AustreibungExpulsions5

Expulsions - 5

Austreibung Expulsions - 5

      THE EXPULSION OF GERMANS
                               By Dr. Alfred de Zayas

The main speaker at the premiere of the documentary travelling exhibition "In the Claws of
the Red Dragon" in Pittsburgh last year, organized in cooperation with Dr. Marianne
Bouvier and B. John Zavrel,was Dr. Alfred de Zayas, a prominent expert in international
law; he is an American of Spanish-French descent. After law school at Harvard, de Zayas
went to Germany on a Fulbright fellowship, took doctorate in History at the University of
Goettingen. He works as a legal consultant in New York and Geneva, Switzerland, and is the
author of several books dealing with the subject of the Expulsion of Germans in Europe.

The following is a transcript of the essential part of the excellent lecture on the Expulsion
which he gave in Pittsburgh.

Dear Friends,

When I was a student of history at Harvard back in 1970, I knew nothing at all about the
Expulsion of Germans. None of my history professors considered this event sufficiently
notable to mention it, much less to assign a research paper on it. It was curiously not in
history class, but in a seminar on Law of War that I first heard about the Expulsion.

At that time I still could not read or speak German, but my law professor, the late Richard
Baxter, who was subsequently the American judge at the International Court of Justice,
encouraged me to pursue the matter and he brought to my attention two books in English
that touched upon the subject matter. Those were the books of Victor Gollancz Our
Threatened Values and In Darkest Germany. Victor Gollancz was a British socialist and a
human rights activist. I was so impressed by Gollancz that I later dedicated my first book,
Nemesis at Potsdam, to his memory.

Now, when I first approached the subject matter, I thought naively enough that it was a
legitimate field of research, like any other. But I soon learned that it was no accident that
there was nearly nothing written in English on the theme -- it was taboo, it was not chic, it
was not fashionable to do research or to publish in this field.

After all, Germans were looked at in a rather monolithic fashion as all Nazis, and not
deserving any degree of human sympathy. As citizens of the "evil empire" they were morally
disqualified "ad illicio."

It is perhaps curious to compare it with the way the press today deals with the Soviet system,
but thank God the press has not thought of disqualifying the Russian people and
considering them "ad illicio" as criminals only because their system is an inhuman,
anti-democratic system.

Now, what actually happened with regard to the Germans at the end of the Second World
War, the previous speaker has already outlined and given you the figures of the Expulsion.
Obviously you can take the simplistic view and say, "Hitler started the war, he lost the war,
therefore the Germans have to take the consequences," but I don't think that this axiom
actually exhausts the subject matter.

As you may or may not know, the expulsion syndrome was actually started by Hitler
himself. After subjugating Poland, he expelled over 1 million Poles from western Poland,
from the areas that were annexed by the Reich, and pushed them off into so-called
General-government Poland, and he also expelled over 100,000 French from Alsace-Lorraine
into Vichy France. And this was a matter that curiously enough was condemned by the Allies
during the war, and at the time of the Nuremburg Trials, this expulsion that Hitler carried
out for the purpose of "Lebensraum" -- pushing out one ethnic group in order to settle the
area with your own -- was declared to be a war crime, and a crime against humanity.

Not only in the London Agreement, that was the basis of the Nuremberg Trials, but
throughout the trials, and the hearings, and the proceedings, it was constantly brought up,
and a number of the German leaders were actually convicted of committing these specific
crimes, war crimes and crimes against humanity on the basis of these mass expulsions. So
that it is a particular anomaly that the Allies themselves got involved in a policy of expulsion
of a far greater extent than the one that had been carried out under the Nazis.

Now, it is not just the Expulsion that is of interest to us and you have seen the pictures, a
great many of which are devoted to the flight of German civilians from the Red Army in
1944.

In October of 1944 the Red Army entered East Prussia, and they entered the area of
Gumbinden, Nemmersdorf, and Metgethen and they occupied the area for approximately
two weeks and pretty much decimated the civilian population.

Thereupon the German army was able to re-occupy the area, and they realized what had
happened. The legal division of the German Army was given the assignment of investigating
what had happened; a great many persons, -- witnesses who saw the bodies, when they came
in, -- gave their depositions, and their sworn testimony is available for the study of any
researchers.

