Bunjevci Croats within the framework of Hungarian federalism at the end of World War I

Conditions of Democracy in German Austria and Hungary, 1918–1919

During World War II, American women entered the workforce in unprecedented numbers, and many of them relied on federally funded child care programs. At the end of the war, working mothers vigorously protested the termination of child care subsidies. In Citizen, Mother, Worker , Emilie Stoltzfus traces grassroots activism and national and local policy debates concerning public funding of children's day care in the two decades after the end of World War II. Using events in Cleveland, Ohio; Washington, D.C.; and the state of California, Stoltzfus identifies a prevailing belief among postwar policymakers that women could best serve the nation as homemakers. Although federal funding was briefly extended after the end of the war, grassroots campaigns for subsidized day care in Cleveland and Washington met with only limited success. In California, however, mothers asserted their importance to the state's economy as productive citizens and won a permanent, state-funded child care program. In addition, by the 1960s, federal child care funding gained new life as an alternative to cash aid for poor single mothers. These debates about the public's stake in what many viewed as a private matter help illuminate America's changing social, political, and fiscal priorities, as well as the meaning of female citizenship in the postwar period. |Stoltzfus traces grassroots activism and national and local policy debates surrounding public funding of childcare services for working parents in the two decades after the end of World War II. Using case studies from Cleveland, Washington, D.C., and the state of California, she explains why we still don't have adequate child care in America. The book helps illuminate America's changing social, political, and fiscal priorities, as well as the meaning of female citizenship in the postwar period.

Correspondence: The Profitability of Primacy

János Pelle. <i>Vérvád, hisztéria, népítélet: “Zsidókérdés” Magyarországon 1945-ben és 1946-ban</i>

After the end of the First World War, some countries in the Balkans remained dissatisfied with the status quo achieved with the Versailles system of peace treaties. The Albanian movement for territorial and ethnic Albania failed to fully realize - Kosovo and Metohija remained in the Royal Yugoslavia, established in 1918, which emerged from the First World War as a victorious state. The large Albanian population is a serious problem for the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. One of the culprits, according to some researchers, is Belgrade's own political circles in the interwar period. Nationally, culturally, economically and politically, the Albanians in this period are in the worst position of any other national minority in the royal Yugoslavia. Here are a few examples to support the above. In the period between the two world wars, the Albanian minority in Yugoslavia did not have a single school in their mother tongue, nor did it have a single cultural, educational or economic association. Dissatisfaction among Albanians from Kosovo and Metohija is growing with the policy of colonizing the Serb population from other parts of the country. This policy of repression against the Albanian population in Kosovo and Metohija provoked his numerous emigration to Albania. Much of the progressive emigration, in the person of Hassan Prishtina, Bedri Peyani, Ibrahim Gjakova and others, is extremely hostile to the Yugoslav state. This was cleverly used by the Albanian and Italian governments to break up Yugoslavia years later. In this regard, it is very important for Italian intelligence to engage Kosovo emigration in order to achieve full Italian control over Albania and weaken Yugoslavia's position in the south. With the impending new military confrontation on the international field, which would undoubtedly affect this region of Europe as well, Albanians see a real opportunity to achieve their national goals. Undoubtedly, the Albanian territory is also included in the geostrategic plans of the major countries for conducting military operations in the Balkans and implementing their further plans. In this regard, Italy's goal of making Albania a bridgehead in the Balkans for control of the Straits and the Middle East is to support the aspirations of Albanian nationalists after their long struggle to create a state that unites all Albanians. The status quo of the Balkans, reached by the Versailles system of peace treaties, was destroyed in the course of the Second World War. From all the Balkan states Albania was the first to experience the new order of Hitler and Mussolini and with their help accomplished its national program, precisely с the unification of the Albanian people and establishment of an Albanian identity in the Balkans. With the capitulation of Yugoslavia on April 7, 1941, a new territorial situation was created for the Axis forces and their satellite allies. The partition of Yugoslavia is one of the conditions for the realization of the „New Order“ in Southeast Europe. Convinced that the time was coming when, with the help of Italy and Germany, Kosovo and Metohija, western Macedonia, the eastern regions of Montenegro, etc. would enter Albania's borders, the Kosovo Committee with leading figures of Albanian nationalism, such as Bedri Pejani, Rexhep Mitrovica, Ibrahim Gjakova and Rexhep Krasniqi, have elevated political concepts for ethnic and territorial Albania familiar from the interwar period. In these years „Greater Albania” was a wartime creature, which did not get international recognition. The end of the war also put to rest the idea of a national unification of the Albanian people. The Albanian state again had its boundaries established after the end of the World War I; a large part of the Albanian population was left outside of these borders.

