Ownership Struggle

The​ Second World War is often described as a total war – that is, a war which blurred the divide between front and home front, colony and metropole, women and men, soldier and civilian. But if we shift our attention from Dunkirk and Normandy eastwards – to the war Germany unleashed against Poland and then, from 1941, the Soviet Union – total war seems an understatement. The war in the East was one of annihilation, a Vernichtungskrieg which effaced any distinction between combatants and non-combatants, and in which people were killed not for what they did (bear arms) but for who they were: Pole, Russian, Ukrainian or (especially) Jew. The astounding disproportion in death rates between East and West says it all. US military deaths ran under half a million, more than twice the toll of Korea, Vietnam and Iraq combined, but still only 0.3 per cent of the American population. Britain’s similar number of deaths – even if we add tens of thousands of civilian deaths from bombing – amounted to about 1 per cent of the population. By comparison, almost a fifth of the total population of Poland died, most of them civilians and, more often than not, Jewish. Soviet deaths, more than half of them civilian, topped twenty million, forty times the American number and about 12 per cent of the prewar Soviet population.

When the tide turned at Stalingrad, and the Red Army set off to retake the land the Wehrmacht had devastated, everyone knew the soldiers were bent on vengeance. Across those Nazi-occupied lands, people who had served the occupiers or even just stayed put when others had fled eyed their children and packed suitcases. They boarded trains when they could; they pushed carts westwards. In Poland, columns of concentration camp inmates in striped uniforms were being force-marched the same way: when those near-skeletons dropped, exhausted, guards shot them and left them at the side of the road. Then the roads filled with the Volksdeutsche, the ten million-plus ethnic Germans – East Prussian landowners, urban professionals, Sudeten German factory workers, the half-million ‘settlers’ that the Nazis had planted on seized Polish farms – that furious local populations were flogging westwards. The Reich these columns entered was already chock-full of people out of place: prisoners of war, forced labourers, orphaned and homeless children and refugees of all kinds. Jewish survivors emerged too, some tens of thousands liberated from the camps joined by ‘submarines’ who had lived underground and by those returning from a harsh but not murderous refuge in the Soviet Union. Even excluding the Volksdeutsche, now Germany’s problem, there were when the war ended perhaps eight million ‘displaced people’ – or DPs – within the four occupation zones of the former Reich.

Amazingly, the Allies had anticipated this, in 1943 founding the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) to care for civilians and the displaced and to help military authorities get them back ‘home’. A commitment to repatriation was reaffirmed at Yalta, but very quickly problems emerged. It wasn’t just that borders had moved and identity documents been lost (or burned); it was also that people didn’t want to go back to states that had changed hands, or against which they had fought, or that had tried to kill them. Desperate and traumatised Jewish survivors refused to return to neighbours who had denounced or deported them; when some were returned to Poland anyway and met with pogroms and hatred, all prospect of Jewish repatriation evaporated. Following sharp criticism from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which was caring for Jewish survivors, in December 1945 Truman opened up visas in excess of the usual quotas for some 23,000 DPs in the American zone, two-thirds of them Jewish, and from January 1946 UNRRA too recognised Jews as a national group, to be housed apart from other refugees. In this case (and no other), the Soviets and Americans were on the same page, agreeing that refuge outside Europe must be found, ideally in Palestine. The British, having learned how strongly Palestine’s Arab population would resist this project, objected until, in 1948, they surrendered their mandate, leaving – as one departing official put it – the key under the mat. Of some 230,000 registered Jewish DPs, just over 130,000 would settle in the new state of Israel and about 65,000 in the United States.

But Jews were not the only group disinclined to go ‘home’. Plenty of the 400,000 Polish DPs in Germany (or, sometimes, DPs claiming to be Polish) didn’t want to go back to their ravaged and now communist homeland. Possibly the trickiest group, however, were those DPs whose ‘home’ now fell within the Soviet Union’s (expanded) borders and whom the Soviets were determined to reclaim. In their own zone, they quickly repatriated their citizens and in the Western zones too UNRRA and the military authorities initially facilitated the return of DPs: by March 1946, some 4.4 million Soviets had been repatriated, two-thirds from the Western zones and a third from the Soviet zone; of these, 1.6 million were POWs and the rest forced labourers and other civilians. But then the numbers returning began to taper off. As the DP camps in the Western zones were still full, Soviet officials wanted to enter them to retrieve their citizens; UNRRA staff, aware that some DPs would do anything to avoid going back (flee the camps, even kill themselves) grew reluctant. In the US Congress, UNRRA was under attack for being too liberal, too soft on communism and much too expensive: the United States, as the only power with any money to spare, was meeting about three-quarters of its costs. On the ground in Germany, though, the Soviets and the Western Allies were at loggerheads.

