Liberation and the
Displaced Persons

Why this Chapter exists

The ordeal after the killing.

The liberation of the camps ended the killing. It did not end the consequences of the Holocaust. More than 250,000 Jewish survivors remained displaced persons (DPs), people uprooted by the war and living outside their home countries, for years after it ended. They could not return to their former homes, or would not. Families had been destroyed, communities no longer existed, property had been taken, and antisemitic violence continued in parts of Europe. The last Jewish DP camp closed in 1957.

By 1945, about six million European Jews had been murdered. Relief agencies, Jewish organizations, and Jewish soldiers from Palestine supported the survivors until they found permanent homes. How the receiving countries had treated Jewish refugees before the war is told in the 1933–1939 Chapter.

Several events shaped how the displaced-persons question was resolved: the Kielce pogrom of July 1946, the Exodus 1947 affair, and the founding of Israel as a receiving state for much of the DP population. So did the choices of the countries that did or did not admit survivors. Each outcome came from decisions made by specific governments.

The first liberations · July 1944 – May 1945

The geographic and chronological pattern.

The killings ended at different times in different places. The killing centers and the camps were liberated across some ten months, from the first Soviet entry into Majdanek in July 1944 to the Soviet arrival at Stutthof on May 9, 1945. The Soviet army liberated the major killing centers and concentration camps in the East: Majdanek, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Stutthof, Gross-Rosen. Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka were never liberated. The Germans had closed and dismantled those three killing centers in 1943, before any army reached them. The Western Allied forces liberated the camps in the West: Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Mauthausen.

The first major Nazi camp to be liberated was Majdanek, on the outskirts of Lublin in German-occupied Poland. Soviet troops arrived on the night of July 22–23, 1944, and found the camp virtually intact. The SS had evacuated most prisoners that spring, and the remaining staff fled without fully dismantling the camp. The Polish-Soviet Extraordinary Commission for Investigation of German-Fascist Crimes then documented Majdanek. Its findings were among the first evidence from a liberated Nazi camp to reach the international public. Soviet war correspondent Konstantin Simonov published his account in August 1944 in Krasnaya Zvezda (“Red Star”). It was one of the first published eyewitness accounts of a Nazi killing center.

The Soviet 322nd Rifle Division liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau on January 27, 1945. The Soviet forces found some 7,000 prisoners remaining at the complex, weak from forced marches and starvation. The German guards had already marched most of the prisoner population west on the “death marches” of January 17–21, 1945. These were forced evacuations in winter. At least 9,000 prisoners, and probably as many as 15,000, died or were killed on the marches out of Auschwitz alone. The prisoners who reached the Western camps on the death marches were among those the Western Allies liberated in April 1945. In 2005, the United Nations General Assembly made January 27 International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The Soviet army liberated other camps in its 1945 advance: Gross-Rosen (February 1945), Sachsenhausen (April 22, 1945), Ravensbrück (April 29–30, 1945), and Stutthof (May 9, 1945). Each produced extensive additional documentation of the killing apparatus. But Western skepticism toward Soviet reporting, wartime censorship, and the closed borders that followed kept this Soviet documentation from circulating widely in the West. Western public understanding of the Nazi camps was shaped primarily by the April 1945 liberations.

The April 1945 liberations

The camps the Western Allies entered.

The Western Allied liberation of the camps occurred in concentrated form across April 1945 as the Allied forces advanced into central Germany. The major liberations:

