By Dave Davies
When Allied troops entered Germany at the end of World War II, they were astounded to learn that more than 6 million people had been stranded in the fallen Reich after the war.
"The number of homeless, shelterless, starving civilians [in Germany] was overwhelming," historian David Nasaw says.
Among the displaced persons were Allied prisoners of war, Jewish survivors of concentration camps and forced laborers from conquered lands who had been brought in by the Nazis to fuel the German war effort. Within a few months, most of them were able to return to their homelands, but about a million people refused to go home — or had no home to return to.
Nasaw writes about the remaining group in his new book, The Last Million. He notes that the six-year effort to house displaced persons in camps and eventually find them new countries to settle in proved to be a torturous and politically charged journey at a time when most of the world wanted to forget about the war and people wanted to rebuild their own lives.
"From 1947 on, the nations of the world began to accept for resettlement displaced persons — Latvians, Estonians, Poles, Yugoslavs — but they would not welcome the Jews," he says. "Until America opened its doors to Jewish displaced persons, no nation on Earth was willing to do so."
But U.S. acceptance of displaced persons — especially Jews — was severely restricted. And Nasaw says that the postwar resettlement effort set a pattern for the 21st-century refugee crisis.
"What I discovered for the case of the last million refugees after World War II was that nationalist concerns and political concerns always overruled humanitarian concerns," he says. "In a funny way, the results for the last million were much more promising than the results for the refugees who came after them."
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