If you need me to elaborate, just ask, but I am wondering how people who had become lost or were misplaced somehow found their families or were able to travel back to where they had to be. Europe is a big place to get lost in, and I am wondering how all of the mess was organised. I do understand that the Red Cross would have had some effect, but what else? How did the RC do it?
There were camps for Displaced Persons, operated and funded by the Allied governments. In theory, everyone was supposed to merely stop off on their way home for a few days. But it became much more complex, and many stayed for years. There were Jews not eager to return to Poland, Germany, etc. trying by any means necessary to get to Israel. There were Ukrainians who'd fought for the Axis, or even liberated Russian POW's , unwilling to go back to the USSR and have to explain themselves to Stalin, balanced against Allied POW's liberated by Russian soldiers being used by Stalin to leverage the return of those POW's and turncoats. There were Czechs, Slovaks, Serbs, Croats, Poles, Hungarians, Romanians, etc. who did not want to trade at least a basic life in DP camp for a very hard , possibly very repressive life in a newly-Communist country. And in England, the US, France, there were very war-weary populations reluctant to be paying for the camps, and in war-ravaged Germany no money for them either; but at least, that got better, as the US realized it had no choice but to fund the rebuilding of Europe. A great deal of effort was required to secure guarantees that returnees would not be harmed, and an equal amount of effort was required to push some DP's out of the camps. It was a messy process, and some parts of it ( like sending unwilling Russian and Ukrainian soldiers back to almost certain execution in Russia) are still very controversial. Perhaps it is not surprising that a few DP camps actually existed until quite late- into the 1960's.
Excellent book on this- Tony Judt's Postwar.
Yeah, please elaborate a little. Are you talking about POWs or people in concentration camps or just normal citizens displaced due to fighting?