'Becoming planning minded': The theory and practice of relief 1940-1945

Journal of Contemporary History

Volumn 43, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 405-419

  Shephard, Ben ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

Displaced persons; Planning; Relief; United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration

Indexed keywords

EID: 57749124603     PISSN: 00220094     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0022009408091820     Document Type: Review

References (125)

1. F. Wilson, In the Margins of Chaos: Recollections of Relief Work in and between Three Wars (London 1944), 269.
2. 'The history of UNRRA is a damned awful history ... a statistical record [with] absolutely not one word that matters over the operational capacity of UNRRA': Sir Robert Jackson, i/v 1990, Bodleian Library, Ms Eng c. 4678. G. Woodbridge, UNRRA. The History of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (New York 1950).
3. F.S.V. Donnison, Civil Affairs and Military Government in North West Europe 1944-1946 (London 1961);
4. E.F. Ziemke, The US Army in the Occupation of Germany 1944-1946 (Washington, DC 1975).
5. G. Sereny, The German Trauma. Experiences and Reflections 1938-2000 (London 2000), 25.
6. Standard accounts are: W. Jacobmeyer, Von Zwangarbeiter zum heimatlosen Auslander: Die Displaced Persons in Westdeutschland 1945-51 (Goettingen 1985);
7. M. Wyman, DPs. Europe's Displaced Persons, 1945-1951 (1989; Ithaca, NY 1998).
8. T.E. Ricks, Fiasco. The American Adventure in Iraq (New York 2006).
9. J.A. Salter, Memoirs of a Public Servant (London 1961), 276.
10. P. Addison, The Road to 1945. British Politics and the Second World War (1977; London 1982), 181-9;
11. C. Barnett, The Audit of War. The Illusion and Reality of Britain as a Great Nation (London 1987), 11-37.
12. J. Huxley et al, When Hostilities Cease. Papers on Relief and Reconstruction prepared for the Fabian Society (London 1943);
13. see also Education and the United Nations. Report by the Joint Committee of the London International Assembly and the Council for Education in World Citizenship (London 1942);
14. J.G. Crowther et al, Science and World Order (Harmondsworth 1942).
15. M. Asquith, Famine. Quaker Work to Russia, 1921-1923 (Oxford 1943);
16. R. Fry, A Quaker Adventure (1926; London 1943);
17. M. Marrus, The Unwanted. European Refugees in the Twentieth Century (New York 1985), 15-121;
18. C.P. Vincent, The Politics of Hunger: The Allied Blockade of Germany, 1915-1919 (Athens, OH 1985);
19. N. Baron and P. Gatrell (eds), Homelands: War, Population and Statehood in Eastern Europe and Russia, 1918-1924 (London 2004);
20. B.M. Weissman, Herbert Hoover and Famine Relief to Soviet Russia, 1921-1923 (Stanford, CA 1974);
21. M. Healy, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I (Cambridge 2004).
22. Relief and Reconstruction in Europe - the First Steps. Report by a Chatham House Study Group (London 1942);
23. M.D. Mackenzie, Medical Relief in Europe. Questions for Immediate Study (London 1942);
24. Save the Children Fund, Children in Bondage. A Survey of Child Life in the Occupied Countries of Europe and in Finland (London 1942);
25. G.H. Bourne, Starvation in Europe (London 1943);
26. National Planning Association, Relief for Europe (Washington, DC, 1943).
27. J. Marrack, 'Food for Starving Europe', in Huxley et al., When Hostilities Cease
28. K.G. Brookes, 'The Re-establishment of Displaced Persons', in Huxley et al., When Hostilities Cease
29. A. Bourne, 'Post-war Medical Relief' in Huxley et al., When Hostilities Cease
30. M. Black, A Cause for our Times. Oxfam. The First 50 Years (Oxford 1983).
31. The term 'displaced person' (DP), absent from J.H. Simpson's monumental The Refugee Problem (London 1939), was in general use by late 1942.
32. Probably coined by the Leith-Ross Committee, and given wider currency by the Russian-born demographer E.M. Kulischer in his The Displacement of Population in Europe (Montreal 1943).
33. Proudfoot disliked it, mostly speaking of 'refugees'. Donnison accepted the need for a 'new designation' to describe victims of 'forced movement', but found 'displaced persons' too 'abstract and clinical': F.S.V. Donnison, Civil Affairs and Military Government Central Organization and Planning (London 1966), 187.
