The Humanitarian Crisis in Postwar Europe and Germany

At the end of World War II, Europe faced a humanitarian crisis of unprecedented scale. Between 35 and 40 million Europeans had had been killed in the war, and the survivors coped with devastated cities, ruined farmlands, and shattered infrastructure. Famine threatened the survivors—in some regions, worse than during the war.Footnote ⁶ Adding to the misery, tens of millions more Europeans were displaced during or shortly after the war. These displaced masses comprised three broad categories: first, prisoners held in POW, concentration, or labor camps; second, those who fled from or were expelled by enemies, some in so-called “wild” actions and others as part of population transfers undertaken by various states, especially in eastern Europe; and, third, persons otherwise rendered homeless through wartime destruction.

Camps for non-German DPs stretched from Germany in the north to Italy in the south, numbering 227 in total in 1945.Footnote ⁷ The overwhelming majority of these DPs, officially “civilians outside the national boundaries of their country by reason of the war,” were in occupied Germany, roughly 6 million in the western zones and another 6 to 7 million in the Soviet zone. Most had been brought to Germany as forced laborers, concentration camp inmates, or POWs. In the spring and summer of 1945, the Allies repatriated between 6 and 7 million DPs, leaving 1.2 million in the western zones.Footnote ⁸

The completion of those initial repatriations marked the beginning of what historian Gerard D. Cohen calls the “second and longer phase of the DP episode,” when UNRRA and the IRO cared for the so-called hardcore of the refugees.Footnote ⁹ This “hardcore” remainder consisted of several groups: Poles accounted for half of the DPs (400,000 Poles total) in March 1946. Between 150,000 and 200,000 persons from the Baltic states as well as 150,000 ethnic Ukrainians also proved difficult to resettle and remained in Germany in the spring of 1946.Footnote ¹⁰ Jewish survivors of the Holocaust in Germany numbered between 60,000 and 70,000 shortly after the capitulation. Their numbers increased as three other groups of Polish-Jewish survivors poured into occupied Germany in response to persecution in Poland: camp survivors who returned to their hometowns after liberation, Jews who survived the war in Poland as partisans or in hiding, and Jews who had fled from Poland to the Soviet Union only to be repatriated after the war.Footnote ¹¹ Replacing resettled DPs, anticommunist refugees arriving from Yugoslavia, Slovakia, and Hungary bolstered the “last million” into the late 1940s.Footnote ¹²

For all of these groups, resettlement was often complicated by the displaced individuals’ objections to repatriation and other countries’ objections to accepting them. Military authorities who pushed for the speedy repatriation saw these DPs primarily as a problem of “security and order”Footnote ¹³ and believed that “if you made things hard enough for the DPs in the camps, the DPs would go home.”Footnote ¹⁴ UNRRA workers, by contrast, took a more humanitarian approach in their attempts to not only aid but also rehabilitate the DPs, including much-trumpeted schemes to promote self-governance within their camps.Footnote ¹⁵ According to Cohen, many of these relief workers “perceived themselves as the promoters of a new international age,” which reflected a significant change from earlier attitudes toward relief and relief organizations.Footnote ¹⁶ The scale of suffering clearly had eclipsed the capacities of the International Red Cross and private charities. UNRRA as an international organization, though one dependent on charitable organizations, “became the most powerful ‘do-gooders’ of the immediate postwar years,” and “humanitarianism functioned as an alternative welfare state for stateless people.”Footnote ¹⁷

Unlike the DPs under the remit of international organizations, Germans expelled from eastern Europe were a problem for German governments to solve. Of course, expulsions were not a new phenomenon; the exchange of roughly 1.2 million Greeks residing in Turkey and 365,000 Turks living in Greece is but the largest example of post–World War I transfers.Footnote ¹⁸ Germans were not alone in their displacement following World War II, to say nothing of the sundry transfers, expulsions, and mass murder that played a central role in the German “war of annihilation” (Vernichtungskrieg) during World War II. Contemporaneously with the postwar expulsion of Germans, more than 2 million Poles left the Soviet Union as various types of “repatriates,” much as 482,000 Ukrainians and 36,000 Byelorussians were forced to leave Poland, and nearly 300,000 Italians fled or were expelled from Yugoslavia.Footnote ¹⁹ All told, roughly 12 million Germans were fled or were expelled from their homes at the close of the war.

