The IRO Resettlement Programme

Mandate and eligibility

The Constitution gave the organisation five purposes: repatriation or resettlement, the identification, registration and classification of refugees, care and assistance, legal and political protection, and transport. Annex I set out who counted, among them victims of the Nazi and Fascist regimes, Spanish Republicans, prewar refugees, and displaced persons, defined as those deported from or obliged to leave their country of nationality or former habitual residence, including people compelled to undertake forced labour. Most categories had to show valid objections to returning. Part II listed those who would not be the organisation's concern: quislings, war criminals, people who had voluntarily assisted the enemy, and the Volksdeutsche.13

Eligibility was decided on a four-page form. From the summer of 1947 the IRO issued the CM/1, headed Application for IRO Assistance, and about 350,000 were completed in the German zones, Austria, Italy, Switzerland, England and as far away as Egypt and Syria. Applicants had to account for where they had been and where they had worked over the previous ten or twelve years, say why they would not go home, and set out their qualifications, languages and resources. An eligibility officer interviewed them on those answers and wrote the decision on the form, classifying the case as within or not within the mandate. A Review Board in Geneva heard appeals: of 14,815 decided by the end of 1949 it reversed 4,601 into the mandate and confirmed 8,622 as outside it.41

The door was then closed by timetable. In July 1949 the General Council set 31 August 1949 as the last day for new applications and ruled that care and maintenance would stop on 30 June 1950 for everyone not already moving or needing permanent institutional care.1

The machinery of resettlement

Resettlement was not something the IRO could do alone. Receiving governments set their own criteria and sent selection missions to the camps, and the organisation repeatedly urged them to take a fair share of the non-repatriable and to lower their entry requirements. Where no mass scheme existed people moved on individual work contracts or on nomination by relatives and sponsors.12

The route out ran through a chain of installations. Interviews, medical examinations and trade tests were done at resettlement centres, among them Funk-Kaserne Transit Centre in Munich and Wentorf Resettlement Centre near Hamburg. Shortly before sailing people moved to an emigrant staging area for about a fortnight of formalities, customs and security checks and a final medical inspection. Bremen held one of the largest, made up of Camp Tirpitz, Camp Grohn and Camp Lesum. Bremen and Genoa were the main departure ports.56

The organisation ran its own transport network, chartering ships, booking space on commercial vessels and aircraft and running a monthly average of 35 trains inland over its first thirty months. Thirty-nine chartered vessels, nineteen of them United States Army transports, were in constant operation until late 1949, when falling numbers forced the release of ten. The fleet stood at about 36 vessels in the peak months of 1949 and 15 by the end of 1950. At the far end of the voyage the receiving countries had their own reception centres, among them Pier 21 at Halifax and, in Australia, Bonegilla Migrant Reception and Training Centre and Bathurst Migrant Reception and Training Centre.123

What the movement amounted to

By 31 December 1949, thirty months in, the organisation had repatriated 68,778 people and resettled about 690,000. The United States, Israel, Australia, the United Kingdom and Canada took the five largest shares, and Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela together accounted for about 65,000. The two published versions of that table differ slightly, giving 690,145 and 688,284 for the same period.12

Nineteen fifty was slower, at 191,119 resettled and 2,917 repatriated, held back by the difficulty of working the amended United States Displaced Persons Act, which in June 1950 raised the total admissible under the Act to 313,000, and by the near completion of the Australian programme, which had absorbed 170,543 refugees since IRO operations began. More than 150,000 people were resettled during 1951 and a further 7,000 in January 1952, bringing the totals for fifty-five months to 1,045,750 resettled and 73,873 repatriated.23

Ukrainians inside the programme

The IRO counted people by country of origin, so Ukrainians appear inside the Polish and Soviet columns of its returns rather than as a separate line, and no official IRO breakdown of Ukrainian resettlement by destination has been found. In early 1946 there were about 220,000 Ukrainian displaced persons in western Europe, 178,000 in Germany, 29,000 in Austria and 12,000 in Italy, and after the 1946 repatriation drive over 200,000 Ukrainians remained in Germany and Austria.78

For the outcome, the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine gives an estimate covering 1947 to 1957, a longer span than the IRO's own life: 80,000 to the United States, 30,000 to Canada, 20,000 to Australia and New Zealand, 20,000 to Great Britain, 10,000 each to Belgium and France, 7,000 to Brazil, 6,000 to Argentina, 2,000 to Venezuela and 2,000 elsewhere. By 1 August 1948 about 33,000 had already gone, 14,000 of them to Britain and 9,000 to Belgium.7

The camp registers show the same movement from the other side. Ihor Stebelsky's tables put the Ukrainian population of the camps of the British Zone of Germany at 28,460 in December 1947 and 4,580 by 1950, and the Ukrainians in the camps of Austria at 6,214 on 31 August 1948 and 2,572 on 30 June 1950. What was left at the end was a residue of about 10,800 elderly people, invalids, widows and unmarried mothers with children whom no country would take.9

The end of the organisation

The people the schemes would not take were the last problem. When responsibility for care and maintenance passed to local authorities on 1 July 1950 there were 15,319 known institutional hard core cases needing permanent care, with 7,509 family members, and a fund of 22 million dollars was set aside for them. About 40,000 refugees were expected to remain where they were because no emigration could be found.23

The IRO ended on 31 January 1952. Its protective functions passed to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and the movement of migrants to the Provisional Intergovernmental Committee for the Movement of Migrants from Europe, which received a grant to carry a further 12,205 people who already held visas and which became the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration. The International Tracing Service at Arolsen kept the records, and it is those files, the CM/1 applications and the shipping lists, that make an individual journey traceable today.324