Long before the Allies landed in Normandy in June 1944 and began their advance across France, preparations were underway for what to do about the civilians who had been displaced by the German occupiers. What everyone feared was a repeat of the chaos that followed the first world war, when refugees and returning prisoners of war brought with them typhus and a flu epidemic which, by the time it had spent itself, had killed more people than all the casualties of the war itself. What no one had envisaged, however, was either the number of displaced people adrift across Europe, nor the state that they would be in. And, as the Allies advanced, causing more destruction, so the numbers and the confusion grew.
There have been several recent books on the liberation of Europe, most notably William Hitchcock’s Liberation: Europe 1945, but Ben Shephard has kept his focus closely on the story of the 15 million people who needed repatriating and looking after.
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