The
Last Million:
Europe's
Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War
By
David Nasaw
"Is this – is this necessary?"
That was the question a harried Vito Corleone asked consigliere Tom
Hagen in Godfather I when prevailed upon to grant Luca Brasi an
audience -- and it’s what I ask myself whenever another Holocaust book is put on
the market.
So many books, films, museums, and monuments – so much desensitization, trivialization, and enduring ignorance.
Yet with all that it transpires that David Nasaw's The Last Million is necessary.
Nasaw recently retired as Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
Professor of History at the CUNY Graduate Center. He's written critically
acclaimed biographies of Joseph P. Kennedy and William Randolph Hearst.
The late British Jewish historian David Cesarani showed us in Final
Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933-1949 that WWII did not suddenly end for
Europe's Jews on May 7, 1945 when Nazi Germany surrendered. Moreover, as Tony
Judt showed in Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, WWII bled into another
conflict, the Cold War, which Nasaw explains, affected the Last Million's fate.
It never occurred to me to ask my Pater or my Tanta Golda how come they did not reach New York City from their
displaced person camp in Germany until 1949 – four torturous years after
liberation. From Nasaw's book, I infer that there was nothing left for them back
in Spinka, Romania. Jews did try to go home initially, if for no other reason
than to see if anyone else had survived. Too often, they were greeted by hatred
and pogroms and forced back to Germany, writes Nasaw. British Mandate authorities refused to let Holocaust
survivors into Palestine. The US Congress forbade them from entering America.
No place else would have them.
The Last Million
When hostilities ended, there were 8-10 million displaced persons in
Germany – prisoners, forced laborers, and POWs. Most went home to USSR and Western
Europe, but there remained behind in DP camps overseen by the UN – 1 million
Eastern Europeans, mostly non-Jews, who refused to go home or had no home, writes
Nasaw.
Among the trapped were 250,000 Jewish refugees. Between 1945-1952, the
US was loath to grant most of them asylum.
Nasaw reports that in 1945 at Potsdam,
Germany, US President Harry S Truman appealed to British Prime Minister Winston
Churchill to admit 100,000 Jewish DPs to Eretz Israel. Churchill implied he'd
think about it, but then lost the July 1945 elections to the Labor Party's
Clement Attlee. He and Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin were implacable foes of
the 1917 Balfour
Declaration and the idea of a national home for the Jewish people in
Palestine.
Not only did the US and UK not lift a finger to help
the Jews during the Shoah, but they did not help them when the war ended – for
as long as help could be delayed, explaines Nasaw.
How DPs got to Germany
Three different streams of displaced persons found themselves in Germany
after the war. (1) Slave laborers kidnapped from Poland, among other places,
who replaced Germans sent to the Wehrmacht. These DPs didn't want to return to their
homelands, which had become Soviet satellites. (2) Collaborators, including
Waffen SS members, from Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania (the Baltic states) and
Ukraine, fled to Germany to avoid falling into Red Army hands. And (3) Jewish
survivors, many of whom had been marched to Germany to be worked to death in
underground armament factories.
Stuck in Europe
The Soviets defeated the Nazis from the East and the Allies from the
West. After WWII, Germany was divided into four zones: American, Soviet, British,
and French. Berlin, located deep in the Soviet zone, was nonetheless also divided
into Allied and Soviet zones.
The DPs were rounded up and sorted out by nationality into camps administered
by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) founded
in 1943.
Baltic and Ukrainian DPs anticipated that Western pressure would compel
Stalin to pullback from the Soviet-occupied Baltic states and Ukraine.
Stalin had other ideas. He wanted the Allies to ship the East European
DPs back to their countries of origin firstly to address acute labor shortages,
secondly so that war criminals could be punished, and lastly to prevent this
population from reinforcing any US-led anti-communist front.
Meanwhile, in the first few months after the war, Jewish survivors were
herded together with their non-Jewish compatriots, including those who had
collaborated with the Nazis or had been concentration camp guards. The Allies found
it convenient not recognize Jewish peoplehood. A Polish Jew was a Pole. A
Romanian Jew a Romanian.
Unlike the Balts and Ukrainians, Jews had no illusions about a European
haven. Some like Sheah Stark, a disillusioned communist who had found sanctuary
in the USSR during Hitler's drive into Poland, escaped from under the Iron Curtain
and reunited
with his wife Kreisel, my mother's cousin in a German DP camp.
