United Nations Relief And Rehabilitation Administration Research Articles

Women in child search: a gendered view of post-World War II reconstruction

ABSTRACT One of the most crucial sections of the International Tracing Service, centralized and established in 1948, was the Child Search Branch (CSB), which had the emotionally and ethically complex task of assisting ‘unaccompanied children’ who were discovered in far larger numbers after 1945 than anyone had expected. This article examines the role of three women relief workers who ran the CSB in the post-war period: Eileen Blackey, Cornelia Heise and Eileen Davidson. Focusing mainly on these exemplary cases, the authors evaluate and centre the women’s leadership and decisions, showing how women who worked for the CSB played roles that subverted the general rule in the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and its successor organization, the International Refugee Organization (IRO), which was that women were directed into ‘feminine’ posts. Women who ran the CSB played senior roles in child search and welfare and the decisions they took had significant and crucial outcomes for children, although gendered assessments of ‘carer’ and ‘feminine’ roles in UNRRA/IRO more widely have thus far hidden their activities as a subject worthy of analysis. This article shows how gender affected the spheres of influence the women carved out as they contributed to post-war reconstruction and humanitarian aid.

Exhibiting the Missing: The World Jewish Congress’ London Exhibition of 1947, ‘Search for the Scattered’

ABSTRACT In June 1947, the World Jewish Congress (WJC) launched an exhibition in London titled ‘Search for the Scattered.’ Some of the materials on display were loaned to the WJC by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA)’s Central Tracing Bureau (CTB), the predecessor to the International Tracing Service (ITS). The exhibition presented a detailed accounting of the vital work of both the CTB and the WJC. This paper argues, on the basis of the limited documentation that remains, that the ‘Search for the Scattered’ exhibition was a site of postwar knowledge production and transnational exchange that served a practical purpose: facilitating searching by addressing visitors as potential enquirers and reproducing the material culture of the search for visitors to view, read, handle, and understand. Like lists of names that were posted in DP camps, the exhibition can also be read as an early marker of the emotive power of name lists; in Leora Auslander’s words, commemorative markers of ‘a shared fate and common tragedy.’ Although tracing work has been infrequently a focus in the historiography of the Holocaust, the staging of this exhibition demonstrates early recognition of the significance of the WJC’s and CTB’s tracing work and the need for its wider acknowledgement, and suggests the reconstructive and restorative nature of the search itself.

UNRRA in North Africa: A late colonial history of refugee encampment

Abstract This article tells the story of two long-forgotten United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) camps in wartime French North Africa, using their history as a lens through which to view the emergence of a modern global regime of refugee encampment. It examines these camps’ entanglements with the mechanisms of late colonial rule; their resonances with the systems of detention articulated by the Third Reich and its Vichy collaborationists; their rehabilitation of the practice of encampment for post-war colonial ‘development’ schemes like French Algeria’s centres de regroupement; and their eventual clearing of the way for the Cold War–era extension of an internationalist, American-dominated regime of refugee internment, first into Tunisia and Morocco and later across much of the Global South. Through its attempt to present its North African refugee camps as a new, modern, humanitarian form of encampment, UNRRA managed to rehabilitate the old colonial strategy of migrant internment as fundamentally humanitarian rather than punitive, successfully eliding its relationships with Nazi and Vichy practices in the process and establishing encampment as a central strategy of the modern internationalist refugee regime for the era of decolonization.

From POW to Cold War DP: A Global Microhistory of Former Yugoslav Soldiers in Occupied Germany, 1946–48

AbstractThere are still many historical blind spots in research on Europe's displaced persons (DPs) after the Second World War. In particular, there are relatively few studies that link microhistorical perspectives on repatriation and resettlement with global contexts. This essay addresses this gap, in empirical as well as methodological terms, by focusing on a group of DPs that hitherto has received little attention from scholars: former members of the Royal Yugoslav Army, whom the Nazis had taken to Germany as prisoners of war (POWs). Classified as DPs after 1945, they lived in camps administered by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and the International Refugee Organization (IRO). Under the circumstances, they continued to maintain military-like routines and fiercely refused repatriation. This was partly an expression of loyalty to the exiled Yugoslav king, Peter II. But it also mirrored the fears of DPs about—and resistance to the idea of—being returned to their homeland in the context of the early Cold War. Using the example of a DP camp in Bad Aibling (Upper Bavaria), this article connects Yugoslav DPs, Allied DP politics, and the interests of Tito's government, as well as the interventions of international relief agencies. It shows how some DPs adroitly subverted the international logic of DP self-governance as promoted by UNRRA. A global microhistory approach thus reveals how local actors and sites are shaped by, but also foundationally constitutive of, global regimes of migrational self-governance.

