The Last Million: Eastern European Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany

An article from The National WWII Museum in New Orleans on the displaced persons crisis in Europe at the war's end, citing SHAEF's own wartime planning figures and the museum's published casualty and displacement breakdowns. It states that World War II uprooted and dislocated some fifty five million people in Europe alone, that approximately eleven million displaced persons remained in Europe when the war ended, eight million of them in Germany, and that by late September 1945 some 1.2 million refused repatriation and became known as the last million. Its strength is drawing on the museum's own archival holdings and named wartime planning documents. Its limit is that, like the war's own casualty figures, no single demographer's peer reviewed reconciliation of the fifty five million wartime total against the eleven million postwar caseload was located; the two figures measure different things, total wartime uprooting against the population still displaced at war's end.