There is no doubt that every former prisoner was happy to return home from the Third Reich in 1945. But those returns often held their own traumas.

To begin with, it’s fair to assume that every displaced person who returned from Germany was in poor health. Some of them were so desperately ill that they never fully recovered and died young even if they struggled on for some years. But even those who had been arrested late in the war and spent a relatively short time in captivity were weak from malnutrition and exposure. The concept of post-traumatic stress disorder had not yet been developed, but it’s fair to assume that every returnee suffered from it to one degree or another.
Jewish survivors faced particular challenges of returning to families and neighborhoods that had been decimated. They sometimes even found themselves unwelcome in their own homes by the people who had benefited from anti-Semitic policies by moving into their homes.

Less well known, many political prisoners faces similar problems. Although in most cases political prisoners did not lose their entire families, they did sometimes lose their closest friends and colleagues. A Dutch-Paris courier whom we’ll call Anne-Marie, for instance, returned to Paris from the concentration camps in July 1945. She had already recuperated in Sweden for a few months, so she was in fairly good health. Her first actions were to make a report to the American authorities about Dutch-Paris’s help to aviators and to look for her lover, who was also arrested as a member of Dutch-Paris. Her “missing persons” requests and letters still rest in the files of more than one archive. She eventually accepted that he had died during the war, but it’s not clear that she ever found out the circumstances.

Similarly the wife of a Dutch-Paris couple who were arrested together came home to their children. But their father and husband never returned.

Other Dutch-Paris resisters returned from the concentration camps to find that the Germans had not only arrested them, tortured them and deported them, but also looted their homes. This was not simply a case of missing cash and jewelry. Special German units stripped apartments bare down to and including the wiring in the walls. This did not happen to every Dutch-Paris resister who was arrested, but it did happen to a few in Paris and in the south of France. Imagine coming home, sick and traumatized, to find out that you didn’t have a chair to sit in or a bed to rest on. And it was no easy matter to replace a chair, a bed or even a set of plates in 1945 when so many homes had been bombed and most factories had stopped manufacturing domestic items to make war materiel.

The American military recognized the difficulties of returning home for many resisters. A special unit, MIS-X, identified civilians who had helped American servicemen (mostly aviators) during the war. They offered everyone an official certificate, but they also offered certain people a range of services such as medical care, food parcels and clothing. In some cases, they awarded cash. They did not think that the consequence of helping the Allies should be imprisonment and destitution, although in many cases that’s what it turned out to be.