GERMANY: The Unwanted

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¶ Some had been brought to Germany as Hitler's slave workers; others came voluntarily to take good jobs. Some sluiced into Germany in terror before the advancing Soviet armies. Some fled from Tito. This broad wave totaled 5,000,000. ¶ Then there was the wave of ethnic Germans, the Volksdeutsche, whom the Big Three at Potsdam agreed to return to

Germany from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. These toted up to 8,000,000. ¶ There was another wave of 1,000,000 Germans, fleeing from East Prussia. ¶ In 1946 a pogrom in Poland sent 100,000 Jews fleeing into Germany. ¶ In 1948, when Stalin took over Czechoslovakia, a new wave began to roll: those who fled the Iron Curtain.

Many of these waves have been absorbed. The Zionists took care of most of the Jews, and the Germans, whose economy is now going at a higher rate than in Hitler's heyday, have absorbed the 8,000,000 Volksdeutsche and the 1,000,000 East Prussians, as well as a few of the early D.P.s and most of the recent Iron Curtain refugees.

Of the 5,000,000 D.P.s at the end of the war, the I.R.O., which was created by the United Nations in 1946, has helped send 3,500,000 back to their homes, has resettled more than 1,000,000 in 70 countries (the U.S. has taken 300,000). At one time the I.R.O.'s chartered ships made up the largest fleet of passenger steamers in the world.

To replace the I.R.O., a 23-nation conference, meeting recently in Brussels, decided to set up a successor organization, which is expected to take over the I.R.O.'s chartered ships. The U.S. pledged $10 million to it. The emphasis will be not on D.P.s, however, but on a different problem : the resettlement of the great surplus populations which exist in some countries, especially Italy.

Two Problems. The West still has two refugee problems on its hands—and is doing almost nothing about either of them. One is the new problem of refugees from behind the Iron Curtain. They are now detained for weeks in a squalid camp at Valka, outside N¨umberg, until they get a job or emigrate. Most of them are strong hands and are being absorbed, but at Valka a new group of unwanted is developing. Nothing is being done about them. Although Radio Free Europe carefully does not urge Iron Curtain listeners to escape, its iteration of the attractions of freedom often stirs the discontented to seek it.

The second problem is what to do with the Sokolowskis, the 46,000 people left over from the early wave of D.P.s. TIME Bureau Chief Eric Gibbs cabled after touring the D.P. camps:

"We might as well face it honestly that these remaining D.P.s are for the most part no economic, social or political asset. There are a few good hewers of wood & drawers of water to be exported. The remaining people are liabilities, and the problem must be tackled in those terms. It is no good peering at their X-ray plates and exclaiming in horror, 'Oh, but this girl has active TB!' Of course she has. That is why she and her family are still rotting in Germany.

"What we are now faced with is frankly a salvage operation. The numbers are not so large that the whole Christian world could not handle the problem if the people were distributed among the nations."