ABSTRACT
In the 1940s, ‘displacement’ was the fashionable word for becoming a refugee. But the ‘displaced persons’ in Europe, who from 1947 were looked after by the International Refugee Organization (IRO), were refugees with a difference. Most of them had not fled their country of origin but been removed from it. Typically, they had been forced labourers, drafted from wartime occupied territories to work in Germany, or soldiers who became prisoners of war to the Germans and, as such, ended the war there. The term ‘displaced persons’ was inherited by the IRO from its predecessor, UNRRA (the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency), and it applied specifically to those whose displacement in the years 1939–45 was the result of ‘war and fascism’. Many of these displaced persons, or DPs, were Soviet prisoners of war and forced labourers from Russia and Ukraine. UNRRA’s solution to the problem of displacement was repatriation, but that became problematic when a ‘hard core’ of DPs in Germany and Austria refused to be repatriated to the Soviet Union. 1 When the IRO came on the scene in 1947, it offered a new solution: resettlement of the displaced persons in countries outside Europe, including Australia.
