Aliyah Bet was the code name given to illegal immigration by Jews, many of whom were refugees escaping from Nazi Germany or other Nazi-controlled countries, and later Holocaust survivors, to Mandatory Palestine between 1920 and 1948, in violation of the restrictions laid out in the British White Paper of 1939, which dramatically increased between 1939 and 1948. With the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948, Jewish displaced persons and refugees from Europe began streaming into the new state in the midst of the 1948 Palestine war.
Bricha, also called the Bericha Movement, was the underground organized effort that helped Jewish Holocaust survivors escape Europe post-World War II to the British Mandate for Palestine in violation of the White Paper of 1939. It ended when Israel declared independence and annulled the White Paper.
The Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry was a joint British and American committee assembled in Washington, D.C., on 4 January 1946. The committee was tasked to examine political, economic and social conditions in Mandatory Palestine and the well-being of the peoples now living there; to consult representatives of Arabs and Jews, and to make other recommendations 'as may be necessary' to for ad interim handling of these problems as well as for their permanent solution. The report, entitled "Report of the Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry Regarding the Problems of European Jewry and Palestine", was published in Lausanne, Switzerland on 20 April 1946.
Displaced persons camps in post–World War II Europe were established in Germany, Austria, and Italy, primarily for refugees from Eastern Europe and for the former inmates of the Nazi German concentration camps. A "displaced persons camp" is a temporary facility for displaced persons, whether refugees or internally displaced persons. Two years after the end of World War II in Europe, some 850,000 people lived in displaced persons camps across Europe, among them Armenians, Czechoslovaks, Estonians, Greeks, Bulgarians, Poles, Latvians, Lithuanians, Yugoslavs, Jews, Russians, Ukrainians, Hungarians, Kalmyks, and Belarusians.
Föhrenwald was one of the largest displaced persons camps in post-World War II Europe and the last to close, in 1957. It was located in the section now known as Waldram in Wolfratshausen in Bavaria, Germany.
Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp was a displaced persons (DP) camp for refugees after World War II, in Lower Saxony in northwestern Germany, southwest of the town of Bergen near Celle. It was in operation from the summer of 1945 until September 1950. For a time, Belsen DP camp was the largest Jewish DP camp in Germany and the only one in the British occupation zone with an exclusively Jewish population. The camp was under British authority and overseen by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) with camp directors that included Simon Bloomberg. Today, the camp is a Bundeswehr barracks, having been a British Army base until 2015.
Sh'erit ha-Pletah (Hebrew: שארית הפליטה, romanized: Sh'erit ha-Pletah, meaning surviving remnant, and is a term from the Book of Ezra and 1 Chronicles is a Hebrew term for the more than 250,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors living in Displaced Persons camps after the end of the Holocaust and Second World War, and the organisations they created to act on their behalf with the Allied authorities. These were active between 27 May 1945 and 1950–51, when the last DP camps closed.
Feldafing displaced persons camp in Bavaria was the first DP camp exclusively for use by liberated Jewish concentration camp prisoners. It was later used by Jewish refugees from the Russian-controlled Jewish areas. The camp was located in Feldafing's Höhenberg area and beyond.
Earl Grant Harrison was an American attorney, academic, and public servant. He worked on behalf of displaced persons in the aftermath of the Second World War, when he brought attention to the plight of Jewish refugees in a report, commonly known as the Harrison Report, that he produced for President Harry S. Truman. He was Dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School from 1944 to 1948. He also had a distinguished career as an attorney in the Philadelphia area and was a name partner in the law firm of Schnader Harrison Segal & Lewis LLP.
Holocaust survivors are people who survived the Holocaust, defined as the persecution and attempted annihilation of the Jews by Nazi Germany and its allies before and during World War II in Europe and North Africa. There is no universally accepted definition of the term, and it has been applied variously to Jews who survived the war in German-occupied Europe or other Axis territories, as well as to those who fled to Allied and neutral countries before or during the war. In some cases, non-Jews who also experienced collective persecution under the Nazi regime are considered Holocaust survivors as well. The definition has evolved over time.
