Lessons from the post-WWII refugee crisis
Sheila Fitzpatrick discusses her new book about the mass resettlement of displaced Soviets.
In her new book Lost Souls: Soviet Displaced Persons and the Birth of the Cold War (Princeton University Press, 2024), the historian Sheila Fitzpatrick takes a new look at one of the most complicated and dramatic crises to emerge in the aftermath of World War II: the resettlement of 1 million people from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe who chose not to return home, even though Moscow wanted them repatriated. Some had retreated with the German military as the war drew to a close; others had been prisoners in German—or Allied—POW camps. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, they found new lives in North and South America, Australia and Israel. Today, Lost Souls is a reminder that political will combined with individual effort can occasionally help overcome even the most trying crises.
Compass’s Dmitry Kharitonov spoke to Fitzpatrick about the book at a time of escalating migration crises.
The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Dmitry Kharitonov: Your book tells the story of displaced persons, or DPs, along two parallel lines: one from the perspective of governments and diplomacy and the other from that of the people themselves. Your version of what happened differs from earlier accounts. What made you doubt and challenge the conventional wisdom?
Sheila Fitzpatrick: Well, I don’t even know that this was a challenge. It’s good literature, although it’s not specifically focused on Soviet DPs. What I decided to do, which admittedly nobody has quite done, was to put two things together. One is a diplomatic story, the great power story of negotiation about what happens to DPs. In the great power story, they are just pawns of fate. Naturally, that’s the story that tends to be in the archives because the archives are the records of institutions on the whole.
The other story I wanted to tell is the story of DP agency. In other words, how DPs could and did, in fact, operate within the parameters set by the great powers in their negotiations. Now, that is not to say that the great powers didn’t have the final say and it is not to say that the DPs were not, in a sense, pawns of fate. But I want to point out that in all sorts of ways, they were able to, and they were actively trying to, influence their situation, obviously for the better. As individuals, they were in a mess not of their own making, and they wanted to come out in as good a shape as they possibly could.
Kharitonov: What was the most interesting, intriguing or unexpected thing you discovered?
Fitzpatrick: I was most surprised when I suddenly realized that this whole thing, that is, the resettlement program for DPs run by the UN’s International Refugee Organization, viewed from a certain perspective, was a success. You always tend to approach displacement as a story of misery and trauma. There’s the notion that refugee agencies can never cope, can never find a way of dealing with the millions of people. We can think of endless examples of failure. After I’d written the whole book, I was thinking about writing the preface, and I thought, but this is a success. In terms of a refugee operation, it was a success. Within seven years, you get almost everybody resettled, free of charge, in a First World country. That never happens with refugees. If not exactly the country of one’s choice, at least they were not resettled in the country of one's non-choice. In other words, if one didn’t apply to go to Brazil, one wouldn't be going to Brazil. You may not get your first choice, but the place you go to has got to be on your list. And then I started to think, well, what’s the reason for that success?
Kharitonov: In terms of the number of DP migrants received, Australia was second only to the United States. This country had no prewar experience of non-British migration and no conception of a “melting pot.” How did it play out for Australia and the DPs?
Fitzpatrick: Well, it was a bit of a shock to the system for Australia. Australia had a population of only 7 million at the time, and they took 200,000 East European DPs. Before that, immigration had been basically British. They had a strong labor need and took what they could get. The way it was sold was basically via Latvians, who were presented as very high-quality northern European-type migrants, but that’s another story.
So Australia takes a great number of former Soviets, often passing as something else, and other East Europeans who are culturally quite alien, as well as a substantial Jewish contingent. At the same time, it takes in a large number of Italian, Greek and Maltese migrants, who are also strange to Australia. That means that the DP impact per se is a little bit blunted because of the shock of all these people, collectively called “wogs,” who speak other languages. The Australian response is: Why can’t they speak English? The migrants, when they come, spend two years doing sort of indentured labor for the Australian government, manual labor. It means that they live in migrant hostels, in migrant camps, and those camps are not in the big cities; the migrants are out of sight for some time. By the time they come into sight, they’ve learned some English.
The Australian approach is, let’s assimilate them. They could all become “new Australians,” that was the title for migrants. Various programs were set up to teach them to become Australian but these programs were not enforced with such rigor that Russian, Ukrainian, Latvian communities are unable to form. They all behaved the same way: They would build a little church; they expand it; they find a priest; they create Saturday language schools to preserve the culture; and they keep their heads down. Growing up in the 1950s in Australia, I had absolutely no idea about their existence, and I was very surprised when I found out how many there were.
Kharitonov: The DP problem was inevitably tied to the problem of war criminals escaping from justice. How significant was that issue?
Fitzpatrick: To begin with, there are war criminals and there are collaborators. Comparatively, very few people were involved in flagrant war crimes like shooting groups of Jews in occupied parts of the Soviet Union. The much larger group of people had lived under the German occupation or in Germany itself and did its best to survive in that context.
