The Return of political prisoners, prisoners of war and forced laborers from Germany to France, Belgium and the Netherlands had slowed to a trickle by August 1945.   If someone had not yet come home or at least gotten a message to his or her family by then, it was unlikely that they ever would.

And yet the families and loved ones kept hoping.  Dutch-Paris had several prisoners still missing at the end of that summer.   One Dutch-Paris leader put an advertisement in the newspaper asking for any information about his sister.  He received two letters in response from women who had been prisoners at Ravensbruck with her and could tell him about her final days.

Other families made an endless round of the Red Cross and the social ministries and every other organization they could think of that might have contacts in Germany who might have information.   One Belgian family filled out endless forms searching for a missing person and made personal inquiries among returned political prisoners.  They had almost reconciled themselves to their prisoner’s death in late 1945 when the Belgian foreign office told them that the Soviets reported that they had the man and were exchanging him for a Soviet citizen.   How happy the family was as they prepared to welcome home their husband and brother.   But he didn’t arrive and he didn’t arrive.   Finally, months and months later, the Soviets said they had made a spelling error.  They knew nothing about the missing man.   The family had to accept that the story another prisoner had told them about the missing man being in a factory that was bombed into rubble in the last weeks of the war must be true.

The uncertainty about the fate of missing persons had practical as well as psychological ramifications.   If you could not prove that a person had died, you could not get a death certificate.  Without a death certificate, property could not be sold, nor could benefits be collected.   Surviving families were cast into destitution.  This was such a common and pressing problem in the Netherlands that the Dutch parliament changed the laws regarding the issuance of death certificates in cases of displaced persons.

In the case of Dutch-Paris, the lack of a father’s death certificate left his children without means or a legal guardian.   It took a great deal of official correspondence and bureaucratic dealings to straighten out the children’s legal situation on the part of both their uncle and the official leader of Dutch-Paris.  Fortunately they had adults to advocate for them.   The Netherlands still has over 500 names on its list of missing persons from WWII.