Displaced People as a Social Outcome from WWII - Research Paper Example

Displaced People: The Product of the Second World War I. Introduction The Second World War ushered in displacing of populations on an unparalleled scale. German and Soviet offensives in 1939 and 1940 generated waves of immigrants in swift succession; then followed the banishments of civilians from the invaded territories into the Reich, specifically following the Axis crusades in the Balkans and the Soviet Union, and incarceration of millions of prisoners of war from the Allied party. Augmented to this were the mass emigrations of Jews from all the regions colonized or occupied by the Axis powers to forced labor camps and extermination camps in the Eastern part, the Final Solution.1 Throughout 1944 and 1945 millions more immigrants escaping the approaching Red Army poured out into Germany, where ten million overseas workers competed with the indigenous population for food and housing. According to Malcolm Proudfoot, some sixty million European inhabitants had been taken away from their homes through force by justification of the conflict. This population surpasses by manifold that is generated by the First World War. It is not definite whether this total counts all those who escaped fascism in Italy, Spain and Greater Germany prior to the war and the millions of indigenous Germans driven out from Easter Europe subsequent to the war.2 An immeasurable population of Chinese, Koreans and Southeast Asians were expelled from their homes by the advancing Japanese. When historians take into account this occurrence, they must consider that the entire extent of the world immigrant phenomenon caused by this war may not at all be known.3 At some stage in the twentieth century the immigrant has become a continual dilemma in international relations. For the first time in human history the society of autonomous nations has had to deal with mammoth waves of dispossessed people in permanent banishment, and sadly they are incapable to provide enduring refuge to all who aspire for it. Undoubtedly, the emergence of fascism in Europe and the consequent Second World War contributed much in this historical phenomenon. In the 1930s Nazism formed refugees in populations that exceed beyond the capacity of the Office of the League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in addition to private assistance organizations.4 The governments of the Western nations were thus forced to consider refugees no longer as interim predicament ensuing from particular conflicts; in 1938 they instituted the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, the earliest stable organization to offer them assistance and security. During the war the Western Allies assigned their military forces the obligation for the safeguarding and restoration of the millions of exiles to their homeland, a remarkable development of the military mission for both theater and field commanders. Following the war, the West stopped to classify the dispossessed by national or ethnic origin and implemented a new more encompassing definition of refugee as any individual pursuing refuge from the ravages of war or dread of persecution. Moreover, in its postwar encounter with the communist coalition, the West learned not to hand over anymore the protection of refugees to organizations whose capability to act in response was hindered by regulations of the governments of member nations that were generating refugees; as a replacement, they established new organizations that preserved a greater liberty of action.5 The Second World War also generated the twentieth century new-fangled term ‘displaced person’. The term was derived in the discussion of research and planning for postwar refugee continued by the governments of the Western Allies. The earliest extensive survey of Europe’s demographic disorder was the Displacement of Population in Europe, circulated in 1943 by Eugene M. Kulischer, an investigator with the International Labor Office. Kulischer defined displacement to count German settlers in nations occupied by the Axis, non-Germans who left their homelands or were forcibly expelled, and non-Germans hired for work or military service by the Axis.6 It is probable that Kulischer’s work opened up the term ‘displaced person’ and its acronym ‘DP’ into the global vocabulary. II. Refugees and Displaced Persons The mass of migrations, departures, exiles, banishments and transfers during the 1930s and 1940s formed intense alterations upon the demographic chart of Europe. There are various reliable studies ordered by several national and international societies in an attempt to understand the complicated chain of events. A portrayal of the circumstance prior to the outbreak of the war in Europe is portrayed in the Refugee Problem, a study assigned by the Royal Institute of International Affairs in 1939 and shortened by Sir John Hope Simpson. Throughout the war the International Labor Office assumed a dynamic enthusiasm in the massive foreign labor agenda in the Reich; under its backing Eugene Kulischer created the work mentioned above The Displacement of Population in Europe.7 This literary piece not only facilitated the popularization of the term ‘displaced