Displaced Persons from the Soviet Union to Australia in the Wake of the Second World War

The ‘displaced persons’ (DPs) from Eastern Europe, including the Soviet Union, whom Australia took in as immigrants under the mass resettlement scheme after the Second World War, dramatically changed the country’s immigration patterns and demography. They paved the way for further diversity to come. There is a growing scholarly literature on displaced persons (DPs) after World War II, both in general and with reference to their postwar resettlement in Australia in particular. Internationally, the current debate usually focuses either on discourses and institutional settings or the fate of specific ethnic groups.1 In Australia, the discussion is entangled with the history of immigration and of White Australia, and is often connected to present day refugee issues.2 A particularly rich vein of scholarship concerns Australia’s uneasiness about accepting Jews.3 This special issue, by contrast, focuses primarily on the history of one particular group of DPs: people who had been exposed to Soviet rule during the war – either as Soviet citizens, or deportees and refugees from Poland and elsewhere – and who subsequently found their way to Australia in the late 1940s and early 1950s, mainly under the DP mass resettlement scheme administered by the International Refugee Organization (IRO).