European Volunteer Workers: Records and Polish Roots

European Volunteer Workers (EVWs) were displaced persons recruited by the British Ministry of Labour from camps in Germany and Austria after the Second World War to fill labour shortages in Britain. The Balt Cygnet scheme for women began in 1946, and the much larger Westward Ho scheme followed in 1947. Westward Ho alone brought 34,688 EVWs in 1947, and researchers put the overall total at more than 80,000. Many were Poles, Ukrainians, Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians.

If your parent or grandparent came to Britain as an EVW, their story is usually spread across two sets of records: displaced persons (DP) files at the Arolsen Archives in Germany, and British records such as police alien registration, Home Office security reports and naturalisation papers. The DP files are often the richer source for the family’s Polish origins, because they record birthplace, parents and wartime movements.

What the European Volunteer Worker schemes were

By 1946 Britain was short of workers in hospitals, farms, mines and mills. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of displaced persons were living in camps in the British and American zones of Germany and in Austria. Many were former forced labourers or refugees who would not, or could not, go home to countries now under Soviet control. The Ministry of Labour sent recruiters to the camps, and those selected travelled to Britain as “European Volunteer Workers” (books and catalogues also use “European Voluntary Workers”).

Balt Cygnet

Balt Cygnet was the first scheme. It recruited single women, at first from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, for domestic work in hospitals and tuberculosis sanatoria. It began in 1946, and a written parliamentary answer of 13 April 1948 recorded 1,800 women brought over under Balt Cygnet for domestic work. They worked as ward maids, kitchen hands, cleaners and laundry workers, and some later trained as nurses.

Westward Ho

Westward Ho, launched in 1947, was far larger and took both men and women. It supplied workers to agriculture, coal mining, textiles (especially cotton and wool), and hospitals and domestic service. The same Hansard answer gives 34,688 Westward Ho arrivals in 1947 (25,115 men and 9,573 women). Most EVWs arrived in 1947 and 1948, and the schemes are usually dated 1946 to about 1951. Totals for the whole period vary with what is counted; the figure of more than 80,000 comes from a University of Nottingham and University of Manchester research project.

Who came, and how Poles fitted in

The British government preferred some nationalities to others. Balts were favoured, Ukrainians less so, and Jewish displaced persons were not eligible. Poles were not excluded, but in July 1947 the Minister of Labour told Parliament that recruitment had to take account of the large number of Polish soldiers in the Polish Resettlement Corps already waiting for work in Britain. Polish DPs still came in considerable numbers, alongside Ukrainians (some of them born in pre-war south-eastern Poland), Balts and smaller groups from other countries.

This matters for research: two people recorded as “Ukrainian” and “Polish” in British files may have been born in the same village. Nationality on DP and EVW papers reflects how a person described themselves in 1946 or 1947, not the state that kept their birth record.

EVWs and the Polish Resettlement Corps are not the same

The two groups are easily confused, but their records are completely different.

Polish Resettlement Corps (PRC): formed in 1946 for members of the Polish Armed Forces under British command who chose not to return to communist Poland. Their families followed later. Their service records are held by the Ministry of Defence, and their settlement was supported by the Polish Resettlement Act 1947. See our guide to Polish veterans’ resettlement in Britain.
European Volunteer Workers: civilians recruited from DP camps. Many Polish EVWs had been taken to Germany as forced labourers during the war. They have no Polish Army service file; their paper trail starts in the DP camps.

Some families include both: a PRC soldier who married a Polish EVW, for example. Check which route each person took before ordering records.

Life on arrival: directed labour and hostels

EVWs were usually sent first to holding hostels and then placed in work by the Ministry of Labour. The terms were strict:

They received the same wages as British workers in the same jobs.
They could not leave their job without Ministry of Labour permission.
As aliens they had to register with the police and report changes of address and employment.
Many lived in hostels and former camps near the farms, pits and mills; dependants who were allowed to join them were often housed in separate dependants’ hostels. Polish ex-servicemen’s families lived in similar camps, described in our guide to Polish resettlement camps and hostels.

These arrangements produced files on hostels, placements and policy, many now at The National Archives. The catalogue does not show a central series of personal files on individual EVWs, so do not expect one dossier per worker.

DP records at the Arolsen Archives

The Arolsen Archives (formerly the International Tracing Service) in Bad Arolsen, Germany, hold the largest collection of records on displaced persons. For an EVW this is usually the best place to start. The main record types are:

DP 2 cards (registration records): created when a person was registered in the British or American zone from late 1944 onwards. They often give date and place of birth, parents’ names, residence in 1938, occupation, languages and the camps the person passed through.
CM/1 files: applications for assistance from the International Refugee Organization (IRO), used from summer 1947 to the end of 1951. Applicants had to account for where they had lived and worked over the previous decade and explain why they would not return home. This is often where wartime forced labour in Germany is recorded.
The post-war card file: an alphabetical-phonetic index to around 3.5 million DP documents, useful when the spelling of a name varied.
Wartime records: forced labour registrations, health insurance cards and employer lists from the Nazi period, which may pre-date the DP files.