Forced Migration and Refugee Resettlement in the Long 1940s: An Introduction to Its Connected and Global History

AbstractWhen considering the wave of forced migrations during the Second World War in Europe and Asia, and the international and institutional responses thereof, we can speak about the 1940s as witnessing the birth of a global refugee resettlement regime. Organisations including the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), the International Refugee Organization (IRO), and eventually the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) placed refugee resettlement at the heart of constructing the postwar world order. This volume adopts a global optic to investigate the formation of this international resettlement regime in Europe and Asia, while also studying refugee camps and movements, agency of refugees and migrants, decision factors for resettlement, and the intellectual production of people on the move. A historicisation of the global resettlement regime of the long 1940s may well carry important political and ethical lessons for us today, if only to remind us of the connected fates of our common humanity, and the responsibilities we therefore bear towards our fellow human beings.

Anglo-Jewish Humanitarianism and the Jewish Relief Unit, 1943–1950

Abstract The Jewish Relief Unit (JRU) was an Anglo-Jewish humanitarian agency of 213 members that operated across Europe during 1945/50, particularly in the British Zone of Occupation in Germany. JRU staff cared for the hundreds of thousands of Jewish Displaced Persons (DPs) who lingered in United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) assembly centres such as Belsen before their eventual departure for the United States or the new state of Israel. The JRU has remained a somewhat understudied body relative to other Jewish organizations active in DP camps and this article, based on personnel files and field reports archived at London’s Wiener Library and the London Metropolitan Archives, centres JRU aid workers as valuable objects of study in their own right, in line with increased historiographical interest in the backgrounds and world-views of postwar UNRRA operatives. Through an emphasis on materials related to and produced by individual JRU staff members and on the intimate and everyday character of their work, this article suggests that the JRU work among Jewish DPs in Germany was more substantive and consequential than has often been appreciated. More broadly, the work of the JRU is suggestive of the significance of humanitarian relief and reconstruction to postwar Jewish revival in Germany.

International Food and Medical Relief. UNRRA (1943-47) and the New Global Order

During the Second World War several initiatives in Britain and the US carried out a prospective analysis of famine and nutritional relief in occupied countries. The results were devastating. Food aid programmes were launched, refugee camps opened for displaced people and health services established. With contributions from the countries involved, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) was approved in Washington (November 1943)by the United Nations’ forty-four members and associated countries afteran initial agreement between the British and the US administrations. This article aims to discuss the political tensions around UNRRA and its technical work, especially in international food relief.

ДЕЯТЕЛЬНОСТЬ ЮНРРА В ПОЛЬШЕ 1945-1947 гг.: УСПЕХИ И ПРОВАЛЫ МЕЖДУНАРОДНОЙ ГУМАНИТАРНОЙ МИССИИ

The article is devoted to the activities of the mission of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) in Poland. The history of UNRRA characterizes the development of humanitarian activity on truly international basis, it also allows us to trace the tasks and priorities of post-war planning and reconstruction process. The main efforts of the organization were concentrated on the situation at the European continent. Providing assistance to Poland as one of the hardest-hit countries in the war whose fate has also caused political controversy, was a serious test for the UNRRA. The article is based on American and Soviet diplomatic documents, as well as materials from the UN archive; sources give us reason to conclude that the main difficulties of the organization included agreement on the deployment of the mission, as well as planning supplies. The authors characterize the main directions of the mission's activities in 1945-1947, present information on the volume and structure of humanitarian aid supplies to Poland. Archival documents of UNRRA provided a basis for studying the activities of the organization aimed at stimulating the process of repatriation to Poland. Humanitarian aid and funding of programs through the organization made it possible to stabilize the situation and minimize the negative consequences of war in Poland. UNRRA's international approach has been both a strength and a weakness of the organization. On the one hand, the international approach contributed to an effective response to political challenges and logistical problems. On the other hand, the interaction of the USSR and the USA in one organization inevitably led to an aggravation of political contradictions regarding the goals and objectives of the organization's activities in a particular region.

