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Appendix A
- State University of New York Press
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APPENDIX A Loose Ends It took many years for the greatest human tidal wave in history to come to an end: 60 million Europeans had been set adrift by the events preceding and culminating in World War II. After assisting in the repatriation of nearly 7 million DPs, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) ceased to exist in 1947, at which time more than I. 5 million DPs still languished in European camps. The International Refugee Organization, a temporary United Nations agency, succeeded UNRRA. During the next four years it resettled more than 1 million persons in overseas countries; only 73,000 chose to return to their native lands. In 1951, an Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration was established ; through June 1957 it had assisted 600,000 more to relocate overseas.l In 1945, the repatriation of Soviet nationals from the western zones of Germany had proceeded with such great rapidity that, in four and a half months, 2 million Russians were returned to their zone. During this time, among the numerous complaints received by the western Allies from Moscow was one that said that Soviet citizens had been unnecessarily held in the Dachau and Allach camps, and were mistreated by an unspecified Army unit. On investigation it was shown that these particular Russians had been sent home two months before the incident was alleged to have happened. The complaints were without basis, their purpose to silence Allied complaints about Soviet noncompliance with the terms of the Yalta agreement that related to British and American POWS.2 I have not been able to find evidence of other complaints about the treatment of camp inmates. I 253 At Dachau, we often wondered how the inmates were greeted on their return home. Andrus has described one reception .3 In May I945, in the small resort town of Mondorf, Luxembourg , the Palace Hotel was being converted into a secret prison for suspected high-ranking Nazis; the prison's Allied code name was ASHCAN. Security was tight. Constantly patroling American soldiers cordoned off the area with barbed WIre. As activities at the Hotel increased, a convoy carrying 160 Luxembourgers, former prisoners at Dachau, reached the town and wound through the narrow streets. During the sad trip, Prince Felix and the 14-year-old Prince Charles had helped nurse and feed their sick people, and had watched some of them die. News of the procession spread. The townspeople rushed to welcome the party. Shocked by the "yellowish, parchment skin and hollow, sunken eyes" of their countrymen, some of whom needed help to walk, the spectators began to weep. Soon they were sobbing loudly as some in the crowd identified and then embraced their parents or children, relatives long thought of as dead. An ominous moment. Whispers, then shouts. The Nazi criminals in the hotel! Murderers! Vengeance! Allied soldiers began to consider what action to take should the incensed townspeople storm the fences and barbed wire. Prince Felix, who had served as a brigadier with the British Army, stepped down and talked to his people at length, and as the convoy continued on its way, the crowd dispersed. So did some of the survivors of Dachau return home. No triumphal entry. No exultant celebration. No brass band. During the first week of liberation of the camp at Dachau, it seemed important to many inmates to establish the identity of the first American to enter the camp, but nobody was certain. The front-page dispatch in the New York Times of May I, 1945, told about the battle to take the camp, and the killing of Nazi guards. "One of the infantry officers, Lieutenant Colonel Will Cowling of Leavenworth, Kansas, opened the main gate and was all but mobbed by the prisoners...." In his diary, one of the inmates wrote a brief account of the 254 I Appendix A day of liberation. The battle over, an American soldier walked slowly into the prison hospital, chewing gum. "Hello, Boys!" he says. He looks like a giant, the inmate thinks. But he does not know his name. Later he hears that an American soldier of Polish extraction mounted a Polish flag-he had been carrying it for four months-on the main watchtower. Another American jumped on the tin roof of a bicycle shed and gave his gun to a prisoner. The soldier wanted to be the first one in the camp; he was a German-American Jew from Cologne; his father had died in the camp...