In War's Wake: Europe's Displaced Persons in the Postwar Order by Gerard Daniel Cohen (review)

When the Nazis finally surrendered in May 1945, 8 million civilians who had been torn from their homes and homelands were stranded in Germany, constituting a new category of war victims—displaced persons (DPS). Most of them wished to return to their native countries, and within a few months, all but about 1.2 million did. But that "last million" objected to repatriation. Cohen's book is about the international politics, stretching until the early 1950s, surrounding the attempt to deal with this diverse population of Jewish survivors, as well as the Poles, Baltic peoples, and Ukrainians who did not wish to live under Communist regimes in their homelands.

The postwar refugee problem was unprecedented. Despite the millions of DPS across the world, the last million Europeans received unique attention from the victorious Allies, the United Nations (UN) (and its newly founded International Refugee Organization [IRO]), and Western human-rights activists.

Unlike Anna Holian's recent book, Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism: Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany (Ann Arbor, 2011), which focuses on how the refugees themselves developed conflicting political agendas within DP camps, Cohen emphasizes the role of international jurists, political philosophers, and activists from welfare organizations in creating expansive conceptions of human rights through their advocacy on behalf of the DPS. He pays significant attention to the writings of Hannah Arendt, Eleanor Roosevelt, and of lesser-known American figures within the IRO, such as the aid worker Kathryn Hulme and General Director J. Donald Kingsley.

DP politics intersected with conflicting Cold War nationalist agendas. Most Jewish DPS wished to go to Palestine, but the British and Arab governments tried to limit Jewish immigration severely. American politicians expressed idealistic conceptions of free movement, but only reluctantly did they ease existing restrictive, fundamentally antisemitic immigration laws and policies. The Soviet government, desperate for labor to rebuild after the German devastation of the western USSR, demanded the immediate return of its former citizens, hoping also to prevent them from contributing to the increasingly vocal anti-communism of the West.

Cohen's identification of the DP camps as a "field of experimentation" is a reference primarily to the elite inquiry that developed the structures, principles, and language of modern human rights as international law (82). He studies the political and intellectual experimenters, far outside the camps.

The Soviet refusal to accept the IRO's constitution at the end of 1946 or to join in its work allowed American interests to become predominant within the IRO. The international political implications of refugee work, the increasingly important leadership role of the IRO, and the power of American funding behind that bureaucracy transformed what had once been charity work into "liberal humanitarianism." Cold War liberalism infused the "emergence of enforceable international rights" (99). Discussions of DPS showed significantly less concern for anti-fascism than for anti-communism, excluded consideration of the millions of refugees and dissidents in European colonies across the globe, and promoted political dissidents from Eastern Europe as ideal refugees.

Although DP camps in Germany did not disappear until 1957, the European refugee crisis officially ended in 1951, the same year as the UN's promulgation of the Geneva Refugee Convention, the so-called Magna Carta for refugees. Despite the politicization of the plight of the refugees during the postwar period, Cohen makes a persuasive case for its significance in creating the intellectual framework for our current worldwide concern for, but still limited willingness to accept, refugees. Its concept of the refugee as "any person which owing to a well-founded fear of persecution is outside of his country" created political criteria for judgments about asylum seekers that continue to be dominant today.

On the ground, organizations that had dispensed charity in ways familiar for hundreds of years began a transformation into nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), competing with governmental power in the international arena. As the arm of the new United Nations, the...