Displaced Persons

During and after World War 2, millions of Europeans were pushed from their homes and countries for a vast array of reasons. Some simply wanted to avoid the fighting, ethnic Germans in Eastern Europe were fleeing the advancing Red Army, and Jews were escaping Hitler’s final solution. Once the dust had settled after the war, millions of people were without home and without state. The case of the “displaced person” was quickly looked into by both Western and Eastern powers. As a result, the political rift between the conflicting ideologies of democracy and communism deepened. Two authors, among many others, have made it their duty to look deeper into the problem of the displaced person. Gerard Daniel Cohen and Tara Zahra approach the subject from vastly different angles, but both touch upon the subject of displaced persons, the rise of international organizations, and the overall politics of the time.

In the first chapter of Gerard Daniel Cohen’s book “In War’s Wake”, he goes into general detail surrounding the immediate aftermath of World War 2, and the ever-present and immediate Eastern European refugee question. One major point he discusses in this chapter is the “battle for refugees” between the Western and Eastern powers immediately after the war. The immediate five years after World War 2 is very interesting to me because it is generally glossed over in general history courses. I never took the time to think about the immediate destruction of homes and families caused by the war, or how the question of refugees played into the growing political conflict between the West and the Soviets. Cohen goes on to discuss the growing divide between the West and East in relation to the refugee question. After much debate on the world stage it was agreed upon on February 12^th, 1946 the “no refugee or displaced persons who have finally and definitely, in complete freedom and after receiving full knowledge of the facts,…expressed valid objections to returning to their countries of origin…shall be compelled to return to their countries of origin”.¹ However, this resolution does not apply to any person who was believed to be in collaboration with the Nazi’s, with those people being returned to their country to face trial. This resolution also goes against the Eastern Bloc’s call for the repatriation of their displaced peoples. While Cohen focuses on the broader political conflict surrounding refugees, other scholars have taken to researching very specific groups of displaced persons, namely children.

Tara Zahra’s article entitled “’A Human Treasure’: Europe’s Displaced Children Between Nationalism and Internationalism” focuses on one large aspect of port-World War Two’s reconstruction, that being the question of what to do with the thousands of displaced and orphaned children. World War Two had a significant impact on the population of Europe, with millions of soldiers and civilians dead from the war itself, as well as millions more pushed from their homelands. Zahra’s article focuses on a specific sub-group of these displaced peoples, that being children. She puts her article in terms of nationalism versus the growing sense of internationalism after the war. After the war, United Nations organizations such as the International Refugee Organization (IRO) and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) led the growing internationalism movement between much of the Western powers. What I found interesting about Zahra’s article was her research into the strict terms of nationalism when approaching the reclamation and repatriation of “lost children”. For example, when Zahra is discussing the lost children of Lidice she goes into detail of how thousands of children from Eastern Europe were kidnapped by the Germans to undergo “Germanization”. After the war there was an effort made by these governments, the IRO, and the UNRRA to reclaim these children. The IRO and UNRRA sought to return the children, who had been brought up in German homes and spoke German exclusively, to their country of origin for the “best interests of the child”.² Even though the children had no emotional claim to their homeland, there are still multiple cases of children being forcibly taken from their German homes back to their country of origin in Eastern Europe. This reclamation of children along with the forced deportation of millions of German speakers from Eastern Europe goes to show that there were still strong senses of nationalism prevalent in a world were internationalism and intergovernmental cooperation was the growing trend.

The two works of Gerard Daniel Cohen and Tata Zahra offer two different angles on the topic of post-World War 2 displaced persons. Cohen takes a more general look at the growing political conflict between the West and the East, while using the displaced persons as the center piece. While Zahra, takes a more detailed look into a sub-group of the displaced people, children. Zahra also focuses on the prevalent idea of nationalism still present in European countries after the war. Both readings share the topic of rising international organizations such as the IRO and The UNRRA. I found both reading to be really interesting considering they cover a topic which is never brought up often in general history classes.

Works Cited

1. Gerard Daniel Cohen, In War’s Wake: Europe’s Displaced Persons in the Postwar Order (New York: Oxford University Press, Inc., 2012), 3-34.
2. Tara Zahra, “’A Human Treasure’: Europe’s Displaced Children Between Nationalism and Internationalism” Past and Present 210, supp.6 (2011). Accessed September 5, 2016.
3. Link to photo: http://www.dpcamps.org/munich.html