Let’s take the case of somebody who, say, was director of a technical institute somewhere in Belarus when the Germans came. This person could resign his position, or he could not resign. It’s obvious that most people are not going to resign; if they resign, it’s an unfriendly act, so they don’t. That’s collaboration, right? But that’s not collaboration of the same kind as taking people from a village and shooting them. The International Refugee Organizations (IRO) says, we’re not taking any collaborators; it’s part of its constitution. A collaborator cannot be a displaced person. The trouble is, how do you know who was a collaborator? Nobody is going to show up to the IRO and say, I’m a collaborator.
So what happens is, before the resettlement schemes come into effect, there’s a sort of standoff. The IRO says it’s not taking collaborators, and it takes some without knowing, but other collaborators just don’t try to get DP status. They hang out in the cities and survive however they can. But then comes resettlement, and that’s when the IRO thinks, well, we’ve got this large group of people who may or may not be considered collaborators. The test case here is the Latvian Legion. It was a national patriotic, anti-Soviet group that fought alongside the Germans during the occupation. At first, it consisted of volunteers, but then the Germans started conscripting. Therefore, if you are identified as a Latvian Legion person, are you a collaborator or not? Initially, the IRO tried to find out whether they had volunteered or been conscripted. Everyone said they had been conscripted, so it didn’t get very far. After a while and not without pressure from international Latvian organizations and the US to some degree, the IRO says, look, it’s too hard. Let’s just assume they were all conscripted. And so having been in the Latvian Legion in itself stops being a sign of collaboration.
This example is followed across the board in a process described in unpublished—basically, secret—memos in the IRO as a liberalization of its policy. In other words, let’s go easy on collaborators. These people arrive in the US, Australia or whatever, and, of course, they try not to be noticed. They try to forget about all that stuff. In both countries, there’s a submerged tension about that, but it’s only in the 1980s that the US moves toward hunting down war criminals, especially those who committed war crimes against Jews, and the other nations follow suit. Then it becomes a tremendously fraught issue.
Kharitonov: You say the Cold War made possible the speediest and most successful solution to this major refugee crisis. Today, there are no shortages of crises, and a cold war, it could be argued, is taking place again. Could anything similar to what happened for DPs then be achieved now for refugees from Africa, Asia, Gaza, Ukraine?
Fitzpatrick: That’s a really nice thought, isn’t it? I mean, one could hope. What happened and why I say that the Cold War solved their problem, is that DPs were initially formally defined by the IRO as victims of war and fascism. Their DP status was due to that.
At the same time, in practice the DPs were the people who wouldn’t repatriate to countries that now have communist governments. That was the DPs’ own self-definition, and that understanding of DPs as victims of communism gradually came to prevail over the official one.
As the Cold War developed, the fact that it was Nazism or the war that got them into this situation was simply forgotten. It became irrelevant.
What is interesting, from the American point of view, is that these people had chosen the Free World. They had chosen democracy over totalitarianism. They knew what it was like in the Soviet Union, and they wouldn’t go back there. This has enormous propaganda value. This value is used, in particular, to sell the funding of the IRO. It was largely paid for by the Americans, and the Americans had stopped funding its predecessor, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), in part because they thought it was too lefty, too pro-Soviet. They agreed to fund this new body very largely for two reasons. One, we’re dealing here with victims of communism. Communism is our enemy. It behooves us to step up and help these people. And the second one is we’re going to forget about repatriation. It doesn’t matter if the Soviet Union yells and screams because we’re not repatriating these people. We’re going to resettle them. And that is what happened.
Could that happen again? First of all, you had to be identified as democratic to get settled in the Cold War context. Democratic, and an opponent of the antagonist in the Cold War. It’s not quite clear who that would be at this moment. Second, it was important that DPs were identified as European, meaning white. There was, rather late, a recognition that not everybody who came from the Soviet Union could be described as European. There are Kalmyks; there are Bashkirs—the Asian part. It becomes a problem. Australia has a White Australia policy; these people don’t look white. The US doesn’t have a White America policy but it says that the DPs coming in have to be European. With the Kalmyks, there was a big and complicated campaign that ended with the most extraordinary judicial recognition that the Kalmyks, although they may have come from Asia and they may have not on the face of it seemed European, were spiritually European by virtue of their democratic convictions and, therefore, acceptable.
Of the groups you mentioned, nobody fits that requirement of being “democratic” and white except the Ukrainians in the current war, and you can see that the reaction to Ukrainian refugees was very, very markedly different from that towards other groups. There was a degree of welcome virtually everywhere that simply was not available for any other refugee group. So it’s not a very hopeful conclusion, I think, that one can draw from the circumstances I’ve described in my book, even if we have a new cold war. The resettlement of displaced East Europeans after the Second World War was a one-off success that, in the climate of the old Cold War, was made possible by their re-definition as victims of communism.
Sheila Fitzpatrick is a leading Soviet studies scholar and author of 15 books, including The Russian Revolution (1982), The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (1992) and The Death of Stalin (2025).