Closed Door Policy: David Nasaw on America's Approach to Refugees
"We are a nation of immigrants that doesn’t want any more."
IDEAS
According to the latest estimates, four million Ukrainians have fled the country in the last six weeks. Even before Russia’s invasion six weeks ago, however, the world was already facing its worst refugee crisis since the aftermath World War II. That earlier era is the topic of The Last Million: Europe’s Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War, the latest book by the best-selling historian David Nasaw. To understand why we always seem to get refugee issues wrong, I spoke to Nasaw last week. We discussed those questions and more, including the plight of Syrian and Afghan refugees, what should happen with the Ukrainians forced from home—and what actually will.
Octavian Review: Who were the Last Million, and what happened to them when World War II ended in Europe?
David Nasaw: When hostilities ceased in the spring of 1945, there were some seven to ten million non-Germans in Germany, with smaller numbers in Austria and Italy. They were POWs and political prisoners. They were the survivors of death camps, concentration camps, and labor camps. And they were the millions of forced and slave laborers who had been brought to Germany during the war to replace the millions of soldiers who were stuck on the Eastern front. All suddenly free.
They were homeless. They were malnourished, diseased, and totally disoriented. The Americans and the British occupying armies wanted to keep the roadways open, so they rounded them up and sent them to what they called assembly centers, where they divided them up by nationality and prepared to send them home. By the end of the summer of 1945—and this was a miraculous logistical feat—seven million to eight million foreigners had been sent home, by car, truck, plane, bicycle, or by foot (in the case of the French). But there were a million left behind. And this last million refused repatriation for a variety of reasons.
OR: Who were they, and how many of them were Jews?
Nasaw: In the beginning, not many of them were Jews. When the camps were opened and the Jews who were in hiding in Germany and Poland came out into the open, there were maybe between 30,000 and 50,000 of them. But over time, the number of Jews grew. Some 80-90 percent of the Polish Jews who had survived did so because they had escaped into the Soviet Union, where Stalin had put them to work. In 1946, Stalin gave them the opportunity to go back to Poland. Between 200,000 and 250,000 went—and quickly discovered that the antisemitism in Poland after the war was worse than it had been before the war. These Jews had no place to go except the displaced persons camps overseen by the Americans in Germany. As a result, by the middle of 1946—especially after the Kielce Pogrom, in which Polish civilians, entirely on their own, slaughtered dozens of Jews—one quarter of the Last Million were Jewish.
The Last Million also included around 400,000-500,000 Poles who had been brought into Germany as forced laborers, and were now afraid to go home again because their country had been destroyed and the Soviets had assumed dominance there. These Poles were told by anti-communists in the camps and by the provisional government in London not to go home and ratify the Soviet takeover, but to stay in the camps instead, where they could form a resistance army that, with the help of the Americans, would retake Poland.
The rest of the Last Million was made of Latvians, Lithuanians, and Estonians. Hitler had given the Baltic peoples more leeway during their occupation because he thought they were closer to Aryans—not quite Aryan, but also not Untermenschen in the same way that Poles and Jews were. When the war came to an end, tens of thousands of Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, and Ukrainians who had collaborated with the Nazis escaped their homelands because they knew the Red Army was coming and they would be punished for their collaboration. They ended up in the displaced persons camps, having destroyed their papers and lied their way in. Among them were thousands of Waffen-SS members. There had been an Estonian unit of the Waffen-SS. A Latvian unit. A Ukrainian unit. And there were lots of Lithuanians in the auxiliary police forces. The reality is that more than half of the six million Jews who were killed in the Holocaust were not killed by gas. The Holocaust by bullets, which took place in Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and throughout Eastern Europe, was as horrendous and as large as the Holocaust by gas in the extermination camps. And collaborators from Eastern Europe, the Baltics, and Ukraine had made it possible for the German SS to round up, transport, murder, and bury the Jews.
OR: How did the Last Million then get stuck in camps for an extended period of time after the war?
