, representatives of the more than two hundred ethnic groups who had lived for centuries under the former Russian Empire. Camp populations swelled with the arrivals of previously independent Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Poles who had lived under Soviet control for part of the war, as well as Slovenes, Croatians, Serbs, Herzegovinians, and others who in 1945 found themselves under Communist rulers in Yugoslavia.

The long-term peril that this exodus forecast for the Soviet Union had been seen in 1947 in an amazingly prescient article by George Kennan, The Sources of Soviet Conduct, which helped provide the intellectual basis for a long-term American effort to contain Soviet expansion. Soviet dominance was dogged by internal opposition, the young American diplomat stressed, and he argued that the United States should increase the strains to promote tendencies which must eventually find their outlet in either the breakup or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power. The DPs’ determined refusal to return to the Soviet empire—apparent to all observers at the time Kennan was writing—provided considerable evidence that the USSR was in reality a splintered regime, its peoples neither contented nor loyal.¹

But despite Kennan’s analysis and the DP example, to most Western observers the control of these disparate peoples by Stalin and his heirs seemed total—both secure and unchallenged. For the 1989 edition of this book, I noted in passing that the cold war seems a permanent fixture. And two years later, following an attempted coup in the Soviet Union, Conor Cruise O’Brien concluded in a New York Review of Books essay that the Baltic republics, if permitted to leave the Soviet Union, would probably be democratic, but I would not now rate their chances of being allowed to leave as high. Despite such forebodings, with the final collapse of Communist control the former satellite nations rushed to exert their nationhood. The USSR’s incompleteness as a nation was now exposed to the world.²

These events of the late 1980s and early 1990s helped bring to the surface major refugee themes that had been festering throughout the tumultuous twentieth century. These currents had risen and fallen in the public consciousness as wars, redrawing of borders, transfers of populations, and the creation of new states challenged assumptions about such issues as citizenship, nationality, nationalism, even ethnicity. Identity figured in all of these: Did a person remain a citizen even when refusing to return to his homeland? Could a country refuse nationality to people born on its soil? Could a regime demand the return of its own nationals from the outside? And was there a place for a nationalism that was independent of that nation’s government?

The displaced persons had known these debates. The same arguments had swirled around them as they first clustered in the comers of a desolated Europe in 1945. As they were gradually brought together in old German training centers and bombed-out buildings, refugee identity and a nation’s rights were argued heatedly when Soviet officials suddenly arrived and demanded that the British and Americans yield up the residents of the camps. And these issues hovered in the background when camp residents asked each other whether there was any reason to wait another month, another year—or a lifetime—for the chance to return home. It was a debate made more complex and tragic during the early postwar years by the fact that no nation in the world wanted them except their Communist-ruled homelands—and then the questions were deliberated anew when opportunities finally opened to resettle in the West.

In the 1990s these issues suddenly reappeared as the Berlin Wall was tom down and statues of Lenin toppled in town squares throughout Eastern Europe.

One reason for the refusal of such questions to fade away is that both the Cold War and its closing proved remarkably prolific in producing new refugees. Experts agreed that, contrary to earlier expectations, there were more refugees in the early 1990s than at the end of World War II; the DPs were only the beginning of a flow, not the end as had been hoped. The world refugee total would rise to some 20 million by the mid-1990s, confounding earlier predictions that their numbers would decline as proxy struggles fought in the distant suburbs of the Cold War withered from lack of superpower sponsorship. Instead, the absence of East-West competition seemed to stimulate new tensions—now North-South tensions—as warlords, caciques, and other local headmen of the former client states were free to do battle with their ethnic or economic foes in Yugoslavia, Africa, Indochina.³

The issues had seemed simpler in the late 1940s, when the Cold War provided the defining principle for America and its allies. Indeed, the East-West struggle would mark the boundaries for United States refugee policies for the next fifty years. In 1948 the original U.S. Displaced Persons Act regarded refugees as objects of political concern, not simply as suffering humanity, for it focused on them as anti-Communist migrants. Ideology set the limits. Soon there would be others seeking refuge because of Communist controls—Hungarians, fleeing after their revolt failed in 1956; Cubans, leaving the island when Fidel Castro embraced Communism in the early 1960s; the peoples oflndochina, left adrift—some literally so—following the American defeat in Vietnam in the 1970s.⁴