In addition to the flight of Germans from the Red Army's advance into East Prussia in the winter of 1945, a series of “wild” expulsions in the spring and summer preceded the beginning of officially sanctioned removals. Through August 1945, between 600,000 and 900,000 Germans were driven from Bohemia.Footnote ²⁰ Historian R. M. Douglas notes that estimates of the number of Germans subjected to wild expulsions from Poland range between 200,000 and 1.2 million, though he suggests that a figure of 1 million is likely conservative. Indeed, one of the major problems in assessing the number of Germans subject to the expulsions is that some German refugees had tried to return home at the war's end, so it is difficult to arrive at a base estimate of the number of Germans in Poland when state-sanctioned expulsions began in June 1945.Footnote ²¹

The ongoing wild expulsions ensured that regulation of future population transfers was a topic of discussion when the British, Americans, and Soviets met at Potsdam in July and August 1945 to determine a course for the occupation of Germany. The violence of these initial expulsions had led to unease among the British and Americans, and even the Soviet commanders in Berlin and along Germany's eastern border became unwilling to accept more displaced Germans.Footnote ²² As such, the conference attendees revisited the issue of expulsions. Stalin remained unwilling to abandon plans for revising German borders and transferring populations, but he did concede the need for better-regulated transfers, which the parties agreed were to proceed in an “orderly and humane manner.”Footnote ²³

Unsanctioned expulsions of Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia nevertheless continued until late 1945. At this point, according to historian Philipp Ther, “the West rediscovered human rights for themselves, which had hardly played a role at Yalta and Potsdam,” in part because of journalists’ reports of suffering Germans, in part because the occupiers wanted to avoid the difficulties associated with caring for sick and starving expellees.Footnote ²⁴ The plans announced by the Allied Control Council on November 20, 1945, amounted to the transfer of the remaining 3.5 million Germans in Poland and 2.5 million in Czechoslovakia between December 1945 and mid-1946.Footnote ²⁵ The Soviets agreed to take an additional 2.75 million Germans from across eastern Europe into their zone; the Americans 2.25 million from Czechoslovakia and Hungary; and the British 1.5 million from the Polish Recovered Territories.Footnote ²⁶

In addition to the 12 million German expellees, occupation authorities also needed to resettle Germans displaced by Allied strategic bombing meant to “dehouse” the workforce driving Germany's war machine. Britain's bombing of Germany began at first because it was the only way to strike Germany, but in 1942 the British bomber command decided that it was not practical to knock out individual factories. Instead, as historian William Hitchcock characterized the strategy, “the city as a whole had to be destroyed.”Footnote ²⁷ The brutal toll of the Allied air campaign was: 2.7 million tons of bombs dropped on Germany, 3.6 million units of housing destroyed, 7.5 million Germans left homeless, and at least 305,000 Germans killed.Footnote ²⁸ As with the expellees, care for these refugees fell to German authorities and was to be done with German resources, though the scale of the problem again necessitated oversight by the military governments.

The Establishment of a Camp System, 1945–1946

The occupying military governments and local German civil authorities responded to the displacement crisis by trying to limit or otherwise regulate the movement of displaced populations, and thus developed a system for permitting travel and assigning residences. Such restrictions responded to the fact that cities, both large and small, struggled to cope with mass displacement.Footnote ²⁹ For example, the British military government responsible for the northern German region, including the district of Göttingen in which the town of Friedland was located, instituted “circulation restrictions” in June 1945.Footnote ³⁰ Metropolises likewise found it necessary to restrict the inflow of refugees who arrived, regardless of the extent of wartime damage the cities had suffered. On July 27, 1945, the Soviet marshal Georgy Zhukov responded to an increase in the incidence of typhoid infections in Berlin by declaring the city off-limits to migration by individuals without proper transit permits. At that point, unpermitted traffic to Berlin totaled some 4,000 to 5,000 persons per day.Footnote ³¹