In his account of the DP crisis published in 2012, In War’s Wake: Europe’s Displaced Persons in the Postwar Order, Gerard Daniel Cohen argued that this stand-off marked the beginning of both the international refugee regime and the Cold War. Cohen was particularly interested in the way that the crisis spurred the development of international human rights law, which guarantees the citizen’s right to leave a state if they choose, and of international agreement around Jewish nationhood, but he also attended to the way Allied recognition of DPs’ right to refuse repatriation dramatically worsened Soviet-Western relations. Sheila Fitzpatrick, reviewing the book in the LRB (11 April 2013), largely accepted these arguments but was critical of Cohen’s reliance on the records of UNRRA and the refugee organisation that succeeded it. ‘I wonder whether a parallel and complementary story couldn’t be told,’ she wrote, ‘by someone capable of mining Soviet and Polish archives.’ Leavening Cohen’s sources with records from the Russian state archives and memoirs, she has now written that story.

Fitzpatrick’s main focus is, as her subtitle makes clear, Soviet Displaced Persons – or, more precisely, those DPs who were claimed by the Soviets but not repatriated. Who were these people? The International Refugee Organisation (IRO), which took over from UNRRA in mid-1947, but without Soviet participation, categorised some 350,000 of the more than one million it resettled by 1951 as ‘Soviet’. This figure, Fitzpatrick points out, is certainly an underestimate, for Russians resisting repatriation routinely claimed to be Poles or Yugoslavs or some other East European nationality (and acquired forged documents to prove it); Soviet authorities thought 450,000 a more realistic number. But the designation is tricky for a second reason: most of these ‘Soviets’ were – or could claim to be – from regions that had not been part of the USSR in 1939. According to the IRO, 163,474 were ‘Balts’, from the independent Baltic states annexed by the USSR following the Nazi-Soviet Pact (then conquered by the Nazis, then retaken again by the Red Army); 113,677 were ‘Ukrainian’ (and a few thousand more Belorussian), many from Western areas that had been Polish before 1939; and – because Russians who had fled the Bolsheviks decades earlier were allowed to register as DPs too – a further 26,323 were ‘stateless’. Only 41,325 were listed as hailing from the (pre-1939) ‘USSR’. The great majority of these 350,000 ‘Soviet’ DPs, in other words, were ‘Soviet’ in Soviet eyes but often not in the eyes of the DPs themselves and – as the Allies did not recognise Soviet sovereignty over the Baltic states – not really in Western eyes either. Claimed by the USSR but now in the Western zones, they became the object of ‘an “ownership” struggle between the Soviet Union and the Allies’.

Fitzpatrick has always been drawn to strong arguments, and she makes one here. She credits two factors – a deepening Cold War antagonism that disposed the Western Allies to ‘rebrand’ these DPs as victims of communism, and the ‘agency’ of DPs themselves – for an unusually swift and successful resolution to the whole problem, with DPs who resisted repatriation given entry to precisely those lands (especially the US, Canada and Australia for the remaining ‘Soviets’; Israel and the US for the Jews) to which they most wished to go. Some of this story is familiar: other historians have tracked the shift in UNRRA and Allied thinking and detailed how Cold War tensions disposed the Allies towards resettlement. Fitzpatrick is unusual, though, in her insistence on how DPs made their own chances, not just resisting repatriation but also consciously refashioning themselves as the migrants the West wanted. In their ability to exploit anti-communism and their own pluck, ‘Soviet’ DPs emerge, in Fitzpatrick’s striking words, as ‘surely the luckiest of victims’, their happy fate in marked contrast to that doled out to most other refugee populations.

Although UNRRA staffers were often left-leaning internationalists, their organisation of camp life, even if undertaken for pragmatic reasons, empowered DPs and legitimised anti-Soviet feelings. Encouraged to establish self-governing institutions, ‘Soviet’ DPs organised themselves by nationality, building the schools, churches, youth groups and civic associations that underwrote what it meant to be ‘Latvian’ or ‘Ukrainian’ or ‘Russian’. The camps fostered new ties too, with DPs often forming new families (and forgetting old ones), the high birth rates among Jewish women in particular evidence of ‘a conscious desire to rebuild the population after the Holocaust’. The camps were not oppressive ‘total institutions’, though. DPs could come and go, travel or pursue an education, seek work or live outside the camp, and (for the young and female) trade companionship or sex for meals, dates or even marriage: for a DP woman, Fitzpatrick writes, marriage to an American GI was ‘as good as it got’. Indeed, DPs who were young at the time often remember the camps with nostalgia, as a ‘halcyon’ time, a kind of extended ‘gap year’ – ‘an interval of freedom and hedonism that separated wartime misery from the strains and uncertainties of settling in a new country’. ‘Soviet’ DP life in the Western zones, in other words, provided both the support needed to resist repatriation and a kind of training for a Western life.