Nasaw: In 1943, President Franklin Roosevelt knew that there was going to be a huge problem when the war was over, so he established UNRRA, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. UNRRA—with American dollars, American soldiers, and American supplies—administered the displaced persons camps after the war. There were hundreds of camps throughout Germany. People were divided by nationalities, so the camps became nations in exile. If you went into Polish or Ukrainian camps, you’d only hear Polish or Ukrainian spoken. Each camp had churches, schools, newspapers, orchestras, literature. They became largely self-governing enclaves. The only relationship they had with the surrounding German population was through the black market, which all of the camps participated in.
In the Jewish camps, people realized that they did not have the luxury of simply mourning the six million and their relatives. It was their responsibility, their mission, to recreate the Jewish community. To show that Hitler had failed, that he had not exterminated all the Jews. So the Jewish displaced persons camps had the highest birth rates in the world. There were dozens of newspapers. There were printing presses. There were historical commissions set up to try to collect as much information about prewar Jewish communities as they could. And to identify those who had participated in the Shoah.
At the start, there was battle between the Bundists and the Zionists. The Bundists said, “Let’s go back and recreate our communities in Poland and Lithuania.” But they were outnumbered by the Zionists, who said, “Europe is no place for Jews. The place where we must rebuild is Palestine.” And people in the Jewish camps began to prepare. There were little kibbutzim. There were training grounds, where Jews, with the help of Jewish Agency and Jewish soldiers who had fought with the British, got military training. And they taught themselves the skills—primarily agricultural—they thought they were going to need in Israel.
Of course, large numbers of Jewish survivors, having survived one war, did not want to enter into a nation whose birth was going to trigger another war. So for many displaced persons, the goal was to immigrate to the United States, Canada, Australia, or Latin America.
OR: You talk in the book about how it was sometimes harder for Jews to get into the United States than it was for fascists and collaborators.
Nasaw: I wrote the Last Million because the story has somehow vanished or been hidden from view. So many people don’t know what happened. Jewish history jumps from the Shoah to the creation of Israel in 1948. And American history doesn’t want to look at the cruelty with which we treated the Jewish people.
Following the war, the majority of the U.S. Congress didn’t want any Eastern Europeans immigrants. It took three years of lobbying and campaigning—in large part by Jewish organizations and Jewish-funded nonsectarian organizations, with the help of the Catholic church and congressmen and senators from districts and states with large numbers of Eastern Europeans already living there—for Congress to finally pass the Displaced Persons Act in June 1948, which started letting people in. We were the last country on earth to allow displaced persons to resettle on our land. And the 1948 legislation was written in such a way as to exclude 90 percent of the Jewish survivors in the DP camps.
Why was that? Well, begin with antisemitism. Of course, in the postwar period, it was no longer possible to use the antisemitic language that Hitler had used. So American anti-Semites took up the call of the papacy after the Russian revolution. They claimed that Jews were inherently subversive, cared only about themselves, and had been indoctrinated, brainwashed by the Soviets, and would destroy the United States if we let them in. They were seen as the original sleeper cells. So the 1948 bill was an abomination. President Harry Truman himself called it discriminatory—and then he signed it into law.
OR: Why?
Nasaw: He said he signed it because it was better than nothing, and because if he didn’t sign it, all those Poles and the Lithuanians were going to be stuck in Germany. And he had to get them out so that he could establish West Germany as an independent state that was part of the Western Cold War coalition.
After he signed the bill, a minority of Jewish activists protested against it, saying “Why are we bringing in tens of thousands of anti-Semites, fascists, and Nazi collaborators?” So in 1950, a second Displaced Persons Bill was passed, which eliminated the barriers to Jewish immigration. But by 1950, it was too late. No Jew had wanted to stay in Germany a day longer than he had to. When the state of Israel declared its independence in 1948, and its first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, said, “Every Jew who wants to come to Israel will be welcomed here,” they went. Between 1948 and 1950, of the 200,000 to 250,000 Jewish displaced persons in Germany, 50,000 were allowed into the United States. The remainder went to Israel.
OR: And the non-Jewish Eastern Europeans let into the United States were people who wouldn’t go back east, right?
