By examining the forgotten history of refugee relief in the French zone, this book reveals that ‘caring’ for DPs became a political and moral project, overseen by the French state, international organisations, and occupation authorities. It demonstrates that French practices towards DPs were deeply implicated in the mixed record of the French zone: DP camps were both sites of violent discipline, but also spaces of valuable educational opportunities and exchange across cultures. Not only were French occupation officials and relief workers concerned about the image of France circulating in DP camps, but they also drew a number of DP artists into the orbit of French cultural diplomacy in Germany. For French occupiers and relief workers, exhibiting French cultural richness and selling the ‘French way of life’ was considered as a tool to express and project French political power. Fundamentally, this book nuances the view that the Second World War was a radically ‘modernising’ and ‘internationalising’ moment in the history of humanitarianism. French approaches to relief work were underpinned by gendered assumptions, racial prejudices and the received wisdom of the superiority of certain ethnic groups over others.

This chapter demonstrates that French arguments over the transfer of DPs to France sit at the juncture of several critical debates about post-war politics of migration and France’s diplomatic strategies in the context of the nascent Cold War. In the aftermath of the Second World War, DPs constituted an enticing demographic opportunity to replenish a French population denuded by two world wars and a declining birth rate. And yet the question of DP emigration defied consensus in France. Communist decision-makers and their ideological fellow-travellers on the French left were strongly opposed to the recruitment of what they regarded as fascist DPs and ‘war collaborators’. Beneath the surface of what was ostensibly a political and ideological opposition to the entry of allegedly ‘anti-communist’ DPs lay a labyrinth of economic fears, a traditional protectionist reflex, as well as a raft of moral and cultural concerns about their ‘assimilability’ and ‘desirability’. Thus despite the early high hopes attached to the transfer of fit and industrious DPs to France, it was not until April 1947 that a coordinated and significant recruitment scheme was launched by French authorities. Crucially, this chapter reveals that the selection of DPs triggered extensive controversies about how far DPs could or should be assimilated into the nation state and about the presumed superiority or inferiority of various categories of DPs and refugees.

This book has argued that Germany’s treatment of Allied prisoners during the First World War was neither brutal nor benign, but somewhere in between. Through the experiences of Australian prisoners of war captured on the Western Front, we see that Germany largely adhered to the pre-war agreements as best it could. Although there were cases of deliberate mistreatment, ex-prisoners of war testified that their captors had largely treated them humanely, provided them with food, shelter and medical assistance, and respected the rank of captured officers.