• Ohrdruf (April 4, 1945). A subcamp of Buchenwald, liberated by U.S. 4th Armored Division forces. Ohrdruf was the first camp with surviving prisoners that U.S. forces liberated. Natzweiler-Struthof had been found abandoned in late 1944. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, with Generals Omar Bradley and George Patton, visited Ohrdruf on April 12, 1945, shaping Eisenhower’s subsequent documentation order.
• Buchenwald (April 11, 1945). Liberated by the U.S. 6th Armored Division. Buchenwald was one of the largest concentration camps in central Germany. Hours before U.S. troops arrived, an underground prisoner organization had taken control of the camp. About 21,000 prisoners were found alive at liberation, including many who had arrived on death marches from camps farther east. Among the liberated prisoners was the future Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel.
• Bergen-Belsen (April 15, 1945). Liberated by British forces of the 11th Armoured Division. Bergen-Belsen had been overwhelmed in the final months of the war as large transports of prisoners from evacuated Eastern camps arrived without corresponding capacity for housing, food, water, or sanitation. The British forces found some 60,000 surviving prisoners and thousands of unburied corpses. The BBC reporter Richard Dimbleby’s broadcast from Bergen-Belsen, delivered April 19, 1945, brought the camp to a wide British audience. Bergen-Belsen was the only major camp the British liberated, and it shaped much of the British public’s understanding of Nazi atrocities. More than 13,000 of the survivors, too ill to recover, died after liberation despite Allied medical care.
• Dachau (April 29, 1945). Liberated by the U.S. 42nd and 45th Infantry Divisions. Dachau (the first camp under SS control, opened on March 22, 1933) was the model for the system and the camp longest in operation (twelve years and one month). Some 32,000 prisoners were found at liberation. Many had been transferred from evacuated Eastern camps in the final weeks.
• Mauthausen (May 5, 1945). Liberated by the U.S. 11th Armored Division. The last major camp liberated by U.S. forces. Roughly 40,000 prisoners were found at the complex.
• Theresienstadt (May 8, 1945). Liberated by Soviet forces on the day of the German unconditional surrender. The “showcase” ghetto-camp the Nazi regime had used to deceive the International Red Cross in June 1944 contained about 30,000 surviving prisoners at liberation, including large numbers of children whose immediate postwar fate became a major focus.

Eisenhower’s documentation order

“A tendency to charge these allegations merely to propaganda.”

After his visit to Ohrdruf on April 12, 1945, General Eisenhower pressed for the camps to be photographed, filmed, and documented in detail. On April 15 he wrote to General George C. Marshall, the U.S. Army Chief of Staff: “The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where they [there] were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’”

The effort produced the visual record that shaped how the world came to understand the killings. U.S. Army Signal Corps photographers and cameramen produced thousands of photographs and extensive film footage of the camps in April–May 1945. The American press covered the camps extensively. At Eisenhower’s urging, delegations of newspaper editors and members of Congress came to see them. The record was later used at the Nuremberg trials (treated in the Postwar Trials Chapter) as evidence of the Nazi crimes.

Eisenhower’s letter anticipated denial. Holocaust denial later became an organized movement in the second half of the twentieth century. The photographs, film, and testimony gathered in 1945 remain part of the evidence that historians and museums, including the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem, use today.

Conditions in the immediate aftermath

Conditions after liberation.

The conditions of the survivors in the weeks and months following liberation were severe. Much of the surviving population had been kept on starvation rations for years. Allied doctors could not quickly reverse the physical effects: typhus, tuberculosis, dysentery, severe malnutrition. Bergen-Belsen’s post-liberation deaths, noted above, were not unique. Survivors also died after liberation at Buchenwald, Dachau, and the other liberated camps. The Allied medical response brought emergency feeding, typhus inoculations, and temporary hospital facilities, but the number of the sick strained it.

The survivors were concentrated in the Allied zones of occupied Germany and Austria, and in Italy. In the summer of 1945 the largest groups were in the U.S. zone of Germany, chiefly in Bavaria, and at Bergen-Belsen in the British zone. Their numbers grew sharply over the next year and a half as the Bricha brought survivors west from Poland. At the end of 1946 the number of Jewish DPs was estimated at about 250,000, with 185,000 in Germany, 45,000 in Austria, and 20,000 in Italy.

Many survivors had no immediate destination. Some 90 percent of the prewar Polish Jewish population had been killed. The surviving Polish Jews who tried to return to their prewar communities met severe postwar antisemitic violence, treated in the Kielce section below. For many, that violence settled the question of return. Much of the surviving Eastern European Jewish population had no surviving relatives and no surviving prewar communities. For them, the DP system was the only available option.

The Harrison Report · August 24, 1945

“We appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them.”

In June 1945, at the State Department’s request and with a letter of support from President Harry Truman, Earl G. Harrison went to Europe to investigate the conditions of Jewish and other DPs who could not go home. Harrison was Dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the U.S. representative to the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees. He spent July and early August 1945 visiting roughly thirty DP camps in Germany and Austria. He delivered his report to Truman personally on August 24, 1945. Its finding: the U.S. Army’s treatment of the Jewish survivors was inadequate.