Now, it was this kind of occupation by the Russians that forced the flight. You may compare
the American occupation of the Rhineland, of Duesseldorf, of Cologne, of Koblenz, and you
will realize that the Germans living in these areas had no need to flee from the American
Army, whereas you had 5 million Germans from East Prussia, from Pomerania, Silesia, East
Brandenburg, who helter-skelter and pell-mell had to leave the area. Surely, not because
they wanted to leave the area in the middle of the winter of 1945, but because they realized
that the entire population of Nemmersdorf and of other cities had been liquidated.

This aspect of the Expulsion, just the loss of life involved would have been enough, I would
say, for any historian to devote attention to it, but as I already mentioned, the flight has
been largely ignored.

Now, these refugees were basically turned into expellees when they were not allowed to
return to their homeland. Because certainly at the time of the flight, the German refugees
were expecting to return to their homelands at the end of hostilities.

But, before I go into the nature of the Expulsion itself, I wanted to cite from George Kennan
as to the nature of the flight. In his Memoirs, Volume 1, page 265, he wrote

"the disaster that befell this area, (speaking of East Prussia) with the entry of the Soviet
forces has no parallel in modern European experience. There were considerable sections of it
where, to judge by all existing evidence, scarcely a man, woman, or child of the indigenous
population was left alive after the initial passage of Soviet forces; and one cannot believe
that they all succeeded in fleeing to the West."

Obviously Kennan'sMemoirs are not devoted to the Expulsion of the Germans, but he does
have several pages in which he describes it from the perspective of an American official at
the American embassy in Moscow.

As far as the decisions with regard to the Expulsion of the Germans, those were taken as
early as at the Teheran Conference, and confirmed, or actually expanded, at the Yalta
Conference, and finally at the Potsdam Conference, where they were more or less articulated
in ARTICLE 13 of the Potsdam Protocol.

In this ARTICLE 13 the allies agreed that it was necessary to transfer the German
populations from what they referred to as Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. They did
not mention the Donauschwaben, the areas in Yugoslavia, or the areas in Rumania, but in
fact all of these countries were in the process of pushing the Germans out at the time.

And the reason for these expulsions from East Prussia, Rumania and from Silesia was
ostensibly that Poland was to be given compensation. Compensation for the territory of
eastern Poland that had been annexed by the Soviet Union pursuant to the
Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact of 1939.

People, and very many historians conveniently seem to forget that the outbreak of the
World War II in 1939 was caused not only by Hitler, but also by Stalin: Soviet Union
invading the eastern half of Poland, and Germany invading the western half.

Stalin made it very clear at Teheran that he was certainly intending to keep the half of
Poland that he had invaded, and he ended up keeping it. But not only that, he ended up
taking up a good slice of East Prussia, which is today part of the Soviet Union, and
Koenigsberg is today, as you all probably know, called "Kaliningrad."

As far as the lip service that was paid to human rights, you will read in ARTICLE 13 of the
Potsdam Protocol, that these expulsions were to be carried out in an "orderly and humane
fashion."

Now, as far as the nature of the Expulsion, or the manner in which the expulsions were
carried out, I wanted to quote very briefly from Victor Gollancz's book Our Threatened
Values, on page 96 where he says:

"If the conscience of men ever again becomes sensitive, these expulsions will be remembered
to the undying shame of all who committed or connived them... The Germans were expelled,
not just with an absence of over-nice considera- tion, but with the very maximum of
brutality."

Now, I'm quoting Gollancz precisely because he is not German. In the German archives in
Koblenz, you have over 40,000 reports of survivors that are open to all researchers, and
there you will see what the survivors have to say.

Some critical voices might say they have an axe to grind, that they are just trying to excuse
themselves. But you have extensive documentation -- American, British, French
documentation that prove the nature of the expulsions as an exceedingly cruel and brutal
expulsion.

Particularly sad is the fact that if you compare that with our commitments, because after all,
ostensibly the Americans and British entered the war on behalf of democracy and for certain
principles of humanity and fair play -- and, after all, in August of 1941 President Roosevelt
and Prime Minister Churchill had agreed in the middle of the Atlantic on the ship Augusta
on the so-called Atlantic Charter, and the Atlantic Charter provided that neither would seek
territorial or other aggrandizement, and they both undertook a commitment to oppose, and
I quote, "territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the
peoples concerned."

So, in light of the principles which we ourselves proclaimed as our peace aims, it is most
regrettable that at the end of the war we did not live up to those principles.

