United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in the context of Dupont Circle Building

UNICEF (/ˈjuːniˌsɛf/ YOO-nee-SEF), originally the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund, officially United Nations Children's Fund since 1953, is an agency of the United Nations responsible for providing humanitarian and developmental aid to children worldwide. The organization is one of the most widely known and visible social welfare entities globally, operating in 192 countries and territories. UNICEF's activities include providing immunizations and disease prevention, administering treatment for children and mothers with HIV, enhancing childhood and maternal nutrition, improving sanitation, promoting education, and providing emergency relief in response to disasters.

UNICEF is the successor of the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund, and was created on 11 December 1946, in New York, by the U.N. Relief Rehabilitation Administration to provide immediate relief to children and mothers affected by World War II. The same year, the United Nations General Assembly established UNICEF to further institutionalize post-war relief work. In 1950, its mandate was extended to address the long-term needs of children and women, particularly in developing countries. In 1953, the organization became a permanent part of the United Nations System, and its name was changed to United Nations Children's Fund, though it retains the UNICEF acronym.

Displaced persons camps in post–World War II Europe were established in Germany, Austria, and Italy, primarily for refugees from Eastern Europe and for the former inmates of the Nazi German concentration camps. A "displaced persons camp" was a temporary facility for displaced persons, whether refugees or internally displaced persons. Two years after the end of World War II in Europe, some 850,000 people lived in displaced persons camps across Europe, among them Armenians, Czechoslovaks, Estonians, Greeks, Bulgarians, Poles, Latvians, Lithuanians, Yugoslavs, Jews, Russians, Ukrainians, Hungarians, Kalmyks, and Belarusians.

At the end of the Second World War, at least 40 million people had been displaced from their home countries, with about eleven million in Allied-occupied Germany. Among those, there were around 1.2 million people who refused to return to their countries of origin. These included former prisoners of war, released slave laborers, and both non-Jewish and Jewish concentration-camp survivors. The Allies categorized the refugees as "displaced persons" (DPs) and assigned the responsibility for their care to the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA).

Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp was a displaced persons (DP) camp for refugees after World War II, in Lower Saxony in northwestern Germany, southwest of the town of Bergen near Celle. It was in operation from the summer of 1945 until September 1950. For a time, Belsen DP camp was the largest Jewish DP camp in Germany and the only one in the British occupation zone with an exclusively Jewish population. The camp was under British authority and overseen by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) with camp directors that included Simon Bloomberg. Today, the camp is a Bundeswehr barracks, having been a British Army base (see Hohne Station) until 2015.