The international participation in organization of production of antibiotics in the USSR: "The penicillin project" of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (1946-1947)

On the basis of declassified materials from the Russian State Archive of Economics and State Archive of the Russian Federation, for the first time, the history of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) project for the supply of penicillin factories in the post-war years to two republics of the USSR - Ukraine and Belarus is considered. It is shown that the project initially had political significance, since the demonstration of humane intentions served to strengthen the political authority of the United States. However, despite the declaration, the Anglo-American leadership of UNRRA approached the implementation of the project formally and hardly planned its completion. This was expressed in non-compliance with requirements for completeness of equipment, violation of delivery deadlines, constant attempts to reduce and contain them, in non-supplying adequate technical documentation and specialists for setting up production. The delay in the delivery time of equipment resulted in its rapid moral obsolescence. The modernization of partially supplied factories was impeded by embargo on the export of advanced industrial equipment from the United States having strategic importance. The incompleteness of the project contributed to further split in international relations.

Vloga Unrre pri oskrbi in repatriaciji jugoslovanskih razseljenih oseb v Italiji (1945–1947)

S kritično analizo arhivskih virov, ki jih hrani Arhiv Organizacije združenih narodov v New Yorku, in s pomočjo literature članek prikazuje preskrbo in repatriacijo jugoslovanskih razseljenih oseb iz Italije v Jugoslavijo ob posredniški pomoči Uprave združenih narodov za pomoč in obnovo – UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration). Jugoslavija je zahtevala repatriacijo razseljenih oseb neposredno po koncu spopadov, a mnoge so se vračale še v letih 1946 in 1947, precejšnje število pa je emigriralo v tretje države.

Bordering and Repatriation: Displaced Unaccompanied Children from the Polish–Ukrainian Borderland after World War II

ABSTRACT After the end of World War II, the welfare workers of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and, from 1947, the International Refugee Organization (IRO) took care of displaced children and helped them to return to their home countries. This paper explores how the post-war controversies between the Soviet and Anglo-American governments and (re)bordering of the Polish–Soviet borderland changed the welfare workers’ approach to interpret belonging of unaccompanied displaced children of presumably Ukrainian origin. In the winter of 1945 the region of Eastern Poland was annexed by the Soviet Union. In the summer of 1945, British and American officials declared that they refused to recognize the acquisition of these territories by the Soviet Union. In result, the repatriation of unaccompanied Ukrainian children who originally came from this borderland became the subjects of intense controversy between the former Allies. The welfare workers used the fact of these children's belonging to the Polish–Soviet borderland as an argument against their repatriation to the Soviet Union. By looking into the social dimension of bordering processes, this article suggests that the UNRRA's and IRO's social workers redefined the border between the two countries in their daily work.

“I feel I am at the stage now of really learning something”: Esma Banner, Post‐Second World War Migration Worker and Photographer

Australian woman Esma Banner (1910–2001) was a keen amateur photographer who worked for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and the International Refugee Organisation (IRO) between 1945 and 1951. While posted in Germany, Banner kept a diary, wrote over 100 letters to her family, kept official reports, took photographs and collected art and craft by Displaced Persons (DP). In particular, photography and family were important to her. She said in a letter home: “You are all always in my thoughts – every picture I take is for you”.This article primarily focuses on visual materials in Esma Banner's personal papers. Banner's collection substantially documents her professional relief work with UNRRA and the IRO, and through this, her interactions with other relief workers as well as displaced children and adults can be seen. Here Banner's photographs and albums are read alongside published materials, letters and diaries to reveal a range of political, personal and gendered understandings of post‐Second World War reconstruction work. The material also provides some insights into the experiences of forcibly displaced children and adults. Banner's photographs are used to reflect upon the place of visual and personal sources in writing histories of post‐Second World War reconstruction.