The moral question therefore arises: if the allies fought against the Nazi enemy because of
this inhuman message, could they then adopt some of those same methods in retribution?
Who was it then who succeeded in imposing his methods on the other? Whose outlook
triumphed?

I think this is a question that we all have to answer to ourselves.

Robert Murphy, the political advisor of General Eisenhower, and later the political advisor
of Clay during the occupation in Germany, was one of the first official voices in the
American government that opposed the Expulsion, and to criticize the manner in which the
Expulsion was being carried out.

In a memorandum to the State Department of 12 October 1945 he presented this moral
dilemma very eloquently, and I quote in part:

"Knowledge that they are the victims of a harsh political decision carried out with the
utmost ruthlessness and disregard for the humanities does not cushion the effect. The mind
reverts to other mass deportations which horrified the world and brought upon the Nazis the
odium which they so deserved. Those mass deportations engineered by the Nazis provided
part of the moral basis on which we waged war and which gave strength to our cause. Now
the situation is reversed. We find ourselves in the invidious position of being partners in this
German enterprise and as partners inevitably sharing the responsiblity."

As a result of this and all the memoranda of Murphy, the American government repeatedly
protested at Warsaw and at Prague and tried to get some cooperation from the
Czechoslovak government and from the Polish government.

But unfortunately the Soviet occupation forces in those areas encouraged both the Polish
and the Czechoslovak governments in the Expulsion, so there was no way for the U.S. to
effectively stop it.

With regard to the legal aspects of the Expulsion, were such expulsions to take place today,
there is no question that it would constitute the violation of various provisions of
international law.

ARTICLE 49 of the Geneva Convention of 1949 prohibits specifically such expulsions. I'm
speaking of the Geneva Convention for the protection of civilians.

ARTICLES 3 and 4 of the Fourth Protocol of the European Human Rights Convention also
prohibits such expulsions.

It would also be incompatible with ARTICLES 12 and 13 of the International Covenant on
civil and political rights.

It would be incompatible with the General Convention of 1948 and with several other
instruments.

But obviously, at the time of the Expulsion none of these
instruments were in force. So the only applicable principles
were the Hague Conventions, in particular, the Hague
Regulations, ARTICLES 42-56, which limited the rights of
occupying powers -- and obviously occupying powers have
no rights to expel the populations -- so there was the clear
violation of the Hague Regulations.

And, obviously, if you want to apply the Nuremberg principles to the German Expulsions,
considering that the London Agreement was supposed to reflect, and not to create
international law, so if that was applicable to the German crimes against the Poles with
regard to deportation of Poles, and deportation of French for purposes of "Lebensraum,"
certainly it was applicable to the expulsions by the Poles of Germans and by the Czechs of
Germans.

So, if you apply these Nuremberg principles and the Nuremberg judgement, you would have
to arrive at the conclusion that the Expulsion of the Germans clearly constituted war crimes
and crimes against humanity.

Now as you all know, the more than 12 million German expellees who survived, and who
have come to the Federal Republic of Germany, have been integrated into the democracy
that the Federal Republic of Germany is, and have contributed to the European
reconstruction and to the so-called

Wirtschaftswunder, which was facilitated through the funds of the Marshall Plan.

And one of the most noble things that the German expellees did, and I would invite all
non-Germans to try to place yourselves in the position of the German expellees, and try to
see it through their eyes, what it meant having lost homelands that were over 700 years
German; having lost half of their families in the process of the expulsion, having suffered
what they all suffered, having being spoliated and having been victimized, -- what it meant
to adopt the Stuttgart Charter of the German Expellees, which provides specifically for
renunciation of revenge and renunciation of violence.

I wanted to quote from this document, which is also on one of the placards. I quote:

"We, the expellees, renounce all thought of revenge and retaliation. Our resolution is a
solemn and sacred one, in memory of the infinite suffering brought upon mankind,
particularly during the past decade."

Now, consider what it meant to write that, at a time when the memories were still very fresh,
and when the wounds were not yet healed.

I think it is a tremendous contribution to peace, tremendous contribution to the
normalization of the post-war Europe.

For this contribution of the German expellees to peace in Europe, earlier this year the
German American National Congress (DANK) passed a resolution to nominate the Union of
Expellees for the Nobel Peace Prize, thus joining the earlier initiative of parliament members
of several nations from the European Parliament.