Camps offered a stopgap solution to the displaced searching for shelter and local governments struggling to provide it. In the Soviet zone, for instance, local officials took the initiative in the establishment of more than 600 camps, which fell under effective centralized control only in 1946 and 1947.Footnote ³² Part of this sudden growth of camps all over Germany, transit camps multiplied near zonal boundaries as a means to care for the various sorts of refugees and to enforce travel restrictions; Friedland was one of eight facilities that the British military government designated along its border with the Soviet sector to control such traffic.Footnote ³³ The number of zonal transits at Friedland alone during its first six months of operation speaks to the scale of displacement and sheds light on the diverse affected groups: 535,306 German wartime evacuees were exchanged between the British and Soviet sectors; 209,797 were “refugees” comprising both expellees and Soviet zone refugees; 12,492 POWs; and 3,021 DPs.Footnote ³⁴

Travel and residence restrictions ultimately proved problematic for city officials, because rather than resolving displacement, they left it to fester elsewhere, often in overcrowded refugee camps or makeshift accommodations. Limits on movement within and between districts stemmed from security concerns, but too often local authorities used them to avoid the burdens and epidemiological risks associated with refugees.Footnote ³⁵ The administrator of a Göttingen refugee facility thus noted their false promise, arguing that restrictions created the “social problem” (Übelstand) of refugees continuously wandering around the district for months at a time. Even when they could find housing, local mayors refused to allow residence. According to the administrator, this fact “embittered the homeless persons to the extreme.”Footnote ³⁶ Such bitterness was disconcerting because it might lead to political radicalization. The refugee authority for the Hildesheim governing district in the British zone thus warned, “A simple inability is seen as ill will, and the thought arises, why should the still propertied here have a better situation than themselves, and whether it would not be much more right and fair to divide what remains equally among everyone.”Footnote ³⁷

To begin to control the crisis, in October 1945, British and German provisional authorities required that all incoming refugees pass through a transit camp, such as the one at Friedland.Footnote ³⁸ Proof of registration at these camps and travel to one's assigned destination entitled the displaced to ration cards. Aid thus became contingent upon refugees entering the state-run resettlement system. Presumably, this system would address the problem of insularity in local communities because the completed documentation was straightforward and provided no legal grounds for refusing aid to refugees, though it could not completely overcome local intransigence. Registration in the camps also enabled the state to reenter refugees into population rolls, restarting its social bookkeeping. Persons needing immediate medical care could be evaluated and treated at the camps’ medical facilities or sent to nearby hospitals. The underpinning logic thus seems to have been that rather than provoking bitterness through rejection from insular communities, state intervention through refugee transit camps would instead promote relief and gratitude for provisions, medical care, and shelter.

To accomplish these goals, the Friedland camp administration set up a strictly controlled procedure for incoming persons, delineated in Camp Order Number 1 from September 1945.Footnote ³⁹ After the arrival and unloading of trucks, staffers sent individuals to register in tents and receive their stamped ration cards. Delousing and a further stamp came next, before distribution of food and clothing. Individuals then waited until called for departure, at which point they received a ticket and could reclaim their possessions. Registration, medical examination, delousing, and questioning by the British security services took about fifteen minutes per person.Footnote ⁴⁰ Typically, processing was completed on the day of arrival because a backlog in the flow of refugees (roughly 4,000 to 5,000 per day in the early months of operation) would have been catastrophic.Footnote ⁴¹

Registration of individual identities at Friedland served the practical purpose of reestablishing some form of personal identification. In many instances, individuals arrived without personal identification or any sort of papers, such as refugees from the Soviet zone with only a certificate stating, “free of lice and infectious diseases.”Footnote ⁴² Refugees simply swore an oath to the camp police in which they attested to their identity.Footnote ⁴³ The first commemorative history of Friedland admitted, “In isolated cases individuals may have used this opportunity to make a small name change.”Footnote ⁴⁴ In one documented instance, the temptation for name change also proved irresistible for a camp staffer who wished to leave behind his past membership in the SS.Footnote ⁴⁵

