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Paper 15-54R submitted to the Journal of Refugee Studies

Title: Humanitarian sentiment and forced repatriation: the administration of Hungarians in a post-war DP camp

AbstractThis article analyses the Quaker administration of Feffernitz Displaced Persons (DP) camp in post-war Austria under the authority of the British military government. Specifically, it seeks to understand how the Quaker relief agency responded to the question of forced repatriation, how these responses derived from its own ethical traditions and from the political and administrative context. It seeks to add to the historiography on relief agencies’ responses to the dilemmas of governing DP camps. Using the archives of the Society of Friends and the British Foreign Office, it looks at how the question of forced repatriation was understood and acted upon in Feffernitz DP camp. It is argued that Quaker ethical traditions combined with widely-held humanitarian sentiments and Western anti-communism to question the application of forced repatriation in this and other DP camps. The semi-independence of Quaker organizations from the government and the relief regime allowed them to protest aspects of forced repatriation in Feffernitz and elsewhere on an ad hoc basis. However, because of the Quakers’ focus on ethics rather than politics, their critique of the politics of repatriation was limited and was not formally articulated in public or at an organisational level. The article thus stresses the importance of contextual knowledge in refugee crises, in conjunction with ethical independence and reflexivity in dealing with fast-moving and uncertain situations.

Keywords: repatriation, Quakers, DPs, humanitarianism, relief, post-war

After the end of the Second World War, millions of soldiers and civilians were ‘displaced’ across Europe. The victorious powers devised a system of camps and organisations intended to return citizens to their countries or, in the case of Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans living outside of Germany) to Germany or Austria. The Yalta Conference of February 1945 set out the programme of population movement after the war, and necessitated displaced Soviet citizens be sent back to their countries regardless of their wishes. Force was not mentioned in this agreement, and neither did the allies anticipate that displaced persons, Soviet or otherwise, might not wish to return home (Boshyk 1988: 200). The British government initially used force to repatriate unwilling Soviet and Yugoslav citizens, but by early 1946 this policy had been reversed and the British officially rejected the use of force in repatriating DPs. While the negotiations of the Soviets and the West undoubtedly set key parameters of the situation, relief workers administering care and aiding repatriation also had a significant role in influencing this decision. (Salvatici 2012: 428).

The article considers how Quaker relief workers responded to the question of forced repatriation in one DP camp. My case study is the Feffernitz camp in the British zone of Austria, catering for Hungarians displaced after the war and run by the Friends’ Ambulance Unit under the jurisdiction of the Red Cross and British authorities. I centre on the question of ‘forced repatriation’, raised when the British authorities tried to encourage reluctant Hungarian DPs to return to Hungary in 1945-6. By looking at the components of the government position and the Quaker response, with comparison to other camps across Europe, the article shows how Quaker ethics interacted with the political situation and the international humanitarian apparatus, to produce particular stances. While on one level this was a political question, determined by decisions at Yalta and the burgeoning Cold War, I


argue that the response of humanitarian workers made an important contribution, at Feffernitz and elsewhere. Disentangling the threads of the Quaker response can help to illuminate the diverse influences on these decisions which ‘produced political and administrative experience which gave distinctive form to set of concepts defining refugees and delimiting organisational tasks.’ (Gordenker 1987: 19)

Quakers come from a distinctive religious tradition and have taken innovative positions in humanitarian work (Davis 1999;Hatton 1993;Gill 2009). With respect to refugees and displaced persons, Ilana Feldman has analysed the Quaker American Friends’ Service Committee (AFSC)’s work in post-war Gaza, focusing on how the group’s ethics interacted with the political determinants of the refugees’ situation. She argues that ‘[a]lthough neither AFSC volunteers nor the people they came to aid had the authority to determine humanitarian policy, their on-the-ground negotiations and interactions were crucial for shaping the refugee condition. Humanitarian practices were self-consciously narrow in their focus—intended to respond to immediate need, to avert full-blown crisis, rather than to define social policy—but their effects were often far reaching’, and that the AFSC in Gaza had ‘an acute awareness of the possible political effects of humanitarian intervention, although they were not in a position to foresee what all these effects might be’ (Feldman 2007a: 137). It is clear, therefore, that Quaker positions have and can shed important light on certain points in the history of humanitarianism and particularly on the question of relief agencies’ moral independence and the efficacy of humanitarian work in the face of ethical dilemmas.

The article on documents from the British national archives, as well as the private archive of Henry Headley, an FAU/BRC welfare officer in Feffernitz until mid-1946. Headley was a practising Quaker and had joined the FAU because he objected to military service. The archive includes theatre programmes from the camp, letters sent to the Red Cross, correspondence with another welfare officer who stayed later, John Strachan, as well as letters from some of the camp’s Hungarian residents to Headley.

