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The chapter shows how the DP experience crucially shaped the system of international migration after the Second World War. Supervised by the IRO between 1947 and 1951, the “resettlement” of displaced persons around the world was an unprecedented instance of planned population redistribution. Mass emigration to Israel or New World countries was not simply the final act of a long humanitarian drama; worries about “surplus population” and a desire to disseminate “freedom loving” Europeans in order to countenance the global spread of communism added demographic and ideological urgency to the departure of refugees from the continent.

The chapter discusses the screening operations conducted in the DP camps by Allied armies, UNRRA personnel and IRO staff members. A key challenge for the Western Allies was the identification of “true” and “false” refugees. From 1945 to 1947, antifascism was the main criteria used to separate genuine refugees from “usurpers of DP status.” Military screeners tried to identify former collaborators, veterans of the German army and Nazi sympathizers hidden among the DPs. With the intensification of the Cold War, anticommunism trumped antifascism in the granting of DP status. The IRO reintegrated into its ambit refugees previously rejected on the ground of collaboration. It also erected, for the first time in the history of political asylum, strict boundaries between political and economic refugees: the DP camps served as a laboratory for the attribution of refugee status in the postwar era.

The “last million” of European DPs left a strong imprint on human rights law. The enduring spectacle of refugees in occupied Germany placed the question of statelessness at the center of international attention. While the DP problem glaringly exposed the weakness of modern human rights, it also triggered the proclamation of a wide range of international protections and added enforceable substance to the otherwise non-binding “human rights revolution.” The 1951 Refugee Convention solidified in international law the postwar displaced persons experience in Europe.

The chapter examines the negotiations on displaced persons held in 1946 within various organs of the United Nations. Whereas the Soviet Union, Poland and Yugoslavia demanded the compulsory return of their displaced nationals, and in particular those deemed “quislings and collaborators,” Western nations insisted on the rights of individuals to oppose their national governments. On February 14, 1946, the first human rights resolution adopted by the UN General Assembly recognized the right of DPs to temporarily remain in Germany. Deprived of Soviet support, the International Refugee Organization created in December 1946 was mandated to resettle the “last million” of displaced persons across the world.

The chapter shows how the DP episode transformed the ideology and practice of modern humanitarianism. Prior to 1945, the alleviation of human suffering was the responsibility of private charitable organizations committed to war-stricken civilian populations. The “relief and rehabilitation” of Europe’s displaced persons was instead a coordinated international operation: traditional charity gave way to a “machinery of international relief to the prominent role played today by the United Nations and Western NGOs in the conduct of humanitarian interventions.

The chapter analyzes the place of Holocaust survivors and Jewish displaced persons within the postwar refugee regime. Recognized as a stateless and extraterritorial community, Jewish DPs nationalized the course of Jewish history and triggered unprecedented philosemitism in international politics. As much as the historical agency claimed by the survivors of the Final Solution, the skillful determination of the Zionist movement or the political backing of the Western and Eastern blocs, refugee humanitarianism enabled the advent of Jewish statehood.

This chapter examines the anti-colonial nationalist led Indian government’s decision to remove itself from international humanitarian bodies and covenants addressing refugee relief and rehabilitation in the 1940s, as a result of the experiences of the Second World War. Instead, all aliens, regardless of their circumstances, were flattened into a single umbrella category by legal instruments like the 1946 Foreigners Act. The decision rested on a particular understanding of how the self-determination and the rights it guaranteed were in tension with a more universalist notion of human rights adopted in the 1940s. It thus explores the nature of rights, humanitarianism and the establishment of the self-determined nation-state in India, and how the figure of the refugee was caught in between these, at the immediate moment of India’s transition from colony to nation-state.