The Last Million: Europe's Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War

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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 1945, after German forces surrendered to the Allied powers, millions of concentration camp survivors, POWs, slave laborers, political prisoners, and Nazi collaborators were left behind in Germany, a nation in ruins. British and American soldiers attempted to repatriate the refugees, but more than a million displaced persons remained in Germany- Jews, Poles, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and other Eastern Europeans who refused to go home or had no homes to return to. Most would eventually be resettled in lands suffering from postwar labor shortages, but no nation, including the United States, was willing to accept more than a handful of the 200,000 to 250,000 Jewish men, women, and children who remained trapped in Germany. When in June, 1948, the United States Congress passed legislation permitting the immigration of displaced persons, visas were granted to sizable numbers of war criminals and Nazi collaborators, but denied to 90% of the Jewish displaced persons. A masterwork from acclaimed historian David Nasaw,The Last Milliontells the gripping but until now hidden story of postwar displacement and statelessness and of the Last Million, as they crossed from a broken past into an unknowable future, carrying with them their wounds, their fears, their hope, and their secrets. Here for the first time, Nasaw illuminates their incredible history and shows us how 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 Ten 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 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and The Chief, which was awarded the Bancroft Prize for History and the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for Non-Fiction. He is a past president of the Society of American Historians, and up until 2019 he served as the Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Professor of History at the CUNY Graduate Center.