Displaced Persons (DP) Records

After the Second World War, millions of people were uprooted across Europe. For many families with Polish roots, “DP records” (Displaced Persons records) are the missing link between wartime upheaval and post-war resettlement in the UK, North America, Australia and elsewhere. These files can be extraordinarily informative—but they sit across different institutions, in several languages, and are often misunderstood. Below is what DP records are, what they can contain, and what is realistically possible when trying to obtain them.

Polish refugees after World War II

Polish displacement after 1939–1945 had several distinct pathways, and understanding which one fits your family is often the key to knowing where to look:

• Former forced labourers and prisoners: Many Polish citizens were deported for forced labour in the German Reich, or held in prisons and concentration camps. Liberation did not mean an immediate return home; a large number entered the DP system in Germany and Austria.
• Civilians caught in border changes: Post-war border shifts and the establishment of a Soviet-backed government meant some people could not, or would not, return to their pre-war homes—especially if they came from areas incorporated into the USSR (today parts of Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania).
• Polish military and auxiliary personnel: Some Polish servicemen and women, and people attached to Allied forces (including those who had been in labour battalions), later appear in post-war welfare and resettlement documentation.
• Survivors and separated families: DP-era paperwork frequently reflects searches for missing relatives, children separated from parents, or attempts to re-establish identity after the loss of documents.

A practical reality: DP records are often the first place where a person consistently uses a post-war identity (including altered spellings, changed dates of birth, or adopted names). That does not automatically indicate fraud; it can reflect language barriers, fear of repatriation, trauma, or the administrative chaos of the period.

International Tracing Service (ITS) archives

If you have come across the phrase “ITS”, it refers to the International Tracing Service, the post-war body created to document persecution, forced labour and displacement, and to help trace missing persons. Today, its collections are held by the Arolsen Archives (Germany).

For Polish genealogy, ITS/Arolsen holdings matter because they can include, among other things:

• Registration and tracing files created by post-war authorities and relief agencies.
• Evidence of incarceration or forced labour, sometimes with employer names, camp designations, prisoner numbers, or movements between locations.
• Post-war correspondence and enquiries from relatives searching for someone, occasionally naming parents, siblings, last-known addresses, or pre-war home towns.

Two points that many people only learn the hard way:

1. DP-era documents are not “one database”. Arolsen is substantial, but it is not the sole repository of DP-related material.
2. Search results depend heavily on name variants. Polish surnames and place names were routinely misspelt or Germanised; women may appear under maiden and married surnames; diacritics (Ł, Ś, Ż etc.) are usually absent.

Life in DP camps

DP camps were administered under Allied occupation authorities and supported by international organisations (most notably UNRRA and later the IRO). Records created in and around camps can reveal everyday details that do not appear in civil registration:

• Camp addresses and movements (transfers between camps, hospitals, labour assignments).
• Family composition at a specific date: spouse, children, sometimes parents.
• Health and welfare information (often sensitive and not always open).
• Work history and skills used for employment placement and later migration decisions.
• Language and nationality declarations, which can be complex for people from multi-ethnic regions of pre-war Poland.

From a research perspective, camp life records often provide the “bridge facts” you need to locate earlier sources: a precise place of origin, a pre-war address, or confirmation of religion/rite, all of which can determine whether relevant earlier records are in Poland, or now in another country due to border changes.

Documentation and lists

DP research is document-driven, and it helps to know what kinds of paperwork might exist. Common categories include:

• DP registration cards and questionnaires (often the most genealogically useful when they exist): name(s), date/place of birth, parents, nationality, last residence, wartime experiences, sometimes photographs.
• Lists and manifests compiled by camps, welfare agencies, or occupation authorities: arrivals, departures, hospital lists, employment rosters, ration lists.
• Tracing and enquiry forms: “I am looking for…” requests that can name relatives and last-known locations.
• Identity and travel documentation: temporary identity papers, laissez-passer style documents, and later migration paperwork connected to resettlement.

Obstacles are common and should be expected:

• Inconsistent personal data across documents (different birth dates, different spelling, different places given as “home”).
• Place names written phonetically by non-Polish clerks.
• Missing or fragmentary series: not every camp’s records survived, and not all series were preserved in the same way.

A useful strategy is to treat each document as evidence of a person at a particular time and place, and then build a timeline. One record rarely tells the whole story, but several together often do.

Finding family members in resettlement records

Many families start with a story—“he was in a DP camp”, “she came to Britain after the war”—but do not know where to look beyond broad internet searches. In practice, locating someone in resettlement-era documentation often depends on assembling a small set of identifiers first:

• Full name (including likely variants)
• Approximate date and place of birth
• Names of close relatives
• Religion (sometimes relevant to which welfare organisations were involved)
• Likely country/camp region (Germany, Austria, Italy etc.)
• Destination country and approximate arrival year

Resettlement documentation can also intersect with naturalisation, alien registration, passenger lists, work contracts, and post-war community records. What exists, and what is accessible, depends heavily on the destination country’s archival and privacy framework—so it is important to be realistic about what can be obtained quickly, and what may require formal applications, proof of relationship, or long waiting times.

Emigration of DPs

DP emigration after the war was not one uniform process. It typically involved selection criteria and administrative steps that generated paperwork, for example:

• Eligibility and screening (including health checks and security vetting), which may be documented in case files.
• Labour-based migration schemes where people were recruited for specific sectors (often recorded with occupation, employer, and place of posting on arrival).
• Family reunification cases, which can contain correspondence, affidavits, and proof-of-identity documents.

For Polish families, a crucial historical factor is that return to Poland could be politically fraught. Some people avoided repatriation because they feared persecution or had no home to return to. That context helps explain why records might show reluctance to provide precise origins, or why the same person may describe their nationality differently over time.

Accessing Arolsen Archives for Polish records

Arolsen Archives provides access to a significant portion of ITS holdings, including digital search tools and scanned documents where available. However, “accessible” does not always mean “straightforward”.

What to expect in practice:

• Not every person will appear, and absence of a hit is not proof that someone was not displaced.
• Searching requires flexibility: multiple spellings, missing diacritics, German versions of Polish place names, and swapped given-name order are all common.
• Interpreting the documents is specialist work: abbreviations, administrative terminology, and handwritten forms can be challenging—especially where German and Polish are mixed, or where a document references a camp or authority by acronym.
• Privacy and sensitivity: some materials may be restricted or redacted, particularly if they touch on medical matters, adoption, or sensitive wartime experiences.

If you want professional help, this is exactly the kind of case where an experienced Poland-based genealogist can save time: by building a reliable identity timeline, handling Polish-language and place-name issues, cross-checking DP evidence against Polish civil and church records where possible, and advising honestly when a lead is unlikely to produce results.