Why this honor to the Union of Expellees?

Because the German expellees have done more for peace in Europe, than they are credited
for. Indeed, the more than 12 million surviving expellees from East Prussia, Pomerania, East
Brandenburg, Silesia, Sudetenland, etc. could have turned to terrorism like the Palestinian
refugees, and they could have developed into a major destabilizing element in Europe after
1945.

Instead, they proclaimed the Charter of the German Expellees in 1950, in which they
proclaimed themselves to the peaceful reconstruction of Europe, and pledged never to use
violent means to achieve their right to the homeland.

We must also keep in mind, however, that these expellees and their descendants are today --
43 years after the Expulsion -- still waiting for a just settlement of this great injustice, and
for return to their ancestral homelands in the Central and Eastern Europe.

As a final thought, I wanted to encourage all students here, to consider the Expulsion of the
Germans as a worthwhile field of research.

I would like to encourage professors to give research papers and research assignments on the
basis of the many, many aspects of the Expulsion. As I mentioned the archives, both the
Bundesarchiv in Koblenz, and also the National Archives in Washington are full of relevant,
unpublished materials, which would more than satisfy a doctoral requirement, if you wanted
to take a doctorate on any question of the Expulsion of the Germans.

And more importantly, and I rather hope that it will happen, I look forward to the great
novelist, who will put down this history in a novel. I think that there is more than enough
material for a Gone With the Wind, and I would welcome a Margaret Mitchell, who would
write a novel depicting the very human and very deeply felt tragedy of the Expulsion of these
victims of politics and of politicians.

I thank you.

Copyright 1999 Museum of European Art

"Note: There was a three volume complete set of the Expulsions which we believe was
published by the Hague in the Netherlands, shortly after the expulsions were ordered by the
so-called "Big Three".   The expulsions were supposed to be orderly, but were anything but.
After investigations were ordered by interested parties, the bodies of the murdered
non-combatants were either moved or cremated to avoid prosecution.   Then the books on
the expulsions were ordered recalled or destroyed, so no one could learn the truth. The
orders for the recall were probably ordered by someone in high places in Washington, D.C.
A similar problem happened with the white women inhabitants of the former Belgium
Congo, who were raped, tortured, their bodies violated, and murdered. A publication was
produced by Belgium at that time was ordered removed from circulation. An inquiry was
made to the Belgium Consulate in New York, but no answer was ever forthcoming on why
the truth was surpressed.

After hostilities had ceased and several years after world war II, probably sometime around
1966, I was interested in receiving information from the German Information Center in New
York regarding information on the two Germanies, and various films and books were sent to
me, purely for research purposes. When I went to the post office (the Griffith Street office)
in Jersey City, NJ to retrieve some of the films, I was advised by the clerk to desist receiving
films from the West German Government or else.    I don't know what happened after that,
but I never saw that clerk again.

Today, in the eastern part of the United States, many of us German-Americans are still
referred to as Nazis. The media won't permit us to have social articles printed, and the
German stock market information is non-existent here. This, of course, is not so in South
Carolina, Milwaukee or Chicago, and other large Metropolises in the south, middle America
or even the west coast."

Johannes Rammund De Balliel-Lawrora
German-American World Historical Society

We recommend these books:

A Terrible Revenge, by Dr. Alfred Maurice de Zayas

Primer for Those Who Would Govern, by Hermann Oberth

Castle to Castle, by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Seven Years in Tibet, by Heinrich Harrer

Arno Breker: The Divine Beauty in Art, by B. John Zavrel

Alexander the Great, by Robin Lane Fox

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Copyright 2001 West-Art
PROMETHEUS, Internet Bulletin for Art, Politics and Science.

===================================================
European Refugee Movements After World War Two
                    By Bernard Wasserstein

1. Post-war scramble
2. Expulsion of Germans
3. Further expulsions
4. Other wanderers
5. International response
6. Legacy
7. Find out more
Print entire article
Expulsion of Germans

The end of the war in Europe was only the beginning of the suffering for millions of people
left homeless by the fighting, released from captivity or expelled as an act of vengeance.

The end of World War Two brought in its wake the largest population movements in
European history. Millions of Germans fled or were expelled from eastern Europe. Hundreds
of thousands of Jews, survivors of the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis, sought secure
homes beyond their native lands. And other refugees from every country in eastern Europe
rushed to escape from the newly installed Communist regimes.

