In Band of Brothers, there’s a scene where they liberate a concentration camp. However, the soldiers are told that they can’t provide too much food to the prisoners because of their malnutrition and require the prisoners to go back into the camps.
I was wondering what was the exact process, such as health, financial and civil aid provided to the victims, from the moment the gates were opened?
This is a huge topic but adapted from an older answer this focuses on immediate care. I would generally recommend Dan Stone's book for more info as well as at the answers here and here.
So, 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.
Grossman - under the impression of what he has seen at Majdanek - writes "Stories of the living dead of Treblinka, who had until the last minute kept not just the image of humans but the human soul as well, shake one to the bottom of one'sheart and make it impossible to sleep. The stories of women trying to save their sons and committing magnificent doomed feats, of young mothers who hid their babies in heaps of blankets. (...) Inhabitants of the village of Wulka, the one closest to Treblinka, tell that sometimes the screams of women who were being killed were so terrible that the whole village would lose their heads and rush to the forest, in order to escape from these shrill screams that carried through tree trunks, the sky and the earth." Grossman also suffered a nervous break down after writing this piece and took several weeks to recover.
Western Allied troops had a similar experience. Seeing the emanicpated bodies of Concentration Camp prisoners who had been starved by the Nazis for weeks, witnessing their exhausted and tortured state, and hearing them recall the horrors of the camps left a very deep impression with liberating troops. In this letter, Aaron A. Eiferman, soldier of the 12th Armored Division, describes the liberation of the Dachau sub-camp in Landsberg. Writing among other things that ""We have seen what can be called the living dead (...) the sight that hit me was more than a person could express (...) It was to much for me, for I had tears in my eyes."
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.
Another goal -- initially not as important as the medical care focused on survival of the former prisoners -- was housing. At first many liberated inmates had to remain at the former camps until they could be moved to new accommodation. For the purpose of housing and also repatriation to their former countries of origin (that was the original plan but many refused to go back, especially if their former home was in the Eastern bloc), camps for the so-called Displaced Persons were set up. These camps established at various sites all over Germany were intended to house the former prisoners as well as others such as former forced laborers. Being fed with 1500 calories a day and being given the opportunity to work for the Allies or in the local economy, there were thousands of these camps where people awaited repatriation or emigration to the US or Palestine. Run from October 1945 on by the United Nations Refugee Agency, UNRRA, these camps provided housing, foo, and medical care for about 850.000 Displaced Persons. Many liberated Jews waited there for a long time to emigrate to Palestine and from 1948 to Israel or the United States. The last of these camps were closed in the late 1950s.
Sources:
Dan Stone: The Liberation of the Camps.
Shephard, Ben. 'The Long Road Home: The Aftermath of the Second World War.' (Bodley Head, 2010).
Stefan Hördler: Ordnung und Inferno. Das KZ-System im letzten Kriegsjahr. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2015.
Nichaolas Wachsmann: KL. A History of the Concentration Camps.
My answer focuses on Jewish survivors, as I wrote my M.A. history thesis on Jewish refugees in postwar Germany. Although the destruction of the war and the adjustments of occupation made the immediate postwar years difficult across the continent, life for Jews in postwar Europe was especially precarious, even dangerous. As Tony Judt has written, for these chief targets of Nazi genocidal policies, “surviving the war was one thing, surviving the peace another.” The euphoria of liberation and the German defeat provided no relief from antisemitism.
Antisemitism complicates the answer to this question, because many of these survivors, having returned to their countries of origin, were considered by United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration definitions to have been repatriated - i.e., no longer refugees and at first, not eligible for relief. As one example, between 173,420 and 200,000 Jews made the difficult journey back to their hometowns in Poland. Although the end of the war meant the end of the Holocaust, Jews were still in great danger, and the answer of how they were "reintegrated into society" is that many returned, but left again because of antisemitic violence. Antisemitic prejudice had existed in official and nonofficial ways in prewar communities, and this discrimination continued after the Holocaust.