The Harrison Report’s most-quoted sentence: “As matters now stand, we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them, except that we do not exterminate them. They are in concentration camps in large numbers under our military guard instead of S.S. troops. One is led to wonder whether the German people, seeing this, are not supposing that we are following or at least condoning Nazi policy.”

The report’s specific findings:

• Many Jewish survivors were living behind barbed wire, sometimes in the same camps where the Nazis had held them, in crowded and unsanitary quarters worse than those of the German population nearby.
• Jewish survivors were not treated as a distinct group. The DP system mixed them in with the far larger non-Jewish DP population: Poles, Ukrainians, Balts, and other Eastern Europeans whose concerns, and sometimes politics, were very different.
• Jewish survivors were being kept under armed guard, faced restrictions on their movement, and could not get information about surviving relatives.
• The food rations were inadequate.
• The medical and sanitary conditions were inadequate.
• Most Jewish survivors wanted to emigrate to Palestine, where a large Jewish community stood ready to receive them and where many hoped to build a Jewish national home. That route was blocked by the British White Paper of 1939, which had capped Jewish immigration to Palestine (treated in the 1933–1939 Chapter).

The report’s recommendations: recognize the Jewish survivors as a distinct group, house them separately in unguarded facilities under civilian administration, and fix the food, medical, and housing conditions immediately. Harrison also endorsed the request of the Jewish Agency (the representative body of the Jewish community in Palestine) that Britain issue 100,000 additional immigration certificates. He urged the United States to admit DPs under its existing quotas. Truman forwarded the report to General Eisenhower and directed him to inspect the camps.

The American response · August to December 1945

The first substantive U.S. response.

Eisenhower acted quickly. Between August and October 1945, he ordered separate Jewish-only centers, larger rations, unarmed DP police in place of armed guards, and an adviser on Jewish affairs, Rabbi Judah Nadich. These orders produced the separation of Jewish DPs that Harrison had recommended. Then, on December 22, 1945, Truman issued a separate immigration order, the Truman Directive. It gave displaced persons in the U.S. zones preference within the existing U.S. immigration quotas. About 22,950 DPs entered the United States under it by 1947, about two-thirds of them Jewish.

The friction the report caused within the U.S. Army is documented in later scholarship. General George Patton, the U.S. Third Army commander whose forces administered most of the Bavarian DP camps where the Jewish survivor population was concentrated, opposed the Harrison-recommended changes. Patton’s private diary entries from August–September 1945 contained openly antisemitic characterizations of the Jewish DPs and sharp criticism of the priority given to their conditions. The diaries were later published in The Patton Papers (edited by Martin Blumenson, Houghton Mifflin, 1974). General Eisenhower removed Patton from his Third Army command in October 1945. The reason was Patton’s broader friction with denazification, the Allied policy of removing Nazis from public life. His handling of the Jewish DP question was one element of it.

The consequence of these orders was a marked improvement of conditions in the Jewish DP camps across late 1945 and 1946. Jewish administrative leadership was established in the major camps. The food and medical conditions improved. The framework that would support the DP population over the next five years took shape.

The DP camps as architecture

Where the survivors lived between 1945 and 1952.

The DP camps varied in their character. The major camps and their features:

• Feldafing (Bavaria, U.S. zone). The first all-Jewish DP camp. The U.S. Army opened it on May 1, 1945, on the site of a former Hitler Youth training facility, and it became all-Jewish in July 1945. About 4,000 Jews lived there in 1946. An active cultural and religious life developed: Yiddish-language press, Hebrew classes, religious institutions.
• Föhrenwald (Bavaria, U.S. zone). More than 5,000 people lived there by early 1946. The last major Jewish DP camp to close, operated until February 1957 because much of the remaining DP population could not be placed in receiving countries.
• Landsberg (Bavaria, U.S. zone). About 5,000 Jewish DPs lived there in 1945, and it grew into the second-largest DP camp in the American zone. Located near the prison where Hitler had been imprisoned in 1923–24 and had written Mein Kampf. A lively Yiddish-language press developed at the camp (the Landsberger Lager-Cajtung was among the most widely read DP-period publications).
• Bergen-Belsen DP Camp (British zone). Established on the site of the liberated concentration camp. More than 11,000 Jews lived there in 1946. The main center of Jewish DP life in the British zone, and of DP protests against British limits on immigration to Palestine.
• Zeilsheim (U.S. zone, near Frankfurt). Several thousand people lived there. Distinct from the other camps because Zeilsheim was located in a former residential housing complex rather than a former military or concentration-camp facility.
• Wetzlar, Eschwege, the Funk-Kaserne transit and emigration center in Munich, and roughly twenty smaller facilities completed the U.S.-zone DP architecture.
• about fifteen larger DP camps operated in the British zone, some ten in the French zone, roughly twenty in Austria, and about fifteen in Italy.

