The best historical works convey moral complexity. By capturing the texture of the times in which events occur, they temper binary notions of right and wrong even as they lead the reader to more sustainable if less definitive judgments.

David Nasaw’s The Last Million is probably the best book I’ve read this year. It recounts the stories of the million souls we have come to know as the “displaced persons” of the Second World War, and of the responses of the United States, United Kingdom, and other non-Communist countries to their plight. The book is well-researched, cogently argued, and skillfully constructed, blending high politics with stories of individual survivors.

I deliberately use plural nouns here—stories; responses—to reinforce Nasaw’s fundamental point: there was no single DP-type but rather ethnic streams arriving in Germany for different reasons, from different places, and at different points in time. Each by its wartime conduct stood in a different relationship to good and bad, to moral justice. And the resettlement policies of the United States and other nations featured a similarly complex relation to justice. Simply put, the more Nazi-adjacent the ethnic group, the more likely its members were to find a new home in the West.

But that’s the end of a long and fascinating story, The beginning lies in the bloody and rapidly shifting borders between Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. If you were a Balt— Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian— the devil’s bargain between the two dictators extinguished your freedoms and your national independence. Life under Stalin’s thumb was brutal, and when Hitler turned on his Communist ally in December 1941, many signed on with the new occupiers. That could mean anything from passive cooperation to gleeful Jew killing. And when the Red Army returned in 1944, many Balts fled west, to Germany, where the war’s end saw them among the last million housed in the d.p. camps.

A similar but not identical dynamic played out among ethnic Ukrainians and Poles, except here many found themselves in wartime Germany performing forced labor. After the war, like the Balts, they shared a common goal: to free their homelands from Soviet domination (not going to happen for a half century) and to prevent the Allies from shipping them home to Communist persecution. This last point was complicated by the Anglo-Americans’ Yalta commitment to return DPs whose homes lie within the Soviet Union. As the Yalta Agreement awarded the Soviet Union a goodly chunk of eastern Poland (and compensated Poland with a similar slice of eastern Germany) some Poles were subject to forced relocation, others not.

The situation with the Jews was even more complicated. In 1945, the handful of concentration camp survivors were housed in the same DP camps as the other ethnic groups. In practice, this frequently meant with the very same Nazi collaborators who had oppressed them in Hitler’s death camps. Many Americans were non-plussed, or worse. In his 1945 broadcast from the camps, the sainted Edward R. Murrow interviewed Buchenwald survivors, “identifying Englishmen, Frenchmen, Czechoslovakians, German Communists, ‘professors from Poland, doctors from Vienna, men from all of Europe….’” Only one group missing. Not so for General Patton, who pronounced the Balts “the best of the Displaced persons… extremely clean in all respects.” The Jews, by contrasts, “are lower than animals.”

Most European Jews who survived Hitler’s onslaught had fled east, to Russia. Some took Soviet citizenship. Stalin duly dispatched them westward as cannon fodder. Others he shipped to Siberia, or central Asia to work in war factories. After the war, Stalin permitted these Jews to return home, mostly to Poland. There they were greeted by old-school pogroms, most notably although not uniquely in Kielce, and at the doors of their former homes by new Polish residents who made it clear, at gunpoint, that their return was not welcome.

These Jews thus also fled west to the DP camps, but mostly arrived in 1946. This, argued some American policymakers, meant they weren’t displaced persons at all. The U.S. Department of State argued strenuously to close the border with Poland and halt the westward flow, but this position became untenable after the Kielce Pogrom became known in the West.

Nasaw is strong on life inside the DP camps, which emerged as societies of their own. Ultimately, though, the point was to resettle their residents elsewhere. Many nations faced labor shortages, but all proved choosy in just whom they would admit. Essentially, the Balts were considered most desirable and Jews the least, with the Ukrainians and Poles somewhere in the middle. Partly this was rank prejudice and partly the association of Jews with Bolshevism. (Plug here for Paul Hanebrink’s truly excellent A Spector Haunting Europe.)

One result was the years-long battle to shape the U.S. legislation permitting some DPs to resettle in America. With the Senate in particular determined to keep Jews out, the initial law fixed a December 1945 cutoff date for determining DP status, thus disqualifying 90% of the Jews in the camps. It also added a substantial quota for “agricultural workers.” One guess why.

The fate of the Jewish DPs would largely be determined elsewhere, by those waging Israel’s War of Independence. Here the same American diplomats who fought to keep Jews out of the DP camps then fought with even greater bitterness against partition and the establishment of Israel. Failing in that, the Department of State then tried—fun fact!—to inter male Jewish DPs of fighting age in what Nasaw likens to concentration camps, to prevent them from joining the fight in Palestine.