Fitzpatrick makes clear just how frustrating Soviet officials found Allied foot-dragging on repatriation. They asked for lists of DPs only to be told that all Soviets had already been repatriated; they asked to interview camp residents only to find, when they arrived, that all Russian speakers had vanished. They put pressure on people in the Soviet Union to write letters urging their relatives to return, but DPs developed a fine ability to read between the lines of these letters. Soviet authorities found this treatment humiliating and enraging. Given their enormous war losses, they had a pressing need for labour – but they knew too that a significant minority of DPs had fought against the Red Army or even under Nazi command, and wanted to bring those they considered fascists and traitors to justice. All Soviet DPs were screened on repatriation (a process known as ‘filtration’), and while women were usually released into the general population, some 7 per cent of all repatriates were sent to the Gulag, a proportion that rose to over 15 per cent for POWs. The DPs, knowing this, became even more elusive.

So these refuseniks remained in Western camps. As early as 1946, Belgium recruited some into mining, but the work and conditions were so harsh that few DPs would do it. Britain did better, with around eighty thousand DPs of both sexes taking up jobs in mining, agriculture and hospitals and usually staying. But more distant countries less touched by the war took in the most. In 1948, the US passed a ‘Displaced Persons’ Act that opened up more than 200,000 visas, with a further tranche two years later; in the end, the US accepted more than 300,000 DPs, including almost 150,000 of the ‘Soviet’ group. Other Western states stepped up too, with Canada taking nearly 125,000 (including 45,000 ‘Soviets’), the Latin American states another 94,000 and Australia, with a population of only 7.4 million in 1945, more than 180,000 – by some distance the largest number as a proportion of population.

Fitzpatrick insists on the importance of anti-communism in unlocking the American gates as, to Soviet surprise and disgust, the US abjured isolationism to build a Western alliance aimed at containing the USSR. This is persuasive, but when it came to accepting DPs, other desiderata mattered too. Israel was unusual in its willingness to take any Jewish survivor regardless of health or age. Other countries were much more selective. They looked for the single, strong, male and young; no one wanted the ill, disabled, traumatised or old – ‘old’ defined as men over 45, women over 40 and ‘professionals’ over 35 (in those days no country wanted intellectuals or the highly trained). DPs scrambled to meet those criteria. They couldn’t duck the mandatory TB tests (embarkation was conditional on a negative result), but they could shave years off their ages, forget spouses left behind and leave unmentioned the degrees and accomplishments that had once been a source of pride. Fitzpatrick tells a great story about a refugee ship that sailed from Bremerhaven for Australia packed with builders, farm workers, waitresses and domestics, but docked miraculously stuffed with scientists and ballet dancers and university lecturers as well.

Host countries had strong ethnic preferences too, ‘in a disconcerting echo of Nazi racial preferences’ almost universally favouring the ‘beautiful Balts’ (‘clean, bright and civilised’) over Poles and Ukrainians and, still more, over Jews. As the US required DPs to be ‘sponsored’ by someone willing to guarantee housing and support, church groups and other support organisations took on the job of making these matches (often for co-religionists) – but the Kalmyks, a nomadic Mongol people, Buddhist by faith, won entry to the US only after a lawyer persuaded the authorities that they were ‘white’. As the process became routine, anti-communism came to matter more. The 1948 US legislation theoretically barred entry to members of Nazi and communist organisations alike, but after 1950, immigrants to the US had to sign a loyalty oath affirming their lack of communist ties or sympathies. As a result, people who earlier would have been categorised as war criminals had an easier time. Simon Wiesenthal’s warning that the Western Allies were admitting people involved in the mass murder of Jews went mostly unheeded, with the State Department concluding, for instance, that Latvians who had fought alongside the Germans had different aims – anti-communist not fascist – and so could be admitted. Britain too let in ‘Balts’, some with SS tattoos, with only a cursory screening. Not until the late 1970s did the US begin to search out and prosecute perpetrators of genocide – including DPs – living quietly on, say, Long Island.

Faced with the chaos of these times, historians search for logics and patterns. Fitzpatrick identifies a drive towards self-preservation and reinvention exercised by states as well as individuals. Aware of the existential nature of the war in the East, she helps us understand why the Soviets worked so hard to recapture those they considered their citizens and their anger as they found themselves outwitted by a rich and confident West now preaching a new creed of human rights. Her insistence on DPs’ agency, especially when it shades into the claim that they were, in comparison with other refugee groups, ‘lucky’, is more problematic, not just because it writes out the horrific experiences that turned many people into DPs in the first place but also because it effaces how unevenly different groups of DPs had experienced those hardships. The ‘Soviet’ Balts and Ukrainians who fled westwards were mostly refugees, dissidents and sometimes collaborators, not survivors of labour and concentration camps. (David Nasaw’s The Last Million: Europe’s Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War, published in 2020, pays close attention to the way the distinctive character of Jewish suffering was effaced as American churches or charities began lobbying on behalf of particular co-religionists or nationalities and as the US government became more anti-communist, a dynamic that Fitzpatrick’s tendency to bring in Jewish DPs only sporadically can’t adequately capture.)

