From displaced persons to labourers: Allied employment policies in post-war west Germany

Abstract

Previous studies have shown how the Anglo-American management of displaced persons (DPs) in West Germany was a basic platform in the construction of the new ‘regime for refugees’ that took place after the Second World War.1 Building upon this body of research, I shall in the following pages attempt a first analysis of the documents produced by the British Element of the Control Commission on Germany (CCG-Be), the Office of the Military Government of the United States for Germany (OMGUS), the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and the International Refugee Organization (IRO) in order to investigate the development of labour policies towards DPs. Their overall direction may be summed up as the aim to turn the ‘slaves of the Nazi regime’ freed by the Allies, into ‘labourers suitable for democracies’ who later on could be resettled in Western countries.