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.