That staffer's case points to issues of potential mismanagement and corruption, from registration and identity verification through the distribution of aid. Given the improvisational nature of early camp operation, various forms of corruption and mismanagement were common in both East and West until effective control came through “uniting diverse small camps into one greater camp”; that is, by consolidating camps under tighter central oversight.Footnote ⁴⁶ Friedland was no exception, and petty corruption—whether trading goods with camp residents or taking bribes for favorable housing assignments—was a persistent problem until the camp director Richard Krause, appointed in the wake of a 1946 corruption scandal that engulfed his predecessor, brought it under control through 1946 and 1947.Footnote ⁴⁷ Even the commander of the British unit in the camp in 1951 fell under suspicion of profiting from official resources and was removed from his post.Footnote ⁴⁸ Between its reputation for dirty dealings and its muddy environs, Friedland initially enjoyed a reputation far less stellar than the later “gateway to freedom.” In fact, a local newspaper called it the “greatest stain (Schandfleck) on southwest Lower Saxony.”Footnote ⁴⁹

As already described, after registration the camp's next concern was that arriving individuals underwent delousing, another crucial step that early on also suffered from mismanagement. Lice posed a significant threat to public health because they could cause epidemics of typhus and trench fever, a fact that did not endear refugees or refugee camps to local populations. By collecting exhausted, malnourished populations in tight quarters, the camp constituted a danger zone for spreading lice and lice-borne disease to other refugees and from them to their new home communities. Through the autumn of 1945, medical examinations routinely revealed that roughly 20 percent of arriving persons suffered from lice infestation.Footnote ⁵⁰ So, the camp administration mandated delousing with DDT powder for all arriving refugees. By the end of January 1946, the Göttingen office of the State Health Department could report with satisfaction that the delousing personnel had been greatly reinforced and put under the supervision of a doctor and “reliable” group leaders. The camp had also begun construction on a delousing barracks for refugees’ personal effects.Footnote ⁵¹

Finally, after delousing and medical evaluations, camp residents obtained their food rations and waited for their departure. Although persons leaving Friedland were embarking on a long resettlement process, they did leave the camp having undergone rudimentary medical screening, in possession of some provisions, and, most importantly, with the confirmation of a legal identity that entitled them to further state aid. This reentering of refugees in state welfare rolls enabled regional governments to begin assessing their aid obligations. For the individual refugee, entry into the camp's registration records (Kartei) provided proof of status for future welfare claims against the state. Indeed, the key problem facing the mother and son from the introduction was that they were not listed in any camp's Kartei.Footnote ⁵² Although it was not immediately clear how a program of burden sharing (Lastenausgleich) would proceed, both Germans and the Western occupation powers recognized a need to do something for the dispossessed.Footnote ⁵³ From the beginning, Friedland administrators understood these records would prove vital for the refugees themselves, as noted in Camp Directive 4 from September 1945, because they laid the foundation for future, category-specific entitlements.Footnote ⁵⁴

In this respect, the process underway at Friedland diverged from the strategy taken in the East. Although they had likewise resorted to the provisional use of refugee camps, the civil East German and Soviet military authorities did not pursue the creation of special categories and welfare entitlements. According to historian Pertti Ahonen, the “initial similarities in the West German approach to the expellee problem—in social policy, inclusionary tactics, and even instrumentalized rhetoric—ended in the late 1940s and early 1950s.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Instead of an equalization of burdens, authorities in the Soviet zone pursued the equalization of property through land redistribution (Bodenreform) beginning in September 1945. Land redistribution along with the socialization of industry was supposed to resolve true social and economic inequities. These measures would, in theory, provide homes and a livelihood to the displaced “resettlers” (Umsiedler) from eastern Europe, who accounted for some 25 percent of the zone's population.Footnote ⁵⁶

