In War's Wake: Europe's Displaced Persons in the Postwar Order, Gerard Daniel Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 248 pp., hardcover $34.95

Abstract

The Second World War left approximately eight million displaced persons (DPs) in Europe; these included former foreign workers, slave laborers, prisoners of war, and concentration camp inmates. Between spring and fall 1945, approximately six to seven million were repatriated, leaving about 1.2 million stateless. In 1946 the United Nations created the International Refugee Organization (IRO) to care for this “last million,” many of them Holocaust survivors or anti-Communist refugees living in DP camps from western Germany to Sicily. Daniel Cohen's meticulously researched new volume focuses on the policies that emerged out of the practical and political dimensions of resettlement. Drawing on numerous archives, including documentation at the IRO, Cohen argues convincingly that creation of the IRO brought the European refugee problem to the center of the international stage. He analyzes the relationship of the postwar refugee crisis to the nascent human rights movement, governance of international migration, and the advent of the state of Israel. The entire story took place against the backdrop of the early Cold War.