The only place on earth that wanted Jews was the Yishuv. However, the Atlee-Bevin government did all it could to close
Palestine. To add insult to injury, it tried to force Jewish survivors to
return to their previous countries. The British maintained that many people had
suffered during the war, and the Jews had no reason to receive special
consideration.
DPs Yes, Jewish DPs, No
President Franklin D. Roosevelt had the foresight in 1943 to anticipate a
massive postwar resettlement problem and ordered planning for the eventuality.
Hence the Relief and Rehabilitation Administration which became part of the UN
in 1945. In the event, straightforward repatriation of war refugees was not in
the cards. As the Soviets insisted on return/repatriation, Truman initiated a separate
UN International Refugee Organization in 1946 to relocate the DPs.
To help with reconstruction and address labor shortages, IRO member states
(the Soviets did not join) began shopping for the model DPs. From Australia and
South America to New Zealand and Norway, every country wanted the Latvian DPs. They
were Protestant, anti-communist, and in good shape, having arrived in Germany
at the end of the war on their own steam. The British needed them as miners – if
only they wouldn't take off their shirts to reveal their Waffen SS tattoos!
The best option for Jews who didn't want to stay in Germany was Aliya Bet to Palestine; indeed, 20-30,000 refugees tried to
evade Britain's blockade. When caught, the British shipped them back to Europe,
but that generated lousy publicity. Later on the intercepted migrants were interned in British-controlled
Cyprus.
Good, Bad, and Inept
While Truman, a Democrat, was willing to confront the Atlee-Bevin
government by leveraging desperately needed postwar US aid to a bankrupt Britain,
he could not begin to sway a Congress that had fallen to the Republicans in
1946 (though xenophobic southern Democrats likewise opposed Jewish immigration).
Atlee-Bevin are unvarnished villains. Nasaw seems ambivalent about the
Palestinian Arabs who were aligned with Hitler during the Shoah and on whose behalf the British blocked Jewish
entry. State Department Arabists supported the British stance on Palestine. He is
perhaps too fair to Truman and Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, military governor of the
US occupied zone, treating them as flawed heroes in the Last Million saga.
Nasaw presents the US Jewish establishment as initially unprepared to help
Europe's Jewish survivors in the face of US Army red tape, callousness, and
foot-dragging.
Every hour mattered to the survivors. For three long months after VE Day,
the Jews had to share DP space with their Polish, Ukrainian, and Baltic persecutors.
Jewish US Army chaplains pleaded for American Jewish organizations to
intervene. In July 1945, responding to this campaigning, Truman sent Earl
Harrison, Commissioner for Immigration and Naturalization under Roosevelt, to
study the Jewish survivors' plight. Harrison, a Quaker, reported that the Allies were treating the Jews just as bad as
the Germans except for not killing them.
This led Truman to press Eisenhower to improve the Jewish survivors'
conditions – to give them indeed special consideration and separate them from
Poles, Ukrainians, and other East European groups who had worked with the Nazis.
Eisenhower grudgingly ordered these reforms over the objections of Gen. George Patton.
Life in the DP camps
By August 1945, the Jewish displaced persons were allowed to live as a distinct
community, and relief organizations led by the Joint Distribution Committee
were authorized by the US army to provide help. Quality of life improved. The
survivors founded Sh'erit ha-Pletah (1945-1951) to laisse with the Allied authorities.
Social, political, and cultural life developed. There were sporting
competitions between DP camps. A barter economy developed in which cigarettes
were a prime currency.
Had the US Congress been confident that Jews would not benefit, the
gates of America would have been opened, Nasaw argues. The 1948 Displaced
Persons Act allowed 400,000 refugees into the United States above existing quota
restrictions. Of these, only 80,000 visas were issued to Jewish persons.
Jewish lobbyists tried to build a pro-immigration coalition with
Protestant and Catholic groups, but Jewish DPs remained excluded. Jewish groups
resorted to misleading paperwork to bring DPs into the US.
After the establishment of Israel in 1948, those who did not want to go
there because, like my father and his sister, they did not want to walk into
another war remained behind in DP camps. In September 1950, the anti-Jewish bias
in US immigration law was reformed. By 1951, just about all the Jewish DPs in
Germany found refuge in Israel or the US and other countries.
