Free Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 by Tony Judt

British officials that they did not want to return ‘home’ and would rather stay in Germany—of all places. They were not always successful: between 1945 and 1947, 2,272,000 Soviet citizens were returned by the Western Allies.
    There were terrible scenes of desperate struggle, particularly in the early postwar months, as Russian émigrés who had never been Soviet citizens, Ukrainian partisans and many others were rounded up by British or American troops and pushed—sometimes literally—across the border into the arms of the waiting NKVD. 8 Once in Soviet hands they joined hundreds of thousands of other repatriated Soviet nationals, as well as Hungarians, Germans and other former enemies deported east by the Red Army. By 1953 a total of five and a half million Sovietnationals had been repatriated. One in five of them ended up shot or dispatched to the Gulag. Many more were sent directly into Siberian exile or else assigned to labour battalions.
    Only in 1947 did forced repatriation cease, with the onset of the Cold War and a new willingness to treat displaced persons from the Soviet bloc as political refugees (the 50,000 Czech nationals still in Germany and Austria at the time of the February 1948 Communist coup in Prague were immediately accorded this status). A total of one and a half million Poles, Hungarians, Bulgarians, Romanians, Yugoslavs, Soviet nationals and Jews thus successfully resisted repatriation. Together with Balts these formed the overwhelming majority of displaced persons left in the western zones of Germany and Austria, and in Italy. In 1951 the European Convention on Human Rights would codify the protection to which such displaced aliens were entitled, and finally guarantee them against forcible return to persecution.
    The question remained, however: what was to become of them? The refugees and DPs themselves were in no doubt. In the words of Genêt (Janet Flanner), writing in The New Yorker in October 1948, ‘[The displaced persons] are willing to go anywhere on earth except home.’ But who would take them? West European states, short of labour and in the midst of economic and material reconstruction, were initially quite open to importing certain categories of stateless person. Belgium, France and Britain especially needed coalminers, construction workers and agricultural labourers. In 1946-47 Belgium took in 22,000 displaced persons (along with their families) to work in the mines of Wallonia. France took in 38,000 people for manual employment of various kinds. Britain took 86,000 persons in this way, including many veterans of the Polish army and Ukrainians who had fought in the Waffen SS ‘Halychnya’ Division. 9
    The criteria for admission were simple—western European states were interested in strong (male) manual workers, and were not embarrassed to favour Balts, Poles and Ukrainians on those grounds, whatever their wartime record. Single women were welcome as manual workers or domestics—but the Canadian Labor Department in 1948 rejected girls and women applying to emigrate to Canada for jobs in domestic service if there was any sign that they had education beyond secondary school. And no-one wanted older people, orphans or single women with children. Refugees in general, then, were not met with open arms—post-war polls in the US and western Europe revealed very little sympathy for their plight. Most people expressed a desire to see immigration reduced rather than increased.
    The problem of the Jews was distinctive. At first the Western authorities treated Jewish DPs like any other, corralling them in camps in Germany alongside many of their former persecutors. But in August 1945 President Truman announced that separate facilities should be provided for all Jewish DPs in the American Zone of Germany: in the words of a report the President had commissioned to look into the problem, the previously integrated camps and centers were ‘a distinctly unrealistic approach to the problem.