Occupiers, Allies, and the Long Postwar Adam R. Seipp (bio) Susan L. Carruthers. The Good Occupation: American Soldiers and the Hazards of Peace. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. 386 pp. Notes, index. $29.95. Steven P. Remy. The Malmedy Massacre: The War Crimes Trial Controversy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. x + 342 pp. Maps, notes, index. $29.95. In 1954, the German journalist and Nazi-era exile Norbert Mühlen wrote an essay for the American Academy of Political and Social Science in which he sardonically described the evolution of America's postwar occupation armies from triumphant victors to "an uneasy and implausible mixture of conquistador and social worker." The apparent moral and strategic clarity of defeating German and Japan had, by the early 1950s, devolved into the complex trade-offs of political and economic reconstruction. The fundamental messiness of this transition makes it particularly fascinating for historians. Susan Carruthers and Steven Remy have written compelling accounts that highlight the frustrations, dead ends, and difficult choices that Americans faced during the decade after World War II. The two books under review here reflect important trends in the historiography of America's role in the world after 1945. First, there has been a tremendous interest in the political, cultural, and military aspects of postwar occupation. This has stemmed, not unreasonably, from more than fifteen years of American engagement with occupation and reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan and the global military realignment after 2001. Given the life cycle of academic books, it seems appropriate that the past few years have seen a number of excellent titles that situate the American military presence overseas during the Cold War within the context of international, domestic, and regional politics. This effort has been remarkably interdisciplinary, with important contributions by historians, sociologists, and political scientists. The sociologist Amy Austin Holmes's recent book on American "protection regimes" and domestic politics in Germany and Turkey stands out as an excellent example of where comparative studies can take us. Likewise, Maria Höhn and Seungsook Moon's edited [End Page 300] volume, "Over There": Living with the US Military Empire from World War Two to the Present (2010) highlights the global dimensions of America's Cold War and post-Cold War development of overseas bases. Second, the period immediately following the end of the Second World War has experienced a substantial resurgence of scholarly interest. The postwar period is no longer defined by the growing tensions of the early Cold War and is now widely seen as a dynamic historical period on its own terms. As historians move away from a view of these years that privileges the behavior and attitudes of the superpowers, a much more nuanced and multi-polar story emerges. One example of many is the florescence of scholarly treatments of the return of German and Japanese soldiers from imprisonment after the end of the war. Frank Biess (2009) and Yoshikuni Igarashi (2016) have both written outstanding studies of the domestic contexts of returning soldiers, a parallel made even more explicit by the fact that both books are titled Homecomings. Historians have not lost sight of the critical role of the U.S.-Soviet rivalry, but are much more willing to look for less teleological narratives. Newer literature on the postwar period emphasizes the plural visions of reconstruction and renewal, the contingencies of national and sub-national politics, and the long shadow of the war years. Tony Judt's magisterial 2005 study of Europe after World War II has helped to inspire a more expansive view of the entire notion of a "postwar," one that in the case of Europe may reasonably extend to 1989, if not beyond. At the beginning of Susan Carruthers's highly readable and engaging study, she takes up these challenges directly. "While we've come to know a good deal about how citizens of the former Axis powers 'embraced defeat,' we know considerably less about the awkward and hesitant way in which Americans—in and out of uniform—embraced supremacy in the postwar world" (p. 14). Readers familiar with Carruthers's earlier work on American anxieties about captivity in the early Cold War will recognize the threads that...