Nasaw: Regrettably, immigration policy then as now is built not on humanitarian concerns, but on geopolitical considerations. By 1948, the Cold War was raging. The American government wanted to bring into the country as many staunch anti-Communists as it possibly could. And here you had 180,000 people who were violently anti-Communist and had every reason to be so, because their nations had been taken over by the Soviets. And by that point, Hitler was dead and the Nazis had been defeated, so who the hell cared if we brought in some Ukrainian concentration camp guards, some members of the Iron Guard, some Waffen-SS soldiers? Americans have a very short historical memory.
OR: Let’s talk about the current refugee crisis—not just the one involving the Ukraine war, but also Syria and Afghanistan and other parts of the world. How does the current situation compare with the postwar period? And are there lessons from that time should inform us now?
Nasaw: The similarities are difficult to ignore. Remember what happened after World War II. Number one, the American Congress refused to take in any displaced persons whatsoever, and allocated millions of dollars to keep them in camps overseas instead. Then the U.S. State Department and the White House did everything they possibly could to convince our friends and allies to take these people in.
We’ve done the same thing with the Ukrainians. There are four million refugees at this moment. The UN High Commission on Refugees estimates that, in the end, the number will be more than five million. A lot of European experts say it’s going to be closer to 10 to 15 million. We don’t know what’s going to happen in this war. But we already know that there are millions of Ukrainians who’ve lost their homes, their neighbors, their family members, and are absolutely traumatized. Are they going to want to go back to the Ukraine? Are they ever going to feel safe there again? No. And what has the United States done? We waited a month. It took until March 24—a month after the Russian invasion, and after the European Union, Canada, and neighboring countries had already welcomed in millions of Ukrainians—for President Joe Biden to say, “We’ll take 100,000.” 100,000 out of four or five million. And he didn’t say how they are going to get here. He didn’t lay out a path. He mentioned the U.S. refugee program. But if you go to the State Department website, it says explicitly that refugees looking to enter the United States should not file applications for visas. They should register with the UN. And we know the UN process is going to take from two to five years. It is a disgrace.
OR: Has this always been the American way of dealing with this problem?
Nasaw: Yes. We are a nation of immigrants that doesn’t want any more. It took three years before we welcomed any displaced persons after World War II. And even after we did, we made a distinction between Jews and those who worshipped Jesus and were white and European. That same kind of discrimination is going on today. We will eventually welcome in 100,000 Ukrainians, but nobody else.
OR: How do you think the issue will play out in Europe?
Nasaw: I think the Europeans are welcoming Ukrainians now in large part because they think they’re going to go home again. As Ukrainians refuse to go home, I don’t know what’s going to happen. Eventually, pressure is going to be put on the United States to also walk the walk. It’s not enough to send dollars.
OR: If you were in charge of refugee issues, what would your policy prescriptions be?
Nasaw: I would try, desperately, to entirely revamp and rethink America’s immigration policy. I am not in favor of simply opening all our borders. On the other hand, we have to build an immigration system that is based on hope, not fear. That is grounded in the contributions immigrants have made to this country. And not to fear that they are drug dealers, COVID carriers, or barbarians.
That’s number one. Number two, we’ve got to form a policy that rests on our humanitarian instincts rather than on geopolitical concerns. And that involves a totally new way of thinking. It is absurd that at this moment, when there is a labor shortage in this country, to put up barriers to the hundreds of thousands of skilled and unskilled Ukrainians who want to come in. The same is true of Guatemalans, of Cameroonians, and of Haitians. This country was built on the brains and the brawn of immigrant populations, and we harm ourselves by not having a sensible immigration policy in the 21st century.
Yes we are a nation of immigrants BUT the immigrants that started this nation were for the most part either self starters or desperately in need of a new life.
They brought skills and determination, yet even with that about 40% returned home, America was just to strange and different.
Taking in the young, the educated, those in their prime or with abundant knowledge makes sense. As cruel as it may sound taking in the elderly and chronically sick does not.
If this is our standard there will be much more agreement on letting them in. Self interest as a person or a nation still matters for both the nation and its people.