We hear stories about the allies finding the concentration camps and usually the movie ends and we are left to assume a happy Disney ending.
Did they get their homes or businesses back? Was there any kind of compensation for victims? I don't imagine they just went home and back to work on Monday morning.
What about the less desirables like mentally challenged, what happened to them post war? Were hospitals built and people hired to care for them or was this system pre-existing anyway before the Nazis?
Finally, about gays. I watched the Alan Turing movie on Netflix so of course am an expert now. Aside from the Nazis, it was not a good thing to be out back then in Germany either. Were they just moved from the camps to prisons?
Sorry for the wall of text, just wanted to give a few examples so that I don't just get answers from a Jewish victims perspective. As we know, many group were victims and that's what I am curious about.
Thanks for your time.
Ok, so for context, first it is important to mention that the Third Reich was dissolved by the Allies into three states: Austria, the West-German Federal Republic, and the East-German Democratic Republic; the latter two being founded in 1949 and Austria establishing its government in April 1945. The answers to your questions depending on which of these states is the focus. I will mostly focus on West-Germany since they were the legal successor state of the Third Reich with Austria claiming it was the first victim of Nazi aggression and East-Germany claiming to represent the "other", i.e. the anti-Nazi Germany.
Jews
Starting with the question concerning Jews: Starting with the immediate liberation, the situation presents as follows. When the Allies -- Western Allies as well as the Soviet troops -- first liberated the camps, most of them were completely shocked. The Soviets had liberated camps well before the Western Allies starting in July 1944 with Majdanek and moving on in January 1945 to Auschwitz. The first camps liberated by the Western Allies were Natzweiler in Alsace, liberated by French troops in November 1944 and the Ohrdruf sub camp of Buchenwald, liberated by US troops on April 4, 1945.
As I said, the first reaction to liberation was shock. In the Soviet case, the camps they came across were mostly empty by the camps standard because the Nazis had moved the prisoners west before the Soviet troops arrived. In Majdanek about 2.000 and in Auschwitz about 6.000 people were liberated, most of them too sick to be moved by the Nazis or having hidden themselves in the camps. The shock and horror they encountered is apparent in an essay by Vasily Grossman, a Soviet writer who witnessed the liberation of Majdanek and then went on to describe the extermination camp of Treblinka, whose remains Soviet troops encountered at the same time as they liberated Majdanek.
In the last camp liberated, the Ebensee camp, US soldiers came to face inmates who had been forced to use their frozen comrades bodies' as mattresses and were there also had been cases of cannibalism in the last weeks of the war. The shock was profound. So was the logistical challenge of providing thousands of people with help.
Under this impression, the first aid given was often food and very basic medical care in order to ensure the survival of as many prisoners as possible. Especially the troops that liberated camps often made it their first priority to give food to the liberated prisoners, sometimes with dire consequences. The body of a person who has been on a starvation diet for a long time is not able to immediately process solid food for some time. A considerable number of people died right after liberation after they had been given army rations by the liberating troops simply because their bodies went into shock from the sugar, fat etc. Only with the arrival of medical personnel shortly after liberation, did this practice cease in many camps and a proper diet to nurse prisoners back to health could be instituted.
Another problem was disease and housing. In many camps, but especially Bergen-Belsen, which had been used as a camp to collect prisoners from death marches in the last weeks of Nazi rule, typhus broke out. The typhus epidemic was so severe in fact that British burnt down virtually all of Bergen-Belsen after the prisoners had been evacuated. /u/TheTeamCubed talks more about it here. They also discuss the idea of providing psychiatric care, little of which was implemented.
In the first weeks after liberation about 10.000 people died in Belsen alone from various causes without the Allies being able to help.
Aside food and immediate medical care, an important part of what some termed "medical liberation" was hygiene. When at the end of April a twelve-strong Relief team of UNRRA personnel and Quakers arrived in Belsen they wrote that "little nursing is done at all since it was necessary to concentrate on trying to keep the patients clean, warm and fed, no easy matter when diarrhea is prevalent and hot water almost unobtainable." They set up a system of delousing the prisoners with DDT in order to prevent even more people becoming sick with typhus - something which terrified the prisoners because so many were traumatized about coming in contact with medical personnel with chemicals.