The first section sketches the outlines of the displaced persons problem, and the situation in Feffernitz camp regarding forced repatriation. The second section outlines the status of the Hungarian DPs in the eyes of British policy and Quakers, asking how it contributed to the decisions made about them. The third section looks at the historiography on the Quaker repatriation policy, asking whether there was a Quaker position on repatriation, and how the issue was conceptualised. The final section considers the broader context of this decision in British and humanitarian policies and the governance of army and relief workers in this context.

IDisplaced person was a label given to those who were displaced from their countries by war, but presumed to want to return. The task for the militaries and voluntary organisations helping the DPs was simply to provide the means for them to return. At the end of the war, there were 137,700 Hungarians in the Western SHAEF (allied) zones of Austria (Proudfoot 1957: 227). Hungarians were ‘ex-enemy’ and so were not eligible for help from UNRRA (the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration), set up to provide civilian relief and repatriate millions of DPs, but were instead looked after by the British Military Government (Woodbridge et al. 1950: 491-2). The majority of DPs, including Hungarians, repatriated in 1945, but a so-called ‘hard core’ of DPs unwilling to return to newly communist countries remained into 1946, prompting the formation of the International Refugee Organization (IRO). The IRO took the place of UNRRA on 1 July 1947 and, unlike UNRRA, sought to


help those who were unwilling to repatriate because of ‘valid objections’: persecution by race, religion, nationality or political reasons, family, infirmness or illness. The Hungarians in Austria were not, however, eligible for IRO help and remained the charge of the British Military Government.i

While under the jurisdiction of the Military Government, Feffernitz was run by welfare officers from the British Friends Ambulance Unit (FAU), under the British Red Cross (BRC). The FAU was a Quaker-run body set up for conscientious objectors, often fulfilling the requirements of a conscientious objection tribunal, to undertake medical and relief work in the war. It worked more closely with the army than the other Quaker relief group, the Friends’ Relief Service, but shared the aim of presenting an alternative to war. In many fields of action, the FAU worked as part of Royal Army Medical Corps teams (the army medical services), or the Red Cross. They therefore did not have full autonomy in choosing how to undertake their work. About a quarter of FAU members transferred to UNRRA, the FAU post-war service, the Friends Relief Service or the Red Cross after their service was over (Davies 1947: 463). Its membership therefore can be said to have shared pacifist beliefs and broadly humanitarian ideals, while carrying out British policy. By 1946, thousands of Hungarians remained in the camp, unwilling to return to Hungary where the fascist government had been toppled, and where the Soviets were exerting increasing influence. On 14th February 1946, a British army officer visited the camp and told the Hungarians resident there, among other things, that ‘the U.N.O. vote against forced repatriation did not apply to enemy subjects’ and that ‘no exceptions’ would be made to the repatriation policy.ii This led to disquiet and threats of strikes by the inmates and action by the FAU.iii The camp’s British Red Cross (BRC) welfare officers (both FAU) knew from having spoken to army officers previously that British policy was not to use force (see below) and so found themselves in a dilemma, caused by what they described as a policy of ‘dishonest bluff.’ They sent a letter to the BRC headquarters in Klagenfurt:

At the present moment, when this question is put to use, we have only two alternatives:- either to say that we have no official information and that in any event repatriation policy concerns not us but the relevant DP authorities, or to say that we have information from the highest level in this country to the effect that the announced policy does not represent the true position and will in practise be modified.

This latter course we have been ordered not to adopt. The former course means that at least by implication we refer people to the announced policy which we believe is not the true one.Neither of us is prepared, even by implication, to commit perjury or to be associated with this policy of bluff and we only put up with this intolerable position for the moment in the confident expectation that HQ will clear up the matter in the immediate future.

Should, however, MG declare that after all they propose to adhere to a policy of what we regard as undue pressure an entirely new situation will arise calling for action the nature of which need not be indicated here, as, in our opinion, in addition to the humanitarian aspect of the matter, such a policy would be at variance with the said UNO resolution of 9 February, the terms of which are not in our possession, and certainly with British policy as set out by the Lord Chancellor in the House of Lords on 30 January.iv

It is not clear whether the officer who had visited the camp was intentionally deceiving the Hungarians, or whether he had misinterpreted the policy.v He was corrected on this matter by his superior on the following day.vi Weeks later, this was further clarified by the Foreign Office: ‘Foreign Office policy regarding the Hungarians is that members of armed forces who


fought with Germans against Soviet should be sent back without reference to their wishes but force is not repeat not to be used.’vii It is possible to discern several strands leading to this somewhat uncertain decision not to use force.

