Ok, so initially there's a bit of a grey area when you talk about "liberated," because liberation wasn't something that happened overnight. Camps were liberated at different times, and in some cases retreating Nazi forces made deliberate efforts to clean out the camps or prisoners prior to surrendering them. Allied liberated camps had different outcomes than soviet camps etc.
Because it's the easiest example, imagine you were a jewish man at Buchenwald or the Ohrdruf sub-camp, one of the earlier camps liberated by the allies. The easiest thing to do is just walk you through the rough timeline.
Allied forces take control of the Buchenwald camp on April 5, 1945 after german forces retreat from the area.
Based on numerous concerns, Allied military officers have inmates of the camp stay "incarcerated." until they can be medically stabalized and a determination can be made on what to do with them. The allies do bring in medical personnel and food supplies to begin treating the prisoners. For the first several weeks, hundreds of prisoners would continue to die daily. Gradually conditions improved in the camps, although only to a point.
For our hypothetical prisoner from Buchenwald, you probably continue to live at Buchenwald for another 2-3 months perhaps, being fed allied military rations and being treated by allied doctors. you'll slowly regain some semblance of health
After the war ended the Allied Command faced the monumental task of repatriating some 7 million displaced persons within Europe. This included both Ethnic Germans that had settled in other parts of Europe as well as concentration camp survivors, refugees and others. Allied policy was generally to attempt to repatriate as many of these persons as possible. However, because the task could not be accomplished instantly, displaced persons camps were established in europe these were refugee camps intended to house displaced persons, which included holocaust survivors as well as eastern Europeans.
On October 1, 1945, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Programme is formally given legal control over the displaced persons program. However, the UNRRA is widely seen as having been under-staffed and under funded, and conditions in DP camps often were poor at best.
Based on allied and UNRRA policy, once you were healthy, would be moved to a "displaced persons" camp to be repatriated to your country of origin probably sometime between July and November 1945. If you were Jewish you would most likely be moved into a camp in the US controlled section of occupied germany. The UNRRA to avoid charges of discrimination, specifically did not create any special policies towards jewish displaced persons However, this was later changed and jewish survivors were given some special accomodations in terms of being grouped together.
Those displaced persons would could be repatriated (germans, western europeans, and the like) were quickly repatriated, leaving the bulk of the persons in DP camps to be eastern Europeans (Poles, Ukranians etc) and jews who could not be repatriated to their countries of origin. Particularly if you were from an area that was now occupied by the Russians, you aren't likely to be forced to return.
Rather, you will have at least a temporarily uncertain future, and will continue to live in the displaced persons camp in occupied germany for a number of months or years. You are likely living in housing built by the US military or UNRRA, and fed by either US military or UNRRA personnel. Conditions are poor at best, and downright abysmal at worst, with refugees living in cramped overcrowded housing and being fed insufficient food.
Gradually, private aid agencies will step in to provide solutions to the problems, but they had limited impact. Many of these private aid agencies were juewish centric agencies.
Conditions were made worse by further refugees fleeing soviet bloq countries. Between 1945 and 1948 there was an even larger percentage of Jewish refugees coming into DP camps, to the point where in 1948, an allied military commander closed the borders to further refugees, although the orders were not ironclad and many continued to come. This is a review of a book on the refugee crisis after WWII in general
At this point, you get along basically in a similar way as any other refugee anywhere gets along. Black market Micro-economies spring up in refugee camps based both on rations and on markets within the camps themselves. Cigarettes and Chocolate and rations are common currencies. If you have a marketable skill you perhaps try to earn some side income. Prostitution was not an uncommon source of income. You rely on others in the camp and established new networks for support.
Over time, many left the camps, but opportunities were somewhat limited and covert. Jewish groups started moving jewish residents into Israel at this point, but due to a British prohibition on settlement on palestine they often had to be smuggled (although, much like today, it was not terribly difficult).
The big sea change was in May 1948, two significant things happened
the US senate passed the Wiley-Revercomb Displaced Persons Bill this allowed 100,000 displaced persons to gain permanent residence in the United States.
In may 1948 the state of Israel was established, and immigration was opened to every person of Jewish Descent. (the return act wasn't formally passed until 1950, but once Israel was recognized, people could travel there openly) About 130,000 remaining displaced persons emigrated to Israel within the first three years of Israeli statehood, many were assisted by Zionist groups.
Again, for our hypothetical resident from Buchenwald, you've probably moved to a DP camp somewhere in the American Zone of Germany. You have limited opportunity and limited resources. Perhaps if you can find gainful employment, or have family somewhere, you've gotten out before now, but if you truly have nothing, you're probably still in a DP camp by 1947 or early 1948.
At this point, options become available. Per the above, you can scrounge together whatever savings you can beg, borrow and steal, and try to apply for a US visa and get on a boat to New York, or you can go to a Zionist group, and they will arrange for transport to the newly formed state of Israel. By the late 1940's to 1950, most of the camps had been emptied.
I'll recommend Keith Lowe's Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II in answering this question. It's written more toward a popular audience and is a good general history of the period and conditions in question. More specifically on this topic, I'd also recommend Henry Feingold's Bearing Witness: How America and Its Jews Responded to the Holocaust, and the U.S. Holocaust Museum's ample and well-written articles. I'm going to draw upon these sources and the works published by the U.S. Army's Center of Military History.
The answer to your question depends on where the person falls on the Western Allied/Soviet occupation line. On the eastern side of the line, the Soviet Union had been wracked by five years of war and was ill-suited to care for millions of external refugees. European Russia had been devastated by the war, and the primary postwar concern of the Soviet Union was matters within its borders. On the western side of the line, the Western Allies were better-equipped to cope with the millions of refugees created by the war, though they faced their own significant problems.
