Picturing Displacement: UNRRA and the Visual Language of Humanitarianism – Silvia Salvatici
Established in November 1943 by 44 Allied nations, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) presented itself as the humanitarian arm of the Allied war effort. Tasked with assisting civilians in liberated countries, it distributed food, provided medical care, traced missing relatives, and managed refugee camps. More broadly, UNRRA sought to promote a new vision of humanitarian action, combining international cooperation with modern relief practices. Photography played a crucial role in communicating this mission. Rather than focusing on suffering and distress alone, UNRRA’s images highlighted recovery and renewal. Men, women, and children displaced by war were often portrayed as active participants in a process of rehabilitation, reflecting the organization’s belief that relief should lead to both physical and moral reconstruction.
For UNRRA, photographs were more than documentary records. They were powerful tools for building public support and demonstrating the effectiveness of international relief efforts. Thousands of images taken by professional photographers appeared in brochures, reports, and publications, such as the leaflet Fifty Facts about UNRRA. Today, these photographs offer historians a unique opportunity to explore how humanitarian narratives were constructed in the aftermath of the Second World War. They provide valuable glimpses into the experiences of Displaced Persons, while also showing how visual language helped shape ideas about relief and refugees’ rehabilitation.
Representing Camps and Repatriation
UNRRA dispatched most of its photographers to Europe, the core of the organization’s rehabilitation mission. Within the European theatre of humanitarian operations, their cameras focused primarily on Germany and on the millions of Displaced Persons (DPs) under the agency’s care. In the immediate aftermath of the war, DPs were widely regarded as the quintessential victims of “German barbarism.” Relief operations for Europe’s displaced population attracted unprecedented public attention and generated intense debate over the extensive use of personnel and resources devoted to DP assistance. This context is essential for interpreting photographs taken in assembly centres, which should be read against a backdrop of divided opinions about the effectiveness of UNRRA’s DP operations and the symbolic role assigned to European refugees in the agency’s effort to promote a “new humanitarianism.”
In UNRRA’s visual narrative, the overcrowding, disorder, and poor living conditions of the DP camps documented in many reports and testimonies rarely appeared in the photographs released by the Administration, even in images taken immediately after the war. Several photographs shot by the American photographer Maxine Rude in 1945 illustrate this tendency. Rows of trucks and piles of supplies convey a sense of order and efficiency, while the open spaces and sparse crowds seem to contradict contemporary accounts of camp overpopulation. Similar features emerge in a photograph of DPs preparing for repatriation, where the subjects stand at attention in military formation.
This image is particularly noteworthy because, although it belongs to the UNRRA collection preserved in the UN Archives, the “Signal Corps – US Army” logo is clearly visible in the lower-right corner. Two explanations are possible. Photographic materials were often scarce in occupied Germany, especially in the immediate post-war period, and UNRRA photographers frequently relied on Army equipment; the logo may therefore have been added automatically during printing. Alternatively, in its early stages the UNRRA Public Information Office may have circulated photographs originally produced by the Army. Whatever the explanation, the overlap between UNRRA and military authorities in producing and disseminating images of relief activities reflects the broader collaboration between the agency and the military in shaping post-war public information campaigns.
Assisting military authorities in the repatriation of Displaced Persons was one of UNRRA’s main tasks in post-war Germany, and these efforts were extensively documented. According to reports from the Public Information Office in the US zone, the circulation of photographs and accounts of repatriation served a dual purpose. It promoted what UNRRA considered one of its most important achievements while also encouraging displaced persons to view return to their countries of origin as a desirable option. The images were therefore aimed at two distinct audiences: Western publics, who needed reassurance that refugees were being successfully repatriated, and the refugees themselves, who were to be persuaded to accept repatriation.
In this photograph, the departure of a group of children being repatriated to Poland is portrayed as a celebratory occasion. UNRRA officers distribute sweets, the railway carriage is decorated with flowers, and a few smiles can be seen among the passengers. The image presents repatriation as a positive and even festive experience, reinforcing the optimistic narrative promoted by UNRRA’s public information campaigns.
Such images, however, reveal only part of the story. Many Displaced Persons from Eastern Europe refused repatriation. Under the terms of the Yalta Agreement, British and American authorities handed over most Soviet citizens to Moscow’s representatives regardless of their wishes. Baltic refugees maintained that they had no country to return to after the Soviet annexation of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, and strongly resisted any contact with Soviet officials. Among Polish DPs, only about half chose repatriation voluntarily, prompting the Allies to ask UNRRA to persuade the remainder to follow suit.