IIThe Yalta agreement on Soviet citizens did not apply to Hungarians, but a general assumption of allied policy was that DPs should return and that ex-enemy citizens be given less consideration. Thus, on 24 November 1945 General Richard McCreery, Commander-in-Chief of the British Forces in Austria, suggested to the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) that ‘all Hungarians, Romanians and “stubborn Soviets” must be repatriated by using force.’ (Cseresnyés 1995: 60) In practice, there was room for negotiation of the category of ex-enemy, and of what help the British authorities should provide. Many of the Hungarians in Austria were soldiers and their families who had retreated with the German army at the end of the war. Many were sent to Feffernitz camp, although significant numbers remained camped outside. Enemy combatants were meant to go into prisoner of war camps, but these Hungarians included women and children, and ‘the army were aghast at taking such gipsies into PW camps’ and so allowed for the possibility of them becoming DPs as the 1945 winter came on.viii

In September 1945 Foreign Office policy was that Hungarians who had played an ‘active or prominent’ part on the side of Germany should be repatriated regardless of their or the Hungarian government’s wishes.ix While initially the British attempted to root out Hungarian soldiers, this plan was abandoned in 1946 as the Hungarians started to return to Hungary (Cseresnyés 1995: 60). The question of war guilt seems to have been superseded by the desire to rid themselves of the economic burden of Hungarian DPs. Alongside this, in the British administration, the shift from POW to DP had made repatriation less certain, with the British Military Mission in Hungary asking in February 1946, ‘[a]re we now to understand that surrendered personnel by being converted to DP status regain the right to OPT whether or no they will return HUNGARY.’x The question was understandable given the ambiguity in the order from the Allied command in Austria that: ‘members of armed forces who fought with the Germans against the Soviet can be sent back without reference to their wishes. No force or pressure should be used to compel ordinary Hungarians to return.’xi The order did not say whether force would be used on members of the armed forces, although it implies that it could. We can see that uncertainty remained because the telegram in reply ran: ‘If suggested policy is adopted those Hungarians will be the only persons against whom force is to be used. Most of those still remaining have Wives and Families with them and are unwilling to return to Hungary.’xii The reply suggests that the presence of wives and children had made the Hungarians ‘ordinary’ and that they therefore should not be subject to force.

As well as wives and families, the status of Hungarians was shaped by notions of war guilt. This, though, is only mentioned once in the records of the welfare officer Henry Headley. When proposing a ‘declaration to all Hungarians in Austria’ to be used by the British authorities, he stated ‘[a]ny war criminals or prominent national socialists need not think that by remaining here they will escape justice. Britain and Russia are allies and it is no intention of the British to protect Hungarians from any action which the Russians may see fit to take. Justice in equal measure will be accorded to them whether they remain here or return to Hungary.’ In fact, through 1946 and 1947 the negative consequences of communism on returning DPs are instead stressed by the FAU/BRC welfare officer, John Strachan who argued that ‘something is very wrong with [Hungary] which is getting worse not better’.xiii


In reality the Hungarian DPs in Austria had a variety of backgrounds. The ‘vast majority fled before the Soviet advance’, but comprised several different groups. Szalasy, Hungary’s pro-Nazi leader, had evacuated government workers, members of the fascist Arrow Cross organisation and paramilitaries. Hungarian troops fighting with the axis retreated with German forces, while upper and middle class individuals fled the Soviet army independently. In addition, early 1946 saw Smallholders Party and Socialist Party politicians flee political repression (Vernant 1953: 70-71). Many were escaping justice, and the Allies handed 312 war criminals to the Hungarian government by August 1946, although they were hard to find amongst the hundreds of thousands of DPs. Questions of war guilt are of course complicated, and it is difficult to trace the careers of Feffernitz residents specifically, but it is almost certain that the camp included collaborators with the Horthy and Szalazy regimes, and perhaps war criminals (Deak 2000). Yet as Soviet-backed communists began to take control of Hungary after 1946, ‘the line between people imprisoned for war crimes and those charged with other antiregime activities disappeared’ (Kenez 2006: 145-149), meaning that while many of the Hungarians may have been guilty of some degree of collaboration many, others nevertheless would have had legitimate reasons to fear the new regime.

Information on the residents of Feffernitz is relatively sparse. According to a diplomat who inspected the camp in 1946, they ‘were largely army officers and middle-class, professional men, accompanied in a surprising number of instances by their wives and families.’xiv To give an individual example, in the account of a recent book tracing the path of one Feffernitz resident, Tibor Zoltai, from Hungary to the US, at least one Feffernitz resident had been a counter espionage officer in fascist Hungary, another a major-general. The author recounts that on 30 May 1946 the ‘British military police conducted their first raid in the Feffernitz camp, looking for high-level Hungarian officers.’ On the other hand Tibor Zoltai, the book's protagonist, had been conscripted into the German army at age 20, before surrendering to American troops. After spending time in a POW camp, he was released and found his way to Feffernitz in search of his father, demonstrating a less straightforward enemy status (Gogins 2009).

