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The “Human Rights Revolution” at Work Displaced Persons in Postwar Europe
Displaced Persons in Postwar Europe
“When this ghastly war ends,” gloomily predicted Franklin D. Roosevelt in October 1939, “there may be not one million but ten million or twenty million men, women and children belonging to many races … who will enter into the wide picture – the problem of the human refugee.” 1
Six and a half years later, Eleanor Roosevelt confirmed the forecast of her then deceased husband. “A new type of political refugee is appearing,” she wrote in February 1946, “people who have been against the present governments and if they stay at home or go home will probably be killed.” 2 To be sure, these statements could have adequately described earlier instances of forced displacement, none the least the refugee exodus from the Reich of the late 1930s. But although continental Europe had been awash with stateless and exiled people from the end of the First World War to the advent of Nazism, the presidential couple envisioned “the problem of the human refugee” as an impending postwar crisis more than the continuation of an older phenomenon.
Two decades of isolationism and restrictive immigration quotas may have blinded American eyes to the magnitude of European displacement prior to 1939. The prospect of renewed American engagement with the world, however, revived strong interest for “Europe on the move.” Observing this phenomenon at both ends of the conflict, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt were undoubtedly right: the scale of the European refugee problem at the end of the Second World War went beyond anything seen before.
Writing on the eve of Victory in Europe, Hannah Arendt similarly reflected upon the impending refugee crisis. “It would be a good thing,” she observed in April 1945, “if it were generally admitted that the end of the war in Europe will not automatically return thirty to forty million exiles to their homes.” And then the former refugee from Nazi Germany divulged one of the greatest challenges the authorities would face:“[A] very large proportion,” she warned, “will regard repatriation as deportation and will insist on retaining their statelessness.”
Arendt had evidently in mind the yet unquantified Jewish survivors of the Final Solution but also referred to other types of anti-Soviet Eastern European displaced persons (DPs). Altogether, she presciently pointed out, “The largest group of potentially stateless people is to be found in Germany itself.” 3 Contrary to the military and humanitarian focus on population management, Arendt believed that the “DP problem” was first and foremost political in nature. From 1946 to the end of the decade, the vocal and conspicuous “last million” of Europe’s DPs – a multinational group of Jewish and non-Jewish asylum seekers unwilling or unable to go home – amply corroborated her predictions.
Indeed, the “DP story” comprised two distinct chronological sequences, one logistical and one more markedly political. It is generally assumed that at the end of the war there were approximately eight million civilians in Germany who qualified as “displaced persons” under the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA, 1943–1947) and Allied military directives: foreign workers, slave laborers, prisoners of war, and liberated concentration camp inmates formed the bulk of this predominantly Eastern European population. Between the spring and the fall of 1945, six to seven million DPs were returned to their countries of origins – forcibly and often tragically in the case of Soviet nationals. Yet in September 1945, 1.2 million refugees still remained in Western Allied hands. As it became increasingly clear to humanitarian personnel and Allied military commanders at the start of 1946, return rates significantly dwindled among the remaining DPs.
Their refusal to go home, routinely analyzed by various surveys, was motivated by political, economic, or psychological factors. Combined with fresh arrivals from beyond the “iron curtain,” the diminishing appeal of repatriation facilitated the long-term presence of one million DPs in occupied Germany (small numbers of refugees also lived in the DP camps of Austria and Italy). Brought to Germany by the Nazis as foreign workers and slave laborers, 400,000 Poles and Polish-Ukrainians amounted in March 1946 to nearly 50 percent of the DP population (Polish-Ukrainians were later independently classified as “Ukrainians”). From 150,000 to 200,000 Estonians, Lithuanians, and Latvians formed a sizeable Baltic group, including former Wehrmacht conscripts and volunteers, migrant workers, and slave laborers as well as civilians who fled the advance of the Red Army.