34. Comparisons of DPs with 'lost keys' (W. Jacobmeyer, 'The "Displaced Persons" in West Germany', in G. Rystad (ed.), The Uprooted. Forced Migration as an International Problem in the Post-war Era (Lund 1990), 271;
35. G. Dallas, Poisoned Peace (London 2005), 428) rest on a semantic confusion between 'displaced' and 'misplaced'.
36. P. Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston 1999), 20.
37. In early August 1940, the British dismissed a proposal by ex-President Hoover to allow relief aid to Norway, Holland, Belgium and France through the blockade. American critics were depicted as anti-British isolationists.
38. W.N. Medlicott, The Economic Blockade (London 1952), I, 551-2, 666;
39. M. Gilbert, Finest Hour. Winston S. Churchill, 1939-1941 (London 1983) 741-4;
40. B. Pimlott (ed.), The Second World War Diary of Hugh Dalton 1940-45 (London 1986), 76;
41. G. Fox, 'The origins of UNRRA', Political Science Quarterly 65 (1950), 561-84.
42. F. Leith-Ross, Money Talks (London 1968), 289;
43. National Archives (NA) T 188/247, 148,153.
44. Donnison, Central Organization and Planning (1966), op. cit., 139.
45. Hugh Dalton found the Soviet Ambassador in London, Ivan Maisky, 'full of the most ridiculous suspicions - e.g. that the Relief Organisation might be intended to be supra-Governmental and might, e.g. distribute food in Russia as Hoover did last time, without any reference to the local authorities'. Pimlott (ed.), Diary of Hugh Dalton, op. cit., 525-6.
46. D. Acheson, Present at the Creation. My Years at the State Department (London 1970), 65-7.
47. Donnison, Central Organization and Planning (1966), op. cit., 138.
48. National Planning Association (NPA), Relief for Europe (Washington, DC 1942), 37-44;
49. B.M. Patenaude, The Big Show in Bololand (Stanford, CA 2002), 28-48.
50. NPA, Relief for Europe, op cit, 38.
51. T. Hoopes and D. Brinkley, FDR and the Creation of the UN (New Haven, CT 1997), 1-74;
52. R.A. Divine, Second Chance (New York 1967), 98-135.
53. Hoopes and Brinkley, FDR, op. cit., 55-65.
54. Divine, Second Chance, op. cit., 115.
55. T. Sjoeberg, The Powers and the Persecuted (Lund 1991);
56. B. Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe (2nd edn, Leicester 1999);
57. H. Feingold, The Politics of Rescue (New York 1970). The IGCR was created in 1938 to enable the United States to co-operate with the League of Nations on refugee matters. In 1944, Roosevelt created yet another organization, the War Refugee Board, in response to pressure from Jewish groups.
58. Litvinov, the Russian Ambassador to Washington and former Foreign Secretary, had negotiated the entry of the Hoover aid mission to the USSR in 1921. Halifax, British Foreign Secretary 1939-40, had been Ambassador in Washington since 1941.
59. Acheson, Present at the Creation, op. cit., 68.
60. A.H. Vandenberg, Jr, The Private Papers of Senator Vandenberg (New York 1953), 66-74.
61. Divine, Second Chance, op. cit., 157.
62. Leith-Ross, Money Talks, op. cit., 294-5. Knowledge of experience in Austria after the first world war made Leith-Ross a consistent advocate of this view.
63. Woodbridge, UNRRA, op. cit., I, 30-2.
64. Acheson, Present at the Creation, op. cit., 69.
65. The Economist, 4 December 1943.
66. Quoted in National Planning Association, UNRRA; Gateway to Recovery (Washington, DC 1944), 15.
67. W. Arnold-Forster, 'UNRRA's Prospects', Political Quarterly 15 (1944), 57-65. The first UN agency was actually the Food and Agriculture Organization, which never attracted the same attention as UNRRA.
68. Dictionary of American Biography, Supplement 7 (New York 1981);
69. A. Nevins, Herbert H. Lehman and his Era (New York 1963);
70. P. Roth, The Plot against America (London 2004).
71. Acheson, Present at the Creation, op. cit., 43.
72. Pimlott, Diary of Hugh Dalton, op. cit., 613;
73. House of Lords, 15 December 1944.
74. Dallas, Poisoned Peace, op. cit., 429.
75. The Economist, 15 July 1944.
76. S.R.M. Best, 'The British Foreign Office, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), and the Displaced Persons Problem in British-occupied Europe, 1944-1947'. (PhD thesis, LSE 1991), 87-100.
77. The Times, 14 February 1945.
78. House of Lords, 14 December 1944. See Donnison, North West Europe, op. cit., for problems in liberated Europe.