person’ but also suggested that the liberating armed forces should accomplish mass repatriation immediately after the war as workable as the fundamental initial stage in European revitalization. Arieh Tartakower and Kurt Grossman published in 1944 The Jewish Refugee which was the initial attempt to provide a systematic account of the dispossession of the Jewish communities in Europe. Subsidized by the American Jewish Congress, this work made use of a comprehensive collection of references, listed in the bibliography, to explain the predicament confronting the world of the Jews and to recommend solutions. It accurately foresaw that, for several reasons, the mainstream of Jewish refugees would not be triumphantly repatriated to their homelands and recommended a number of probable nations and territories of reception, primarily Palestine.8 Eugene Kulischer’s 1948 work entitled Europe on the Move: War and Population Changes 1917-1947 promoted the notion that since the decline of the Roman Empire the productive Germanic inhabitants have struggled to invade the East, and the mutually productive Slavic peoples have been advancing on a westward route. The consequence of the Second World War was the almost absolute setback of the Germanic thrust toward East and the consequent dispersal of the Slavonic settlement region into Central Europe. To validate his argument he created a detailed account of Europe’s changing demographic current. The Rockefeller Foundation sponsored a project more determined in its range, if not its hypothetical conclusions; a group of examiners under Vernant released The Refugee in the Postwar World in 1953 as the earliest survey of the population, location and situation of refuges in all corners of the world.9 It also trails the history of various international organizations to assist these vulnerable populations. The flow of refugees encouraged by the Soviet tyranny in Hungary prompted the publication in 1957 of Refugee and the World Community by John Stoessinger. The researcher committed much effort to yet an additional recent survey of the situation but is primarily concerned with the determination of the refugee dilemma and the obvious incapability of international organizations to keep up with it. If one argument in all these works can be identified, it is the incapacity of specialists to suggest valuable responses to the aggravating refugee dilemma, now acquiring throughout Asia and Africa.10 If a single work should be recommended as the paramount research on the refugee dilemma during and after World War II, it would be European Refugees by Malcolm Proudfoot. A geographer of population through training, Proudfoot served in the Displaced Persons Branch. This position provided him an exceptional leverage from which to examine and document the armed forces’ preliminary encounter with the mass of dispossessed peoples. It surveys the refugee predicament in all of its significant attributes: wartime activities, flights and migrations, trainings of the military to handle the massive DP (dispossessed people) dilemma in Europe.11 Proudfoot talks about the diverse difficulties linked with civilian assistance in regions ruined by war and the armies’ astonishing achievement of repatriating ten million displace people. He also commits a chapter each to Jewish postwar refugees in the territories occupied by the Allied forces and to indigenous German refugees, the exiles. It lingered to be the best English-language basis on Europe’s war refugees, specifically the response of the Allied military to their difficulties.12 Journalist Arthur Morse wrote a book in 1967 entitled While Six Million Died which became the first extensive study of what would turn out to be the most controversial feature of the history of refugees in the Second World War, the letdown of the Western nations, specifically Britain and the United States, to offer refuge for European Jews during the Holocaust. Morse condemned the American people for their negligence and blamed particular government officials for declining to loosen up restrictions on immigration. The next year David Wyman released the Paper Walls, which argued American’s comeback to the mounting predicament of European Jews from 1938 to 1941.13 The implications of the depression provoked a popular aggression against foreigners in common and Jews specifically; these anti-foreigner sentiments overcame among the public and Congress and disheartened government officials from adopting tougher measures. In a study conducted in the 1970 entitled The Politics of Rescue, Feingold put emphasis upon Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long; anti-Semitism provoked his headstrong rejection to release more visas to European Jews aspiring refuge in America.14 Great Britain was in the most advantageous status next to the United States to assist the Jews. In April 1943 British and American authorities conducted a covert conference in Bermuda on the refugee dilemma. The declaration released afterward pledged no tough action and carried much condemnation to both administrations. Britain positioned in far greater peril of defeat than the United States and dedicated a higher allocation of its resources to the war endeavor; these