In early 1946, Holocaust survivors represented less than 10 percent of the overall DP population. But to the small group of Jews liberated by the Allies in the spring of 1945 was gradually added a substantial number of postwar Jewish “infiltrates,” predominantly of Polish origin: At the peak period of 1947–1948, approximately 200,000 Jewish refugees lived in the American occupation zone of Germany. Alongside these main groups whose size constantly evolved because of repatriation, emigration, and the entrance of newcomers, small numbers of anticommunist Yugoslavs, Slovaks, Hungarians, and other Eastern European nationals completed the demographic makeup of the “last million.” 4
Like many contemporary statistics documenting the DP world, this figure, if never far from the reality, was not always accurate. The International Refugee Organization (1946–1952), the agency created by the United Nations to care for the ever- fluctuating “last million,” generally added prewar refugees and other European stateless persons situated outside of Germany in order to round up this tally. But without much empirical distortion, the IRO could safely advertise the DPs to the world as the “last million” of refugees from the Second World War desperately searching for asylum countries. Emblematic of the longer political sequence of postwar displacement, this expression essentially pertained to Holocaust survivors and non-Jewish anticommunist refugees, the two distinct components of a DP camp system that stretched from northern Germany to Sicily.
The history of postwar refugees has been thoroughly documented by the official historians of the humanitarian agencies in charge of the DPs. More recently, scholars have delved into the records of these organizations to cast new light on the DP experience in postwar Germany and Austria, whether by focusing on particular nationalities or by offering a more comprehensive view. 5 Recent or more dated, most accounts predominantly concentrate on the humanitarian aspect of “relief and rehabilitation.” Undeniably, the difficult delivery of food rations, health care, or housing accommodations amid the material devastation of postwar Germany remained a daunting challenge for the charity organizations and international agencies entrusted with this mission.
“Surely in recorded history,” observed the head of UNRRA “Displaced Persons” division in 1947, “there has been no group of unwilling migrants that has posed such complex problems.” 6 But whereas the DP episode provided the arena for the largest humanitarian intervention in the immediate postwar years, it also informed the rise of the human rights movement characteristic of the 1940s. “Today,” Hannah Arendt observed in 1949, “the whole question of the Rights of Man has taken a new life and pertinence.”
This new concern was partly due to the interwar “emergence of an entirely new category of human beings … who do not possess citizenship” but also to the “new millions of displaced persons” added by “the events of the forties.” The DPs, argued Arendt, propelled human rights to the center of postwar international politics: “[T]he problem of statelessness on so large a scale had the effect of confronting the nations of the world with an inescapable and perplexing question: whether or not there really exist such ‘human rights ‘independent of all specific political status and deriving solely from the fact of being human?” 7 For contemporary international jurists, the “DP question” – namely, the fact that nearly a million people refused, for various reasons, to abide by the directives of their national government reflected one of the main features of the postwar human rights agenda: the curtailment of state sovereignty in favor of the rights of individuals. “Behind the affairs of people deported and exiled from their homes,” wrote a legal scholar in 1948, “there is the chief question of the relation of the individuals towards the international community.” 8
Although seldom used by the activists and political actors of the 1940s, the expression “human rights revolution” is commonly employed today to describe the advent of the human rights era in the aftermath of the Second World War. According to this widely held view, it was during this pivotal decade that a handful of dedicated “visionaries,” not all of them of Western origin, mounted a successful assault against the old concept of state sovereignty: Following the “gathering storm” of the interwar years and the ideological “crusade” of the wartime period, the “revolution” launched in 1945 challenged the “Leviathan-state” to curtail some of its traditional prerogatives in favor of the rights of individual citizens. 9 In this evolutionary narrative, the predominantly “juridical revolution” of the postwar years allegedly laid the groundwork for subsequent “advocacy” and “enforcement” phases in the last decades of the twentieth century. 10
The idealist celebration of human rights as the “idea of our time,” particularly prevalent in the West since the end of the Cold War, hinges therefore on a revolutionary reading of the 1940s: Against overwhelming odds and despite many contradictions (such as the persistence of racial segregation in the United States and of European rule in the colonial world), human rights became at that time a matter of international responsibility by challenging the nation-state’s monopoly on the conduct of international affairs.