The 1952 McCarran–Walter Act
As WWII transitioned into the Cold War, anti-fascist sensibilities were obliterated.
Why did so many Nazis and fascists wind up nestled in the West? Because the
Allies willfully refused to ask the Soviets or the Jews for help in identifying
them.
Indeed, by 1951 US policy was adapted to allow Waffen SS veterans to
enter the US, according to Nasaw. The 1952 McCarran–Walter Act (the overdue
response to the post-WWII refugee quandary) was crafted to thwart communists
from entering while easing the admittance of Nazi collaborators.
With Operation Paperclip and similar programs American intelligence actively sought the services of German and East
European Nazis and their partners (such as rocket scientist Wernher von Braun) as
tools against the Soviet communism.
Only in the late 1970s and early 1980s was the extent of this immoral collaboration
revealed in exposés by an unnamed whistleblower within the Immigration and
Naturalization Service, in leaks to Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman and
journalists, and through the work of Nazi hunters such as Simon Wiesenthal. Some
fascists like John Demjanjuk and Valerian Trifa crept into America, but many
others were ushered in by US intelligence.
Palestine
Nasaw has a theory about why on May 14, 1948 the US under Truman was the
first to recognize Israel. The answer lay in Europe. As a bulwark against
communist expansion, he wanted to establish a West Germany but could hardly do
so with 250,000 Jews still in German DP camps. (The Bonn Republic came into existence in 1949.)
In an otherwise judicious book, Nasaw feels impelled to assert that the
displaced European Jews' problem was solved by not allowing the displaced (or
self-displaced) Palestinian Arabs back when Israel when the Arabs states agreed
to a temporary armistice in 1949. Of course, had the Palestinian Arab
leadership accepted the 1947 UN Partition Plan, there would have been a
two-state solution, no nakba, and no Arab refugees.
In the decades to follow, these 750,000 Arab refugees and millions of their descendants were encouraged to
think that their return to Palestine was imminent. The United Nations Relief
and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees has been for over 70 years forbidden from
finding them permanent homes.
Rather than develop the parts of Palestine they control the Palestinian
Authority and Hamas have squandered nearly 30 years of autonomy and billions of
dollars in Western and Gulf Arab aid. Hamas, which has demonstrated first-rate engineering capabilities, might have transformed the Gaza Strip
into a Singapore-on-the-Mediterranean. Instead, they opted for permanent war.
Both the PLO and the Islamists rejected offers from Israeli leaders Ehud Barak, Ehud Olmert, Ariel Sharon, and even Binyamin Netanyahu for demilitarized Palestinian statehood.
The creation of Israel in 1948 was not Europe's indemnity for the
Holocaust, as Nasaw implies. It was a fulfillment of Jewish aspirations that predated
the civilizations of Islam and Christianity, let alone the European
nation-state.
Humanity and Displacement
The lesson Jews ought to draw from the Shoah is that their first
imperative needs to be a secure homeland whose doors will always be open.
Man is a wolf to man. The Holocaust did not end that, as the victims of Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao,
Karadzic and Assad and might attest. Displacement is a sad feature of many lives. After WWII,
there were 11 million displaced people. Today, there are 80 million refugees
worldwide. Even taking the imperfections of human nature into account, all enlightened
nation-states have a compassionate obligation to provide immediate help to the
suffering displaced and, in the longer term, to pursue rational, tolerant, and
transparent immigration and naturalization policies.
A Necessary Book
With extensive research
and nimble synthesis, David Nasaw has taken a complex story and made it comprehensible and accessible. His narrative moves along at a nice clip.
Among the recognizable displaced he mentions is the family of New
York Times reporter Joseph Berger. Other familiar names come up. We learn that former NYC mayor Fiorello La Guardia was
in 1946 put in charge of winding down the DP operations of the UN Relief and
Rehabilitation Administration.
Historian Abraham Duker, the unassuming chairman of the Judaic Studies
department when I was at Brooklyn College in the 1970s, makes a cameo
appearance. He worked for the Office of Strategic Services and prepared
material for the Nuremberg Trials. As a columnist for Der Tog English
edition, he led the charge against US immigration policy, which excluded Jews
but protected fascists. He took Jewish establishment groups to task for their
tactical support of immigration legislation supported by church groups that
failed to protect Jewish interests.
This book belongs in every serious Shoah history collection, and I don't
say that lightly.