Erakirjad infoallikana Eesti ja Lääne vahel stalinismist sulani (1946–1959) [Abstract: Private letters between Estonia and the West as an information source from Stalinism to the start of the post-Stalin thaw, 1946–1959

Erakirjad infoallikana Eesti ja Lääne vahel stalinismist sulani (1946–1959) [Abstract: Private letters between Estonia and the West as an information source from Stalinism to the start of the post-Stalin thaw, 1946–1959

State-Building after Disaster: Jiang Tingfu and the Reconstruction of Post-World War II China, 1943–1949

AbstractPost-World War II reconstruction in Europe and Asia is a topic of growing interest, but relatively little attention has been paid to the relief and rehabilitation effort in China in the immediate post-1945 period. This article reassesses the postwar program implemented by the Chinese Nationalist (Guomindang) government and the UNRRA (the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration), not just in terms of humanitarian relief, but also as part of a process that led to new thinking about the nature of the postwar state in Asia. It focuses on the ideas and actions of Jiang Tingfu (T. F. Tsiang), head of the Chinese National Relief and Rehabilitation Administration that worked with UNRRA. Chinese ideas for reconstruction in China were simultaneously statist, international, and transnational, and were shaped by high modern ideas drawn from Soviet and American examples. They were also influenced by China's poverty and wartime vulnerability, which made locally directed solutions more relevant in areas such as public hygiene. Success was unlikely because of the incipient Chinese Civil War and the huge demands of reconstruction on a state that was near-destitute, with a destroyed infrastructure. Nonetheless, its characteristics still bear examination as a first, tentative chapter in a longer story of post-imperialist and Cold War state-building that would shape countries in Asia and beyond.

The Motherland Calls: “Soft” Repatriation of Soviet Citizens from Europe, 1945–1953

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Motherland Calls: “Soft” Repatriation of Soviet Citizens from Europe, 1945–1953*Sheila FitzpatrickSheila FitzpatrickUniversity of Sydney Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 90, Number 2June 2018 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/697460 Views: 610Total views on this site Citations: 4Citations are reported from Crossref © 2018 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article: Ondřej Daniel, Ido de Haan, Isabelle Surun 1.3.3 Migration in Contemporary History (ca. 1900–2000), (Feb 2023): 85–96.https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0323.09Margaret Tali Transnational therapeutic memories: Remembering forced migration in documentary film, Memory Studies 15, no.33 (Jun 2022): 551–562.https://doi.org/10.1177/17506980221092875Regina Laukaitytė „Pilkoji zona“ Lietuvos gyventojų repatriacijos ir filtravimo sistemoje 1944–1952 m., Lietuvos istorijos metraštis 2021/1 (Oct 2021): 133–155.https://doi.org/10.33918/25386549-202101006Olga Gnydiuk Bordering and Repatriation: Displaced Unaccompanied Children from the Polish–Ukrainian Borderland after World War II, Journal of Borderlands Studies 36, no.22 (Jun 2020): 201–218.https://doi.org/10.1080/08865655.2020.1768882

THE FRENCH IN EXILE AND POST-WAR INTERNATIONAL RELIEF, c. 1941–1945

AbstractThis article explores Free French responses to Allied planning for post-war international relief in Europe. A number of French experts in exile, often veterans of the League of Nations, advocated international co-operation with the nascent United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). For such figures, participating in the UNRRA could bring critical knowledge, political legitimacy, experience, and funds. They also hoped that this participation could bolster French prestige in the wake of the recent experience of defeat and foreign occupation. Their efforts had little impact on the early development of international relief, yet the contacts and exchanges between French and Allied planners resulted in a political imperative that gave a new impetus to the post-war restructuring of French relief abroad. Studying the complex inter-relationship between French foreign policy and humanitarian efforts during the Second World War can offer historians a framework through which to reconsider French attempts to reassert their power globally. Crucially, this article argues that the UNRRA was used by a number of French expert planners as a platform from which to pursue broader political aims, notably the reassertion of republican legitimacy and the re-establishment of national sovereignty.

