The fighting has ended in Europe—but with millions of displaced people surging in all directions across Europe, it cannot be called peace. While millions of POWs look forward to going home, forced labourers and people of eastern Europe know they have no home to return to. And try to escape the communist yoke.
At the end of World War 2, the world was not going back to what it had been before 1939. The Allied victors of the biggest, broadest, most destructive and bloody war in history now had to build a post-war world.
- Audio version
- Video version (patrons access)
Facts:
- 40 million people were homeless.
- In the UK, 30 % of homes were damaged or destroyed.
- In France, the Netherlands and Belgium, 20% of homes damaged or destroyed.
- In Germany, 45% of all dwellings destroyed.
- In Poland, 30% of all buildings and 60% of all schools were destroyed.
- Ukraine suffered more damage in the Second World War than any other country:
- 700 cities and towns fully or partially destroyed
- 28,000 villages damaged or destroyed
- 16,000 villages
- 28,000 collective farms.
The Allies had to accommodate displaced persons and prisoners of war in former German prison and concentration camps. While Western Allies struggled to feed, house and return POWs to their homes, the USSR sent forced labourers and captured Red Army soldiers to Gulags and labour camps in Siberia.
Historical photos
Displaced persons on the move across Europe
Rubble women in Berlin
Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2012.
Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945. New York: Viking, 2002.
Antony Beevor, The Second World War. New York, USA: Little, Brown and Company, 2012.
Harald Jähner, Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955 New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2022.
Evan Mawdsley, Thunder in the East: The Nazi-Soviet War 1941–1945. London: Bloomsbury. 2016.
Orest Subtlety, Ukraine: A History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988.
