The Times reported that at the end of the war there had been 20,000,000 displaced persons in Europe including refugees, slave labor that had been imported into Germany and evacuees from battle areas. By mid-April of 1946 all but 1,190,000 had been repatriated. Of the remainder about 900,000 were in DP camps in Germany and Austria. More than half of the DPs were Poles, about 200,000 were Spanish Republicans exiled in France and the rest were largely Balts or Jews. Many of those who remain fear returning for fear of retaliation or antisemitism, Their fate was being reviewed by a UN committee and by the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine.
The UN Committee was looking for new permanent homes for the DPs who did not wish to return to their homelands. but the Soviets objected They insisted on forced repatriation, particularly of Poles and citizens of the Baltic states now occupied by the Soviet Union. The Soviet claim was that many uneilling to return were collaborators who should face trial and punishment. While some Nazi collaborators undoubtedly were among the DPs, particularly among the Croats and Serbs, the majority of Poles and Balts among the DPs had been slave laborers or Nazi concentration camp inmates. The article noted that the Soviets true concern was the anti-Communists among these refugees. Stalin wanted them dead or in prison not free to organize resistance movements. The Soviets did not apply the same principal of forced repatriation for the Spanish refugees, many of them Communists.There were some indications that France was willing to absorb this group.
About 100,000 Jews were in camps in the Allied zones. Most were from Poland or the Balkans, Since January an Anglo-American Committee had been investigating whether Palestine should be opened to them. The US was expected to support the large scale immigration of Jews to Palestine. Finishing touches were being put on the committee report.
In a feature story on the refugee situation also published in the section, Drew Middleton took notice of the ethnic Germans from outside of Germany who had fled the advance of the Russian Army or had been ejected from their homes after the war by the Soviets.They had not been included in the statistics cited above They came from East Prussia, Danzig, Konigsberg, Lodz, Pomerania, Posen, Silesia, East Brandenberg, Czechoslovakia, Transylvania, Slovenia, Trieste and Hungary, which had sizable German communities. Middleton estimated their number at 6,000,000 to 6.500,000. Later historians have put the count at about 12,000,000. For the most part they were civilians, many of them women, children, the elderly and infirm. Many were in dire straits and had nowhere to turn. Germany was not their homeland; many of these families had lived in Central Europe or along the Baltic coast for generations, even centuries. They were not allowed to return to their former homes in the east and those who had not left during the war were expelled by the Soviet Army.The western allies did not want to take them in and the formerly occupied nations interned them. The overwhelmed relief organizations in occupied, war-ravaged Germany lacked the resources to deal with this flood. Middleton wondered if they would eventually be recognized as refugees and given some help or ignored and driven to desperation. The record is not good. The British and Americans offered some assistance within their occupation zones. The French barred the refugees who had been expelled after the war from their zone of occupation and the Soviets refused humanitarian aid in their occupied zones. Somewhere between 600,000 and 3,000,000 of these refugees were killed or died from disease and malnutrition. The death toll in internment camps was high, particularly among the children and the elderly. Atrocities were committed such as the Red Army mass murder of the residents of old folks homes and mental patients in Lubin not able to leave. In the west, the situation had been especially bad in Denmark in 1945 after its liberation from Nazi occupation. Shortly before the liberation, 250,000 German civilians had been evacuated by the Nazis from the Baltic war zone to Copenhagen. The Nazis had forced them to remain in the war zone until the last possible moment. They had become unwelcome visitors in Denmark once the German army had retreated and were herded into camps where they received little food or medical care. Some historians say that 80 percent of the infants and toddlers died within months of their arrival. In Germany, where 20 percent of the present day population is descended from this exodus, their treatment after the war is a sore point, but their history is largely overlooked elsewhere. To this day some people still believe that, based on their ethnicity . these refugees bore the stain of Hitler's crimes and got what they deserved. Ethnic hatreds run deep and were not a monopoly of the Nazis. See Wikipedia for a more extensive discussion.
Middleton also raised the issue of stateless people- some 18,000 by official figures-- among the refugees, as well as some 47,000 people in the American zone whose nationality the Army was unable to classify for unstated reasons. This could have included members of ethnic minorities without homelands such as gypsies or ethnic subgroups with cross-identities such as the Protestant Mazurs who had settled in south Prussia after experiencing discrimination in Catholic Poland. They were historically, linguistically and ethnically Polish but had traditional religious, cultural and political ties to the Germans. Most of the Mazurs chose to settle in Germany after the war.