The survivors called themselves the She’erit ha-Peletah, Hebrew for “the surviving remnant.” They organized quickly. At Bergen-Belsen, the survivor leader Josef Rosensaft formed a Central Committee of Liberated Jews in June 1945 to speak for the DPs to the British. The DP camps built up an organized cultural and religious life across 1945–48. DP journalism produced more than 170 publications, many of them in Yiddish. Survivors also formed orchestras and theater groups, among them the Kazet Theater (from KZ, the German abbreviation for concentration camp), founded at Bergen-Belsen in 1945. Elementary and secondary schools, kindergartens, and vocational classes operated across the camps, run by the Joint Distribution Committee, ORT (the Organization for Rehabilitation through Training), the Jewish Agency for Palestine, and the wider Jewish welfare organizations.

Most survivors had lost their entire families, and a wave of marriages followed liberation, with group weddings in some camps. Rosensaft himself married a fellow survivor, Hadassah Bimko, on August 18, 1946. A dentist from Sosnowiec, Poland, she had lost her parents, her husband, and her young son at Auschwitz. Their son, Menachem, was born at Bergen-Belsen on May 1, 1948. Some 23,000 babies were born in DP camps between 1946 and 1948, the “DP baby boom.” At Bergen-Belsen alone, about 2,000 children were born after the first months of liberation.

A set of major organizations kept the system running. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA, 1943–47) provided much of the DP system’s logistics and administration. The International Refugee Organization (IRO, 1947–52) succeeded UNRRA and organized the resettlement period. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (“the Joint,” founded 1914) provided the Jewish-specific support: food, medical care, religious materials, cultural programming, and emigration assistance. ORT provided vocational training. The Jewish Agency for Palestine coordinated the Aliyah Bet operations. HIAS (the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, founded 1881) coordinated the U.S. admissions. The Jewish Brigade, the World War II British Army unit of roughly 5,000 Jewish volunteers from Palestine, provided postwar support and organized the early operations of the Bricha, the escape network described below.

Why return was impossible

The documented record.

Several documented reasons kept most survivors from going home:

• The communities no longer existed. Most of the Eastern European Jewish communities had been destroyed during the killings. Survivors returning to prewar towns, where Jews had sometimes made up a large share or even a majority of the population, found almost no Jews left. The synagogues, schools, cemeteries, and communal organizations had been destroyed.
• The homes were occupied. Many survivors found their prewar homes occupied by non-Jewish neighbors who had moved in during the deportations. Getting property back was contested and unresolved for years, and it was one of the main practical barriers to return.
• The neighbors were unwelcoming or actively hostile. Many survivors met open hostility from prewar neighbors. Part of it was the property question, part was antisemitism the Nazi defeat had not erased, and part was the politics of the moment.
• The new political authorities offered little protection. In Kielce in 1946, members of the Polish police and army joined an attack on Jewish survivors. The Soviet position on Jewish-specific treatment, documented in the Soviet Jewry Chapter, shaped the Eastern European response.
• The postwar antisemitic violence kept killing. The Kielce pogrom of July 4, 1946 (treated in its own section below) was the most notorious instance of postwar anti-Jewish violence in Poland, but it was not isolated. In Poland alone, estimates of Jewish survivors killed in antisemitic violence across 1944–47 range from about 500 to 1,500. The record is documented in works including Jan Tomasz Gross’s Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz (Princeton, 2006). Similar postwar violence was documented in Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, and the wider region.

The Kielce pogrom · July 4, 1946

Forty-two Jews, most of them Holocaust survivors, murdered in postwar Poland.

On July 4, 1946, a pogrom broke out in the Polish city of Kielce. It came fourteen months after the German surrender, and nearly a year and a half after the liberation of Auschwitz. Polish soldiers, police, and townspeople killed 42 Jews, most of them Holocaust survivors, and injured about forty more. The violence convinced many Polish Jews that they had no future in Poland, and it accelerated their emigration to the DP camps and onward.