In addition to the communist approach to economic issues, ideology further informed the different paths taken with respect to the equalization of burdens. In the East, authorities saw resettlers as having been a “‘fifth column’ who had substantial complicity in the war,” making “an equalization of burdens like in the West … ideologically impossible.”Footnote ⁵⁷ This thinking contributed to the 1948 decision by the ruling Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, SED) to essentially declare the problem to have been solved and dissolve the central administration for resettlers. The party nevertheless found it necessary to introduce new integration policies in 1949 and 1950, only to terminate them in 1952, again walking away from the issue with the expectation that general economic policies would resolve any remaining issues with displacement.Footnote ⁵⁸

Returnees from War and Imprisonment, 1946–1955

Beginning in the summer of 1946, the populations processed at Friedland changed from the mixture of evacuees, refugees, DPs, and some individual prisoners of war, to larger transports of POWs being sent to homes in the Soviet zone or those being released from the Soviet zone into the British zone. This first group of approximately 120,000 POWs released by Britain to their homes in East Germany constituted roughly 20 percent of the POW traffic in the camp.Footnote ⁵⁹ These POWs—along with the 265,000 evacuees returned eastward, mentioned in the preceding section—are important because they offer a counternarrative to the politicized, Cold War-inflected memory of Friedland as the “gateway to freedom” in the West. The second, much larger group of returnees traveling westward comprised approximately 450,000 returnees, nearly 90 percent of whom came from Soviet captivity. Various eastern European countries accounted for the remaining 10 percent of returnees arriving via the Soviet zone. Among the returnees were also some 15,000 civilian “internees.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Especially this last group challenged notions of what a prisoner of war was, and examination of the various types of returnees and their processing at Friedland in turn raises questions about returning soldiers as another, less-commonly recognized category of displacement.

When returnees from Soviet and eastern European captivity, mainly male soldiers, arrived at Friedland, they faced processing procedures much like those for other populations. Medical evaluation and care in the camp were especially important for this group because they often arrived in poor health due to overwork and poor conditions in prison/labor camps.Footnote ⁶¹ Rather than the usual certification of refugee status, the returnees initially received a D-2 Certificate of Discharge from the camp's British military unit, which was necessary for rations, housing assignments, and registration at local returnee offices; in the 1950s the D-2 was replaced by a German-administered certification.Footnote ⁶²

Similarities between returnees and other types of refugees were significant in the case of the paradoxically termed “returnees without a homeland” (heimatlose Heimkehrer). These returnees were persons who prior to the war had lived outside the boundaries of what was to become West Germany. For example, an individual might have lived in a region ceded to Poland or the Soviet Union after the war, or could have been an ethnic German who had never lived in Germany nor held German citizenship at all. Initially, they received train tickets to the dedicated returnee camp at a former garrison near Munster, Lower Saxony, where search services might provide an address for family in the West. If not, the returnees would continue to the refugee camp at Uelzen, Lower Saxony, for distribution in keeping with refugee quotas for various districts.Footnote ⁶³ Beginning in 1949, however, the Friedland camp took over complete responsibility for returnees without a homeland. Assuming no immediate family could be found, the camp would initiate contact with employment advisers and charities in the attempt to find work and housing placements. If no placements were available, the returnees would be officially discharged to the Friedland camp and then distributed according to refugee quotas. Sick or injured among them were sent to a hospital in Göttingen or other medical facilities, and after their recovery they returned to the camp for the same processing as healthy heimatlose Heimkehrer.Footnote ⁶⁴

In other cases, the need to translate legal categories in a practicable system of classification was complicated by reality not matching gendered assumptions that returnees would be male soldiers. The camp initially offered the D-2 certificate only to released members of military formations, including female auxiliaries. In November 1948, however, the Prisoner of War Committee of the Zonal Advisory Council announced that Friedland would issue D-2 certificates to female civilian internees as well, a decision grounded in the arrival of the first women's transport from Siberia earlier in July. In addition to auxiliary clerks, this transport was discovered to have included civilians, all of whom had done “men's work” in mines.Footnote ⁶⁵ This administrative directive was later enshrined in the Aid Measures for Returnees law passed in 1950, which included “Germans, who because of their ethnicity (Volkszugehörigkeit) or citizenship (Staatsangehörigkeit), were interned in a foreign land, and within two months of their release from foreign captivity take or took up residence in federal territory, insofar as their internment did not occur because of National Socialist activity in a foreign land.”Footnote ⁶⁶ The benefits provided by 1950 law were: 500 DM as release and transitional funds, priority in housing allocation, protection from employment dismissal, priority in finding work and vocational retraining, unemployment insurance, and pension insurance.Footnote ⁶⁷