'The expulsions were ... conducted in a ruthless and often brutal manner.'
At the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, British, American and Russian leaders agreed to
'... recognise that the transfer to Germany of German populations ... remaining in Poland,
Czechoslovakia and Hungary, will have to be undertaken.'
They also specified that '... any transfers that take place
should be effected in an orderly and humane manner.' The
expulsions were, in fact, conducted in a ruthless and often
brutal manner.

Some of the people who left those eastern countries were
recent arrivals, who had been settled in German-conquered
territories by the Nazis as part of their long-term plan for
German domination of eastern Europe. But most of those being expelled came of stock
whose ancestors had been settled in the eastern lands for generations, and who knew no
other place as home.

The Volksdeutsche, as the Nazis had called them were, however, for the most part, victims of
a calamity of which they were themselves part-authors. Not all were Nazis, but a majority
had become supporters of Hitler. (This is open to discussion)

Displaced persons in Vienna, 1946 © Even before the end of the war the greater part of the
German population of East Prussia had fled westwards - although
thousands drowned en route, in overloaded ships that sank in the
Baltic Sea, and which had been torpedoed by Russian Submarines.

In the city of Königsberg, annexed by the USSR, the food supply
broke down completely in 1945. People were reduced to eating offal,
and human flesh was offered for sale as fried meatballs. Seven centuries of German
civilisation, in the city that had nurtured philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and Johann
Gottfried von Herder, thus ended in cannibalism. By 1949 nearly all the surviving Germans
in the region had been driven out.

'At the peak period ... 14,400 people a day were being dumped over the frontier.'
In Poland, German-owned farms and houses were handed over to Poles. Germans were
rounded up by Polish militias and put in camps, before being removed from the country. In
Czechoslovakia, more than 2.2 million Germans were expelled, and their property was
expropriated. At the peak period, in July 1946, 14,400 people a day were being dumped over
the frontier. About three quarters went to the American occupation zone of Germany, and
most of the remainder to the Soviet zone.

About 60,000 Germans had already fled from Hungary before the end of the war, some
travelling by boat up the Danube. After the war the government ordered the German
population to leave en bloc. As their trains left, some deportees tried to affirm their loyalty
by waving Hungarian flags, singing Magyar folk songs, and chalking on the sides of the
carriages slogans such as, 'We don't say goodbye, only au revoir!'

Most were sent to Germany, but from some villages the entire adult
population was deported to labour camps in the Donets Basin of the
Soviet Union. By the end of the expulsions only about 200,000
Germans remained in Hungary.

Family of German refugees, September1945 © In Romania, from the autumn of 1944, tens
of thousands of the Swabian Germans of the Banat, and more from the ancient Saxon
communities of Transylvania - long-established outposts of German peasant and mercantile
life - loaded their wagons and hitched their horses for the long trek to their ancestral
homeland. By 1948 the pre-war German population of 780,000 had been reduced by more
than half.

'... Germans who were expelled or who departed voluntarily from eastern Europe ...
mounted to 11.5 million ...'
Virtually all the half million Germans in Yugoslavia fled, were expelled, or were sent to
labour camps by the victorious Communist partisan forces. An estimated 27,000 were sent to
camps in the Soviet Union. Violence against the Volksdeutsche here was probably more
relentless than in any other country.

According to official West German accounts (perhaps exaggerated) at least 610,000 Germans
were killed in the course of the expulsions. The total number of Germans who were expelled
or who departed voluntarily from eastern Europe after the end of the war mounted to 11.5
million by 1950.

Other wanderers:

A displaced person returns from a German prison camp © As the German presence in
eastern Europe was thus abruptly terminated, the Germans' foremost victims were also
turned into refugees. Surviving Jews from concentration camps who returned to their homes
found that they were unwelcome. Their property had new occupants who were generally
reluctant to vacate the premises.

'Hundreds of thousands ... fled westwards ... most of them hoping to get to North America.'
In Poland and Slovakia pogroms broke out, in which Jews were killed. Over 100,000 Jews
infiltrated to the western powers' occupation zones in Germany and Austria. Most sought
permission to enter Palestine - but the British mandatory government there denied entry to
all save a handful. They therefore remained stuck for years in so-called displaced persons'
camps.

