ABSTRACT
The Displaced Persons after World War II have received little attention from American historians. Although crimes against the victims of the Holocaust before and during the war have been chronicled in several excellent studies by Henry L. Feingold, David S. Wyman, and Arthur Morse, no historian has published a single monograph about the displaced persons (DP) who remained after the war. Contemporary accounts by Bartley C. Crum, Richard Crossman, Ira Hirschmann, and Leo W. Schwarz, among others, captured the ennui and hoplessness of those refugees waiting in the European DP camps until they could reach Palestine. Robert A. Divine wrote two chapters on The Displaced Persons Acts of 1948 and 1950 in his book, American Immigration Policy, and Eugene Kulischer, Malcolm J. Proudfoot, and Jacques Vernant in the 1940’s and 1950’s produced sociological analyses of the refugee problem. 1 But for the past twenty years the DP’s, except for two graduate student theses and one fine article, have been all but ignored in this country. 2 The subject requires major historical inquiry and at least three scholars, two in the United States and one in Germany, are currently engaged in serious research on the DP’s. 3 One facet of DP experience concerns the policies in the camps hastily set up by the military to house them after the war ended. That aspect is the subject of this essay.