Photographs such as the one reproduced here presented a reality very different from that experienced in many camps, where repatriation often generated tension, confrontation, and both passive and active resistance. Nor were the journeys back to Eastern Europe as orderly as official images suggested. UNRRA reports frequently complained about shortages of food and supplies, unexpected accidents, and the difficulties of managing large groups of travellers. Unsurprisingly, such aspects rarely appeared in the agency’s photographic output. By focusing on successful departures and orderly returns, UNRRA’s visual narrative concealed many of the problems that accompanied repatriation and avoided drawing attention to the limitations and contradictions of its humanitarian mission.
Children and the Visual Language of Rehabilitation
A large share of the photographs taken by UNRRA in camps and assembly centres documented the rehabilitation of displaced persons. An excellent example is Peter’s Day, a visual chronicle produced by Wlad Groman, one of the agency’s official photographers, at the unaccompanied children’s centre of Kloster Indersdorf in southern Germany. “Peter” was a fictional name, and the photo sequence presented his transition from a troubled past to a new life under UNRRA’s care. The opening images show him saying goodbye to the woman who had looked after him since 1944 while an UNRRA officer leads him away, symbolizing the passage from one identity to another.
Peter had been abducted from a Russian orphanage by the SS and placed with a German foster family. His story referred to a broader UNRRA programme aimed at locating children who had been forcibly transferred to Germany during the war and returning them to their countries of origin. Although the number of cases was relatively limited, the issue of these “lost children” occupied a prominent place in post-war public debate. Their recovery often involved conflicts between foster families unwilling to let them go, military authorities, UNRRA personnel, and representatives of the children’s countries of origin. Yet the photographs largely concealed these tensions. What could be a painful and contested separation was instead presented as an amicable farewell and the beginning of a hopeful future.
The rest of the sequence follows Peter through the various stages of rehabilitation: a bath before his medical examination, a nutritious meal, participation in a sculpture class, and finally a peaceful night’s sleep in his “new home.” By presenting rehabilitation as an orderly and carefully managed process, the photographs emphasized UNRRA’s ability to restore health, stability, and normality to displaced children.
Children occupied a central place in UNRRA’s visual documentation. Their images conveyed a powerful message about the organization’s mission, yet unlike many contemporary humanitarian campaigns, UNRRA rarely emphasized suffering itself. Photographs often showed children eating, playing, or engaging in educational activities. Images taken at Kloster Indersdorf by Maxine Rude, for example, depict children enjoying meals rather than displaying signs of deprivation. Hunger is present only indirectly. The focus is not on need, but on relief: not on starving children, but on an organization capable of feeding and rehabilitating them.
The Humanitarian Image of Displacement
UNRRA’s photographs rarely presented Displaced Persons as suffering victims of war. Instead, they portrayed them as recipients of effective humanitarian intervention: refugees living in orderly camps, families preparing to return home, and children being fed, cared for, and rehabilitated. The aim was not simply to document conditions in post-war Europe, but also to demonstrate the success of the Administration’s programmes and the value of international humanitarian cooperation at a time when reconstruction and recovery were becoming global priorities.
The images examined here reveal a distinctive representation of displacement. While they acknowledged the hardships experienced by refugees, they placed far greater emphasis on the capacity of humanitarian action to restore order, health, and normality. In doing so, they promoted a reassuring vision of post-war recovery and of the role played by international organizations in achieving it.
The displaced persons depicted in these photographs were often presented less as historical actors than as beneficiaries of aid. Their individual experiences, choices, and forms of resistance tended to disappear behind the larger narrative of humanitarian success. Even when captions provided details about personal stories, the subjects themselves remained largely defined by the assistance they received. As a result, UNRRA’s visual archive offers valuable insights not only into the experiences of displaced people, but also into the ways visual language helped shape contemporary ideas about relief and displaced persons’ rehabilitation. More broadly, these images remind us that humanitarian representations are never neutral: they influence how recipients of aid are imagined, understood, and remembered.
For a more detailed analysis, see Silvia Salvatici, “Sights of benevolence: UNRRA’s recipients portrayed”, in H. Fehrenbach and D. Rodogno (eds.), Humanitarian photography: a history, Cambridge University Press, 2015.