The term used again and again in contemporary accounts is "Displaced Persons," or DPs. As the final weeks and months of the war ticked down and camps were liberated, the first priority was to care for the survivors and bury the dead. In some cases, these survivors were kept near the camps in order to provide for concentrated care. Once healthy enough to move, many camp survivors simply left and tried to make their way home. This was an extraordinarily difficult and trying process, as millions of other Europeans were doing the same.
By July 1, according to the U.S. Army history of the occupation of Germany (p. 290), 1.39 million Soviet citizens alone had gone east from the Western-occupied sectors of Germany. The Soviet forces, in the same period, had delivered 300,000 Western European DPs and prisoners of war. There were millions of Germans on the roads, too, leaving destroyed homes, returning home after being demobilized, or simply trying to find food.
The responsibility of caring for these millions of DPs (as compared to prisoners of war, who were treated separately) fell upon the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, which was created in 1943. If you're interested, you can watch a 1944 newsreel on the administration here. The UNRRA operated hundreds of camps across Germany and the rest of Western Europe.
The original intent of the camps was to unite families, and repatriate people back to their home countries. A Frenchman forced to work in Germany might go to a camp for immediate shelter and feeding, and once his needs were met, would be able to send letters or messages back to France to ensure he had a place to go, whether to his home or to the home of a family member.
Initially, Jews were placed into this system alongside non-Jews. There was no distinction between Holocaust survivors and other refugees. This, of course, posed problems, since many of the refugees were Germans and others who had strong antisemitic views untouched by the end of the war. Word of the poor treatment of Holocaust survivors reached President Harry Truman, who ordered the separation of Jews and non-Jews starting in 1945.
How could they tell, you ask? Well, antisemitism was still strong, and few people were going around pretending to be Jews. DPs who lacked family nearby still had friends made in the camps or on the road who could vouch for each other. Furthermore, if there was any doubt about someone's status, they could simply be quizzed about Jewish traditions and practices.
Starting in fall 1945, private Jewish relief organizations were permitted to operate in UNRRA camps alongside the regular infrastructure. The biggest of these was the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which had been formed to support Eastern European Jews during WWI. As the Holocaust Museum's article states cogently and clearly:
"After the war, the JDC—working together with the Jewish Agency for Palestine, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), and other organizations—became the central Jewish agency providing support and financial assistance to Jewish survivors of the Holocaust residing in the displaced persons (DP) camps in Germany, Austria, and Italy. The JDC provided food to augment official rations, supplied clothing, books, and school supplies for children, supported cultural amenities, and bought religious supplies for the community. Between 1945 and 1950 alone, some 420,000 Jews in Eastern Europe become beneficiaries of the [JDC], which spent over 300 million dollars on assistance and sent an army of professionals (doctors, nurses, teachers, social workers, and administrators) to serve the needs of approximately 700,000 people each month—both in and outside of the DP apparatus."
Where did people go once leaving the camps? It depended upon their personal preference. Many survivors didn't want to return home because their property had been entirely destroyed or confiscated, or because there was still significant antisemitism. Even if it wasn't explicit ─ would you want to live next to neighbors who had acquiesced in your attempted murder? Sometimes, conditions were even worse. In 1946, the residents of Kielce, Poland, "murdered at least 42 Jews and injured over 40 in the worst outburst of anti-Jewish violence in postwar Poland."
As Lowe writes, "Jews of all nationalities would discover that the end of German rule did not mean the end of persecution. Far from it. Despite all that the Jews had suffered, in many areas anti-Semitism would increase after the war. Violence against Jews would resurface everywhere ─ even in places that had never been occupied, such as Britain."
In Holland, France and Italy, Lowe explains, Jewish refugees returning home were treated the same as other refugees. "On arrival in the city's central station they were interviewed, registered, and given ration cards and clothing coupons. Sometimes they were given advice on where to stay, or where to find help, but sometimes the desks of the various aid agencies were unattended," he writes on page 193.
This equal treatment disregarded the fact that Jewish communities had been utterly destroyed throughout Europe, and that there were few social networks left for the survivors. Rebuilding those was a titanic task, and while other survivors might have friends and family to lean upon, that was rarely the case. Furthermore, other survivors didn't tend to endure the outright plundering and repossession of property that took place among Holocaust victims. In many cases, it was easier to simply emigrate and start over, rather than try to rebuild in place.
The United States accepted some Jewish refugees, but not many. Numbers were kept low until the 1948 Displaced Persons Act, and in that same year, the creation of Israel allowed another formal conduit for Jewish refugees. Before that year, emigration to Israel was largely illegal, but it continued anyway and was encouraged by many European nations that publicly announced that they would not stop it. Great Britain, which feared Jewish-Palestinian conflict, tried to stand in the way with formal restrictions, so most migration was done covertly through organizations like the Brichah, which also operated human-smuggling operations across borders throughout Europe, Lowe writes.
Ironically, Lowe explains, the flight of Jews from eastern Europe through the DP camps and on to Palestine finished the work of the Holocaust and made Europe much more Judenfrei than it had been at the end of the war.
Additionally, what would it look like for a woman in the same situation?
Followup: Immediately following the end of the war i've heard that many German citizens didn't know about the death camps.
Would surviving jews returning to germany receive extra help of sorts out of national guilt? Or did not enough germans know yet? or perhaps was there still animosity towards them?
Follow up question: If my home (or say I had sizable wealth) had been confiscated, what legal recourse did I have to try and get it back legally? What was the timeline like on that?