The appearance of Hungarians knocking desperately on America’s doors demanded action: to reject them would have meant handing the Soviets a propaganda victory. But authorities in Washington found a way to allow entry: a loophole in U.S. asylum law gave the attorney general authority to give temporary parole to aliens for emergent reasons or for reasons deemed strictly in the public interest. Parole became the vehicle by which several American presidents, acting outside congressional control, moved quickly to allow entry to thousands of refugees from Communism. After President Dwight D. Eisenhower paroled 38,000 Hungarians in 1956–57, President John F. Kennedy paroled several hundred thousand Cubans in 1961–63, allowing them to come to the United States even though they lacked proper visas, permitting them to remain after their visas had run out. Similarly, President Ronald Reagan used 64,000 of the 70,000 slots allotted in the 1980 Refugee Act for persons fleeing Communist regimes.⁵

That 1980 act marked an attempt by Congress to trim executive power in deciding who could enter the United States as a refugee. Parole was abolished in 1980, but a separate quota for refugees was then created within the U.S. immigration system, and Congress obtained for itself a say in deciding annual refugee allocations. Congress also eliminated the definition of a refugee, inserted in 1965, as anyone fleeing from any Communist or Communist-dominated country. Now a refugee was defined as anyone outside his or her country, not firmly resettled, possessing a well-founded fear of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, social class, or political opinion. Despite this definition, there was enough leeway in the law’s application for President Reagan to favor those fleeing from Communism, and he did. The Cold War still provided the governing principles.

But further events challenged the Cold War’s appropriateness as a policy guide in refugee issues. Haitians fleeing their dictator were turned away by the United States as being mainly job-seekers, not refugees, while Salvadorans avoiding their country’s civil war languished in Honduran camps, charged with having supported leftist guerrillas.⁶

Criticism of the United States’ stance increased throughout the 1970s and 1980s, both within and outside the nation. A coalition of religious, human rights, and ethnic organizations began pressuring the administrations of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter to reach beyond Cold War limitations in setting refugee policy. Their main success in the 1970s marked only a partial step toward breaking with the past: gaining admittance for fifty thousand Soviet Jews—although an anti-Soviet argument helped win backing within Congress. Chileans fleeing the crackdowns by anti-Communist dictator Augusto Pinochet proved unsuccessful, however.

After Fidel Castro allowed some 130,000 Cubans to exit in the spring and summer of 1980—the Mariel Boatlift—and it was discovered that many were criminals and other undesirables, the mood in America began to shift away from automatic acceptance of anyone fleeing Communism.⁷

Meanwhile, the United Nations organization that had been specifically created to deal with refugees after the DP era was chafing under limitations laid down at its 1951 founding. This was the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which replaced the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and the International Refugee Organization. The UNHCR discovered as it moved out of the DP camps in Europe that the Cold War was spawning new regional conflicts that challenged the organization’s orientation toward Europe.

In an effort to deal with changing conditions, the UNHCR moved sporadically over the years to expand its 1951 mandate. That original mandate was the outcome of a lengthy and difficult United Nations conference that year in Geneva, Switzerland, which defined a refugee as one who is unable or unwilling, for reasons other than personal convenience, to accept the protection of his or her own country, but who is outside that country and afraid to return. The refugee had to have been in this position as a result of events before January 1, 1951—basically limiting coverage to World War II refugees.⁸

Scarcely six years into its existence as a separate UN-sponsored organization, the UNHCR was confronted with a new situation: some 200,000 Hungarians left their country when Soviet troops crushed a revolt that had seemed to be lurching toward democracy. If the United States—as previously noted—was challenged by the Budapest events, the UNHCR was also, for it had no time to interview fleeing Hungarians individually to find out if they were escaping persecution. Legal niceties were abandoned and the United Nations quickly authorized the UNHCR to raise $500,000 and to use its good offices in dealing with refugee crises.