The immediate trigger was a false accusation. An eight-year-old Polish boy, Henryk Błaszczyk, disappeared on July 1, 1946, and returned home on July 3. He had run away from home and was afraid of getting into trouble. He claimed that Jews had kidnapped him and held him in the building at Planty Street 7. That building housed the Kielce Jewish Committee and a large share of the surviving Kielce Jewish population. The claim drew on the blood libel, the medieval accusation that Jews murdered Christian children for ritual purposes, treated in the Blood Libel Chapter. It was reported to Polish police on July 4. A crowd gathered outside the Planty Street 7 building, and factory workers from the city joined it.

The pogrom lasted some five hours. Polish soldiers and police entered the Planty Street 7 building and removed Jewish residents to the courtyard. There the assembled crowd beat and killed them. Further violence occurred at the Kielce railway station, where Jewish travelers passing through the city were pulled off trains, attacked, robbed, and murdered. Most of the forty-two dead had lived through the war years, and they were murdered more than a year after the war in Europe ended.

After Kielce, Jewish emigration from Poland to the DP camps in Germany and Austria sharply accelerated. Roughly 100,000 Polish Jews emigrated through the Bricha network in the months following Kielce, more than had emigrated in the preceding fourteen months. Later scholars documented the event and its consequences, including Jan Tomasz Gross in Fear and Joanna Tokarska-Bakir in Pod Klątwą (Under a Curse, 2018). Their work is part of the wider Polish engagement with the question of postwar antisemitic violence in Poland. The Polish Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) examined the documentary record in the post-1989 period.

The Bricha

The organized movement from East to West.

The Bricha (Hebrew: בריחה, “flight” or “escape”) was the large, organized, clandestine movement of Eastern European Jewish survivors out of their prewar territories. It carried them across the Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Austrian, and German borders to the DP camps in the Allied zones of occupied Germany, Austria, and Italy, and from there onward to Palestine. The Bricha operated from about mid-1945 through 1948. It moved some 250,000 Jewish survivors across the broader European territory.

The Bricha’s infrastructure came from four sources. One was the Jewish Brigade, the British Army unit of roughly 5,000 Jewish volunteers from Palestine. Another was the Mossad LeAliyah Bet, the clandestine-immigration arm of the Yishuv, the Jewish community of pre-state Palestine. The Joint Distribution Committee provided the financial and logistical support. The fourth was a wide network of local Jewish activists in the territories the Bricha crossed. Most of the refugees ended up in the American zone, where U.S. authorities admitted them to DP camps.

The main routes of the Bricha:

• The Polish route. Through the Czechoslovak border at the Tatra Mountains, then south through Czechoslovakia into Austria and onward to Italy or the U.S. zone of Germany.
• The Romanian route. Through the Hungarian border, then west through Hungary and Austria.
• The Russian-zone route. Most of the Jewish survivors in the Soviet zone of Germany and the Soviet zone of Austria moved west into the Allied zones across 1945–46. The broader Cold War closure of the East-West border then made the crossings far more difficult.

The Bricha was organized and sustained by Jews themselves. It gathered survivors in the Western DP camps, where the Joint Distribution Committee and the relief organizations could support them. From there, emigration to Palestine, later Israel, and to other receiving countries became possible.

Aliyah Bet and the British blockade

Clandestine immigration to Mandate Palestine, the territory Britain then governed.

Aliyah Bet (Hebrew: עלייה ב׳, “Ascent B”) was the large clandestine Jewish immigration to Palestine from the 1930s to 1948. Aliyah (“ascent”) is the Hebrew term for immigration to the Land of Israel, and bet, the letter B, marked it as unofficial. It defied the British Mandate-era immigration restrictions documented in the 1933–1939 Chapter. Much of the Aliyah Bet activity came in the postwar years, 1945–48. In those years the DP population’s push to reach Palestine collided with the British refusal to expand the Mandate immigration quotas.

Three parts made it work. The Mossad LeAliyah Bet, the organization of the Yishuv responsible for the clandestine immigration, directed it. The Palmach naval forces, the naval branch of the Yishuv military organization, provided large parts of the operational personnel. U.S.-based fundraising, coordinated by the American Jewish community, supplied the money. Dozens of ships were used in the postwar Aliyah Bet operations. Many were purchased through Joint Distribution Committee and American Jewish fundraising.