Thousands of so-calledoccupation childrenwere born to Allied soldiers and Austrian women in sexual relations after the end of the Second World War. Their experiences correspond to the experiences ofoccupation childrenin Germany and, more general, to the experiences of Children Born of War, i.e., children born after sexual contact between local women and foreign/enemy soldiers in conflict and post-conflict situations, regardless of the time of birth and the geopolitical context. Now, more than 75 years after the end of the war, we have studied the changes in the social and political handling ofoccupation childrenin Austria over the past decades, using official sources such as newspaper reports, and including biographical interviews conducted with Britishoccupation childrenin the 2010s. Three phases were identified into which the handling ofoccupation childrencan be divided: The post-war years, in which these children were perceived as an (economic) burden; the phase ofoccupation childrengrowing up and becoming adults, in which they were hardly addressed in public; and the period since the 1990s, in which they have experienced increased media, family, and public interest, which can be attributed to their efforts to make their life stories heard, to the academic research into their living and socialization conditions, and to the formation of networks. The study complements other research onoccupation childrenin Germany and Austria, highlighting the significant differences in the discourse on U.S. American, British, Soviet, and Frenchoccupation children, especially betweenwhiteand Blackoccupation children, and addressing the differences in Austria compared to Germany. The article argues that challenges and opportunities in the integration of these children have been tied to changes in social values and morals as well as to collective processes of coming to terms with the war and post-war period.

Keywords: immigration, labor migration, Estonia, 1920s. This article studies the Estonian immigration policy of the 1920s in comparison with immigration policies implemented in other European states at that time. The aim of the article is to determine the principles influencing decisions made regarding the immigration of foreigners – that is, citizens of other states as well as persons without citizenship as a result of the First World War. In brief, the implementation of immigration controls in Europe after the end of the First World War can be explained both by economic and political factors. First, most European countries faced an economic breakdown leading to increasing unemployment rates and shortages of consumables. Thus European authorities did not welcome newcomers, who would most likely face unemployment in the receiving countries and become an additional burden to already overloaded welfare systems. However, the introduction of strict immigration restrictions for foreigners searching for jobs or residence after the end of the war has also been associated with the Great War itself, in that it inflamed nationalistic hatred among belligerents and thus had an influence on the general rise of nationalism and xenophobia in the post-war years. As this study has shown, the Estonian immigration policy did not differ much from the practice implemented in other European nation-states at that time. Like the majority of other “new” states that were established in Europe as a result of the First World War, Estonia was heavily suffering from economic breakdown in the early 1920s. The influence of rising unemployment and food shortages can be seen in the restrictive immigration policy. The desire of the Estonian authorities to control and stop the inflow of foreign citizens seeking jobs in Estonia can be seen both in limitations set for the issuance of entry permits as well as permissions to reside within the state’s territory. A direct correlation between the worsening of the economic situation and the introduction of restrictions on the immigration of foreigners can be distinguished. The most strenuous attempts to restrict the immigration of foreign citizens to Estonia were made during the years directly following the proclamation of independence, and again in 1923 when the economy was hit with a new depression. However, the influence of ethnic relations in Estonia on the formation of the immigration policy cannot be neglected. Although Estonia is known for its liberal minority policy, the loyalty of minorities – and especially of those who had belonged to the former power elites – was doubted in Estonian administrative circles in the early 1920s. Thus, the restrictions set on the immigration of persons belonging to certain ethnic groups (i.e. Russians or Germans) could also be associated with the unwillingness of the Estonian authorities to increase their numbers in Estonia. However, the restrictive policy could also be explained by attempts to stand against “nepotism” in the industrial and banking sectors (e.g., to avoid the recruitment of German rather than Estonian citizens to businesses run by the local Baltic-Germans). Several problems were also associated with the immigration of Russian refugees, whose number in Estonia has been estimated to exceed 20,000 in the early 1920s. Similarly to loyalty risks associated with the influx of communists, the loyalty of White Russians who had fought for the re-establishment of the Russian empire was seriously doubted in Estonian political circles, leading to strict surveillance of their activities in Estonia by the local police authorities as well as to restrictions set for their entry. Although refugees already residing in the state’s territory were treated differently from other persons who were not holding Estonian citizenship (e.g., they were not expelled from Estonia and were given limited unemployment benefits), their further influx was nearly banned in 1923. In all, it can be said that Estonia, similarly to other “new” European states, was suffering immense economic hardships after the end of the First World War, and the economic and security interests of the state were kept in mind by the Estonian political circles when forming the immigration policy in the 1920s. As a result, restrictions on the immigration of foreigners were introduced in order to favor the recruitment of Estonian citizens in the local labor market. Helen Rohtmets (b. 1977) is a Ph.D. student at the Institute of History and Archaeology, University of Tartu.

