Statue of Refugee at the Friedland Museum

"GRIFF IN DIE FREIHEIT"  (Reaching for Freedom) is a six meter high sculpture by Fritz Theilmann. In 1955, it was erected at the Friedland Transit Camp in Lower Saxony, Germany by the Association of Returnees (VdH). The figure on the stone base is shown climbing over a barbed wire fence in a prison camp and thus became a symbol of the former German prisoners of war. It also epitomised the mass migration of displaced individuals who initially were processed at this border transit camp in the aftermath of the Second World War

These uprooted populations included foreign victims of the Nazi regime (forced laborers, prisoners of war, and concentration camp survivors), Germans evacuated from bombed-out cities, Germans fleeing or expelled from from Eastern Europe, and German soldiers who were demobilised and released from prisoner of war camps. 

Established by order of the British military government in September 1945, the camp at Friedland functioned as the lynchpin for a system designed to collect, aid, register, and resettle displaced populations as quickly as possible. As such, the camp functioned as a regulating form of humanitarianism that not only aided refugees with food, shelter, and medical services, but also turned unmanageable masses into settled individuals with claims on the postwar welfare state. 

Between 1945 and 1960, the camp processed over 2.1 million individuals. Given the scope of the crisis, this intervention to ameliorate suffering and restore social order depended on the work of German civil authorities, the British military government, and German, British, and international charities.