The British answered with force. The British navy patrolled the Eastern Mediterranean and intercepted most of the Aliyah Bet ships. Passengers were detained at Atlit, the Mandate-era detention camp in Palestine. From August 1946 they were also detained at Cyprus, where the British established detention camps to relieve the overcrowding at Atlit. Some 50,000 Aliyah Bet passengers were detained at the Cyprus camps across 1946–49. Many were held until after the 1948 founding of Israel resolved the question.

The figures across the postwar Aliyah Bet:

• roughly 70,000 Jewish DPs sailed for Palestine in Aliyah Bet operations across 1945–48. Most were intercepted before landing.
• about 50,000 were detained at Cyprus across 1946–49.
• some 1,600 died at sea or in detention across the whole 1934–1948 effort, the great majority in the wartime sinkings.

The Exodus 1947

The ship sent back to Germany.

The Exodus 1947 began as the SS President Warfield, a former Chesapeake Bay steamship. The Haganah, the underground Jewish defense organization in Palestine, acquired it, and it was refitted in Baltimore and then in southern France. On July 11, 1947, the ship departed Sète, France with roughly 4,500 Jewish DPs aboard. Most of the passengers had come from DP camps in Germany. The destination was Palestine.

The British navy intercepted the Exodus 1947 in international waters off the Palestinian coast on July 18, 1947. The passengers and crew resisted fiercely. Three were killed, including the American crew member William Bernstein, and the ship was forced into Haifa harbor. Then the British broke from their own precedent. The standard British response to Aliyah Bet ships was detention at Cyprus. This time the British government went further, and ordered the passengers moved to three British prison ships (the Empire Rival, the Runnymede Park, and the Ocean Vigour) and returned to Europe.

The point was deterrence. The British meant to show that attempting clandestine immigration to Palestine would end in physical return to Europe. What followed was the opposite of what they intended. The three prison ships traveled across the summer of 1947 under continuous, intense international press coverage. They arrived at Port-de-Bouc, France in late July 1947, and the French government refused to forcibly disembark the passengers. The passengers declared a hunger strike, and a three-week standoff followed in the summer heat. On August 22, the British government decided to return the passengers to Germany.

The ships arrived in Hamburg, in the British zone of occupied Germany, on September 8, 1947. The passengers were forced off the ships. They resisted physically, and the international press covered it all. They were placed in two DP camps in the British zone, Pöppendorf and Am Stau (later Sengwarden), over their resistance.

The affair drew worldwide publicity and, in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s assessment, strengthened support for the survivors’ struggle to emigrate. On November 29, 1947, about three months after the world press watched the Exodus passengers forced back to Germany, the United Nations General Assembly voted on the Palestine partition (Resolution 181). Later research treats the affair as one of the turning points in the international position on the Palestine question. The standard study is Aviva Halamish’s The Exodus Affair: Holocaust Survivors and the Struggle for Palestine (Syracuse, 1998).

The 1948 founding as DP relief

The receiving state arrives.

For many survivors, the establishment of the State of Israel meant, for the first time since liberation, a state committed to receiving Jewish refugees as citizens rather than as temporary displaced persons. All limits on Jewish immigration were lifted at once.

The State of Israel was founded on May 14, 1948, documented in the Modern Israel Chapter. The founding resolved the question of the DP population’s destination. The Israeli Law of Return, enacted July 5, 1950, established the commitment that any Jew could immigrate to Israel and become an Israeli citizen. The law came after years in which receiving countries had refused Jewish refugees (1933–1939), British restrictions had held back immigration to Palestine (1945–48), and much of European Jewry had been left trapped.

The DPs left for Israel in enormous numbers across 1948–51. About 136,000 Jewish DPs immigrated to Israel from the camps during this period, nearly the entire Jewish DP population that had not by then emigrated to other destinations. Counting survivors who came directly from Europe outside the DP system, the scale was larger still. By the end of 1952, Israel had absorbed some 718,000 immigrants. Of those, roughly half came from Europe, most of them survivors. The arrival of the DP population reshaped the young state’s population and politics.