Much of this material can be searched free in the Arolsen online archive. If you cannot find a person, send an inquiry through the Arolsen website. Arolsen does not charge for its services; it gives an average processing time of about five months, and up to 13 months.

British records of European Volunteer Workers

The National Archives: policy files

The National Archives at Kew holds files on how the schemes were run, created by the Ministry of Labour (LAB), the Home Office (HO) and other departments. Examples include LAB 9/191 (European Volunteer Workers: Westward Ho scheme, 1946 to 1948), HO 213/1005 (discussion of the Westward Ho scheme, 1948), FO 945/496 and FO 945/497 (Operation Balt and Cygnet) and LAB 26/191 on setting up hostels. Search Discovery for both “European Volunteer Workers” and “European voluntary workers” to find files on particular industries and hostels. A few LAB 26 files concern named individuals, mostly over hostel debts or places, so search for the surname too.

Home Office security reports (HO 481)

The series HO 481, Operation Post Reports (1947 to 1959), records interviews with foreign nationals living in Britain at the start of the Cold War. Each report usually gives the port and date of arrival, date and place of birth, nationality, police registration number and address, followed by an assessment of the person. Many EVWs and other DPs appear. The volumes form two interleaved A to Z sequences, so a surname may be in either of two volumes. The series is closed for 100 years unless otherwise stated, so you may need a Freedom of Information request, with evidence of death where you have it.

Police alien registration

Every EVW had a police registration certificate and a matching record at the local police station, updated when they moved or changed jobs. The National Archives holds only a sample of about 1,000 London cards in MEPO 35 (1918 to 1957). Outside London, surviving registers and cards are held by police forces or have been passed to county record offices, so ask the record office for the area where the family first lived. Check family papers too: the certificate booklet itself often survives at home.

Naturalisation

Many EVWs later became British. Naturalisation certificates from 1949 to 1986 are in HO 334 and can be searched by name in Discovery. For people who arrived between 1934 and 1948, a case file may survive in HO 405, but only about 40 per cent of these files survive and they are closed for 100 years, again open to Freedom of Information requests. Our guide to naturalisation records for Poles in the UK covers the steps in detail.

Other British sources

Civil registration: marriages and births of children in England and Wales from 1947 onwards, often giving a Polish or Ukrainian surname in several spellings.
Employer and hostel records: some National Coal Board, mill and hospital records survive in county record offices.
Community sources: parish records of Polish Catholic and Ukrainian churches in Britain, and the records of ex-servicemen’s and community associations.

From EVW records to Polish records

For a Polish-born EVW, the DP file is often the bridge back to Poland. Look for:

Place of birth: the village and district, often written phonetically or in German. Identify it on a map of pre-war Poland; many places in the eastern borderlands are now in Ukraine or Belarus.
Parents’ names: including the mother’s maiden name, which is the key to the Polish baptism or civil birth entry.
Religion: Roman Catholic, Greek Catholic, Orthodox or Jewish, which tells you which registers to search.
Residence in 1938 and the date of deportation: this places the family before the war and points to wartime records in Arolsen.

The next Polish step is usually the birth or baptism record in the parish or civil registry for that place, followed by the parents’ marriage. Our guides to displaced persons records and finding a birth entry in Poland explain how.

An illustrative example

This case is invented to show the method. A family knows that “Stanley Kowalski” worked on a farm in Lincolnshire from 1947 and married there. His naturalisation certificate gives his birthplace as “Zolkiew, Poland”. His Arolsen DP 2 card names him as Stanisław Kowalski, born in a village near Żółkiew, gives his father as Jan and his mother as Maria née Nowak, and shows he was taken to Germany for farm labour in 1942. With the mother’s maiden name and the exact village, the parish for the 1920s baptism can be identified. Żółkiew is now Zhovkva in Ukraine, so the surviving registers may be in Polish or Ukrainian archives.

Common pitfalls

Names: clerks in camps and in Britain wrote names as they heard them. Try Polish, German, Ukrainian and anglicised spellings, with and without diacritics (Wróbel, Wrobel, Vrobel).
Ages: birth dates can differ between DP cards, British papers and the Polish register. Compare several documents before deciding which is right.
Nationality: “Polish”, “Ukrainian”, “stateless” and “Soviet” can all describe people from the same pre-war Polish province.
Closed files: HO 405 and HO 481 are closed for 100 years; allow time for Freedom of Information requests.
No central EVW file: do not expect a single Ministry of Labour dossier. Build the picture from Arolsen, police, security and naturalisation records.