Between September and December 1945, Polish Jews alone suffered twenty-six “minor pogroms” which, by the British ambassador’s count, led to 300 deaths; Jewish organizations claimed the numbers were higher. The most notorious incident of postwar Polish pogroms was that in Kielce on 4 July 1946, when Poles murdered 38 to 42 Jews on rumours that the town’s Jews had ritually sacrificed a missing Christian boy. Pogroms like that at Kielce and the more generalized violence that characterised postwar Poland led to the deaths of approximately 1,500 Jews. Antisemitic prejudice and violence sparked both organized and spontaneous flight of hundreds of thousands of Jews from all over central and eastern Europe into the unexpected safety of the American-occupied zone of southern Germany – in some instances becoming refugees for a third time.
Postwar hostility, and naked violence against Jews who attempted to recover their former homes, business, and belongings convinced some 150,000 Jews from eastern Europe, including tens of thousands who had already survived the war in the Soviet Union, to make the roundabout and illegal crossing of frontiers into American-occupied Bavaria.
There were several reasons for this: the American zone was the first part of occupied Germany where officials set up Jewish-only DP camps; the United States was the first Allied government to express official support for increased Jewish immigration to Palestine; and many hoped that the American zone was their best chance at getting out of Europe and into either Palestine or the United States. Some were there for years, waiting.
The challenge of the seemingly interminable wait for Palestine and the United States did not impair the development of a remarkably vibrant society, albeit a temporary one. The refugees went to school, studied at yeshivas, learnt trades, worked for relief agencies or for the camp committee—and much else besides, primarily as preparation for a life abroad. Residents celebrated Jewish holidays, organized political parties and kibbutzim, performed in theatre troupes, and played football (soccer) in a league of other camps.
In terms of food and supplies, procuring adequate food supplies in a continent ruined by war was one of UNRRA’s most pressing administrative duties, and having enough food was a daily concern for the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees and ethnic Germans who moved to the American zone. Meals, therefore, became a point of contact, of appreciation, and of friction between Jewish, American, and German cultures. On the whole, Jewish DPs ate enough but they objected to foods foreign to the Ashkenazi experience, like rolled oatmeal imported from the United States. What kinds of foods made up the ration? At one camp, Föhrenwald, near Munich, the American Joint Distribution Committee (a Jewish charity) reported that Jews there received two sets of rations in the fall of 1945. The first set, distributed by UNRRA, was three ounces of meat, fish, or cheese daily and a number of mostly dry and canned goods. The local German food office provided the remainder, including half a pound of potatoes and six ounces of vegetables per person, per day. Föhrenwald residents later received supplemental rations based on their work (e.g., labourers, teachers and administrators got more rations). Residents also received cigarette rations, up to three a day. They could smoke the cigarette ration, of course, but the cigarette was useful for much else besides. Between 1945 and 1948, the cigarette functioned as the most widely accepted and trusted measure of value in the occupation economy, since the value of the German Reichsmark had been wrecked by inflation.
In terms of health, the physical effects of malnourishment, hard labour, and successive difficult journeys in the years of war and genocide meant that many women who dreamt of marriage and children feared infertility because they had ceased menstruating regularly or at all for months, even years; those who did become pregnant were at a much greater risk of illness, complications, and miscarriage. But there was a baby boom: German doctors and midwives helped deliver babies born in at least one Jewish refugee camp (Föhrenwald, outside Munich).
It was a long process of "reintegration" and it usually took place somewhere else. By 1948, however, the pattern for the future was clear: the DP camps began to close as their residents moved overseas to Israel and other countries, whose visa policies began to loosen. Föhrenwald itself became a destination for the internal migration of refugees, as one by one the Jewish camps were amalgamated until only Föhrenwald was left. Until 1957, it remained a Jewish space even as the postwar economic miracle and the Cold War transformed the western zones of occupied Germany into the prosperous Federal Republic.
I could go on, but I should stop here and give you some sources and suggestions for further reading. I'm happy to answer any follow-up questions in the comments below. It's not often I get to talk about this subject these days!