The same team also re-estbalished a water supply and provided small quantities of solid food together with a high claorie mixture designed to enter straight into the blood stream of prisoners unable to eat solid food and also designed to prevent diarrhea. Another issue was clothing, which the Allies had to supply in great quantities since as one of the British officers in Belsen described: "They (the liberated prisoners) were clad in filthy rags and were crawling and grovelling in the earth for bits of food.
Despite all the problems and criticism of the early effort, Dan Stone summarizes: "In fact, the medical relief operations at the camps liberated by the Western Allies accomplished a great deal, when one bears in mind the logistical difficulties of providing food, medicine, and clothing while the was still on." He goes on to cite Paul A. Roy who, briefly in charge of Dachau after its liberation, set out the scale of the challenge:
We had more than 32.000 human beings on our hands who, for years, had been treated worse than animals. Our first job was their welfare. We had to nurse them back to health, and to rehabilitate them mentally. Many of them had been so completely starved that the fatty tissue surrounding their nerves had been used up, producing a kind of nervous short-circuit. They could not think consecutively. Some of them had lost their memories, and their mental reactions were very slow and childish. They were human wrecks who had to be salvaged
Questionable language aside, Roy's words describe that here an institution designed to fight a war against Germany suddenly found themselves caring for thousands of liberated former prisoners who for all intents and purposes were in the most terrible state a living human being can be in. After an initial period of problems, the Allies managed to built an infrastructure of care and help for these prisoners and despite the great strain of doing so while the war was still on, managed to do so in a rather amazing way.
After administering the immediate care, the questions remained on the future of the liberated people. With most Jews liberated by the Western Allies from camps where they had been sent via death marches in the last weeks of the war, the situation that presented itself was not only a logistical but also a political challenge.
The Allied policy towards liberated prisoners, seven million foreign forced laborers in Germany as well as other non-German nationals displaced by Nazi Germany was that repatriation was the ultimate goal. Together with the United Nations Refugee Relief Adminsitration (UNRRA), the Western Allies set up hundreds of camps in Germany for these so-called Displaced Persons, where they were housed and fed either until they returned to their homeland or another solution was to be found.
Concerning Jews, the Allies readily acknowledged that they didn't have a homeland per se to return to: Nazi Germany had declared the victims of deportation stateless and next to those liberated from the camps, the biggest surviving group of Jews were those who had either been willingly evacuated by the Soviet before advancing German troops or had been not so willingly deported from Soviet occupied Eastern Poland; both groups having found themselves in central Asian Soviet Republics during the war and were after the war attempting to return. Like those who survived the camps and attempted to go home to Eastern Europe or Germany, they found their homes either destroyed or in possession of another person, who was often not very happy to see them return. Additionally, as you pointed out, people don't stop hating over night: In 1946, the local population of the Polish town of Kielce staged a pogrom against returning Jews killing several and injuring at least 42. After this display of violent anti-Semitism, many surviving Jews flocked again to the Displaced Persons camps in Germany, expressing their wish to either emigrate to the US or Palestine (Israel after 1948).
Due to a variety of reasons (the British limiting emigration to the Mandate in Palestine, anti-immigration discourse in the US), emigration was slowed and so thousands of surviving Jews remained in Germany in Displaced Persons camps until 1955 when the last of them closed and most had emigrated to Israel or the US.
Restitution again depends on which state we are talking about with only Western Germany offering a nominal restitution to victims of the Holocaust after the war and most of the property (save some cases of art later on) being not returned to their former owners, forcing them to essentially build a new life to wherever they emigrated.
Here is an overview of major compensation programs from the Claims Conference. As you can glean from that, most included either compensation based on the estimated loss of property or pensions for loss of life, health, freedom etc. with the payed sums dwarfing in comparison to the profit made from the Holocaust.
Can I ask a related historigraphical question?
That is, at what point did historians begin to discuss the persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany and Nazi occupied states as part of the larger Holocaust? I know it wasn't until 2002 that the German government issued an official apology to the gay victims of the Holocaust.