Reviewed by: German-Balkan Entangled Histories in the Twentieth Century ed. by Mirna Zakić and Christopher A. Molnar M. Blake Morley German-Balkan Entangled Histories in the Twentieth Century. Edited by Mirna Zakić and Christopher A. Molnar. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021. Pp vii + 381. Cloth $35.00. ISBN 978-0822966753. Twentieth-century Balkan history is often presented through the legacies of the Ottoman and Habsburg empires. By the end of World War I, both empires ceased to exist. The essays in Mirna Zakić and Christopher A. Molnar's edited volume take up the question of Germany's involvement in southeastern Europe when this imperial void presented itself. This work brings to light an important chapter in Germany's destructive drive for power during the first half of the twentieth century while highlighting the ways that ethnic Germans from the Balkans and West Germany came to terms with this tragic history in the postwar period. The book is organized into an introductory essay that familiarizes the reader with the history of German-Balkan relations, followed by two sections of essays linked by the themes of war, empire, migration, and memory. The first section, titled "War and Empire in the Balkans," focuses on German-Balkan entanglements during the first half of the twentieth century and how actors [End Page 614] within the region negotiated Germany's political, economic, and military ambitions. David Hamlin opens this section with a challenge to Fritz Fischer's thesis that Germany's war aims during World War I reflected longstanding prewar ambitions for domination. Rather, Hamlin argues that German-Romanian relations during the war, which culminated in the signing of the Treaty of Bucharest in 1918, were dictated more by Germany's need to fortify its wartime domestic economy. Bernd Robionek's study of the economic cooperative Avis, an ethnic German organization in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, shows how attempts to fortify a local self-sufficient ethnic community aligned with Germany ultimately forced the cooperative into a double bind caught between the shifting economic demands and racial policies of the Nazi state and the complex realities of an ethnically diverse Yugoslavia. Christian Promitzer explores Germany's entanglements in the Balkans through the development of Nazi racial science (Rassenkunde), highlighting the often-overlooked links between SS racial policies and earlier anthropological studies of Serbian prisoners of war during World War I and German ethnographic research throughout southeastern Europe in the interwar period. Mirna Zakić's essay focuses on the "misremembering" of Prince Eugene of Savoy among ethnic Germans in the Serbian Banat as they sought to position themselves as equals in the Third Reich and how the Prince's image was put to work to support Nazi claims in the Balkans during the 1930s and 1940s. Mark Biondich's chapter on the Holocaust in southeastern Europe shows how the scale of genocidal violence in Croatia was not the result of Nazi policies alone but more so determined by preexisting anti-Jewish and anti-Serb domestic policies of the Ustaša, the Independent State of Croatia's (NDH) fascist regime. Closing out the first section of essays, Kateřina Králová and Jiří Kocián's analysis of Holocaust survivor testimonies demonstrates the inherent difficulties of overcoming traumatic memory and how this process is challenged by different attitudes toward German collective guilt and individual responsibility, attitudes ultimately determined by whether the survivor came from an occupied state or a collaborationist state in southeastern Europe. The second section, "Aftershocks and Memories of War," turns to the question of memory as the collected essays explore German-Balkan entanglements in the postwar period. Jannis Panagiotidis adds a global dimension to these entanglements by showing how Gottschee Germans utilized preexisting transcontinental business and familial networks in North America to negotiate the complexities of postwar migration and German identity. Gregor Kranjc's chapter continues the discussion on Gottscheer German postwar experiences by focusing on the ways individual traumatic memories of loss and suffering from different events before, during, and after World War II allowed members of the Gottscheer diaspora in the United States to develop a collective memory of victimization that occluded their own Nazi past. Similarly, Gaëlle Fisher's essay...