‘Fighters without guns’: humanitarianism and military action in the aftermath of the Second World War

This paper makes a contribution to the debate about the interplay between military action and humanitarian aid. It takes on the case study of post-World War Two Europe and in particular the activity carried out by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), which offers a useful key for highlighting the entanglements between relief and reconstruction projects. It is from this perspective that the interaction between humanitarianism and military undertakings also acquires a special meaning, which recalls both the development of the international aid regime and the post-war history of Western countries. The matter will be addressed from two points of view. First to be analysed is the set of agreements stipulated by UNRRA and military authorities, for the zones under Allied administration after the liberation, but also with respect to specific areas of intervention, like the Displaced Persons Operations. The terms of the official agreements allow the delineation of the tasks actually assigned to the agency by the United Nations and the role of control and protection reserved for military organizations. Based on the formal agreements, it is already possible to reconstruct a vision of relief understood as the result of the inextricably linked action of military and humanitarian actors. Next, the interplay between different interpretations of activities to help civilians affected by the war will be examined. This section will focus on the personnel deployed by UNRRA, on their origins, and on duties they are called on to fulfil. People with extensive experience in the welfare sector were a substantial part of the personnel, but a significant number of UNRRA employees came from military ranks. This essay, therefore, has a twofold objective. It analyses the normative and institutional frame that shaped relief work in Liberated Europe. At the same time, it aims to uncover competition and cooperation between military and humanitarian actors in the field. The aim is to highlight how the co-construction of the aid operations between military and civilian personnel that occurred during the second post-war period followed a series of complex, nonlinear paths that conditioned the development of the humanitarian regime from within.

A River Runs through It: The Yellow River and The Chinese Civil War, 1946–1947

In June 1938 China's Nationalist government breached a major Yellow River dike in a drastic attempt to use flooding to slow the Japanese invasion. The strategic breach caused the Yellow River to abandon the northern course it had followed since 1855, and its new southeastern course led to eight years of catastrophic flooding. After World War II, the Nationalists, with extensive aid from the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), aimed to close the breach and divert the river back to its pre-1938 course. However, the Chinese Communists had taken control of much of that course, and local interests there opposed the plan to bring back the river. The Yellow River diversion project thus became intensely politicized. This article examines how the diversion plan became embroiled in the Chinese Civil War of 1946–49, how the river's return to its northern course in 1947 impacted communities in its path, and how the Communists and Nationalists imagined the river and made different tactical and rhetorical uses of it during the war. I find that the campaign to reroute the river was complicated not only by the civil war but also by tension between local and national interests within the Communist Party, and that UNRRA's attempts to mediate between the Nationalists and Communists at times put the organization at odds with both parties. Moreover, in 1946 and 1947 the intense struggle to tame, make strategic use of, or cross the Yellow River became an important metaphor for the battle to control China.

Destruction Repaired and Destruction Anticipated: United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), the Atomic Bomb, and US Policy 1944–6

ABSTRACTThis analysis examines the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and the Acheson-Lilienthal project and brings into conversation their drafting histories, politics, and diplomacy. Placing them in the same analytical framework, something not hitherto done in the literature, this essay traces the saga of UNRRA and Acheson-Lilienthal and their tandem cold-war fates. As peoples and governments pick their way through the humanitarian dilemmas and atomic hazards of the twenty-first century, it is useful to reflect upon the experiences and lessons of these two long-ago initiatives.

French Politics of Relief and International Aid: France, UNRRA and the Rescue of European Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany, 1945–47

This article examines the history of French relief and assistance to Displaced Persons between 1945 and 1947 and the role of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) in the French zone of occupation in Germany's South West. For French planners and humanitarian workers, the problem of ‘non repatriable’ DPs was much more than a humanitarian problem and was bound up with issues of domestic reconstruction, policies of occupation, culture and identity as much as the provision of medical aid and relief. Overall, by bringing together issues that have been kept separate in the historiography, this article illuminates the role of distinctive diplomatic strategies, economic requirements and cultural differences in shaping understandings and practices of refugee humanitarianism in the aftermath of the Second World War. It uncovers, in particular, the way relief was understood by the French as a vehicle for pursuing international leadership and as a means of restoring national prestige following years of defeat and foreign occupation.