Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II Read Free

of the biggest population movements the world has ever seen. Germany was awash with foreign workers in the spring of 1945. The country contained almost 8 million forced labourers at the end of the war, who had been brought to German farms and factories to work from every corner of Europe. In western Germany alone, UNRRA, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, looked after and repatriated more than 6.5 million displaced persons. Most of them came from the Soviet Union, Poland and France, although there were also significant numbers of Italians, Belgians, Dutch, Yugoslavs and Czechs. A large proportion of these displaced persons were women and children. One of the many aspects of the Second World War that make it unique among modern wars is the fact that vast numbers of civilians were taken prisoner along with the traditional military captives. Women and children, as well as men, were effectively treated as war booty. They were enslaved in a way that had not been seen in Europe since the time of the Roman Empire. 1
    To make the situation in Germany even more complicated, millions of Germans were displaced within their own country. By the beginning of 1945 there were an estimated 4.8 million internal refugees, mostly in the south and east, who had been evacuated from bombed cities and a further 4 million displaced Germans who had fled the eastern reaches of the Reich in fear of the Red Army. 2 When we add the nearly 275,000 British and American prisoners of war, this makes a grand total of at least 17 million displaced persons in Germany alone. 3 This is a fairly conservative estimate, and other historians have placed the figure far higher. 4 In Europe as a whole, according to one study, over 40 million people were forcibly displaced for varying periods during the war. 5
    As the end of hostilities approached, huge numbers headed out onto the roads to begin the long journey home. Derek Henry, a British sapper with the Royal Engineers, first began to encounter such groups near Minden in mid-April 1945.
     
We had been told to be on the lookout for pockets of German troops still putting up a fight but fortunately all we came across were thousands of DPs and refugees of every nationality, all heading towards us and the West: Bulgarians, Rumanians, Russians, Greeks, Yugoslavs and Poles —you name it, they were there, some in small groups of two or three each with their pitiful bundle of belongings heaped on to a pushbike or in a farm cart, others in large groups, piled onto overcrowded buses or on the backs of lorries, it was never ending. Whenever we stopped they would descend on us, hoping for some food. 6
     
    Later, according to US intelligence officer Saul Padover, ‘Thousands, tens of thousands, finally millions of liberated slaves were coming out of the farms and the factories and the mines and pouring onto the highways.’ 7 Reactions to this huge torrent of displaced people differed widely, depending on the person who witnessed it. For Padover, who had little time for Germans, it was ‘perhaps the most tragic human migration in history’, and simply more evidence of German guilt. For the local population, who were understandably nervous of such large groups of disgruntled foreigners, they represented a threat. ‘They looked like wild creatures,’ wrote one German woman after the war, ‘one could be afraid of them’. 8 For those overwhelmed military government officers whose job was to gain some sort of control over them, they were merely a ‘swarming mass’. 9 They filled the roads, which were already too damaged to accommodate them, and were only able to feed themselves by looting and robbing shops, stores and farmhouses along the way. In a country where the administrative systems had collapsed, where the local police force had all been killed or interned, where shelter was non-existent, and where food was no longer being distributed, they represented an impossible burden and an irresistible