Blogging is certainly not a strong point for me in my academic career, so I need to work on it in order to contribute better to the field because it allows us to communicate our thoughts more freely and casually than formal papers only shared between student and professor. The displaced persons situation in Europe after the conclusion of World War Two was difficult to handle, which caused a lack of uniformity in how it was handled. It was not expected that Germany would increase in population after losing the war, but with the movement of people across Europe and Germany’s central location on the continent does in fact make the country a natural location for people moving from Eastern Europe to the west. The number of children born from a mixture of more than one culture led to tension between countries, specifically France and Germany. It seems that France was more threatened by the increase in German population after a war in which the Germans lost. The increase in population represented the potential for war that scared the French population, which had for two generations fought the Germans. This led to more aggression on the part of the French in trying to get possession of children born to French men and German women, and French women and German men. The French wanted to portray the German women as promiscuous. Even though the French government was aggressive in identifying the children of mixed heritage, only a fraction of that number were actually repatriated to France.
Before the reading I would have expected the German government to participate in more of adoptions and genetic moving because of the history of Re-Germanization and the process of Nazi expansion through the expansion of German territory in the 1930’s into Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. With the end of the war and the targeting of Germany for being the primary adversary in the war, Germany was accused of taking children from Allied countries during the war. Germany lost territory to Poland and was occupied by Russians, Americans, British, and French soldiers, leading to more children of mixed heritage than in other countries. There was certainly some natural population growth in this area, but the bulk of the increase in population came from displaced persons themselves. There were millions of displaced persons from Eastern Europe, some of German ancestry and heritage, that then made their way to Germany after the war, swelling the population. This had to be threatening to a country like France, which has fought wars against Germany in two successive generations, but in the context of the Cold War against the Soviet Union the American and British authorities were more likely to let the children stay in Germany to act as a buffer against the Soviets. The problem of refugees and displaced persons was a problem that had been foreseen by the Allied Powers, including President Roosevelt as early as 1939. This led to the creation of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration to help deal with the problem.
