World War II and its aftermath had a profound effect on the population of Europe. Millions were killed as the result of combat, occupation, and genocide. As the proverbial dust of the Second World War began to settle, millions more Europeans found themselves uprooted and scattered across a war-ravaged continent. The administering of these Displaced Persons was one of the major issues of the immediate postwar period, and its implications were of international consequence.
In light of the atrocities and destruction of WWII, many sought to achieve new global order based around “universal” human rights. Newly formed international humanitarian organizations homed in on the many displaced and orphaned children in Europe. Alongside this were the attempts of European countries to rebuild strong, homogenous national identities.
In her article “‘A Human Treasure’: Europe’s Displaced Children Between Nationalism and Internationalism,” Tara Zahra posits that human rights arguments about the displaced children of WWII became defined by nationalism. “In the campaign to reconstruct Europe’s children after WWII, international organizations reinforced nationalist ideals and policies, and collectivist understandings of child welfare and pedagogy were translated into the individualist and universalist languages of children’s ‘best interests.’” (p. 335)
As Cohen mentions in the introduction of In War’s Wake, a historiographical analysis of literature about DPs shows that for several decades it remained largely the purview of bureaucracies and governments. He observes how DPs became “passive objects of military and humanitarian governance,” and how “Until the 1980s, the only books dedicated to Europe’s displaced persons remained the voluminous official histories of UNRRA and the IRO, as well as surveys penned by American demographers and former military planners” (p. 7) In the first chapter Cohen argues that the DP problem cemented the East-West divide and prefaced the Cold War. Debates at the UN between the Soviets and Western powers regarding DPs illuminated the chasm forming between the two.
In 1952, the U.S. Displaced Persons Commission published a report titled Memo To America: The DP Story. The book is nearly 400 pages long, but the conclusion helps summarize the U.S.’s actual and perceived involvement with the “displaced persons problem.” This Conclusion takes on a congratulatory note on a job well done, arguably overwriting the human suffering that took place.
The DP crisis casts a pall over the more popular narratives of a tidier postwar reconstruction and of Allied success in the rebuilding of Europe. However, as these authors (and others) have argued, understanding these events is crucial for a complete picture of the postwar era.
For all the aspirational strides of the postwar human rights movement, the fate of the individual refugee became diminished in the current of politics and ideologies, and displaced adults and children were caught up in postwar nationalism and international maneuvering.
Sources:
Gerard Daniel Cohen, In War’s Wake: Europe’s Displaced Persons in the Postwar Order (2011), Intro. & ch. 1
Memo to America, the DP Story: The Final Report. United States: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1952. (Available here)
The DP crisis after WWII is certainly a less talked about event in history classes in my experience. One takeaway I had from studying this topic was that the noble idea of promoting human rights and returning people to their countries of origin was not totally successful and was not without less noble intentions. Control over the work forces of European countries and therefore their ability to rebuild after WWII was the higher ambition for both the US and USSR. Still, I do not think the attempt was a failure. It is difficult to briefly and accurately describe just how unprecedentedly damaging WWII was, but with so many millions left stranded in foreign countries after the war, I think the UNRRA did an acceptable job at tackling the problem to the point where fewer than a million people were still displaced by the time the effort ended. At a point, responsibility had to shift downward from the multinational level.