Realist-minded writers have recently cautioned against idealization and morality tales. The emergence of international human rights, they maintain, was not the sole product of tenacious visionaries bent on creating “fire-walls against barbarism”; nor was it only spurred, as idealists contend, by a “war weary generation’s reflection on European nihilism and its consequences.” 11
The historian and legal scholar A. W. Brian Simpson, for instance, argued in a detailed study that the meteoric rise of human rights after 1945 primarily resulted from “complicated interrelationships between individuals and institutions, and governments, with their varied ideological commitments and perceptions of reality, history and self interest.” 12 For Mark Mazower, pragmatic calculations chiefl y accounted for the widespread preoccupation with human rights during and after the Second World War. Rather than a smiling revolution in moral standards, the dawn of the human rights age was a “strange triumph” largely made possible by the desire of the Great Powers and many small nations alike to finish off the moribund interwar system of minority rights in favor of more expedient individual rights, abstract enough to be safely embraced. Thus staunch advocates of mass expulsions of ethnic minorities, such as the Czechoslovak leader Edvard Beneš, could at the same time ardently champion “a Charter of Human Rights throughout the world” for the postwar era. Seen in this light, the ideology of human rights paradoxically reinforced – as much as it sought to restrict – the supremacy of state interest. 13
Nonetheless, one common feature unites these diverging lines of interpretation: Whether critical or apologetic, assessments of the “revolution” primarily focus on the motivations of the drafters rather than on the actual enforcers of human rights. This imbalance is easily justifiable: As pointed out by most international jurists in the 1940s and 1950s, the international proclamation of human rights, resounding as it may have been, was noticeably devoid of enforcement mechanisms. As the renowned international lawyer Hersch Lauterpacht pointed out in 1947, the cautious refusal of the United Nations Commission of Human Rights to recognize the right of individual citizens to petition the world organization against abusing states significantly weakened the challenge against national sovereignty. 14
The French jurist René Cassin, and with him a substantial number of legal commentators, opposed this pessimism: “From one side of the world to the other and from the bottom to the top of the social ladder, workers on strike, victims of racial and religious discrimination, persecuted intellectuals … all invoke with great hope this Universal Declaration.” Yet Cassin readily admitted that this landmark document, as its preamble stated, set only “a common standard of achievement for all people and all nations” to be attained in the future. For the time being, he recognized, the Declaration – including its important provisions regarding refugees and political asylum – served only as “a magnet and a goal for the aspirations of mankind.” 15 Despite the efforts deployed by the United Nations to underscore the impact of the Universal Declaration and encourage the worldwide celebration of a newly created “Human Rights Day” (1949), the “revolution” of the 1940s was overwhelmingly perceived by its advocates and critics alike as being more declarative than legislative, more suggestive than binding. 16
The limited number of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) specifically concerned at the time with international human rights further prevented the “revolution” from being fully put into force. As opposed to the thousands of human rights NGOs operating in the world today, only a handful of such organizations were in existence in the mid-1940s. The most prominent among them, the New York–based International League for the Rights of Man and the Paris-based Fédération Internationale des Droits de l’Homme, epitomized the historical and geographical continuity uniting the “human rights revolution” of the 1940s with the “Atlantic revolutions” of the late eighteenth century. But like the more numerous (and predominantly American) civic, religious, labor, educational, or women’s organizations enlisted by the United Nations to participate in the drafting of human rights, their role remained essentially consultative. Indeed, as a study by William Korey indicates, the first postwar NGOs saw standard setting as their main priority: namely, “the establishment of international norms by which the conduct of states can be measured or judged.” 17 As such, early NGOs may well have “revolutionized the language of international relations, which statesmen of an earlier era and even some of the recent period would have found strange and unacceptable.” 18 But until the later appearance of more militant watchdogs committed to fact -finding and implementation – such as Amnesty International after its creation in 1961 – the “enforcement revolution,” facilitated by the détente era and the unraveling of the Cold War, still remained a fairly distant prospect.
