The Last Million: Europe's Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War

David Nasaw

Sep 2020 · Sold by Penguin

About this ebook

From bestselling author David Nasaw, a sweeping new history of the one million refugees left behind in Germany after WWII

In May 1945, German forces surrendered to the Allied powers, putting an end to World War II in Europe. But the aftershocks of global military conflict did not cease with the German capitulation. Millions of lost and homeless concentration camp survivors, POWs, slave laborers, political prisoners, and Nazi collaborators in flight from the Red Army overwhelmed Germany, a nation in ruins. British and American soldiers gathered the malnourished and desperate refugees and attempted to repatriate them. But after exhaustive efforts, there remained more than a million displaced persons left behind in Germany: Jews, Poles, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and other Eastern Europeans who refused to go home or had no homes to return to. The Last Million would spend the next three to five years in displaced persons camps, temporary homelands in exile divided by nationality, with their own police forces, churches and synagogues, schools, newspapers, theaters, and infirmaries.

The international community could not agree on the fate of the Last Million, and after a year of debate and inaction, the International Refugee Organization was created to resettle them in lands suffering from postwar labor shortages. But no nations were willing to accept the 200,000 to 250,000 Jewish men, women, and children who remained trapped in Germany. In 1948, the United States, among the last countries to accept refugees for resettlement, finally passed a displaced persons bill. With Cold War fears supplanting memories of World War II atrocities, the bill granted the vast majority of visas to those who were reliably anti-Communist, including thousands of former Nazi collaborators and war criminals, while severely limiting the entry of Jews, who were suspected of being Communist sympathizers or agents because they had been recent residents of Soviet-dominated Poland. Only after the controversial partition of Palestine and Israel's declaration of independence were the remaining Jewish survivors able to leave their displaced persons camps in Germany.

A masterwork from acclaimed historian David Nasaw, The Last Million tells the gripping yet until now largely hidden story of postwar displacement and statelessness. By 1952, the Last Million were scattered around the world. As they crossed from their broken past into an unknowable future, they carried with them their wounds, their fears, their hope, and their secrets. Here for the first time, Nasaw illuminates their incredible history and, with profound contemporary resonance, shows us that it is our history as well.

Ratings and reviews

We tend to revel in the victory of the war and the success (and generosity) of the Marshall Plan. But there is another story that is less well known and that has parallels to today that shouldn't be ignored. After the war, there were 7 million displaced persons (DPs) in the Western zones who were housed in temporary "camps" while being processed to help them return home. That included POWs, forced laborers that Germany had conscripted, and various others. It also included concentration camp survivors and a significant number of war criminals posing as refugees to avoid certain arrest and execution. Within a year, most of the displaced persons had returned to their homelands. But there remained 1 million who either could not or would not return, among whom were 250,000 Jews. When some were finally chosen to emigrate, they were mostly young, able-bodied, with no dependents and almost entirely "Christian." No one wanted the Jews and America was among the worst offenders. It took 6 years before the last were finally resettled. And while Jews were mostly excluded, there was little effort made to weed out former Nazis and war criminals. This book describes the process in each of the nations in detail and its effects on each nation, the Arab world, the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, and more. It is well-researched and, though long and sometimes tedious, well worth reading especially in light of the issues we face today.

About the author

David Nasaw is the author of The Patriarch, selected by the New York Times as one of the 10 Best Books of the Year and a 2013 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Biography; Andrew Carnegie, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, the recipient of the New-York Historical Society's American History Book Prize, and a 2007 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Biography; and The Chief, which was awarded the Bancroft Prize for History and the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for Nonfiction. He is a past president of the Society of American Historians, and until 2019 he served as the Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Professor of History at the CUNY Graduate Center.