Displaced Persons (DP) Records

At the end of the Second World War millions of people in Europe were far from home. For many families with Polish roots, the records of displaced persons (DPs) connect the war years with resettlement in Britain, North America, Australia and elsewhere. These files can be very detailed, but they are spread across several institutions and languages. This guide explains what DP records are, what they contain and where they are held.

If your family moved from post-war Europe to Australia, compare the earlier DP evidence with the Australian papers you hold. Our guide to tracing Polish ancestors from Australia explains how those clues can direct research in Poland; separate guides cover Bonegilla and Greta. Later Australian naturalisation records can provide another dated point for the family chronology.

Polish refugees after the Second World War

Poles ended up as displaced persons by several routes, and knowing which one applies to your family shows where to look.

Many Polish citizens had been deported to the German Reich for forced labour or held in prisons and concentration camps. Liberation did not take them home straight away, and a large number entered the DP system in Germany and Austria. Others could not or would not go back because of the new borders and the Soviet-backed government, particularly those whose homes were now in the USSR, in what is today Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania. Some Polish servicemen and women, and people attached to the Allied forces, also appear in post-war welfare and resettlement files. DP paperwork is full of searches for missing relatives, children separated from parents and people trying to re-establish an identity after losing their documents.

DP records are often the first place where a person uses a post-war identity consistently, with a new spelling, a different date of birth or an adopted name. That is not in itself a sign of fraud. Language problems, fear of forced repatriation, trauma and the confusion of the period all produced such changes.

International Tracing Service (ITS) archives

The International Tracing Service (ITS) was set up after the war to document persecution, forced labour and displacement and to trace missing people. Its collections are now held by the Arolsen Archives in Bad Arolsen, Germany.

For Polish families the Arolsen holdings include registration and tracing files created by post-war authorities and relief agencies; evidence of imprisonment or forced labour, sometimes with employers, camps, prisoner numbers and transfers; and post-war enquiries from relatives, which may name parents, siblings, the last known address or the home town before the war.

Arolsen is large, but DP material is not all in one place, and other archives hold parts of it. Results also depend on name variants: Polish surnames and place names were misspelt or Germanised, women appear under maiden and married names, and Polish letters such as Ł, Ś and Ż are usually missing.

Life in DP camps

DP camps were run under the Allied occupation authorities with the support of international organisations, first UNRRA and from 1947 the International Refugee Organization (IRO). Camp records show things civil registers do not: transfers between camps, hospitals and work assignments; the family’s members on a given date; health and welfare matters, which are often restricted; work history and skills used for job placement and emigration; and declarations of language and nationality, which can be complicated for people from the mixed regions of pre-war Poland.

Camp records often supply the place of origin, the pre-war address or the religion and rite that decide whether earlier records are in Poland or, after the border changes, in another country.

Documentation and lists

The kinds of paperwork that can exist are:

• DP registration cards and questionnaires, usually the most useful: names, date and place of birth, parents, nationality, last residence, wartime history and sometimes a photograph
• lists compiled by camps, welfare agencies and occupation authorities: arrivals, departures, hospital patients, employment rosters and ration lists
• tracing and enquiry forms, which can name relatives and their last known whereabouts
• identity and travel papers, from temporary identity documents to the paperwork of resettlement

Expect personal details to differ between documents, with different dates of birth, spellings and home towns. Clerks who did not know Polish wrote place names by ear, and not every camp’s records survived. Each document places a person at a particular time and place; put together in a timeline, several of them usually tell a consistent story where one does not.

Finding family members in resettlement records

A family story such as “he was in a DP camp” or “she came to Britain after the war” is a starting point, but finding someone in resettlement records needs a few identifiers first:

• full name, with likely variants
• approximate date and place of birth
• names of close relatives
• religion, which can show which welfare organisations were involved
• the country or region of the camp (Germany, Austria, Italy)
• destination country and approximate year of arrival

Resettlement records connect with naturalisation, alien registration, passenger lists, work contracts and the records of post-war communities. What exists, and who can see it, depends on the archives and privacy law of the destination country; some records need a formal application, proof of relationship or a long wait.

Emigration of DPs

Emigration from the DP camps ran through several schemes, each with its own paperwork. Applicants were screened for health and security, and case files may record the results. Labour schemes recruited people for particular industries and recorded their occupation, employer and first posting. Family reunification cases contain correspondence, affidavits and proof of identity.

For Poles, returning home was politically loaded. Some refused repatriation because they feared persecution or had no home left to go to. This explains why some records give vague origins, and why the same person may describe their nationality differently over time.

Accessing Arolsen Archives for Polish records

The Arolsen Archives offer online search tools and scanned documents for a large part of the ITS holdings. Using them well is another matter. Not everyone appears, and no result does not prove that a person was never displaced. Searches have to allow for several spellings, missing Polish letters, German versions of Polish place names and given names in a different order. The documents use abbreviations, administrative terms and acronyms for camps and authorities, often in handwriting that mixes German and Polish. Material touching on medical matters, adoption or sensitive wartime experiences may be restricted or redacted.

We build an identity timeline from the DP documents, resolve the Polish name and place-name problems, and check the DP evidence against Polish civil and church records. If a lead is unlikely to produce results, we say so.