Abraham Judah Klausner was a Reform rabbi and United States Army captain and chaplain who became a “father figure” for the more than 30,000 emaciated survivors found at Dachau Concentration Camp, 10 miles (16 km) northwest of Munich, shortly after it was liberated on April 29, 1945. He also cared for thousands more left homeless in camps as the victorious Allied Forces determined where they should go.
The Jewish insurgency in Mandatory Palestine, known in the United Kingdom as the Palestine Emergency, was a paramilitary campaign carried out by Zionist militias and underground groups—including Haganah, Lehi, and Irgun—against British rule in Mandatory Palestine from 1944 to 1948. The tensions between the Zionist underground and the British mandatory authorities rose from 1938 and intensified with the publication of the White Paper of 1939. The Paper outlined new government policies to place further restrictions on Jewish immigration and land purchases, and declared the intention of giving independence to Palestine, with an Arab majority, within ten years. Though World War II brought relative calm, tensions again escalated into an armed struggle towards the end of the war, when it became clear that the Axis powers were close to defeat.
The Displaced Persons Act of 1948 authorized, for a limited period of time, the admission into the United States of 200,000 certain European displaced persons (DPs) for permanent residence.
The One Million Plan was a strategic plan for the immigration and absorption of one million Jews from Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa into Mandatory Palestine, within a timeframe of 18 months, in order to establish a state in that territory. After being voted on by the Jewish Agency for Palestine Executive in 1944, it became the official policy of the Zionist leadership. Implementation of a significant part of the One Million Plan took place following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.
The Morrison–Grady Plan, also known as the Morrison Plan or the Provincial Autonomy Plan was a joint Anglo-American plan announced on 31 July 1946 for the creation of a unitary federal trusteeship in Mandatory Palestine.
Simon Bloomberg (1894–1981) CBE, was a Jewish humanitarian known for his work to resettle the displaced persons of Europe after World War II. He was the UNRRA Director of the Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp after World War II and European Director of the Jewish Relief Fund.
Between 1933 and 1945, a large number of Jews emigrated from Nazi Germany and German-occupied Europe. This exodus was triggered by the militaristic antisemitism perpetrated by the Nazi Party and by Germany's collaborators, ultimately culminating in the Holocaust. However, even before the genocide itself, which began during World War II, the Nazis had widely sponsored or enforced discriminatory practices—by legislation, in many cases—against Jewish residents, such as through the Nazi boycott of Jewish-owned businesses. Although Adolf Hitler and the German government were initially accepting of voluntary Jewish emigration from the country, it became difficult to find new host countries, particularly as the 1930s were marked by the Great Depression, as the number of Jewish migrants increased. Eventually, the Nazis forbade emigration; the Jews who remained in Germany or in German-occupied territory by this point were either murdered in the ghettos or relocated to be systematically exploited and murdered at dedicated concentration camps and extermination camps throughout the European continent.
The London Conference of 1946–1947, which took place between September 1946 and February 1947, was called by the British Government of Clement Attlee to resolve the future governance of Palestine and negotiate an end of the Mandate. It was scheduled following an Arab request after the April 1946 Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry report.
The end of the British Mandate for Palestine was formally made by way of the Palestine Act 1948 of 29 April. A public statement prepared by the Colonial and Foreign Office confirmed termination of British responsibility for the administration of Palestine from midnight on 14 May 1948.
Robert L. Hilliard is an American World War II veteran, activist, and academic of communication studies. During and directly after World War II, he informed American citizens and politicians of the plight of concentration camp survivors, and of those survivors taken to an unequipped hospital which was formerly St. Ottillien Monastery in the district of Landsberg, Oberbayern Germany. After the war, he became an accomplished academic, playwright, author, and professor of communications and journalism.
