The war's devastation included an estimated 11 million people who remained uprooted from their home countries. Among them were former German prisoners of war, released slave laborers, and concentration-camp survivors (a large number of whom were Jewish). Confronting the immense task of helping these needy people, the Allies classified the refugees as "displaced persons" (DPs) and made the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) responsible for them. At first, the UNRRA lacked sufficient personnel for this task, so much of the work involved in aiding the DPs fell to Allied military units.

In the spring of 1945, about seven million DPs were in Occupied Germany. Gradually most went home, but more than a million were unwilling or unable to return to their native lands. They included about 50,000 Jews, as well as hundreds of Roma and Sinti (Gypsies) recently liberated from the concentration camps. Some non-Jews feared retaliation for their Nazi collaboration. Others feared persecution by Communist states.

Jewish Holocaust survivors typically faced different dilemmas, as they could not return to their former homes because those homes no longer existed. The few Eastern European Jews who went home often experienced renewed antisemitism and found their property in the unfriendly hands of former neighbors.

Liberation left the Jewish survivors less than free. Most were in poor health and plagued by horrific memories and nightmares. Jews found some relatives and friends alive, but more often they were struck with the news that loved ones had perished.