Inside the DP camps, the population fell fast. The peak Jewish DP population of roughly 250,000 in 1947–48 declined to about 100,000 by the end of 1949, and to some 30,000 by the end of 1950. After 1953 only Föhrenwald was still operating, housing the part of the DP population that could not be placed in receiving countries: chiefly the disabled, the elderly without family connections, and those for whom emigration was complicated.

U.S. admission and the Displaced Persons Act

The American share.

The DPs who did not go to Israel went to the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and other Western receiving countries across 1948–52. The U.S. admission process was structured by the Displaced Persons Act of 1948 (Public Law 80-774), signed by President Truman on June 25, 1948, and expanded by amendments in 1950 and 1951.

The features of the Displaced Persons Act:

• It authorized the admission of roughly 200,000 DPs over two years.
• The original 1948 act was written in ways that disadvantaged Jewish applicants. It required DPs to have entered the Allied zones before December 22, 1945, which excluded the Bricha-era arrivals of 1946–47. It reserved 30 percent of places for agricultural workers, which few Jewish DPs were. And it required that at least 40 percent of those admitted come from areas “de facto annexed by a foreign power,” chiefly the Baltic states and eastern Poland, which favored non-Jewish applicants from those regions.
• President Truman criticized the act’s discriminatory provisions when he signed it. “It is with very great reluctance that I have signed S. 2242, the Displaced Persons Act of 1948. … The bill discriminates in callous fashion against displaced persons of the Jewish faith.” Truman pressed Congress for amendments across 1949–50.
• The 1950 amendments removed the discriminatory provisions and raised the total to some 415,000 over four years.

The figures of DP admission to the U.S. across 1948–52:

• more than 80,000 Jewish DPs admitted under the Displaced Persons Act by 1952, with the aid of Jewish agencies.
• some 15,000 more admitted earlier under the 1945 Truman Directive (about two-thirds of the 22,950 DPs it brought in).

Most U.S. Jewish DP admissions were processed through HIAS (the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) and the Joint Distribution Committee. The main receiving communities, in New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and the other centers documented in the American Jewry Chapter, absorbed the DP population across the 1950s.

The closure of the camps

The end of the DP period.

The major Jewish DP camps emptied across 1949–52. The last did not close until 1957. The closing dates:

• Bergen-Belsen DP Camp: nearly empty by mid-1950. The last residents left in August 1951.
• Landsberg: closed 1950.
• Feldafing: closed 1953.
• Zeilsheim: closed 1948.
• Föhrenwald: closed February 1957.

The last closure came twelve years after the end of the war. It marked the end of the European Jewish DP period. By then, most of the Jewish DP population had emigrated to Israel, the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, or the other receiving countries. Some stayed in Germany and became part of its small postwar Jewish community.

According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, about 136,000 Jewish DPs went to Israel, more than 80,000 to the United States, and some 20,000 to other countries, including Canada and South Africa.

Contested elements

What historians still debate.

Historians still argue several questions about this period:

• The Allied response question. Did the Allied military authorities, above all the U.S. Army under Patton’s command in Bavaria, respond adequately to the Jewish DPs in the first postwar months? Leonard Dinnerstein, in America and the Survivors of the Holocaust (Columbia, 1982), concluded that the early response was inadequate and that the Harrison Report produced the corrections. Patton’s own antisemitism is part of that record.
• The British position question. Britain kept enforcing the 1939 White Paper restrictions through the DP crisis. Why has been argued ever since. Was it Arab political concerns, imperial calculation, antisemitism within parts of the Foreign Office, or some mix? Historians still take different positions.
• The postwar Polish antisemitism question. The postwar Polish antisemitic violence, documented at Kielce and across the Polish record, has been debated at length within Poland. Jan Tomasz Gross’s Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz (2006) produced intense debate in Poland. Later scholars, among them Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, have documented the event and the pattern while taking up questions of Polish national memory.
• The Bricha and Aliyah Bet evaluation question. Did the Aliyah Bet operations help produce the November 1947 partition vote and the May 1948 founding of Israel? Or would Cold War positioning, Truman administration calculations, and the collapse of the British Mandate have produced the outcome anyway? The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s account credits the public embarrassment of the Exodus affair with a significant role in the diplomatic swing toward a Jewish state. Other historians give more weight to the wider forces.

