Displaced Persons 1 of 3

The presence of foreign civilians (displaced persons / DPs) was a typical phenomenon in German cities in the aftermath of the war. When the war ended there were just under eleven million people who had come here due to persecution and terror during the German occupation in their homeland, or had been abducted to do forced labor. By far the largest group of DPs were former forced laborers. In the immediate aftermath of the war, they ended up in a vacuum in Heidelberg (and elsewhere), as the Germans no longer felt responsible for them, and the US soldiers took no notice of them in the first days after their arrival. While the former forced laborers no longer needed to do any work, they were still housed in camps (often the same ones as before) and at first received insufficient food supplies or clothing. The three largest DP camps in Heidelberg in 1945 were the Grenadier barracks in Kirchheim Way, the Baggerloch camp at the goods train station and the camp on the grounds of the Stotz-Kontakt company in Pfaffengrund. Heidelberg companies provided the camps with food, furniture and utensils that the military government had requisitioned or demanded from the city administration. DPs found work with the US occupant or with their former German employers if they had treated them well before.