Administrative lawsuits against the Friedland camp for wrongful rejection of returnee status nevertheless demonstrate that civilians had trouble proving that their internment occurred because of their nationality, not some different, disqualifying reason. Such was the case for one woman who sued the camp in 1957, arguing that the administration had been wrong to refuse her returnee status on the grounds that she had been committed to a medical asylum; she argued that she had, in fact, been imprisoned as a German.Footnote ⁶⁸ The recognition of children as returnees likewise challenged expectations that returnees would be male POWs, or at least adult male or female civil internees imprisoned because of their nationality. Take for example a case litigated in 1956, when a woman sued the camp after administrators denied her application for returnee status. The Friedland administration held that confinement in a children's home did not constitute a qualifying imprisonment as defined by the 1950 law. The court nevertheless ruled for her, finding that she did qualify because the home in question had been within an internment camp for Germans in Yugoslavia.Footnote ⁶⁹

Female returnees also fit awkwardly within the politicized celebrations surrounding the so-called “Great Homecoming” of 1955 and 1956, when thousands of returnees arrived at Friedland after being released from Soviet captivity. As historian Robert Moeller argues, one of the dominant narratives for these homecomings was that of “German Penelopes” welcoming back their long-suffering husbands.Footnote ⁷⁰ Unlike earlier social anxieties over weakened POWs’ perceived loss of masculinity, the 1955 male returnees’ masculinity was not in question—their weakness was instead cast as a much-needed sober, masculine counterweight to (over)consumption as West Germany enjoyed its “economic miracle.”Footnote ⁷¹ Press treatment of the transports’ women, however, was reversed: the hardships of internment called the women's femininity into doubt, so their reintegration depended on refeminization through consumption and beauty. One widely circulated account first published in the Göttinger Tageblatt noted that a fashionable leather purse purchased in the camp cantina was the “most important female attribute,” and “treatment” at a local salon made her into the article's titular “new person.”Footnote ⁷²

Another issue of public perception of the camp and returnees during the “Great Homecoming” was that the arrivals reopened the issue of wartime crimes perpetrated by Germans. In 1955, charges also emerged that former Waffen-SS men attended the arrival of transports in order to distribute pamphlets and recruit members to the Hilfsgemeinschaft auf Gegenseitigkeit der Angehörigen der ehemaligen Waffen-SS, the notorious mutual aid society for SS veterans.Footnote ⁷³ A thankful letter-to-the-editor in the organization's journal, Wiking-Ruf, about the warm welcome provided by SS comrades at Friedland served as evidence of such recruitment activities and gave ammunition to the East German state eager to emphasize fascism in the West.Footnote ⁷⁴

The Friedland camp's administration was aware of problems posed to the camp by any public perception of the facility as a friendly reception point for former Nazi criminals. As such, they rerouted “nonamnestied” POWs, including a former concentration camp doctor and other notorious Nazis, for processing at a border-guard garrison in nearby Hannoversch Münden to at least try to avoid association between “Friedland” and war criminals in news reports.Footnote ⁷⁵ In addition to protecting the camp's image in West Germany, the decision was also influenced by concerns expressed by the Federal Foreign Office that reception of such POWs at Friedland endangered the arrival of future transports, presumably because celebrations of the nonamnestied angered the Soviet and/or East German officials on whose goodwill the timely arrival of transports depended.Footnote ⁷⁶