A letter from the Hungarians thus put their problem before the authorities, appealing to Churchill’s condemnation of communist repression, distinguishing themselves from war criminals, and seeking to place themselves in a category worthy of Western citizenship:

Acting for the children and mothers of the Hungarian camp of displaced persons at Feffernitz we ask with the deepest respect for the making possible the postponement of our transport by force to Hungary, planned in the next days, to the time after the peace treatment soon hoped.

Most of the Hungarians will return in that time by their own free will. For the remaining little minority not hoping the possibility of existence in the shrank Hungary, we ask for be settled in one of the Dominions in the British Commonwelth [sic].

For our families being to the intellectual classes there is no guarantee to found home in the Eastern sphere of Europe of to day. We are a part of the Hungarians of democratic view. But we have in front of us the word of W. Churchill addressed to the House of Commons /10.August 1946/ “At present there are millions of humble homes in Europe where fear is the main preoccupation of family life...”

We have enjoid [sic] the protection of the army of your majesty untill [sic] now too. Now we are asking for the protection of Your Majesty. We hope we could be useful citisiens [sic] of the British Commonwealth. Of cours [sic] our request belongs to the Hungarians who are no “war-criminels” [sic]. xv


As well as the FAU, this was supported by the Red Cross worker, Frank Otten, who ‘said that he had every reason to believe that these Hungarians would on their return to Hungary be victims of persecution and imprisonment’ and that he expected many would resist forced repatriation and try to escape or commit suicide.xvi Such protests, then, defined the Hungarians as victims of circumstance, and sought to offer them an escape. But these complex backgrounds – what the Hungarians did in the war, why they left Hungary, and what might happen to them if they returned – were only partially and imperfectly reflected in the evolving post-war refugee regime.

IIIThis section looks at the resources used by the FAU in protesting the possibility of forced repatriation for the Hungarians, in order to put the episode into the context of Quaker relief work. The Quakers and the FAU had no policy on repatriation and made ad hoc responses as the situation evolved. This can be seen from a note by Henry Headley, undated but presumably written after he had returned to Britain in the second half of 1946 and before the work of the IRO had begun. Headley was not a professional relief worker, having come to the FAU because of conscription requirements, but his dilemmas were common to many relief workers (Pettiss and Taylor 2004: 172-175).

Origin of D.P. problemThose displaced by Germans for work in war “ ” behind retreating armies “ “ before advancing armies12,000,000. First few months 11,000,000 repatriated

Good job by troops of occupationfound that some would not go homePrinciple established of no forceSemi permanent D.P. problem arose+ V.D. refugees expelled from Russian occupied countries

M.G. faced with problemM.G. to admin camps. Germans to be responsible.

Comparison with Ashford [Ashford was the home town of the relief officer, Hothfield a nearby village]

Camp at Hothfield. Polish M.G. Irish DPsPay roll, food, camp supplieswood for fuelJust living doing nothingReaction of Ashford people. ditto GermansB.R.C. racket busting

There is problem for last nearly 2 yearsFuture I.R.O.Under discussion already for over 1 yrInternational matter. Clash betweenWestern humanitarian attitude &Russian “send them home”


EmigrationFor their own benefit that problemshould be settled

Not for nations to simplypick & choose what they fancyBad for countriesBad for D.P. communities to bedeprived of their ablest membersLarge underdeveloped countriesmight aid settlement of groupsof one or more different nationalitiesStill maintain their own culture &national interestsNoticeable [?] in camps.Future in hands of I.R.O.

Pretty nebulous [?] future I hope [?] something happens quicklyxvii

The FAU welfare officers made some efforts to help some of the Hungarians – seemingly those who had jobs for the Red Cross within the camp, or who they had made friends with – resettle in England. Henry Headley, after returning to England, wrote letters to Cyril Dumpleton MP (also a Quaker) in the hope that the politician would visit Feffernitz, although it is not clear whether this was so that the MP could see the low rations or assess the repatriation situation.xviii He corresponded with Thomas Szabo, a Hungarian representative in London, on behalf of two of the Hungarians in the camp, Mr Frigyes Rattky and Mr. Stephen Nagy-György.xix Nevertheless, there was no policy as such, and Headley’s note on the DP problem clearly shows that there was considerable uncertainty as to what options the international system would offer the Hungarians.

What role did Quaker principles have on the situation, and what assessments did Quakers make of their work? In the case discussed here, all of the Quaker workers were conscientious objectors fulfilling the British government’s requirement for alternative service. They saw their relief work not only as a necessary part of the war effort, but also as a way of enacting their religious and pacifist principles. The Unit came from a Quaker tradition of relief in war, first institutionalised in the Franco-Prussian War, which aimed to distinguish itself from the Red Cross (and its predecessor, the British National Society for Aid to the Sick and Wounded in War), which it saw as abetting militarism (Gill 2009). The Unit was largely a vehicle for conscientious objectors to undertake pacifist work while also sharing some of the burdens with the soldiers but as Meyer shows in the First World War, it sometimes sat uneasily between a humanitarian independence and co-operation with the wartime state (Meyer 2015).

