Why did so many Europeans take to the roads and wander the countryside after the war?
1 Answer
Probably because the "displacement" they suffered during the war.
Explanation:
During WWII in Europe huge amounts of people were transferred (or deported) from a country to another; for example, after the armistice in September '43 many Italians (former soldiers and civilians as well) were deported to Germany to concentration camps or to be used as cheap/slave work force in Germany.
An incredible number of Russians, Polish, French Belgian, and Dutch were deported during the war to work in Germany.
Consider also that some countries disappeared while others were invented after the war so that if you were, say, a Latvian, you were not really overwhelmed to go back to...the Soviet Union!
People that found themselves in areas occupied by the USSR tended to flee the place or were forced to (for example Konigsberg and eastern Prussia, that were "Russified" through the expulsion of German inhabitants). During the final months of the war a lot of Germans tried to escape from the advancing Red Army fleeing to the western part of Germany and in doing so became refugees that after the war tried to go back to their original areas.
A lot of people also fought in the “wrong” side so you had, for example, Cossacks units (from Russia) fighting for the Germans in northern Italy, Russian “conscripts” fighting the US forces in Normandy or Belgian and French SS troops resisting around Hitler’s Bunker in Berlin.
Finally you had the inmates of concentration camps, Jews mainly, that were freed from camps in Poland, Germany or Russia and found themselves far from their original homes (Jews were deported from every place in Europe: Germany, France, Holland, Belgium Italy, the Balkans, Russia and were relocated in different places during the Holocaust).
To give you an incredible example from the book “The Second World War” by Anthony Beevor: the Korean Yang Kyoungjong who had been forcibly conscripted in turn by the Imperial Japanese Army, the Red Army and the Wehrmacht, is taken prisoner by the Americans in Normandy in June 1944!!!