I am old enough, barely, to recall Apollo-era jokes about “Our Germans are better than their Germans.” This was a back-handed way of acknowledging, belatedly, that one consequence of America’s DP policy was the admission of flat out Nazis, Nazi collaborators, Nazi sympathizers, Iron Guard fascists and similar riff-raff to our shores. Emerging Cold War tension of course had much to do with this, but not all. U.S. intelligence needed the knowledge and skills it **thought** many of these anti-Communist emigres possessed. In truth most of them possessed neither, and the ones who did were more likely found among the Jews we hoped to keep out.

This account greatly simplifies the richness of a major historical work that is both authoritative and accessible to the general reader. 5 stars…. ( )

From bestselling author David Nasaw, a sweeping new history of the one million refugees left behind in Germany after WWII

At the end of WWII, concentration camps were 'liberated' either by military forces, American, British and Soviet, or in rare cases by the prisoners themselves. In the resulting mass chaos these soldiers could not fathom what they saw, heard, smelled and felt; and that unnatural shock remained with them for years.

They discover stacks of bodies waiting to be burned; thousands of corpses in abandoned train cars, prisoners with typhoid too ill to move, and thousands so sick who would die in the next few weeks. They find political prisoners of many nationalities. They witness what starvation, deprivation, disease, madness and inhumanity look like. It was their job to organize and aid the victims of the nazis and their helpers. They transport many to hospitals, or to make shift shelters throughout German and Austria.

But their manuals provide poor, insensitive guidance. House prisoners by country/nationality. Put Polish Jewish survivors with non-Jewish prisoners, place Ukrainian Jews with non-Jewish Ukrainians, etc. American Jewish and British Jewish soldiers grasped the problem quickly. These Jews who went through hell, lost their families and friends, homes and businesses did not want to live anywhere near, let alone WITH non-Jews who helped the nazis round up, beat, torment, shoot, starve, and work them to death. The soldiers tried to help as much as possible but non-Jewish soldiers do not understand or care. And as military they need to follow the rules! And all because the military would not recognize the Jews as a people, a nation because they didn’t have their own country!

The United Nations Relief & Rehabilitation Authority (UNRRRA) is established to deal with these displaced persons. Surprisingly, it mostly succeeds in repatriating millions to their home countries.

But 1 million remain in German DP camps. Polish Catholics wanted to return home but advised that Soviet Union had annexed Poland and conditions there were rough. Ukrainians, Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians who collaborated with nazis realize they would face justice on returning home.

Jewish camp survivors, mostly Polish, knew no countries wanted them so most desire to leave for and settle in Palestine. The British mandate of Palestine involved keeping the Arabs happy so they would continue supplying England with oil. The Arabs didn’t want the Jews either!

Polish Jewish survivors who managed to reach Poland to find family were threatened or killed by Poles who didn't want to return homes, businesses, possessions they had taken once the Jews had been rounded up.

The US’ virulently anti-Semitic State Department deplorably refused to sympathize with the situation and would not increase quota of Jews permitted entry. (These mostly Southern politicians regretted that MORE Jews hadn’t been murdered!)

President Truman attempted numerous times to convince the Brits the best place for the Jews was Palestine. The British were no less anti-Semitic than their American counterparts, and repeatedly refused to even consider allowing 100,000 Jewish survivors into Palestine. England came up with all kinds of excuses: situation in the Middle-East is too fragile, or the Jews in Palestine are too violent, or why should the Jews be treated better than other displaced persons!

American and British Jewish organizations are finally allowed to send help. They learn of the horrendous conditions Jewish survivors are experiencing months AFTER liberation. They continue to be victimized by the non-Jewish Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians and others with whom they are forced to shelter. Many are still wearing concentration camp rags, living in un-healthy environments, not receiving medical care, or nutritious food. It takes months but the Jewish organizations raise funds to send doctors, nurses, social workers, surgical supplies, clothing, and healthy food. They insist that the Jews be moved to separate housing in the DP camps. UNRRA is slow to allow this; they say their mission is not to treat one group of dp’s more favorably than another! But it is ‘okay’ to treat one group, one people inhumanely, and this after Europe’s Jewish population was nearly decimated!

The Jews finally do get more help but are depressed and angry they are not allowed into Palestine. UNRRA is criticized both for repatriating many dp’s back to their turbulent home countries, and for not repatriating others the Soviet Union wants to use as its labor force. The organization faces an untenable situation. Forced to dissolve.

On April 20, 1946 the International Refugee Organization is founded to replace UNRRRA, and to deal with the remaining displaced people of WWII.

And this is where I stopped reading. Book was dragging on and repetitious. I also found it very difficult to continue to read about the chaos, misery, deprivation, and lack of sensitivity. I needed to stop but may pick up the book to complete it at a later time.