The history of DPs in postwar Europe, however, complicates this established chronology. As the following essay argues, the DP experience immediately put to test the language of human rights hammered out in the 1940s. Deemed by the Big Powers “the most important show on earth” despite the fact that from China to India /Pakistan and the Middle East mass displacement spanned a large part of the globe between 1945 and 1949, Europe’s DPs provided the first concrete field of experimentation for postwar human rights principles.
The international agencies in charge, alongside Allied military authorities, of the governance of European refugees in occupied Germany and Austria – including, during the peak period of 1947-1948, approximately 250,000 Jewish refugees and Holocaust survivors – enforced some of the most important rights forged and adopted by the United Nations . The right of everyone “to leave any country” (Article 13 of the 1948 Universal Declaration), “to seek and enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution”( Article 14), and “to a nationality”( Article 15) all directly pertained to the ongoing DP crisis; and so did newly proclaimed guarantees against arbitrary deprivation of citizenship and state interference with freedom of movement, opinion, and faith.
Displacement, in short, prominently loomed in the background of human rights activism; it also served as an important testing ground for the new principles set forth in the international arena. To make sense of the relationship between the “revolution” and this laboratory phase of modern political asylum, we will examine how some of the main human rights principles discussed throughout the decade were implemented, or at times bypassed, in the Western management of forced displacement. The governance of DPs served as an immediate echo chamber for the language of human rights in the 1940s. The affirmation of a new relationship between individuals and states, the universal scope of individual rights, and the lingering question of protection of minorities not only were issues debated by visionaries, drafters, and international delegates in lengthy deliberations, but also directly pertained to the lives of postwar European refugees.
1. The New York Times , October 18, 1939.
2. Quoted by Mary Ann Langdon, A World Made New. Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York, 2001), 29.
3. Hannah Arendt, “The Stateless People,” Contemporary Jewish Record, 8 (April 1945), 137–153
5. The most thorough overview to date is Mark Wyman, DPs: Europe’s Displaced Persons 1945-1951, 2nd ed. (Ithaca, N.Y., 1998).
6. Fred Hoehler, “Displaced Persons,” in George B. Huszar (ed.), Persistent International Issues (New York, 1947), 10.
7. Hannah Arendt, “‘The Rights of Man’. What Are They?” Modern Review, 3 (1949), 24-37.
8. Eduard Reut-Nicolussi, “Displaced Persons and International Law,” in Recueil de Cours. Institut de droit international (Paris, 1948), 64.
9. Paul Gordon Lauren, The Evolution of International Human Rights (Philadelphia, 1998), 130–205.
10. Michael Ignatieff, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry (Princeton, 2001), 5.
11. Ibid., 4.
13. Mark Mazower, “The Strange Triumph of Human Rights, 1933–1950,” Historical Journal, 47 (2004), 379–398.
14. Herch Lauterpacht, International Law and Human Rights (London, 1950), 397.
15. René Cassin, “La déclaration universelle et la mise en oeuvre des droits de l’homme,” in Académie de droit international. Receuil de cours , vol. 2 (The Hague, 1951), 239-267.
16. United Nations, Department of Social Affairs, The Impact of the Universal Declaration (New York, 1951).
17. William Korey, NGOs and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York, 1998), 3.
18. Ibid
19. Atina Grossmann, “Victims, Villains, and Survivors: Gendered Perceptions and Self-Perceptions of Jewish Displaced Persons in Occupied Post-War Germany,” Journal of the History of Sexuality, 11 (2002), 291-318.
