Despite the logistical problems—the lack of rolling stock, trucks, and cargo planes, the bombed-out roads and bridges, shortages of food and fuel, and the exhaustion of the troops who, having fought and won the Second World War, now had to transport millions of civilians home—the repatriation campaign succeeded beyond expectations.
By October 1, 1945, more than 2 million Soviets, 1.5 million Frenchmen, 586,000 Italians, 274,000 Dutch citizens, almost 300,000 Belgians and Luxembourgians, more than 200,000 Yugoslavs, 135,000 Czechs, 94,000 Poles, and tens of thousands of other European displaced persons, or DPs, had been sent home.
There remained left behind in Germany more than a million displaced persons warehoused in camps, overseen by the occupying militaries and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Authority (UNRRA), which had been organized in 1943 to oversee wartime recovery and the repatriation of the displaced.
The Last Million is the story of these displaced Eastern Europeans who, when the shooting stopped, refused to go home or had no homes to return to. It is the story of their confinement in refugee camps for up to five years after the war ended.
The Polish Catholics who comprised the largest group of displaced persons had come to Germany during the war, the vast majority deported against their will as forced laborers to replace soldiers sent to the eastern front. They had homes and families to go back to and a government that welcomed their return, but hundreds of thousands preferred to remain in refugee camps in Germany. Caught up in the postwar conflict between East and West, they had been warned—and heeded those warnings—not to return to a Poland devastated by war, threatened by civil war, no longer independent but under Soviet domination, its eastern provinces ripped away and annexed by the USSR.
The Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and some of the western Ukrainians had, unlike the Poles, departed their homelands voluntarily in the final year of the war, in flight from the advancing Red Army. Large numbers of them had collaborated with the Nazi occupiers; some had participated in the slaughter of their Jewish neighbors; a significant number had fought in German uniforms as part of Waffen-SS units. Even the innocent among them whose collaboration had entailed nothing more than working in a post office under German superiors feared that should they return they would be charged with treason or war crimes. They preferred to remain in the relative safety of the displaced persons camps in Germany until their nations were liberated from the Soviets or they could start their lives anew somewhere else.