In 1967 a new United Nations protocol on the status of refugees finally eliminated geographic and time restrictions set in 1951. Two years later the Organization of African Unity, reacting to unprecedented population disruptions, approved an expanded definition of refugee to cover those fleeing because of external aggression, occupation, foreign domination or events seriously disturbing public order. These criteria became widely accepted.

The flood of refugees in Africa that stirred the OAU in the 1960s challenged the UNHCR in several ways and finally delivered a deathblow to the organization’s European orientation. For it soon became apparent that massive numbers of Africans were not fleeing persecution but were escaping general conflict and civil strife, and the UNHCR had no choice but to help. Several basic shifts in policy followed, most notably following wars in Algeria, Sudan, and India and Pakistan, when the organization carried out extensive repatriation.

The new UNHCR director, Jean-Pierre Hocke, former head of Swiss operations for the Red Cross, helped pilot the UNHCR over this new terrain. In a 1986 speech he stressed that the vast majority of modem refugees and asylum seekers did not meet the traditional definition of refugees. Instead, they belong to the wider category of persons who leave their countries because of danger to their lives and security emanating from armed conflict or other forms of violence or danger.⁹ Hocke warned that these refugees may not have qualified for help under existing legal instruments, but they needed international protection nevertheless, even including temporary asylum and humane treatment.

Under Hocke’s leadership the UNHCR moved more vigorously into repatriation, which had long been avoided because of controversies of the DP era. Now the organization that had shied away from repatriation was proposing it as a solution to the Vietnamese and other refugee crises, in some cases convincing governments to take back persons they had previously expelled.

The UNHCR also argued for a new focus on the country of the refugees’ origin, rather than dealing almost exclusively with resettlement and care outside the homeland. Internal conflicts, ethnic and communal violence, environmental degradation, forced relocation, and violations of human rights were cited as major causes for the new explosion in refugees. The term displaced person itself was even given new meaning, now designating groups who were forced from their homes but still remained within the country of their birth.¹⁰

A new question began to be debated in policy forums: does the individual refugee have a claim against the country he or she left? In 1994 a new UNHCR director, Sadako Ogata of Japan, observed that the end of the Cold War had rekindled ethnic, religious and tribal hatreds, reviving ancient feuds: in this setting, the earlier emphasis that ignored the refugees’ country of origin is neither adequate nor justifiable in the face of spiralling humanitarian emergencies. She estimated that the number of internally displaced persons in refugee-like conditions might even be higher than the number of refugees outside their homelands who fit traditional criteria. For these reasons, Ogata stressed, statehood carried with it not only obligations of respect for asylum, but also respect for the right to return.¹¹

The escalating refugee totals began to have another, opposite impact, however. With people fleeing from their homes on all of earth’s continents, prosperous countries began to react against the hordes pounding on their doors; this growing reluctance to aid the sufferers has been termed compassion fatigue. Germany alone saw the number of asylum-seekers at its gates rise from 5,388 during 1971 to 256, 112 in 1991, most from Eastern Europe. A special study prepared by a Norwegian team in 1992 described a new post-cold war era taking shape, unleashing forces of conflict that the emerging structures of international order were unable to contain. And these increases in refugee totals came as competition was increasing everywhere for humanitarian dollars. It was becoming easy for many to tum their gaze from the refugees, who now seemed to reflect a permanent condition, like an incurable sickness.¹²

Europeans began to react against what they feared was a growing flood, and Americans became reluctant to open their doors to the large numbers of Central Americans showing up along the coastline. Sweden, long considered the moral conscience of Europe, ordered some 20,000 ethnic Albanians to leave. Germany wrote a safe third country principle into its constitution in 1994, requiring asylum-seekers to go back to the previous safe country through which they had recently passed. And for the first time in the UNHCR’s nearly 40-year history, member governments in 1989 cut its budget; the resulting 25 percent reduction in programs has been called devastating.¹³