Yet this tradition of independence did not necessarily entail distinct policies on displaced persons. Carson has analysed the role of the ‘Quaker internationalist tradition’ in post-war DP camps in Germany (run by the related Friends’ Relief Service). She argues that ‘[u]nlike other organisations engaged in post-war relief and reconstruction, the Quakers demonstrated an impressive degree of self-awareness’. However, this took a religious form and the organisation she studied ‘did not judge its actions in Germany on whether they had provided solutions to the problems of post-war Europe but focused their judgement on whether they had made adequate witness to the principle of Christian love.’(Carson 2009: 81) Indeed,


Quaker writings on relief from the time shed light on Quaker ethics, and their stances to war, relief and refugees (Wilson 1949: 286), but Quaker responses, while somewhat independent, were significantly shaped by the administrative imperatives of their job, as well as widely held ‘humanitarian’ principles both within the British administration and the newly formed international apparatus to deal with the post-war situation (Cohen 2011b;Gemie 2012) as much as by these ethics.

This is evident from how the group narrated the history of their work in the immediate aftermath of the war. The FAU’s official history, published in 1947 and written by Arfor Tegla Davies, gives almost no attention to the question of forced repatriation. Although there is some assessment of the successes and failures of their work and, in particular, criticisms of the ration scale and non-fraternisation rule, Corsellis, another Quaker relief worker writing in the 1990s, complains that the official account only gives a few lines to the forced repatriation is Austria (Corsellis 1995: 354). Partly this is because the issue was not part of public discourse at the time. Nikolai Tolstoy’s work criticising the Allies’ forced repatriation of displaced persons was only published in the 1970s because of the release of official documents, and these revelations are what prompted Corsellis to write his book (Tolstoy 1977). It is clear that in the 1940s, the FAU conceptualised their humanitarianism largely within existing frameworks set by the Allied powers, but also with some reference to their own ideals and the appeals of displaced persons in the camps they ran. There was, however, no clear-cut and unambiguous rejection of forced repatriation as a matter of policy or advocacy.

For example, John Corsellis, who was working for the FAU in Carinthia (Austria), recounted how relief workers’ protests had stopped forced repatriations of Yugoslavians:

This is the only occasion of which I am aware, where the threat of a strike by a team of civilian relief workers – half of whom were conscientious objectors – in conjunction with the protests of the refugees themselves, succeeded in persuading the all-powerful army to cancel elaborate plans it had made to send the refugees back – not just the 6,000 at Viktring, this reversal was to affect all Yugoslav refugees in Austria, Italy and possibly Germany (Corsellis, quoted in Smith 1998: 305).

Corsellis stressed the informality of the army structure, along with the democratic structure of the refugees and the protests made by various army officers and relief workers, as well as the policy of allowing voluntary societies to act as relief workers, as positive factors (Corsellis 1995: 354). This is echoed in the FAU official history which relates how ‘in the early days of confusion the Red Cross and the Unit has been able to supply evidence which resulted in prompt and effective action in preventing forcible repatriation and the transfer of sick persons who were not fit to travel.’ (Davies 1947: 449) In this account the decision to repatriate was the result of confusion (there was no direct order), and overturning the decision was simply a matter of relaying the refugees’ wish not to be repatriated. Tegla Davies account perhaps overemphasises the strength of staff protest and the neutrality of the relief effort, especially since not all FAU members protested forced repatriation (McClelland 1997: 27).

Neither was official Quaker policy clear. The FAU’s Dennis Connolly writes of an army officer’s reluctance to forcibly repatriate Russians on the grounds that ‘he had not fought the Gestapo successfully in order to have to use their methods.’ Connolly ‘reported this conversation to someone in the FAU in London, but unfortunately all he wrote back was a letter thanking [him] for writing about “conditions in Austria.”’ Better results were achieved through independent action, for example when Connolly falsified the papers of a Russian-


Ukrainian (Smith 1998: 308-309). These reports agree that central decision-making was somewhat ambiguous or slow, leaving scope for interpretation by the relief workers or army dealing with the displaced persons. Quaker policy on this matter was in practice made on a case-by-case basis.

In their letter protesting the army’s methods, the FAU stressed the importance of treating the inmates as ethical actors (Feldman 2007b: 699), but, crucially, it was linked to a political framework – the UNO and government statements – which they could invoke. It was important for one of the officers that the other was a lawyer and so could ‘get at the guts’ of the UN resolution that they have ‘got hold’ of.xx This suggests that the actual status of the inmates was still somewhat precarious and that if the FAU did not have copies of the UN report, newspapers or legal expertise, then the rules could have been enacted differently. Cohen notes that liberal internationalism was evident among many relief workers (Cohen 2011b: 63). He also suggests that ‘the governance of “Europe on the move” by humanitarian agencies put into practice a wide array of human rights norms enunciated or declared under the aegis of the United Nations.’ (Cohen 2011a: 61) However, while such views among relief workers, and protections in the international sphere, were clearly evident, they were not connected in all cases. Neither legal norms nor Quaker ethics offered full and unambiguous protection.

