BAD AROLSEN, GERMANY — Looking back at the first weeks after World War II, a French lieutenant named Henri Francois-Poncet despaired at fulfilling his mission: to learn the fate of French inmates of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
For the living skeletons who had survived the Nazi terror, the displaced persons camp set up two miles away offered little relief from misery.
People still died at the rate of 1,000 to 1,500 a day. Corpses were stacked in front of barracks, to be carted away by captured SS guards. "Bodies frequently remained for several days in the huts, the other inmates being too weak to carry them out," Francois-Poncet wrote in a report for the Allied Military Government.
"As most of the survivors could not even give their own names, it was useless trying to obtain information as to the identity of the dead," he wrote. He reported a 25% success rate.
When the Third Reich surrendered in May 1945, 8 million people were left uprooted around Europe. Millions drifted through the 2,500 hastily arranged displaced persons camps before they were repatriated.
A bleak picture springs with stark immediacy from Allied officers' typewritten reports, found in the massive archive of the International Tracing Service in the central German town of Bad Arolsen. The Associated Press has been given extensive access to the archive on condition that identities of victims and refugees be protected.
Far from the joyful liberation that should have greeted the end of Nazi oppression, the files reveal desperation, loss and confusion, and overwhelmed and often insensitive military authorities.
Many had nowhere to go, their families among the 6 million Jews consumed in the Holocaust, their homes destroyed or handed out to new occupants. Those who wanted to get to Palestine were shut out by a British ban on Jewish immigration to the Israeli state-in-waiting.
"Owing to ill treatment by the Germans, most DPs have a distrust and fear of the Allied authorities," said a September 1945 report signed by British Lt. Col. C.C. Allan. "Many DPs have sunk into complete apathy regarding their future."
Liberated concentration camps were transformed into displaced persons camps. Food was still scarce -- often just coffee and wet black bread -- and medical care was insufficient, said a report written for President Truman.
Survivors were kept under armed guard to maintain order. They still wore their old striped, pajama-like concentration-camp uniforms and slept in the same drafty barracks through a bitter winter.
Compounding their misery, they could watch through barbed-wire fences and see German villagers living normal lives. In some places, those villagers were forced to tour the camps and help with the burials, or at least face up to what their fuehrer had wrought. But it was scant comfort to the victims.
"As things stand now, we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them, except that we do not exterminate them," wrote presidential envoy Earl G. Harrison in his famously quoted report to Truman after visiting that summer.
Known for its unparalleled collection of original concentration camp papers, the International Tracing Service, a branch of the International Committee of the Red Cross, also safeguards the world's largest documentation on postwar displaced persons camps. It has nearly 3.4 million names on its card index of those who sought designation as refugees eligible for aid.
Until now, the documents have been used only to trace missing people and verify restitution claims. The archive, which fills 16 miles of shelf space, is to be opened to historians for the first time. At a May meeting in Amsterdam, the archive's 11-nation supervisory commission agreed to begin transferring electronic copies this autumn to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and to Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.
Within weeks after the war, U.N. agencies and volunteer charities took over the displaced persons camps, processing applications for relief and emigration. By 1947, a quarter-million Jews -- a piteous remnant of European Jewry -- shared space with displaced Eastern Europeans who feared returning to what had become the Soviet bloc.
Ex-Nazis were among the displaced persons.
U.S. admits ex-Nazi
Adam Friedrich's 1949 application to the International Refugee Organization to join relatives in St. Louis acknowledges that for three years had he belonged to the Waffen SS, the combat arm of Hitler's dreaded paramilitary organization. He also noted that he had been imprisoned for 20 months after the war.
A refugee organization official scribbled on his form, "The applicant was forced to report to the SS in Jan. '42. Served in the infantry and took part in fighting." Friedrich was rejected.
But U.S. authorities did not have that information four years later when he applied again through the U.S. Refugee Relief Act. Then, Friedrich reported that he had been in the German army but said nothing about his SS service.