This was an unexpected tum of events for those who had predicted a lessening of tensions around the world as Cold War fears and hatreds evaporated. Everywhere were new challenges to peace: even within the former Soviet Union, the creation of independent states meant that some 25 million ethnic Russians suddenly found themselves in fourteen new countries, scattered from China to the Baltic Sea, often facing opposition from their non-Russian neighbors. Fighting—sometimes only minor incidents, but often large-scale violence—erupted in several of the new states. All produced streams of refugees. These developments of the early 1990s revealed another outcome of four decades of Cold War: people around the planet had come to accept the militarized state, acquiescing in the expenditures of enormous funds to maintain well-equipped armies. Now those armies were free to attack rival factions and neighboring regimes. From such conflicts came suffering, misery, and refugees.¹⁴

But the end of the Soviet empire had another meaning for many of the displaced persons who had resettled in the late 1940s and early 1950s in the United States, Canada, Australia, Sweden, Britain, France, Argentina, and other nations. Although these uprooted individuals had adamantly refused after World War II to return to their Communist-dominated homelands, most had retained their ethnic or national identities. Accordingly, in their new homes in the 1950s they brought an ethnic revival, establishing Saturday schools and other institutions to teach languages, folk arts, and similar aspects of their native cultures.

Then with the Soviet crash came a new possibility for many: they could return to the lands they had fled at the close of the Second World War. That thought ran through DP communities around the world like an electric current; for the first time in at least four decades DPs talked hopefully of going back, at least for a visit, possibly to stay.

Behind the former Iron Curtain this current was felt too, and it created a magnet that pulled many to return. A singing revolution ran through Eastern Europe, building not only upon the long history of choral festivals but also upon the precedent launched by Estonia in 1988: this time, weakening Soviet controls spurred patriotic outbursts and brought citizens into the streets to protest the USSR’s domination. A rock festival brimming with youthful exuberance was called the singing revolution because of the independent spirit that quickly enveloped it, and the name was quickly fastened on Estonia’s entire summer of 1988 with its multiplying, ecstatic celebrations. The climax came when a quarter million people, fully a sixth of the country’s population, came together for a massive, emotional Song of Estonia program with patriotic music and speeches.¹⁵

Similar events followed elsewhere as the Soviet regime tottered. Latvia’s 1990 homecoming festival brought a massive return of Latvian visitors from abroad and revealed the depth of the DPs’ attachment to the belief that they, in the diaspora, had nurtured the nation’s true culture during foreign occupation. This had earlier been evident in the DP camps of 1945–51, as discussed below in Chapter 7, Cultures in Exile; it was bound up also in the song festivals that DP groups had presented in the United States and Canada.

The 1990 Latvian festival built on a 120-year tradition of Latvian choral events which in the past, notably during the Communist interregnum, had frequently carried political themes. The Communist regime had insisted on holding such an event yearly as a true voice of the new Latvia—changing words of traditional songs and featuring marching children holding portraits of Lenin and banners proclaiming Long Live the Latvian Worker! During these same years across the Atlantic, however, the festivals in Toronto, Chicago, New York, and other large cities were presented as the authentic Latvian cultural exposition. In 1990, one factor that finally opened the way for Latvian DPs and their children to come back and participate occurred when festival organizers eliminated a song identified with the Soviet repertoire: Lai plaukst musu republika (May our republic blossom).¹⁶

With an enthusiastic buildup both outside and within Latvia, the 1990 event proved spectacular: some 19,000 sang in the festival chorus, the largest ever, including choirs from the United States, Canada, and Australia. Children of DPs from Minneapolis and Indianapolis who had never been to Riga now sang, laughed, and cried with Latvians who had never stepped outside their country. They marched together to the Freedom Monument, built in 1934 as a symbol of the country’s independence, and laid flowers around its base (rather than at the Lenin Monument a block away, as occurred under Soviet rule).¹⁷

Lithuanian DPs moved their quadrennial festival of song back to the homeland in 1994, drawing choirs and thousands of participants from Chicago, Toronto, and other centers of the Lithuanian diaspora. This was actually the second DP-centered event transferred back from outside: in 1993 the Symposium of Science and Creativity, which attracted more than a thousand participants—a third from the West—was held in Vilnius.¹⁸

