Nazi death/concentration/work camp prisoners would have included large numbers of people who would have suffered serious psychological traumas. Were there consequences to the general release of traumatized people into their respective regions; ie. outbreaks of anti-social/asocial behaviours?

by SpiritedGrand

Complete legal and material dispossession, and marginalization of the imprisoned groups seems like a explosive combination when paired with the psychology of abuse and large numbers of people. You would think group/widescale criminality, violent reprisals, or endemic mental illnesses might be almost a certainty in those circumstances.

Related: Was there any effort to manage the discharge of liberated camp survivors to provide some kind of re-intergration into society after their release?

commiespaceinvader

I have written about the care Holocaust survivors received after liberation before here and here while /u/TheTeamCubed has addressed psychiatric care in this answer.

The gist of it is that immediate care focused on the basic care necessary for survival and preventing outbreaks of pandemic diseases such typhus. Psychiatric care was considered but very little was implemented. Descriptions of manifestations of traumas did exist however. Both Susann Carruthers and Dan Stone cite descriptions of US GIs in charge of guarding Displaced Persons camps expressing their disgust with recently liberated survivors defecating in the barracks at night – a behavior adopted while in the camp for going outside to defecate represented a real tangible danger to one's live since guards would often throw people into the latrine and drown them there when they went outside at night.

Another manifestation of trauma comes with the question of sexual behavior. In Hermann Langbein's book Menschen in Auschwitz (People in Auschwitz) several survivors are cited that not only detail a complete lack of sexual urges due to not feeling human in the first place but also the desolate state of their bodies leading to physiological impairments – women who would stop menstruating, men with erectile dysfunction for a considerable amount of time after liberation. In the Allied description of medical care and of the Displaced Person camps for Jewish survivors, it is often mentioned that it often took months or even years for survivors to return normal patterns of behavior. While there are few cases before that, records from the DP camps show that both marriages and births only started to pick up and become more common by mid-1946.

As for retribution and violence, the records indicate very little. This can be explained simply by the state these people were in when liberated and that when recovered months later, the situation in Germany was much different in terms of law and order and lawlessness being under control. There are reports of especially former forced laborers committing retributions, plunder and theft in the days leading up to liberation by American troops and for the days immediately after liberation. Forced laborers were kept in camps in German urban centers and when they noticed that German troops had left and before the Allies arrived, there had been problems in terms of them taking actions against especially cruel foremen and employers and in terms of them having to support themselves by looting. The Allied troops quickly tried to address this problem as a state of order was one of their first priorities when establishing occupation in Germany.

The story of Displaced Persons, Jewish and otherwise, pillaging and raping in German cities and the country site became a popular narrative trope in post-war Germany as told by the Germans not only under the impression of still lingering Nazi ideological fragments but also as a narrative that imbued them with the morality that comes with a victim status and that could be used to fend off the various revelations about the complicity of German society and the German population in the crimes of the Third Reich. But in reality the records we have point to this phenomenon not being an endemic problem when it came to recently liberated concentration camp inmates and even only taking place on a limited scale with former forced laborers.

As written above, little psychiatric care or evaluation was implemented and the re-integration into society was marked for most by the long process of becoming healthy again in the Displaced Person camps and in the process of shedding behaviors picked up during their time in the camps. What most contemporary medical literature focuses on is the issue of survivor's guilt, which is apparently the most widespread form of trauma among survivors and can, according to some literature, even be inherited by the second generation – something termed Holocaust survivor syndrome.

Other studies point to the fact that – related to survivor's guilt above – Holocaust survivors were/are on average three times as likely to commit suicide. So, the general consensus seems to be that the trauma of survivors manifests in violence against the self rather than in anti-social behavior against others, which also goes to explain why there is comparatively little of this kind of behavior found in records detailing the post-liberation period.