Maricio Janue i Miret analyses the Spanish–German cultural diplomacy between the end of the Second World War and the end of the 1950s. The chapter asks about the consequences of the end of the war on German–Spanish cultural collaboration. It examines the elements of change, continuity and/or adaptation—personal, institutional, and ideological-discursive—once the relations were re-established following the creation of the West German State. Janue concludes that, in perspective, the end of the war did not have a rupture effect in terms of the tradition of German–Spanish cultural cooperation, but rather that of pause. Her analysis aims to contribute to the debate around the limits of denazification and the sociopolitical and cultural continuities between the Europe of fascism and that of the Cold War.

At the end of the First World War, the British government put into operation a Free Passage Scheme for ex-servicemen, ex-servicewomen and their dependants to emigrate to the colonies and dominions of the Empire. This scheme was driven by a complex network of interlinked beliefs and policies concerning both the relationship between the metropole and the Empire, and the perceived necessity for social stability in Britain and in the dominions and colonies. This article examines the Free Passage Scheme, paying particular attention to the ways in which it was envisaged as a means of restoring a gendered balance of the population in Britain, where young women outnumbered young men at the end of the war, and in the dominions, where men outnumbered women, and was also seen as a way of emigrating women whose wartime work experiences were understood to be in conflict with gendered identities in the post-war period. The article argues that the Free Passage Scheme needs to be understood as gendered, as it envisaged the transformation of female members of the auxiliary wartime services into domestic servants for the Dominions. The scheme's failure, it is argued, prefigures the failure of the far larger Empire Settlement Act of 1922 to emigrate large numbers of British women as domestic servants.

The article concerns the legal status of Central Lithuania as a so-called puppet state from the point of view of international law. The very concept of a puppet state is based upon the apparent fulfilment of the Montevideo criteria — which boils down to the lack of effectiveness. The reasons for establishing such an entity are varied, but they are all politically biased. The points of reference are primarily Bantustans and Manchukuo — they are key instances of puppet states discussed in legal literature. In the case of Poland, the establishment of Central Lithuania was an imminent effect of the Polish-Soviet War. On the one hand, the goal of setting up the Central Lithuania as a puppet state was undoing the effects of the war with totalitarian Soviet Russia using the fait accompli method. On the other hand, it was about the legitimacy of territorial change which occurred as a result of a territorial referendum on the future of the Vilnius region. The key issue related to establishing puppet states is a need to refer to a very formal approach to international law. However, such an approach is not widely supported by legal writings on international law. As the result a puppet state has to face the allegation of being contrafactual since the very moment of its emergence. That means that a territorial change done by establishing a puppet state cannot be eventually legitimized. One of the criteria mentioned in the Montevideo Convention is a “capacity to enter into relations with the other states”. Notwithstanding, it is a precondition or an effect of statehood that capacity reflects the attitude of the international community to the “newly emerged state”. If can clearly be seen in the cases of Bantustans and Manchukuo. So, e.g., Manchukuo maintained consular relations with a few states, including Poland. However, Central Lithuania did not maintain international relations, but it was not relevant in this very case. That is because Central Lithuania existed for a year and a half. In addition, it took place shortly after the end of the First World War and the Polish-Soviet War, and during an ongoing armed conflict between Poland and Lithuania. The illusion of statehood of Central Lithuania was manifested by the establishment of Department of Foreign Affairs, which was not in the position to represent Central Lithuania in the realm of international relations. Most of all, Central Lithuania did not participate in Polish-Lithuanian negotiations — that entity was an object here. Above all, these negotiations concerned the future status of Central Lithuania. The fact that relations with Central Lithuania were within the competencies of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs is the only argument in favour of acknowledging Central Lithuania as a foreign state in relation to Poland. There was a delegate of Poland at the Provisional Governing Commission. Members of the Provisional Governing Commission were communicating with that delegate, without the need of involving the Department of Foreign Affairs, which made the department completely unnecessary. The correspondence of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the authorities of Central Lithuania reveals that the relations between the two entities were not diplomatic. Poland did not recognize the statehood of Central Lithuania but rather acknowledged the fact that it is abroad. At the same time, Central Lithuania was dependent upon Poland, e.g. for food supplies. Central Lithuania can be seen as shaping stage Polish of east border after ending of war with Soviet Russia based on totalitarian ideology. That is an interesting example of Poland instrumentalizing international in its critical moment. However, such an approach to international law is a two-edged sword.