IVWhat factors determined the viability of the Hungarians’ protest, and what possible solutions were there? Political fears like the Hungarians’ had not been anticipated in 1945 and therefore did not have any legal basis at first, but were accepted in early 1946.xxi In a recent book on the history of repatriation, Katy Long argues of the decision to abandon the use of force in repatriating displaced persons:

In the face of violent resistance and suicide, the realpolitik that had motivated the Allied governments' decisions to adopt a policy of forcible repatriation was increasingly difficult to reconcile with political principle, particularly given the projection of the recent war as a battle for the liberal freedoms of mankind (Long 2013: 64).

On 30 January 1946, the UK Overseas Reconstruction Committee questioned the use of force and suspended it, pending investigation. On 12 February 1946, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 8(I). This was the ‘first explicit codification of the idea of voluntary repatriation as a bulwark against forcible return and was clearly articulated as a direct response to the forcible returns of Soviet refugees to the authoritarian Stalinist state.’ The resolution stated that 'no refugees or displaced persons who have finally and definitely expressed valid objections to returning to their countries of origin shall be compelled to return,’ only excluding 'war criminals, quislings and traitors.’ This resolution helped bring UK policy in line with the US policy of not using force, but in practice force continued in some instances (Long 2013: 64-65).

The decision had a strong political dimension in the context of the burgeoning Cold War. Western policy diverged from Soviet policy in that Western countries, and the IRO, allowed for legitimate reasons for citizens to seek exile whereas the Soviet Union, fearing a loss of population, argued that a good citizen would want to return, and that only war criminals would seek exile. In this context, ‘[r]efugee return assumed a new importance as a cipher for much deeper ideological conflict about the nature of citizenship, individual freedoms, and collective responsibility.’ According to Long, as much as a humanitarian policy, ‘[t]he West's


insistence on “voluntariness” was thus a deliberate politicization of the post-war European displacement crisis’ specifically aimed at the USSR (Long 2013: 68-69;Salomon 1991).

British government policy followed American policy and public opinion in ending the use of force to repatriate in early 1946. Yet by the beginning of 1946 the pace of repatriations had slowed. There were roughly 7,500 Hungarians left in the British zone of Austria who did not wish to be repatriated (Cseresnyés 1995: 64). Contrary to the Foreign Office, the British Command in Germany and Austria ‘was convinced that if no pressure were exerted on the displaced persons to return, these people would prefer to remain in the camps’ (Kochavi 1991: 378). Then in the winter of 1946-7, economic hardship in Britain, including the rationing of bread in July 1946, and the difficulty of getting other countries to agree to take DPs, led the Foreign Office to seek to ‘goad the displaced persons into going back, and to do this by affecting their standard of living.’ (Kochavi 1991: 378-379)

This seems to have been the case in Feffernitz. According to a letter from one FAU welfare officer, the food ration was cut to 700-750 calories in May 1946.

Tomorrow there is another train laid on to Hungary and so this last half of the week has been pretty busy. About 1100 people will leave and I understand that about another 200 would leave if there was place for them on the train. Again it is almost certain that the food situation has persuaded so many people to return. ... It is a pitiful sight to see men, women and children struggling with their luggage and cramming it into cattle trucks which have to take over 40 persons.xxii

It is worth noting that British officials explicitly denied that this was policy, a memo in late 1946 stating: ‘[i]n conformity with the policy of getting Hungarians repatriated and discouraging their stay in DP Camps, no effort was made by Adv Ech to foster camp industries, other than to show interest in their very good exhibitions. The shortage of basic food however is not in keeping with policy.’xxiii However deliberate, the policy had some effect, and by July 1946 the number of Hungarians in Feffernitz had fallen to 2,000.xxiv In 1946 the British supplied six trains to return Hungarians to Hungary and in that year altogether 5,979 Hungarians left the British zone (Cseresnyés 1995: 62). The lowering of rations in summer 1946 appears to be the fullest extent of British pressure on the Hungarians. Subsequently Feffernitz rations were supplemented by June 1946 by about ‘1000 food parcels and 30,000 kilograms of potatoes from Switzerland’, prompted by the welfare officer's writing of a report on poor nutrition in the camp.xxv

In June 1947 Austrian and Hungarian organisations stopped the organised repatriation of those Hungarians who remained in the occupied zone (Cseresnyés 1995: 64) Of those who did not return to Hungary following the British authorities’ reduction of food rations, evidence is fragmentary. One resident, Lewis Gruber, found work in Scotland.xxvi His sister married a British corporal, ‘Sid’, and moved to England.xxvii The father of Catholic Relief worker Brenda Minch, ‘a very big business man’, apparently guaranteed work for two Hungarians seeking to get to England.xxviii Some Hungarians used personal contacts to arrange for work and papers to move abroad (Gogins 2009: 116, 142). According to the Austrian government, there were 689 inmates in Kellerberg, the camp to which the Hungarians were moved in early 1947, as of April 1950.xxix Overall, Proudfoot states that 62,001 Hungarians were resettled in the non-communist world between 1 July 1947 and 31 December 1951 (Proudfoot 1957: 427).


