Victims of War: Refugees’ First Contacts with the British in the Second World War

Abstract

Among those who ‘meet the other in war and conflict’ are the hundreds of thousands of refugees, displaced people, exiles and escapers — all of them ‘victims of war’ — who for various reasons had to leave their countries during and after World War II. At the end of the conflict, this massive forced migration represented a problem of great magnitude, as millions of people had been expelled, or had chosen to leave their homes: more than ten million slave labourers had been forcedly deported by the Nazis to work in German factories and mines; a series of compulsory population transfers, the changes in national boundaries, the Third Reich’ effort to build a new racial order and direct Nazi occupation had affected millions of Europeans (among them Germans, Italians, Yugoslavs, Bulgarians, Romanians, Soviets, Hungarians, Czechs and Poles) (Reinisch 2007). In the first, still widely cited, work on this topic, Malcolm Jarvis Proudfoot (1956) estimated that more than sixty million Europeans were displaced from their homes during the conflict and in its aftermath.