Seventy five years ago the Western Allies were moving into the Third Reich from the west while the Soviet Red Army steamrollered toward Berlin from the east. The armies had a very clear military objective: the unconditional surrender of the Third Reich. But they also had a vast and sprawling civilian affairs problem.

The Americans and British were not able to drive the German army out of a town, arrest the Nazi town council and reopen the schools. There were literally millions of non-German political prisoners, POWs, forced laborers and slave laborers in the Third Reich. As soon as the Allies showed up these hungry people naturally considered themselves as liberated and on the side of the victors. They did not necessarily want to remain in their prison camps or prison clothes and they certainly did not want to keep eating the slop that they’d been allowed as prisoners or slaves. Most of them wanted to go home (unless their home was being occupied by the Red Army).

From the American and British perspective, these millions of people were a potential source of chaos and disease (no fault of their own that they were captive in conditions that fostered typhus etc). On the other hand, they were also clearly victims of the Nazis and the reason for the battles.

The solution was to encourage these people to put themselves in camps where they would be well fed, given better clothing and eventually given a ride home. They could also be vetted for the sort of diseases that might cause epidemics. This suited some people fine, but there were plenty of others who had absolutely no intention to putting themselves back into any sort of camp. And so you have odd incidences at the end of the war, like reports of Cossacks stealing food and laundry in French villages.

There were people who grouped themselves together by nationality and walked home, without much caring about the property rights of German civilians. The majority of French, Belgian and Dutch, however, were happy to accept a plane ride or a truck ride home in the spring of 1945.Millions of prisoners and forced laborers came home to the West in 1945 in planes and trucks in a mass population movement remembered as the Return or le Retour. It was an emotionally fraught period that defines the end of WWII as much as any battle or military campaign.  No one who saw those convoys of displaced persons returning from the Third Reich has forgotten them.