In war's wake: europe's displaced persons in the postwar order

After WWII, Europe was awash in refugees. Never in modern times had so manybeen so destitute and displaced. No longer subjects of a single nation-state, this motley group of enemies and victims consisted of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, ex-Soviet POWs, ex-forced laborers in the Third Reich, legions ofpeople who fled the advancing Red Army, and many thousands uprooted by the sheer violence of the war. This book argues that postwar international relief operations wentbeyond their stated goal of civilian "rehabilitation" and contributed to the rise of a new internationalism, setting the terms on which future displaced persons would be treated by nations and NGOs. The end of the Second World War inEurope gave way to a gigantic refugee crisis. Thoroughly prepared by Allied military planners, the swift repatriation of millions of former forced laborers, concentration camp inmates and prisoners of war nearly brought this dramaticepisode top a close. Yet in September 1945, the number of displaced persons placed under the guardianship of Allied armies and relief agencies in occupied Germany amounted to 1.5 million. A costly burden for theoccupying powers, the Jewish, Polish, Ukrainian, Yugoslav and Baltic DPs unwilling to return to their countries of origin presented a complex internationalproblem. Massed in refugee camps stretched from Northern Germany to Sicily, the DPs had become long-term asylum seekers.Based on the records of the International Refugee Organization, this book describes how the European DP crisis impinged on the shape of the postwar order. The DP question directly affected the outbreak of the Cold War; the transformation of the "West" into a new geopolitical entity; the conduct of political purges and retribution; the ideology and methods of modern humanitarian interventions; the appearance of international agencies and non-governmental organizations; the emergence of aninternational human rights system; the organization of migration movements and the redistribution of "surplus populations"; the advent of Jewish nationhood; and postwar categorizations of political and humanitarian refugees. INDICE: Acknowledgments Introduction: The Last Million The Battle of the Refugees: DPs and the Making of the Cold War West "Who is a Refugee?": From 'Victors' Justice' to Anticommunism Care and Maintenance: The New Face of International Humanitarianism Displaced Persons in the "Human Rights Revolution" Surplus Manpower, Surplus Population Extraterritorial Jews: Refugee Humanitarianism and the Advent of Jewish Statehood Epilogue: The Golden Age of European Refugees, 1945-1960 Notes Sources and Further Reading Index

• ISBN: 978-0-19-539968-4
• Editorial: Oxford University
• Encuadernacion: Cartoné
• Páginas: 256
• Fecha Publicación: 01/12/2011
• Nº Volúmenes: 1
• Idioma: Inglés