Object Spotlight

The Survivors’ Talmud, Heidelberg, 1948.

The Survivors’ Talmud is a complete nineteen-volume edition of the Babylonian Talmud, the central body of rabbinic law and commentary, its title page dated Munich–Heidelberg, 1948. A delegation of rabbis from the Displaced Persons camps requested it in 1946. Its dedication calls it the first time in Jewish history that a foreign government helped publish the Talmud. It was printed in Heidelberg, at a plant that had produced Nazi propaganda during the war.

The Nazi state had burned and looted Jewish books as well as murdering Jews. In 1948, three years after liberation, survivors still living in camps on German soil saw the central text of Jewish learning printed with the help of the U.S. Army. The title page sets the barbed wire below, the Land of Israel above, and the verse between them.

Holding: complete sets survive at the Library of Congress, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the National Library of Israel, and other major collections. The title and dedication pages are viewable online through USHMM’s Experiencing History project.

The photographic record of liberation and the displaced-persons years is held in archives listed on the Sources page, among them Yad Vashem and YIVO.

Classroom Connections

Where this Chapter fits.

Teaching Connections

• World History. This Chapter examines the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust through liberation, displaced-persons camps, refugee movements, postwar migration, and the rebuilding of Jewish life. It connects the end of World War II to the humanitarian, legal, and political challenges that followed genocide.
• Classroom Applications. Students can:
  • analyze refugee and displaced-person records
  • compare national immigration policies after World War II
  • evaluate humanitarian responses to genocide
  • examine the relationship between liberation and recovery
  • analyze survivor testimony alongside government documents
  • construct evidence-based historical arguments using multiple primary and secondary sources.
• International Classroom Relevance. Because this Chapter examines refugee movements, humanitarian relief, immigration policy, postwar reconstruction, and survivor experiences, it supports Holocaust education, refugee studies, human rights education, migration history, and source-based historical inquiry in classrooms worldwide.

Standards Alignment

• NYS Social Studies Framework: NY Grade 8 (United States History) 8.6 and NY Global History 10.10 (Human Rights Violations).
• NYS Holocaust Education Mandate, Education Law §801. This Chapter supports Holocaust instruction by examining what happened after liberation, including displaced-persons camps, survivor experiences, refugee policy, postwar antisemitism, and the search for permanent homes. It expands Holocaust education beyond the moment of military liberation to the years of recovery that followed.
• Common Core, Reading in History/Social Studies (grades 6–12). Students assess an author’s purpose and point of view (RH.6–8.6, RH.9–10.6, RH.11–12.6) and corroborate evidence across multiple sources (RH.6–8.9, RH.9–10.9, RH.11–12.9), working from military reports, refugee records, government documents, survivor testimony, photographs, diplomatic correspondence, and immigration policies.
• C3 Framework, D2.His.1 & D2.His.14 (grades 6–8 and 9–12). Students investigate chronology, historical causation, continuity and change, and evidence-based historical interpretation while examining how societies responded to the humanitarian consequences of genocide.

For further classroom use

• Primary sources. The Harrison Report (free online through USHMM), Eisenhower’s documentation order and his correspondence with Marshall, and the DP-period press and memoir literature give upper-grade students rich material for source-evaluation work. Yad Vashem’s narrative overview, Displaced Persons Camps →, frames the period through survivor testimony and the Harrison Report itself.
• The return to life. The DP camps were also where survivors married, had children, published, studied, and rebuilt. Yad Vashem’s exhibitions The Return to Life → and DP Camps · Culture and Press → document this through photographs, artwork, and the camp newspapers.
• The 1948 founding as DP relief. The link between the DP camps and the establishment of Israel is concrete: on May 16, 1948 survivors at the Landsberg DP camp held a celebratory parade → marking the new state. Its founding opened the doors of emigration for the majority of the Jewish DPs.
• Film. The Long Way Home (Mark Jonathan Harris, 1997, winner of the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature), listed on the Films & Video page, is a documentary on this period.

Read the documents

The record itself.

• Photograph. Survivors greet the U.S. Seventh Army with a hand-made American flag. USHMM Photo Archive ↗
• Document. The U.S. Army Talmud: the edition printed for survivors by the United States Army in occupied Germany. USHMM ↗
• Exhibition. The DP camps’ own newspapers, schools, and theater. Yad Vashem ↗