Displaced persons camp

A displaced persons camp or DP camp is a temporary facility for displaced persons. The term is mainly used for camps established after World War II in Germany, Austria, and Italy, primarily for refugees from Eastern Europe and for the former inmates of the Nazi German concentration camps. Two years after the end of World War II in Europe, some 850,000 people lived in DP camps across Europe, among them Armenians, Poles, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Yugoslavs, Jews, Greeks, Russians, Ukrainians and Czechoslovaks.

In recent times, camps have existed in many parts of the world for groups of displaced people including for refugees in the Darfur region of Sudan, and for Palestinians in Lebanon and Jordan, as well as for Afghan refugees in Pakistan. Such camps are now generally known as refugee camps.

DP camps following World War II

Background

Combat operations, ethnic cleansing, and the fear of genocide resulted in millions of people being uprooted from their homes in the course of World War II. Between 11 million and 20 million people were displaced. The majority were inmates of Nazi concentration camps, Labor camps and prisoner-of-war camps that were freed by the Allied armies. In portions of Eastern Europe, both civilians and military personnel fled their home countries in fear of advancing Soviet armies, who were preceded by widespread reports of mass rape, pillaging, looting, and murder.

Displaced person

A displaced person (sometimes abbreviated DP) is a person who has been forced to leave his or her home or place of habitual residence, a phenomenon known as forced migration.

According to the UNHCR, there were 59.5 million forcibly displaced people worldwide at the end of 2014, the highest level since World War II: 19.5 million were refugees, 1.8 million asylum seekers and 38.2 million internally displaced persons.

Origin of term

The term was first widely used during World War II and the resulting refugee outflows from Eastern Europe, when it was used to specifically refer to one removed from his or her native country as a refugee, prisoner or a slave laborer. The meaning has significantly broadened in the past half-century. A displaced person may also be referred to as a forced migrant. The term "refugee" is also commonly used as a synonym for displaced person, causing confusion between the general descriptive class of anyone who has left their home and the subgroup of legally defined refugees who enjoy specified international legal protection. Most of the victims of war, political refugees and DPs of the immediate post-Second World War period were Ukrainians, Poles, other Slavs, as well as citizens of the Baltic states - Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians, who refused to return to Soviet-dominated eastern Europe.