Displaced persons camps. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displaced_persons_camps_in_post%E2%80%93World_War_II_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displaced_perso

Displaced persons camps. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displaced_persons_camps_in_post%E2%80%93World_War_II_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displaced_persons_camps_in_pos... When it's said that the concentration camps were "liberated", this mostly means that the guards on the fences were changed, and any intentional killings were stopped. But it took quite some time to actually empty the camps. From the Harrison report: >We appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them. They are in concentration camps in large numbers under our military guard instead of S.S. troops. One is led to wonder whether the German people, seeing this, are not supposing that we are following or at least condoning Nazi policy. This was in August 1945, three months after Germany surrendered. Moving millions of people around in postwar Europe wasn't easy, or quick. Obviously, all sides destroyed railways or bridges when possible. What few left operational were running at capacity just moving food, troops, and critical replacement parts. If you're a Allied junior lieutenant, and you're put in charge of a camp of 50,000 people, do you just throw open the gates, and tell them to walk home? If there was food to buy, which there wasn't, (Everyone had conscripted all their farmers. Europe had food supply problems for years afterward) they didn't have any money to buy it. Nobody had ration cards. They were lucky to have identity papers at all. And, of course, the Allies were correctly paranoid about security. The countryside was littered with weapons. Let a starving DP out of a camp, a few days later he might be sorely tempted to pick up a fallen rifle and ambush the next checkpoint he sees. Or... you could just leave them in the camp, where they're all in one place, not clogging the roads, where you can more or less feed them, and where you can eventually get around to handing out Nansen passports, when you feel like it.