Anticipating the inevitable refugee crisis that would ensue after the Nazi defeat, the Allied forces began drafting plans as early as 1943 in an effort to meet the challenge of liberating, rehabilitating, and repatriating approximately seven million displaced persons (DPs) who would come under Allied control. Expecting that DPs would want to return quickly to their native lands, the American, British, Russian, and French allies designated their armies (each of which occupied a sector of Germany, Austria, and Italy) as the immediate providers of relief to the refugees.

The colossal relief effort was expected to take no longer than six months. Between May and December 1945, the military, along with the civilian rescue teams of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), successfully completed one of the great population shifts of history, repatriating close to six million DPs. But the army was ill-prepared to handle the one million DPs (including Jews, mostly from Eastern Europe) who were reluctant to return to their prewar homes. Refusing to return to the lands where their families had been massacred and antisemitism still ran rampant, the Jewish DPs, known as the Sh'erit ha-Pletah, became the unexpected and unwanted long-term wards of the UNRRA and the occupying armies, especially American forces. The often harsh treatment of these nonrepatriables blighted the military’s record in the months following liberation as soldiers found themselves both guard and guardian of people who had survived the cruelest experiences of the Nazi concentration camps.

During the first six months after the final liberation in May 1945, the Allied armies served as the providers of relief in the DP camps. In this strained period, the military was severely criticized for treating the Jewish DPs as criminals who declined to cooperate with the repatriation drive. Curfews were imposed and the DPs were given limited rations. Many had to wear concentration camp uniforms and they often were housed in camps with non-Jewish Poles and other Europeans, sometimes even with Nazi collaborators. German police had access to the DP camps and clashes between Jews and non-Jews were frequent.

Without an army-recognized Jewish administrative body, Jewish army chaplains served as representatives of the Sh'erit ha-Pletah in the first few months by carrying mail and requests for the DPs. Still, relations between Jewish DPs and the army deteriorated to the point that President Harry Truman commissioned Earl G. Harrison, dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School and American envoy to the Inter-Governmental Committee on Refugees, to survey the DP camps in August 1945. Harrison's findings were piercing and far-reaching. The Harrison Report stated:

Under the guidance of President Truman and General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Americans responded swiftly to Harrison’s recommendations to recognize the Jews as a distinct nationality who would be housed in exclusively Jewish camps, and to aid their eventual emigration from Germany. In late 1945, operation of the camps was administered entirely by the UNRRA and other voluntary agencies, most notably the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC). Early in 1946 those agencies and the Allied armies recognized a new authority, the organized Jewish DPs themselves. In February 1946, the First Congress of the Sh’erit ha-Pletah elected the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in the American zone and Zalman Grinberg and Samuel Gringauz became its official representatives. Similarly, in September 1945 in Bergen-Belsen, Josef Rosensaft became the official representative in the British zone. With the Americans allowing Jews who were fleeing Poland to enter the American zone, the UNRRA and JDC providing supplies to the DP camps, and a Jewish Committee managing each camp, the Sh'erit ha-Pletah prepared to enter a brief period of independence.

By mid-1947, the number of Jewish DPs in Germany, Austria, and Italy had swelled to 250,000. This number included 150,000 survivors who had fled Eastern Europe after the Kielce progrom on July 4, 1946, which claimed 42 Jewish lives. Widespread anti-Jewish violence in Poland convinced survivors that they could never return to their prewar homes.

With the aid of the UNRRA and its successor agency the International Relief Agency (IRO) and Jewish relief organizations like the JDC and its British counterpart the Jewish Relief Unit (JRU), the Central Committees of the American and British zones established working societies in the Jewish DP camps. They created services that helped survivors trace their relatives, gather religious and educational supplies, and attend cultural and athletic events. The Organization for Rehabilitation through Training (ORT) trained Jews to enter the workforce. Chosen each year from 1945 through 1948 by the Congresses of the Sh’erit ha-Pletah, the leaders of the Central Committees, including Samuel Gringauz and Zalman Grinberg in the American zone and Josef Rosensaft in the British zone, served as globally recognized representatives for the Jewish DPs.

Eventually the Sh’erit ha-Pletah began to protest their extended stay in the DP camps. Protests became common occurrences in the camps as Zionism increased, and the Sh’erit ha-Pletah began to denounce the British for both refusing to recognize Jews as a distinct nationality and for refusing to open immigration to Palestine. With rising anger, Zalman Grinberg wrote, "This is a conference of surviving Kaddish-sayers who will not satisfy themselves with merely saying Kaddish!"

The protests did not fall on deaf ears. In late 1946 President Truman ordered that preference be given to the DPs with regard to restrictive U.S. immigration quotas. In 1948 and again in 1950, Congress passed laws for DPs, allowing more open immigration for refugees to America. With the passage of the 1948 and 1950 DP Acts and the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, the Jewish DPs left Europe en masse and settled predominately in Israel and the United States. The Central Committee dissolved in 1951, and by 1952 all but one DP camp had closed.