In December 1955, West and East German newspapers also covered outrage surrounding a speaker who, during the festivities following a transport's arrival, led the returnees in an oath to attest that they had committed no crimes during their service on the eastern front. The Leipziger Zeitung, for instance, condemned the “murderers' false oath.” It linked the participants, freed by an “act of mercy” shown to them by the Soviet Union, with wartime depredations against civilians, emphasized through the juxtaposed images of smiling returnees at Friedland and the naked corpses of women murdered by German soldiers on the eastern front. The article furthermore connected war criminals with the “Adenauer clique” that was presently seeking new “knights against the East” and thus “at Friedland made criminals of the fascist era into ‘heroes’ of the second world war.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Indeed, as noted by other historians, the celebrations and recriminations associated with homecomings at Friedland were about more than just the return of the POWs from the last war; they also need to be seen in the context of debates about German rearmament as part of the Western military bloc.Footnote ⁷⁸

Issues of wartime crimes aside, the arrival of the last POWs and internees from the Soviet Union occasioned bitter debate over what constituted an appropriate reception. Delays in the arrival of transports during November 1955 led to an outcry that the jubilant receptions in October had offended Soviet or East German authorities—the actual cause is unclear—and the camp faced complaints from waiting families, while the press suggested that future receptions should be more muted.Footnote ⁷⁹ Letters from families of the delayed transports' members went so far as to blame the camp, because of the criticism of the Soviet Union allowed at earlier receptions, and the Foreign Office in Bonn suggested that “reception festivities be scaled back in comparison to earlier practice.”Footnote ⁸⁰ After all, the returns could not happen without the participation and smooth function of counterpart camps in East Germany, such as those in Gronenfelde and Heiligenstadt, which were necessary for processing and housing the returnees as they traveled to Friedland.Footnote ⁸¹ Others argued that the carnival-like atmosphere with traveling vendors and roadside food stands was inappropriate for welcoming back POWs to their families and homeland. Administrators were forced to defend themselves from accusations that they allowed the returnees to be cheated by such unscrupulous traders and also women of ill repute, particularly given that their families awaited them and their release allowances at home.Footnote ⁸²

The return of prisoners to West Germany from captivity in the communist bloc during the first postwar decade was a fraught process. Friedland played a crucial role in helping the returnees and the German government through the difficult progression from imprisonment to release and reintegration. Political debates and recriminations over these prisoners’ wartime activities together constituted a significant problem. Less widely recognized by historians, however, were the ways in which the varieties of returnees challenged notions of what it meant to be a prisoner of war. Indeed, it is instructive that a camp that quickly proved itself vital to the process of resettling of refugees and expellees became the key location for the demobilization of POWs and creating their claims to the entitlements so crucial to an eventual reintegration in home communities. Given the multiplicity of types of returnees and the challenges presented by these groups, one should consider how the process of POW release and demobilization was in fact an element of the much larger history of the mass uprooting and resettlement of populations during and after war.

Reception Camp for “Vagrant” Male Youths, 1947–1951

From 1947 to 1951, the Friedland camp housed and cared for so-called “vagrant” (wandernde) male youths in a dedicated subcamp, the Friedland Youth Reception Camp. Discovered to be traveling across or merely near the border without a parent or other guardian, these male youths, typically between thirteen and eighteen years old, posed a serious danger to social order—at least in the eyes of camp administrators. The Nazi regime, war, and displacement had all corroded traditional social controls over youths, whether that was the family or community organizations. Indeed, the following prosopography of JAL residents shows the overrepresentation of youths who had been uprooted during or after the war. Moreover, the subcamp encapsulates the entanglement of regulatory and humanitarian action from the perspective of the camp administrators: providing care, education, and either family reunification or a work placement would resolve the problem of youths taking advantage of social chaos and also reorient them to an orderly, productive future.

The establishment of a subcamp for male youths naturally raises the question of why the camp administration did not concern itself with female youths. Surviving administrative documents from the JAL and camp at large are conspicuously silent on this issue. The JAL did in fact house and resettle some vagrant female youths, particularly in 1947 and 1948 before the camp came to an agreement for sending them to a young women's home run by the Protestant charity Innere Mission in nearby Göttingen.Footnote ⁸³ One explanation for the focus on male youths is that they simply constituted the larger problem group because only a handful of vagrant young women arrived at the camp. Worries about possible sexual activity presumably led the camp administration to prefer a single-sex facility.