Croatians also had a history of holding song festivals in their North American centers, and it was one of the organizers of the Canadian Croatian Folklore Festival who took the lead and organized the first such event in independent Croatia, after the Yugoslav Communist regime had fallen and the country had split into its ethnic parts. There, too, choirs came from the United States and Canada and joined with groups from the homeland.¹⁹

Governments of these newly independent states reacted in different ways to the possibility of DP returns. Croatia enthusiastically sought DPs, using a Ministry of Return and Immigration which issued a monthly bulletin of news for returnees while offering special seminars and counsel. Croatia also tried to encourage returns through tax exemptions and monetary aid.²⁰ Lithuania changed its citizenship requirements so that political refugees, their children, and even their grandchildren had the right to become citizens; the new government also created a commission to study the problems of returnees and to seek ways to assist them.

New laws in several countries covered the return of property seized by the Communists; these proved everywhere to be complex, however, and recovery suits were invariably still in process after several years. Estonia, for example, permitted anyone, regardless of current residence or citizenship, to reclaim property lost since 1940; however, some found that acquiring legal title to a house carried responsibilities that could be burdensome—they had to repair a leaking roof or a rotten step, and if the occupants were forced out the new owner had to find and pay for alternate lodging. Slovenia also passed a law for property returns, hailed as denationalization by some returning DPs. But results were slowed by roadblocks put up by local officials, by strict rules on proving prior ownership, and by problems of compensating current owners who had purchased the property in good faith during the postwar era. Such complications added to the disenchantment many DPs came to feel with their homelands.²¹

These issues were tangled with the past. Many saw the DPs not as lost children but as people who had forsaken the homeland during a difficult time. A Lithuanian who returned derided the government as insincere despite its public statements; assistance was simply not forthcoming. A Croatian DP found some local officials opposed to helping returnees obtain their property.²²

Eight years after the collapse of Communism, an exact count of the DPs returning permanently seems impossible: many go back for a visit; others spend six months in the homeland and then go to the United States or Canada for the next six months; some are children of DPs who use their language skills to represent foreign companies; others are retirees living on their Western pensions. Governments make no public census categorizing returnees as former DPs, as emigrants of the prewar years or later than the DP era, or as persons seeking reentry after spending several years in the USSR.

The numbers of DPs permanently returning to most of the homelands of Eastern Europe total no more than several hundred per country. One exception is Croatia, which reported that 1, 144 Americans had applied for tax exemption documents from 1991–97; some 30,000 returned to Croatia from all countries during the same period. There certainly has been no mass migration back, a Lithuanian DP reported from her new teaching position in Lithuania. And there are variations among countries: most Slovenes returning are from Argentina rather than North America; in the Baltic states the part-time returnee seems the norm, splitting time between a university or business position in the United States or Canada and one in the homeland.²³

One reason for the low numbers of returns is that many DPs are now elderly, and any major move is difficult. Another reason lies in the mixed reception experienced by many who have gone back. The visits are in general very painful, said a former DP who had made several visits to relatives in the Republic of Slovenia: People who try to reclaim their lost property, face administrative harassment; many people who try to regain their original citizenship face the resistance of local officials…, but most of all: nobody knows them, nobody appreciates them, even people who have some concern state: ‘You had a good life while we suffered.²⁴ Another returning Slovene found that those in the homeland showed little willingness to learn anything from the people from outside and little understanding for our efforts to help young people get broader education elsewhere. Others noted that the old hatreds of wartime were not erased: the Communists who ended up on top in 1945 were still in positions of power.²⁵

The locals really are not very keen on having us move in, admitted a Lithuanian just back from a visit to the homeland she had not seen since she was a little girl in 1944. As a result of arguing with nationals, quite a large percentage of Lithuanians who returned immediately after Communism’s fall became disillusioned and bitter, she added.²⁶

Similarly, a Latvian who made several visits found that some don’t like the influence of returning people. Returning DPs come on a bit stronger than the rest—‘Let’s hustle; let’s get this democracy going, we say. This attitude sparked resentment.²⁷

Despite continuing problems, successes