As this change in policy suggests, British reasoning evinced a mixture of humanitarian and national concerns – the desire to reduce the drain on national resources, as well as to distinguish their policy from communist methods. Entitlement to care was understood through a national lens, as well as the more specific categories of DP and refugee. In June 1946, a Foreign Office report stated that the question of how to treat DPs who were unwilling to repatriate had not been clearly laid down. The report claimed that this left the Military Government with a situation where they were providing many who had fought against the British with a level of material well-being greater than that of those who had repatriated and of the local population, as well as relieving them of the need to work.xxx

Broadly speaking, the FAU agreed with the national-economic principles of repatriation. The FAU commander at Feffernitz wrote that ‘the Russian occupation and the economic situation’ were ‘probably no doubt something to be avoided if possible but probably greatly exaggerated in these people’s minds . . . Hungary is the home of the Hungarians, the conditions prevailing there are something about which the British can do nothing and they must take the rough with the smooth along with all the rest of the Hungarians.’ This view had consequences for the provision of relief. Having ‘come here quite unasked and uninvited’, they should not expect ‘to be housed, fed off the slender resources of the Austrian nation.’xxxi It suggests uncertainty about the extent of repression in Hungary (hence the crossed out probably), as well as an idea of national community.

While they were subordinate to national policy, the FAU’s approach, and their on-the-ground perspective, meant that they sometimes questioned this policy. For example, when attempting to solve personal problems for the inmates, one FAU officer wrote that ‘[i]n most cases the answer is NO but one has to find out first of all if it really is no and whether there might be any chance of it being yes.’xxxii On the question of resettlement, the FAU worker suggested the setting up of a panel, including Hungarian representatives, to consider applications to remain in Hungary, and the creation of criteria for decisions.xxxiii Combined with the national parameters of the situation, it also meant telling the inmates, honestly, that, after a certain time, ‘no Hungarian...can expect to receive food or accommodation in Austria and the camps will be closed down.xxxiv This letter was written in response to what the FAU saw as the British Army’s ‘dishonest’ policy, suggesting the importance in this situation of an organisation with goals independent from the government, deriving from an independent moral tradition. As Salvatici argues, ‘relief officers sought to shape a common “humanitarian narrative” for their work, one which contrasted starkly with military behaviour.’ (Salvatici 2012: 435). While the humanitarian concern for the Hungarians was tempered by a conscious realism and a notion of national duty, the FAU nevertheless sought to enact a role that was independent from the military authorities and which dealt honestly with, and represented the wishes of, the DPs.

FAU methods still did not fit the government’s political ends, though, so that even when the Military Government worked with transparency and sought to meet DPs’ wishes, their methods still reflected their broader goals. The authorities made various attempts to create an atmosphere where ‘the word “repatriation” would always be in evidence.’xxxv This was not always concordant with relief workers’ methods and an army report suggested that relief workers’ ‘sympathy’, ‘rehabilitation schemes’ and ‘political and professional self-interest’ held up repatriation. It also cited a need for’ reliable knowledge’ to ‘offset [the] many alarming letters that [reached] DPs’ from the eastern countries.xxxvi Hungarian committees were only to be permitted if they had an encouraging attitude towards repatriation.xxxvii Similarly, officials made efforts to counter allegations made by repatriated Hungarians,


accusing the camp representatives of being ‘enemies of the people’.xxxviii As Salvatici notes, for the national authorities, ‘[r]epatriation was considered to be a welfare activity and it implied both organizing the departure of the DPs, and persuading them to depart... All the schemes for working with displaced persons were judged in terms of their probable effect on repatriation, but the criteria for this varied.’ Some relief workers were unhappy with this emphasis and ‘felt they were caught in a system beyond their control.’ (Salvatici 2012: 437)

The British attitude was determined by their aims and jurisdiction, but also by the methods they used. In terms of pure humanitarian concerns, it was often officers’ desire not to have to repatriate that was considered as much as the feelings of the DPs: ‘an attempt to use force on these people would be morally indefensible,...impossible to carry out...and lastly, would be placing a most unpleasant task on the British troops’xxxix This is perhaps why the threats to strike made by the workers in Corsellis’ account were effective in translating it into policy. So the FAU’s individual care was important, but was only effective because of the way the British army managed its personnel and their morale. As Rose argues, '[i]n this period ‘the “attitude survey” or “morale survey” became a key device for making the subjective world of citizens, employees, voters, and so forth, inscribable and calculable’ (Rose 1999: 28). In the military government’s documents force was not initially mentioned in all cases – but it was used or attempted as a consequence of policy outcomes. By translating their humanitarian role into protests, and thus as aspect of British management, the relief workers helped to change British policy on repatriation.