79. Nevins, Lehman, op. cit., 224-9.
80. Ziemke, US Army, op. cit., 3-23;
81. R. Murphy Diplomat among Warriors (London 1964), 185;
82. Acheson, Present at the Creation, op. cit., 42.
83. H.L. Coles and A.K. Weinberg, Civil Affairs: Soldiers Become Governors (Washington, DC 1964).
84. C.R.S. Harris, Allied Military Administration of Italy, 1943-45 (London 1957);
85. D.W. Ellwood, Italy 1943-1945 (Leicester 1985);
86. N. Lewis, Naples 44 (London 1978);
87. H. Macmillan, War Diaries. Politics and War in the Mediterranean, January 1943-May 1945 (London 1984).
88. Drew Middleton, quoted in B. Shephard, A War of Nerves (London 2000), 377.
89. M. Harrison, Medicine and Victory (Oxford 2005);
90. P. Weindling, Epidemics and Genocide in Eastern Europe, 1890-1945 (Oxford 2000);
91. F.M. Snowden, The Conquest of Malaria. Italy, 1900-1962 (New Haven, CT 2006), 198-212. The Naples typhus outbreak was initially very badly handled.
92. G. Rendel, The Sword and the Olive. Recollections of Diplomacy and the Foreign Service 1913-1954 (London 1957), 232.
93. Acheson, Present at the Creation, op. cit., 79;
94. Coles and Weinberg, Civil Affairs, op. cit., 153-4.
95. British military planners assumed that relief would consist of 2000 calories a day, the minimum needed to 'prevent disease and unrest' - an ambitious goal, as it turned out. Donnison, Central Organization and Planning (1966), op. cit., 146.
96. Leith-Ross, Money Talks, op. cit., 305;
97. M.J. Proudfoot, European Refugees 1939-52. A Study in Forced Population Movement (London 1957), 136-40.
98. Proudfoot, European Refugees, op. cit., 101, 108-10, 147-52.
99. L. Mosley, Report from Germany (London 1945);
100. G. Orwell, 'Allies Facing Food Crisis in Germany. Problem of Freed Workers', Observer, 15 April 1945
101. reprinted in the collection I Belong to the Left (London 2001), 125-6;
102. Donnison, Central Organization and Planning (1966), op. cit., 187-93. The Allied definition of a 'refugee' as a homeless person in his own country stood the accepted dictionary meaning of the word on its head.
103. J. Bridgman, The End of the Holocaust (London 1990);
104. R.H. Abzug, Inside the Vicious Heart (New York 1985).
105. F. Morgan, Peace and War (London 1961), 218-51;
106. Z. Warhaftig, Relief and Rehabilitation: Implications of the UNRRA Program for Jewish Needs (New York 1944).
107. B. Shephard, After Daybreak. The Liberation of Belsen 1945 (London 2005). Two technologies developed by the British in India, 'Bengal Famine Mixture' and predigested protein hydrolysates, did not work with camp survivors.
108. Y. Bauer, Out of the Ashes (Oxford 1989), 23-44;
109. S. Milton and F. Bogin (eds), Archives of the Holocaust, 10
110. American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee New York (New York 1995), 1269-72.
111. D. Botting, In the Ruins of the Reich (London 2005), 39-50;
112. Ziemke, US Army, op. cit., 52, 200-7.
113. Estimates of DP numbers: National Planning Association, Europe's Uprooted People (Washington, DC 1944), 6-8;
114. Donnison North West Europe (1961), op. cit., 341;
115. Coles and Weinberg, Civil Affairs, op. cit., 847.
116. Nevins, Lehman, op. cit., 257-8;
117. FO 371/51344. Jackson, who had won a huge reputation running the Middle East Supply Centre and was being groomed for a top job in London, was sent to sort out UNRRA by the British. Whitehall, though still critical and doubtful about the organization, recognized that as it was mainly funded by the Americans, 'our contribution to the expenses of UNRRA was likely to be only about 20% while our contribution to any other organisation might well be 50% or 100%'. FO 371/41144;
118. M.W. Wilmington, The Middle East Supply Centre (London 1972);
119. E.M. Lloyd, Fuel and Inflation in the Middle East 1940-1945 (Stanford, CA 1956).
120. M.J. Smith, Dachau. The Harrowing of Hell (1972; New York 1995). It was a close call at times. On 3 September 1945, Ernest Bevin feared 'an outbreak of epidemic among DPs'. Sir Frederick Morgan, 'UNRRA Diary': Imperial War Museum, Department of Documents.
121. J. Cloake, Templer. Tiger of Malaya (London 1985), 149;
122. Pimlott (ed.), Diary of Hugh Dalton, op. cit., 846;
123. Donnison, North West Europe (1961), op cit.
124. Salter, Memoirs, op. cit., 277-8.
125. F. Wilson, Aftermath (Harmondsworth 1947).