Sample files for 157 youths encompassing roughly the first year of the JAL's operation speak to the multifaceted natures of population displacement and refugee groups in postwar Germany.Footnote ⁸⁴ The adolescents came almost exclusively from the Soviet zone, though a division existed between longtime residents of those territories and recently arrived expellees. The eighty-two individuals with expulsion backgrounds constituted a majority (52 percent) of the overall population in comparison to the sixty-eight youths (43 percent) who had been previously resident in Soviet zone territories. The remaining six youths resided during and after the war in the West. Given that expellees accounted for roughly 25 percent of the population in the Soviet zone, their majority presence among the youths speaks to a lasting transitory status after the expulsion.

Youths typically reported economic rather than political reasons for their flight to the West. The push factor of lost or scarce industrial work due to dismantling for reparations to the USSR combined with a pull factor in the perception of goods and work being more abundant in the West. Another commonly reported reason was work conscription in the uranium mines of the Wismut AG.Footnote ⁸⁵ Their arrivals coincided with the period, starting in 1946 and ending in 1950, in which the Soviet military administration induced tens of thousands of workers, many of whom were refugees, expellees, and returnees without any mining experience, to live and work in terrible, dangerous conditions.Footnote ⁸⁶

Under JAL rules, adolescents were supposed to experience a tightly regulated lifestyle based upon productivity and orderliness. Residents worked within the camp or for nearby farmers or artisans.Footnote ⁸⁷ When youth camp residents attended classes, the lessons concentrated on religious instruction or practical knowledge, such as of geography or reading and discussing newspapers. Schedules also devoted at least several hours per week to gymnastics, sports, and personal hygiene.Footnote ⁸⁸ Trading, buying, or selling items was prohibited in the attempt to prevent the development of a black market. Smoking and disorderly behavior were also strictly forbidden.Footnote ⁸⁹ Naturally, there was a gap between the rules’ prescriptions and the actual behavior of teenagers in the JAL. Residents engaged in illicit trade, including pilfering from the camp and other residents to obtain goods for exchange, and they still smoked, much to the consternation of administrators.Footnote ⁹⁰ In cases of serious or repeated infractions, the camp expelled residents back to the Soviet zone.

As a subcamp within a transit facility, JAL was also responsible for quickly resettling its charges. It contacted families or the youth office in the last place of residence for a decision on family reunification or placement in a job or youth home. Typically, families agreed to a work placement. Of the 874 adolescents housed in the youth camp between January 1947 and March 1951, 513 went to a work placement, and 86 were reunited with their families. The camp sent another 96 individuals back to the Soviet zone for disciplinary reasons, but it is unclear if that category includes additional instances of family reunification. There were 94 cases of individuals fleeing the JAL, and the remaining 85 residents were sent to youth homes or hospitals.Footnote ⁹¹

Statements by the youths and correspondence with their families suggest various reasons for the disparity in rates of work placement and family reunification. Parents had sometimes given permission for their child's departure because they felt economic opportunities would be better in the West. Families in desperate circumstances wished to be relieved of responsibility for these children. In instances of domestic strife, parents and guardians told the camp that a work- or youth-home placement would be preferable to continuing conflict.Footnote ⁹² Assessing the success of resettlements is difficult because only exceptional cases, typically driven by conflict between youths and employers, came to the administration's attention. Living and working conditions and pay were key points of dissatisfaction for the youths, while employers groused about laziness and unruliness.Footnote ⁹³ Youths assigned to small farms also complained of isolation when not integrated into family life.Footnote ⁹⁴ Trauma from displacement and loss undoubtedly affected youths and exacerbated such conflicts. This is most clear in the case of a teenager who had difficulties with a farmer family while waiting for his mother's immigration from the Soviet zone; he committed suicide by drowning in the Werra River.Footnote ⁹⁵