ConclusionThe article has addressed the relationship between Quaker humanitarianism and the politics of displaced persons. Humanitarianism – in the form of staff ideals and motivations, linked to international agreements – was a partially effective way to protest and mould political projects that did not necessarily have the needs of the DPs as their main goal. At the same time, compassion for the DPs and an interest in solving their problems fell a long way short of having the necessary means to do this fully in the case of those being forcibly repatriated. The desire to help Displaced Persons was necessarily enmeshed within the apparatus of camps and citizenship rights, and thus it is not possible to distinguish a purely ‘humanitarian’ viewpoint on the situation from the political parameters of citizenship. The FAU could only protest forced repatriation but they neither had an overall policy on forced repatriation, nor did all Quakers protest the process. This is true even though Quakers went further, in theory at least, than many humanitarians in seeking to attack the ‘root causes’ of war and displacement, having come to humanitarian work from a distinct religious perspective that questioned more utilitarian methods of relief and instead emphasised Christian love and motivations, a perspective that may in fact have discouraged political analysis (Wilson 1949;Jahn 1947). Quakerism did not provide a fully unique perspective on the issue of repatriation, in fact sharing many aims and methods with other humanitarians and military authorities – including a desire not to forcibly repatriate (Wyman 1998: 69).

Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of the Quaker perspective was not then ideological, but rather sociological and organizational. While, as has been stated, many Quakers shared both a humanitarian view that was tentatively against forced repatriation and a nationally based pro-repatriation policy view with British authorities, their relative organizational and ideological independence perhaps gave them greater ability to translate this into action. That is to say that their coming from a distinct religious group, while not providing them with a radically different method of humanitarian relief, prompted greater independence and reflexivity, and thus a greater possibility to critique unsatisfactory arrangements such as


forced repatriation. Indeed the issue of how ‘more “political” decisions concerning positioning and medical priorities [can be] diluted’ when relief is administered on a large scale remains pertinent to the present, and is central in the history of Médecins sans frontieres, for example (Brauman 2008: 8). The Quakers’ tradition of semi-independence from both national governments and humanitarian organizations pre-dated the events described in the article, and was itself a useful resource. Their position on forced repatriation therefore cannot be understood as a straightforward expression of Quaker ethics, which lacked systematic analysis of this question, but the possibility of a Quaker position, at least partially independent of the national, one offered an important space for critique.

In looking to create independent, ethical positions, humanitarian organisations are increasingly investing in reflecting on their work. Borton and Davey argue that history can provide important contextual information for humanitarians, as well as an improved strategic sense of change (Borton and Davey 2015: 154). Indeed, as the 2015 ‘refugee crisis’ in the European Union demonstrates, history shapes the perception of refugees and the right to asylum. The contested history of Hungary as a site for displacement in the twentieth century is central to understanding refugee crises originating or occurring in the country. With the shrinking of the country after the Trianon treaty in 1921, Hungary became a willing destination for Hungarians who found themselves living in other states (Mocsy 1983); conversely, Hungary became an exporter of refugees after 1945 and particularly 1956, but it was only the latter case, amplified by television footage, that won the world’s sympathy. The status of refugees has been shaped by political narratives since this time (Cohen, 2011b). In the case of Hungarians in 1945-7, the political history of Hungary as a fascist state, then victim of Soviet communism, was pivotal to shaping the viability of the Hungarians’ desire to emigrate. Such ideas fed into the categories of ex-enemy and displaced person which went a long way to determining the Hungarians’ futures, suggesting the importance of contextual knowledge in negotiating not only the complexities of the system of refugee law, but the complicated social realities and political contexts to which it is being applied.

Aside from contextual knowledge, Davey and Borton argue that ‘[h]istorical methods...provide an analytical tool that, in evaluating outcomes and emphasizing contingency, has much to offer programmes undertaken in complex settings such as conflicts and natural disasters’ (Borton and Davey 2015: 154). In this way, history does not provide lessons from the past, but a broader awareness and sense of change. The number of displaced persons in 1945, as in 2015, was greater than existing systems and norms could easily accommodate, leading to a need for new solutions. The Feffernitz case shows aid workers thinking on the job and reacting to new problems with only incomplete solutions from ‘the system’. A sense of history therefore provides a valuable resource in helping to turn ethical concerns into practical criticisms and policies.

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