The Last Million

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From bestselling author David Nasaw, a sweeping new history of the one million refugees left behind in Germany after WWII In May of 1945, German forces surrendered to the Allied powers, effectively putting an end to World War II in Europe. But the aftershocks of this global military conflict did not cease with the signing of truces and peace treaties. Millions of lost and homeless POWs, slave laborers, political prisoners, and concentration camp survivors overwhelmed Germany, a country in complete disarray. British and American soldiers gathered the malnourished and desperate foreigners, and attempted to repatriate them to Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, and the USSR. But after exhaustive efforts, there remained over a million displaced persons who either refused to go home or, in the case of many, had no home to which to return. They would spend the next three to five years in displaced persons camps, divided by nationalities, temporary homelands in exile, with their own police forces, churches, schools, newspapers, and medical facilities. The international community couldn't agree on the fate of the Last Million, and after a year of fruitless debate and inaction, an International Refugee Organization was created to resettle them in lands suffering from labor shortages. But no nations were willing to accept the 200,000 to 250,000 Jewish men, women, and children who remained trapped in Germany. In 1948, the United States, among the last countries to accept anyone for resettlement, finally passed a Displaced Persons Bill - but as Cold War fears supplanted memories of WWII atrocities, the bill only granted visas to those who were reliably anti-communist, including thousands of former Nazi collaborators, Waffen-SS members, and war criminals, while barring the Jews who were suspected of being Communist sympathizers or agents because they had been recent residents of Soviet-dominated Poland. Only after the passage of the controversial UN resolution for the partition of Palestine and Israel's declaration of independence were the remaining Jewish survivors finally able to leave their displaced persons camps in Germany. A masterwork from acclaimed historian David Nasaw, The Last Million tells the gripping yet until now largely hidden story of postwar displacement and statelessness and of the people who stood as living testimony to the inescapable consequences of war. By 1952, the Last Million were scattered around the world, and carried with them their wounds, fears, and secrets, as they crossed from their broken past into an unknowable future. Here for the first time, Nasaw illuminates their incredible history and, with profound contemporary resonance, shows us that it is our history as well.

Reviews

Nasaw, who has written well-regarded biographies of Andrew Carnegie and William Randolph Hearst, makes clear how much the Allied forces wished that those in the displaced remnant would simply go back to wherever it was they came from. (At one point, Fiorello La Guardia tried to talk the Poles into it.) Nasaw also captures the power of refusing to leavethe decision not to disperse. This isnt to say that the goal of the Last Million was to stay in Germany forever. By not going through one door, they were trying to open others. For the Jews, the main options were, as Rosensaft laid them out, Palestine or some other place that had not been the recent site of genocidal murder, and the central conflict of The Last Million is the fight, in the years following the war, over which it was going to beA great contribution of Nasaws book is that it takes the cinematic moment in which American soldiers arrive and pronounce the nightmare overShalom Aleichem, Yidden, ihr zint frei, a Jewish chaplain from Brooklyn announced when he drove into Buchenwaldas a starting point rather than a closing scene.The New Yorker

InThe Last Million, Nasaw has done a real service in resurrecting this history. . .Anyone who thinks President Trumps demonization of foreigners is an aberration should read this history.Washington Post

David Nasaw devastatingly illustrates in 'The Last Million,' there was widespread reluctance among the victorious Allies to confront the true nature of the HolocaustThe Last Million describes in meticulously researched detail what happened to the [displaced persons] who feltunderstandably enoughthat they could not go back to the lands of their birth. Wall Street Journal

One of the many virtues of The Last Million is the authors ability to make vivid sense of a bewildering moment. He clarifies without oversimplifyingNasaw demonstrates throughout an especially supple sense of scale. Much of what makes the book so absorbing and ultimately wrenching is his capacity to maneuver with skill between the nitty-grittiest of diplomatic (and congressional, military, personal) details and the so-called Big Picture. In cinematic terms, hes adroit at surveying a vast landscape with a soaring crane shot, then zooming in sharply for a close-up of a single face as it crumples...Nasaw takes pains to avoid facile comparisons between the history he recounts and the current global moment, with its our own seas of refugees. As his calmly passionate book makes plain, however, one would need to be willfully covering ones eyes not to see how then bleeds into now.Adina Hoffman,The New York Times Book Review

Insightful and eye-openingNasaw is a humane writer with a knowledge of his subject that is broad and deep. Jim Zarroli, NPR.org

Based on an avalanche of research, sweeping, searching, and filled with intimate details, The Last Million tells the enduringly relevant and not well-known story of how political differences between the United States and the United Kingdom, Cold War calculations, ethnic and religious conflicts, and antisemitism trumped humanitarian considerations, turning what should have been the primary mission upside down and victimizing those who had suffered the most. Glenn C. Altschuler, The Jerusalem Post

Tells of the last million who had been confined to refugee camps for five years....Through great research, Nasaw helps the reader understand the complexity of permanently relocating refugees to a new country. Seattle Times

Nasaw, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, has once again produced an extraordinarily well-researched book that is well worth reading.Christian Science Monitor

Nasaw does a masterful job of bringing to light the lasting individual and global consequences of policies and attitudes surrounding the last million A thought-provoking, highly recommended perspective on a complex and largely overlooked people and period of modern history. Library Journal, starred review

[Nasaw] provides a characteristically thorough and impressively researched account of the roughly one million displaced persons who found themselves stranded in Germany after the end of the warWhile delving into the weeds of political compromise and legislation, Nasaw never loses sight of the hopes and struggles of the people at the centerThe Last Millionshowcases Nasaws deft handling of complexitynot only the number of global controversies that the Displaced Persons issue fed into, but the morally complex issues of collaboration. Shelf Awareness

A richly detailed account of what happened to the one million Holocaust survivors, former slave laborers, and POWs who found themselves in Germany at the end of WWII . . . Nasaw skillfully and movingly relates a multilayered story with implications for contemporary refugee crises. This meticulously researched history is a must-read. Publishers Weekly, starred review

"[M]asterful...A searching, vigorously written history of an unsettled time too little known to American readers." Kirkus Reviews, starred review

Author Bio

David Nasaw is the author of The Patriarch, selected by the New York Times as one of the 10 Best Books of the Year and a 2013 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Biography; Andrew Carnegie, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, the recipient of the New-York Historical Society's American History Book Prize, and a 2007 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Biography; and The Chief, which was awarded the Bancroft Prize for History and the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for Nonfiction. He is a past president of the Society of American Historians, and until 2019 he served as the Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Professor of History at the CUNY Graduate Center.