countries or resettled, the Central Committee of She'arit Hapleta disbanded in December 1950 and the organization dissolved itself in the British Zone of Germany in August 1951. The term "Sh'erit ha-Pletah" is thus usually used in reference to Jewish refugees and displaced persons in the period after the war from 1945 to about 1950. In historical research, this term is used for Jews in Europe and North Africa in the five years or so after World War II. Displaced persons camps After the end of World War II, most non-Jews who had been displaced by the Nazis returned to their homes and communities. For Jews, however, tens of thousands had no homes, families or communities to which they could return. Furthermore, having experienced the horrors of the Holocaust, many wanted to leave Europe entirely and restore their lives elsewhere where they would encounter less antisemitism. Other Jews who attempted to return to their previous residences were forced to leave again upon finding their homes and property stolen by their former neighbors and, particularly in central and eastern Europe, after being met with hostility and violence. Since they had nowhere else to go, about 50,000 homeless Holocaust survivors gathered in Displaced Persons (DP) camps in Germany, Austria, and Italy. Emigration to the Mandatory Palestine was still strictly limited by the British government and emigration to other countries such as the United States was also severely restricted. The first groups of survivors in the DP camps were joined by Jewish refugees from central and eastern Europe, fleeing to the British and American occupation zones in Germany as post-war conditions worsened in the east. By 1946, an estimated 250,000 displaced Jewish survivors – about 185,000 in Germany, 45,000 in Austria, and 20,000 in Italy – were housed in hundreds of refugee centers and DP camps administered by the militaries of the United States, Great Britain and France, and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). Survivors initially endured dreadful conditions in the DP camps. The camp facilities were very poor, and many survivors were suffering from severe physical and psychological problems. Aid from the outside was slow at first to reach the survivors. Furthermore, survivors often found themselves in the same camps as German prisoners and Nazi collaborators, who had been their tormentors until just recently, along with larger number of freed non-Jewish forced laborers, and ethnic German refugees fleeing the Soviet