Relief and Rehabilitation in the Immediate Aftermath of War

It is only very recently that the issue of relief and rehabilitation in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War has started to spark historical interest to the extent that one can speak of a distinct field of research in the making. In this context, it is with great interest that the inauguration of the Balzan Project on 'Reconstruction in the Immediate Aftermath of War: a Comparative Study of Europe, 1945– 1950' has been received by academics of the period. Established by Professor Eric Hobsbawm with a prize grant from the Balzan Foundation, the project is jointly directed by David Feldman (Birkbeck) and Mark Mazower (Columbia). After a successful first workshop in October 2005, the second event convened under the auspices of the Balzan project focused on relief and rehabilitation in the immediate aftermath of the war. This one-day event was attended by around thirty-five scholars and comprised two sessions. The first examined broad issues of relief and rehabilitation in post-war Europe, while the second focused on relief operations in specific countries (Germany, Italy and Greece). As revised versions of these papers (with two more added) are due to be published in a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary History, the aim of this report is to outline the main issues and arguments raised in the workshop.

Session I: Relief and Rehabilitation

Ben Shepard (Oxford, 'Planning for post-war relief, 1941–1945'), opened the day with a vibrant presentation on the Allied planning for post-war relief, disentangling the different preparations prior to VE Day. 'Rhetorical planning', he argued, commenced surprisingly early in the war and produced the dominant intellectual construct of the period, that of the 'displaced person'. In turn, political planners had to reconcile the several conflicting demands of the allied governments in exile, the British blockade, as well as the concerns of the Soviets and the US Congress. Their deliberations resulted in the formation of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), which became the basic instrument for relief provision. Soon after its establishment, Shepard argued, the organization became preoccupied with maintaining a huge bureaucracy rather than with the conduct of actual operations. Overall, he concluded that although the war was not followed by the immense catastrophe predicted, the Allies underestimated the enormity of the displaced persons problem and its effects on the German economy.

Daniel Cohen (Rice, 'Beyond Relief: managing displacement in the aftermath of World War Two'), convincingly suggested that international relief operations carried out between 1943 and 1947 under the umbrella of UNRRA went beyond their stated goal of civilian 'rehabilitation', in that they contributed to the rise of a new internationalism in the aftermath of the Second World War. He argued that although the concept of assistance was narrowly framed as 'relief and rehabilitation', western humanitarianism was tied to the broader issues of forced migration and genocide. The case of Jewish refugees was proposed as an example. The fact that UNRRA favoured a group approach for Holocaust survivors and defined Jews as a national collective had huge implications. Cohen further maintained that relief operations were an illustration of the Anglo-Saxon 'human rights talk' during the wartime period and showed how Roosevelt's call for 'freedom from want' was translated into a new set of basic human rights. In this context, he concluded, post-war humanitarianism was part and parcel of the emergence of the 'West' in the context of the Cold War.

Jessica Reinisch (Birkbeck, ' "A DP is only a DP only until twenty-four hours after he gets home": UNRRA on international relief and rehabilitation'), placed the issue of relief both in an international and national context. On the basis of new research on UNRRA, she elaborated on a 'curious contradiction' inherent in the organization, that between an idealistic and often romantic international outlook and its actual support for national relief and reconstruction agendas. She used the example of Poland, where the government assumed overall responsibility for operations, as exemplary of...