Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism: Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany by Anna Holian (review)

Though a large body of scholarship has already examined various groups within the diverse and disunified community of displaced persons (DPs) in postwar Germany, with this book Anna Holian presents a comparative study of four of the largest groups: Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, and Jews in American-occupied Bavaria. She argues that the key to understanding how they viewed themselves, their recent experiences, and their future lives was their “competing interpretations of the Second World War” and, in particular, their “stories about National Socialism and Soviet communism.” Ethno-national communities became highly politicized and put forth specific “representations of the past and visions of the future” (2).

Among Jewish DPs, the dominant narrative was a Zionist one, which considered the previous years as the culmination of a long history of antisemitic persecution, necessitating a rejection of Diaspora life and fueling the desire for a Jewish state in Palestine. Fellow DPs who were not Jewish, including Poles, Ukrainians, and Russians, were seen not as allies but rather as former persecutors. For their part, Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian DPs “viewed German national chauvinism, not antisemitism or racism, as the core of the National Socialist project” (4). Their primary concern during the immediate postwar years was, however, not with Nazism but rather with Soviet communism. Not surprisingly, anticommunism emerged as their dominant political sentiment.

Non-Jewish DP groups offered explicitly political explanations for their opposition to repatriation, with nationalism and anticommunism closely intertwined. Poles opposed “Russian” occupation and communism, Ukrainians opposed Russian and Polish “occupation,” and Russians perceived the Bolsheviks as “un-Russian” rulers of the motherland. Despite the differences among these narratives, all of the non-Jewish groups promoted their identity as refugees from communism more than as victims of Nazism; moreover, Ukrainians, Russians, and especially Poles all prepared for a life in exile. While Jewish DPs were no supporters of Sovietization, they stressed the wartime experience and did not join the others in their overt anticommunism, in part because the other groups’ leaders often employed antisemitic and far-right rhetoric.

Even though DPs established a multitude of associations to represent their interests vis-à-vis the American occupiers, international relief agencies, and, ultimately, the German authorities, relations remained rocky. The Germans increasingly restricted the categories for restitution and reparations, and even though Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian DPs shared the anticommunism of many Germans, their involvement in German politics met with ambivalence, if not hostility. Concomitantly, the DPs’ focus was increasingly on their homelands. They wished to influence politics in their ancestral or sentimental home—not in Germany, the country that served as their actual, though likely temporary, home. Over time, “home” became more of an idea than an actual place, as the idealized vision of their homeland bore little resemblance to actual conditions there. They failed to have an impact on political and social conditions in Poland, Ukraine, and Russia, but the DPs did strive to establish definitions of what it meant to be a Pole, Ukrainian, or Russian in exile.

Adding more nuance to the conventional story of Jewish DPs, Holian argues that Zionism was neither the initial nor the most natural political philosophy for many in this group. It was considerably more popular among Polish and Lithuanian than among Hungarian and Czech Jews. Moreover, the first impulse for many Jews was to return home; however, amidst pogroms and continuing antisemitism, many Holocaust survivors soon realized the impossibility of re-establishing themselves in eastern Europe. A desire to emigrate became widespread, but the British ban on migration to Palestine caused many Jews to look for other options. Within occupied Germany, the Americans’ DP policy, including recognition of the Jews as a separate nationality, strengthened the Zionist camp, and Zionist activists were the best organized within the Jewish DP community.

A third group—political prisoners—also engaged in DP politics. Like the Jews, they had been in concentration camps and death...