Other wanderers were also on the move in the early months of the peace. Nearly two million
Poles were compulsorily transferred from eastern areas of Poland that had been annexed by
the USSR. They took the place of Germans expelled from the formerly German regions of
Pomerania and Silesia, now transferred to Poland.

Half a million Ukrainians, Belorussians and others were deported
from Poland to the Soviet Union. Hundreds of thousands of
Ukrainians, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Croats, and others,
fearful of reprisals for wartime collaboration, fled westwards from
all over eastern Europe, most of them hoping to get to North America.

The integration of the millions of refugees in their countries of arrival was not easy.
European states were, in the main, too preoccupied with the sufferings of their own citizens
and with the tasks of reconstruction to have much compassion to spare. The millions of
Germans from the east who suddenly found themselves in a fatherland that most of them
had never seen before became for a while a dangerous element in politics, easy prey to
nationalist demagogues spouting irredentist talk.

'Over two million Soviet citizens were returned by the western Allies to areas under Soviet
control.'
The international response to the refugee crisis took both legal and organisational form. The
Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 guaranteed a '... right to seek and to enjoy
in other countries asylum from persecution', and forbade the arbitrary deprivation of
nationality. The Geneva Convention on Refugees of 1951 defined refugees, accorded them
specific rights, and prohibited their refoulement (or forcible return) from countries of refuge.

Meanwhile a United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) had been
created in 1943. UNRRA was succeeded by the International Refugee Organisation,
established in 1946; and that in turn gave way to the United Nations High Commission for
Refugees in 1950. All these bodies, however, were plagued by political conflict, in particular
the outbreak of the Cold War.

UNRRA was limited under its Articles of Agreement to assisting in the 'repatriation or
return' to their home countries of 'displaced persons'. It transported millions of former
concentration-camp dwellers, forced labourers and other victims of the Nazis to countries
such as France, Belgium, and Greece.

Over two million Soviet citizens were returned by the western Allies to areas under Soviet
control. They were moved in batches, generally in return for equivalent numbers of citizens
of western countries, an equivalence insisted upon by the Soviet authorities.

Many of the Soviets departed willingly. But others did not, and their forcible return
conflicted with the 'non-refoulement' principle. Many citizens of east European states that
were taken over by Communists also resisted repatriation. Most sought refuge in western
Europe, the United States, Canada, or Australia.

Cold War considerations, combined with calculation of labour requirements in industries
such as mining, led Britain, Australia and other countries to grant Poles and some others
permanent settlement. The creation of the State of Israel in 1948 finally provided a secure
refuge for Jews who had been hounded from their homes in central and eastern Europe. But
the buoyant United States economy held out the most tantalising hope to refugees.

Legacy:

American refugee policy in the post-war period was driven by conflicting tendencies towards
isolationist restrictionism and Cold War internationalism. The former approach was
staunchly advocated by powerful figures in Congress and important organs of public
opinion, for example, the Chicago Tribune.

'The deepening of east-west conflict in the early years of the Cold War provided the context
for subsequent US legislation.'
In 1948 the Displaced Persons Act, primarily inspired by anti-Communism, finally led to a
relaxation of US immigration policy. The US Escapee Program was established in the same
year, and offered sanctuary to a limited number of refugees from Communist countries.

The deepening of east-west conflict in the early years of the Cold War provided the context
for subsequent US legislation. The Refugee Relief Act of 1953 provided for the admission
over three years of 214,000 refugees - of these, it was laid down that 186,000 should be from
Communist countries.

By 1959 some 900,000 European refugees had been absorbed by west European countries. In
addition, 461,000 had been accepted by the USA, and a further 523,000 by other countries.
But many 'hard-core' refugees still remained in camps. At that point the United Nations
launched an ambitious effort to resolve the refugee problem once and for all.

World Refugee Year, in 1959-1960, was designed as a 'clear the camps' drive. It achieved
some significant results - at any rate in Europe. By the end of 1960, for the first time since
before World War Two, all the refugee camps of Europe were closed.

But the global refugee problem was far from solved. In Africa and Asia millions of fugitives
from persecution, hunger, and natural disasters continued to scramble for secure homes.
Europe, hitherto mainly an exporter of refugees, henceforth became a net importer. Today
the United Nations estimates that over 17 million asylum seekers, refugees and stateless
people are seeking homes worldwide.

Published: 2005-04-28

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