considerations inclined to surpass initiatives to assist refugees. However, the population of war refugees recognized by Britain was far massive in proportion to its indigenous population than that assumed by the United States.15 The greater part of the displaced persons under Allied assistance was forced laborers during the war. To appreciate the state of mind of the postwar DP and the difficulties of long-term care faced by military regime, one should examine the history of Nazi Germany’s overseas labor program, specifically the circumstances under which alien workers resided. Next to the Soviet inhabitants and the Poles, the biggest group under the overseas workers was the French; their narrative is documented.16 III. European Migration at the Aftermath of the World War II Migration is commonly defined as the movement of people or transfer of citizenship from one region to another. It is not at all times trouble-free to differentiate migrants from refugees during this period, as so many migrations were done through force. The moderately open emigration of peoples from Europe at the concluding phases of the century had turned out to be an entity of the past, and starting in the 1920s immigration to Americas arrived under increasingly serious restrictions. After 1939 countries were stimulated by wartime circumstances and security considerations to cut down open migration even further. The pattern observed here is obvious: while the liberty of the individual to move and resettle was vanishing, the totalitarian nation claimed its authority to transfer masses of people through coercion. Escape and exiles and the welfare of the refugee and displaced person have previously been taken into account. With regard to migration, the Second World War portrays the paradigm of the population shift and population exchange.17 A significant segment of Hitler’s New Order was the revamping of the indigenous map of Central and Eastern Europe. The Nazis pursued a motivated program by which outlying German settlements in the Eastern part were carried home into the Reich, into regions recently seized from Poland. There were also a number of exchanges with Ukrainians and Baltic inhabitants. These movements, in addition to others not involving Germans, are documented in detailed in Schechtman European Population Transfers. A large number of these actions were organized through agreement, replicating the 1920 exchange of population between Turkey and Greece. The researcher made the examination, so threatening now in retrospection, that European national leaders, depressed with the collapse of the League of Nations, could turn to with a growing rate of recurrence to the population relocation or exchange to resolve their predicaments with ethnic minorities.18 In 1946, when the book of Schechtman appeared, the world was at the time witnessing the turnaround of centuries of Germanic expansion to the east and the spreading out of Soviet power, as illustrated by Kulischer. The most significant component of this postwar movement was the forced exclusion of the ethnic German minorities from Czechoslovakia and Poland. Nearly every one of those Germans who had not escaped prior to the advancing of the Red Army into the Reich was thoroughly dispossessed; they were then referred to as ‘persons expelled from their homelands’.19 An approximated twelve million persons were driven away into occupied Germany. Not like the DPs, the exiles received no aid or support from the Allies and had to resort to the excessively taxed governments. These relocations had been given international endorsement at the Potsdam Conference; even though the Allies had appealed for the transfers to be executed in a peaceful and benevolent manner, they could not probably control the relocation of millions of people in the short duration of time allocated.20 There were many instances of acts of violence and acts of retribution. Other forced population relocations are those from Ukraine and Poland residing in the regions of eastern Poland, such as Galicia, occupied by the Soviet Union, and Ukrainians residing in postwar Poland, in addition to people from Hungary living in Transylvania who were compelled to leave after the region was seized by Romania.21 The incident of the Holocaust beckons the representation of East European Jewish communities secluded and defenseless before the Nazi colonizers. Yet several thousand Jews discovered refuge in Soviet Union, and a number of resilient individuals caught in Poland managed to elude extermination and struggle on. As the future of assistance from the Allies became more blurred, Jewish partisans designed escape channels directing out of Europe. These channels eventually became the passageways to Palestine. A large number of Jews were received into the U.S. territory of Germany as displaced people, to acquire basic human needs such as food, clothing, and shelter while waiting the opportunity to surrender Europe on the whole. Others transferred through Austria to camps located in Italy or left through pathways through Bulgaria out to the Black Sea.22 This migration is worth mentioning in the history of the immediate postwar era, for it transpired in disobedience of British restrictions