To claim that DPs were lucky is also odd in that Fitzpatrick’s is not a comparative study: no effort is made to specify the commonalities or differences among the refugee crises mentioned (Palestinians, ‘global South’ refugees attempting to reach Europe) and no attention paid to what I think might be the most atypical aspect of this one, which is that it occurred in an occupied and defeated land. Refugees usually flee war-torn, poor or failed states for prosperous ones that often don’t want them: France’s willingness to let in some 400,000 Spanish Republicans as Franco advanced, like Merkel’s decision to allow a million Syrians into Germany in 2015-16, very much stand out. But in this case, while the Germans didn’t want the DPs either (not least because they were given better rations), their preferences hardly mattered, and the occupying powers could settle the problem as they liked. In the Soviet zone that meant swift repatriation, in the West often resettlement, at least of the young, strong, ideologically attuned and easily assimilable. In 1951, the Federal Republic agreed to assume responsibility for a remaining 100,000-150,000 ‘hard core’ of the old, ill and physically or mentally disabled.

Why​ this insistence on DPs’ good fortune and agency? Fitzpatrick acknowledges her ‘personal stake’ in this story: her marriage in 1989 to Michael Danos (Mischka in those years), who died ten years later. Mischka and his mother, Olga, were DPs in the postwar years, and since they were often apart, living in different camps or cities and leaving a record in letters, their experiences inform the book. Mischka had gone from (Nazi-occupied) Riga to Dresden as an exchange student, so avoiding being drafted into the Waffen SS; as the Red Army advanced, he and his mother set off from different locations for Schleswig-Holstein, hoping to cross the border into Denmark. By the time they arrived the border was closed, so they registered as DPs (Mischka, enterprisingly, in both the British and American zones) but lived mostly outside the camps. In time, Olga started a business while Mischka explored Germany, picked up some money doing casual labour, joined athletic clubs and sorted out his education. In 1946 he enrolled as a student at the technical university in Hanover; he would complete a PhD in physics at the University of Heidelberg some five years later. By then, Olga was in the US, sponsored by a Jewish Latvian she had protected many years earlier. She could thus sponsor Mischka and his first wife, a German, whose membership in the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the girls’ wing of the Nazi youth movement, might have been a problem a few years earlier but was no longer.

Fitzpatrick draws on Mischka’s experiences sparingly, but he was, she says, ‘always a presence’ as she worked, providing ‘a kind of running commentary, audible only to me’. That connection makes the book more vivid, intimate and even moving: the prose brightens and interest quickens whenever Mischka enters the scene. I can’t help but feel, though, that his particular story has too strongly shaped the book’s interpretation. For if it is hard to think of many DPs as ‘lucky’, Mischka surely was. Young, male, fit, well-educated and with no children, he was also Latvian – or, let’s say, Latvian enough to be able to suppress the Hungarian and Jewish strands in his heritage and write ‘Latvian’ on his DP forms. He was, in other words, not just the sort of DP best able to cope with the challenges of displacement but also the sort that everyone – from Allied army officers to UNRRA screeners to American immigration officials to German landladies or girlfriends to the angry Soviets themselves – liked best. Bright and resourceful, he had the wit to use those advantages. If one wanted to make an argument about DP ‘agency’, Mischka Danos is the example one would choose.

Even among the ‘Soviet’ group, families with children, the old and sick, and those who fell by the wayside don’t fit this frame so easily. While writing this review, and reflecting on Fitzpatrick’s argument, I read the unpublished memoir of the father of a friend of mine whose family fled Kiev in advance of the Red Army and spent four years in various DP camps in Germany before being granted visas for America. A child at the time, his account does reveal how ‘agency’ mattered: without his mother’s insistence that the family keep moving, even when his father wanted to turn back, they would not have ended up in the West. ‘Anti-communism’ played a role too, for this was an intelligentsia family, willing to run risks to leave the Bolshevik state. But I was struck by how often random accident saved them – as when they met deserters in Poland who had a horse and agreed to harness their sled to it when the children couldn’t walk any further, or when they caught a last train from Vienna to Munich (so ending up in what became the American zone), or when the children ran out of a building just before Allied bombs flattened it, or when they lost a child en route and, against all odds, found her again. Once they became DPs and the camps were running, their situation eased: they could source forged Polish documents, scrounge music lessons for the children, build the friendships that would turn into sponsorships and chain migration, apply for resettlement. In America the older generation – engineers by training – worked as seamstresses and sales clerks, but their children and grandchildren became, in time, what the family had been a century earlier: engineers, musicians, professors.