Following the Second World War, nations across Europe sought to recover what property Nazi Germany had stolen from them: machines, gold, paintings, and even humans. While many Europeans displaced by WWII eagerly sought to return home, some citizens no longer wished to return to their home countries form before the war. However, following the war, as states began to see their citizens displaced by the war as lost property, some states sought to recover their lost property even if the property did not wish to return home.
The state that fought most fervently to reclaim its citizens after the war was the Soviet Union. The Soviets sought to repatriate all Soviet displaced persons to the Soviet Union whether or not the DPs had any desire to return (with the notable exception of Jewish DPS from the Soviet Union). While the Western Powers were very eager to reclaim their human property as well, they disagreed with the idea of forced repatriation and blocked the newly formed International Refugee Organization from being used to forcible ends. However, Gerald Cohen notes in In War’s Wake: Europe’s Displaced Person’s in The Postwar Order that the language in the IRO’s charter “The main task to be performed is to encourage and assist in every way possible their early return to their country of origin,” was a compromise by the Western powers to the Soviet desire for repatriation above all else (Cohen, In War’s Wake. 30). The political wrangling over the charter of the IRO and the Soviet Union’s insistence on repatriation are two examples of how states treated DPs following WWII as a state asset that should be protected, and in this case protected from the ideological enemy in the beginning of the Cold war.
Aside from the men and women that states sought to reclaim after the war, the children displaced by warfare were sought after by states fir different purposes. In “‘A Human Treasure’: Europe’s Displaced Children Between Nationalism and Internationalism,” Tara Zahra argues that “children were seen as a form of national ‘property’ that required protection from foreign invasion and appropriation.” (Zahra, “A Human Treasure.” 334). Both Western and Eastern European states sought to reclaim their stolen demographic futures that were stolen by Nazi Germany by repatriated children kidnapped by the Nazi regime during the war. But Zahra points out an example in France that reinforces the idea of humans as state property after the war: French officials sought the bring children who were never French citizens into France in order to demographically strengthen the nation and prepare for the country’s future labor needs. Zahra points out another use of children refugees by Czechoslovakia following the war. The Czech campaign to bring home the “Lost Children of Lidice” served as (apart from a genuine desire to bring suffering children back to their homes) as a nationalistic and anti-American campaign that framed the failure of the children taken from Lidice to return to Czechoslovakia as the failure of the Western Allied occupation force to render justice in their occupied territories. This example from Czechoslovakia in combination with the Soviet desire for forced repatriation shows how states sought to use DPs as property to rebuild the power of the state following the war and prepared for the coming Cold War.
Whether humans can be counted as state property is debatable. Though the nations during this time were clearly out for their own purposes. It is easier to rebuild a nation when you have the people to do so. When reading on this subject of reclaiming people what did you first think? Could a case be made that it would be these individuals patriotic responsibility to return? At least it can be said that there is a problem with forcible moving people.
Christopher Jackson
The point you made regarding the Soviet Union compromising what the West wanted to do with the DPs was something I had never though of before in that way. It does seem that the Soviets wanted repatriation more than any other nation, and because of this, the good efforts of other to solve the DP issue were tainted.
Tana Putnam
I really liked this post and how you emphasized the state’s view of people, especially children, as state property. I think it’s kind of disgusting how children were used as a political pawn and benefit to the state, and I think your post brought up some good points about what nationality really is and how it can be difficult to define in many situations.
You stated that International Refugee Organization used forcible end however did they not help out more people and place more children in a better place?