Reviewed by: For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America since 1865 Robert H. Woodrum For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America since 1865. By Robert H. Zieger. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007. Pp. ix, 276.) In the course of his long and productive career, Robert H. Zieger has contributed much to the study of labor history. His classic works, The CIO: 1935-1955 and American Workers, American Unions (currently in its third edition), have introduced waves of aspiring scholars to the major themes in the field. Zieger's edited volumes, Organized Labor in the Twentieth-Century South and Southern Labor in Transition, served as vehicles for new and innovative scholarship and helped fuel an explosion of interest in Southern labor history. In his latest ambitious work, For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America since 1865, Zieger turns his attention to the troubled relationship between African Americans and organized labor since the end of the Civil War. Zieger focuses much of his analysis on two themes: the struggle of blacks to obtain full citizenship in the workplace and wider society, and the role that organized labor has played in either helping or hindering these aspirations. Zieger rejects the narrow focus of recent surveys by "free market" historians, such as Paul Moreno, who view unions mainly as cartels that restrict the number of workers in the labor force, driving up wages and benefits in part by discriminating against African Americans. Zieger believes that unions are essential elements in a free and democratic society, and they have historically played a broader, more complex, and more beneficial role in American history than scholars like Moreno acknowledge. Zieger, however, does not downplay organized labor's racism, and he focuses much of his analysis on the contradiction between the movement's rhetoric of equality and the discriminatory practices of many unions. For Jobs and Freedom begins with an examination of the decades after Emancipation, when national labor organizations first grappled with the race issue in a substantive manner. Tentative efforts to create interracial movements emerged in the coal mines around Birmingham, Alabama, and on the waterfront in New Orleans. However, more durable and exclusionary practices emerged in the lily-white railroad brotherhoods and in many unions that affiliated with the American Federation of Labor (AFL), particularly in the building trades and in unions such as the International Association of Machinists (IAM). Many of these tendencies, Zieger finds, continued into the new century, through the era of World War I. More positive trends emerged as well, in the migration of millions of African Americans out of the South and into the urban areas of the North, and in [End Page 129] the rise of A. Philip Randolph, the president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, who began his long campaign against racism within the American labor movement in the decade after World War I. A burst of activism followed the Great Depression, with the passing of New Deal legislation favorable to unions and the creation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) as a rival to the AFL. The CIO, behind the success of John L. Lewis and his United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), organized black workers, though leadership positions usually remained in the hands of whites. Unions with substantial black membership grew in the automobile, meat-packing, and other industries under the direction of the CIO. The number of African Americans in labor unions grew dramatically, according to Zieger, from sixty thousand to more than one million by the end of World War II. Many of these workers belonged to AFL unions, which were forced to modify their policies and reach out to black workers in part to keep up with the CIO. Legislatively, this era was mixed, according to Zieger, with Franklin Roosevelt's symbolic actions having little practical effect and some New Deal legislation actually excluding or harming black workers. Meanwhile, civil rights attorneys won important victories for black workers against discriminatory unions in the courts, beginning a difficult and long process of reform. Thus, at the end of the war, Zieger concludes that "African American workers had more reason to be optimistic than at...

“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.” 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.” 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.” 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.

Although France had little interest in the Pontus region, it proceeded with a diplomatic mission after the end of the war. The evidence offered by the diplomatic reports of the French commissioner Paul Lépissier about the anti-Hellenic actions of the Ottoman authorities, the Muslims of the region and the Kemalists, during the period from the end of the war until the August of 1920, are particularly valuable and interesting, because they are quite analytical. The reports increased during the spring of 1919 when there was a growing wave of return of the Pontian refugees from southern Russia to Pontus. Lépissier also refers to his efforts towards the prevention of the persecutions and the restoration of the refugees, which seem to have had some results at first. However, after the rise of the Kemalist movement, the anti-Hellenic actions rose rapidly. Indeed, due to the pressures and threats that have been caused by the Kemalists, the French mission was eventually forced to leave Trebizond in August 1920.