in addition to the initial resistance of the U.S. Army, which desired to witness a reduction, not an increase, in the population of DPs in its auspices in Germany and Austria. Apparently, the ordeals of the Jews did not stop with the termination of the war. Survivors who came back to Poland discovered their homes devastated and themselves unwanted. Many endured another difficult hike into the American occupation regions of Germany and Austria, simply to have to fall in line in DPs camps for the chance to move abroad. A large number of these postwar DPs, perhaps the mainstream, wished to go to America. Unluckily, similar sentiments that had disheartened tough action to rescue Jews at some stage of the war marked themselves after the war in constraints on immigration. American approaches toward the displaced people, particularly the Jews, and how the manner sooner or later was cleared for DPs to migrate to America are well documented.23 IV. Conclusion The European discipline encourages research in all its attributes, particularly in the dimension of social history. The displace people dilemma in postwar Europe provides the opportunity to explore and examine how a people laid waste and disbanded by war gather themselves and reconstruct a community in unknown lands. As one scholar had observed, the DP camp operated as a substitute homeland; investigation of religious life, teaching, learning and employment in the camps should provide abundant insights. Some work has already been conducted on the Jewish displaced people.24 There hangs about much to be accomplished for DPs of other national and ethnic minorities, specifically the Poles, the biggest national society among the postwar DPs living in western Germany. Social historians can also move toward the question, examining, for example, the functioning of the covert economy, the black market, among the overseas workers in Nazi Germany. German historians have previously conducted much reliable work on the living circumstances of the foreign laborers; English-speaking scholars may be specifically enthusiastic in exploring these works to unveil sources of the crime, unemployment and social estrangement or alienation that most willingly characterized the postwar DP in the memories of several military government officials. Another interesting subject matter is the massive attempt devoted at the aftermath of the war to bringing back together lost family members. Such work is an essential segment of refugee relief; the history is thus far to be written illustrating the tracing tasks performed by the Allied forces and carried on to the present-day by the Red Cross.25 Much can be known through exploring how the armed forces handled refugees and dispossessed people discovered within their zones of operations. Only the military was capable to cut up thousands of removed people, feed them, and make use of the essential measures to reduce the proliferation of disease. Investigation of the military unit documents in archives can produce several objective lessons that may be of indicative value nowadays as armed forces confront the challenge of performing civilian assistance assignments all over the world. At some stage and immediately after the war the arguments on the refugee and relocated populations dilemmas generated a large literature, the greater part of which composes of descriptive stories of eyewitnesses, current surveys of the condition of refugees all over Europe or the world, some organizational past, and a great number of journal write-ups on professional topics, such as medical assistance and child protection. Few researches focus extensively with refugees, displaced populations and relocation during and after World War II.26 The subject matter is expansive and exceptionally complicated. Luckily, some scholars have tried to associate and account the history of European refugees in its wholeness and a number of other have generated researches of some of its primary aspects. Several outstanding works can thus be suggested for the further study of the plight of the refugees and immigrants during and after the Second World War. Scholarly perspectives on the linkage between twentieth-century mechanized warfare and local social and political structures differ remarkably. Some discover trivial connection between the two. War and its requirements are viewed as an interval, a chaotic interlude, to be definite, but one neither readdressing social organization nor strengthening prewar patterns very much.27 Nevertheless, gathering together or mobilizing manpower and natural reserves is an essential measure of a nation’s capability to wage war triumphantly and to clean up the mess afterwards. Works Cited Bauer, Yehuda. 1970. Flight and Rescue. New York: Random House. Lee, Loyd, and Robin Higham. 1997. World War II in Europe, Africa and the Americas, with General Sources. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Marrus, Michael R. 1985. The Unwanted. European Refugees in the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford UP. Vernant, Jacques. 1953. The Refugee in the Post-World War. New Haven, CT: Yale UP. Wyman, Mark. 1989. DP. Europe’s Displaced Persons, 1945-1951. Philadelphia: Batch Institute. Read More