Journal of Contemporary History current issue

Introduction: Relief in the Aftermath of War

Reinisch, J. — 2008-07-08

`Becoming Planning Minded': The Theory and Practice of Relief 1940--1945

Shephard, B. — 2008-07-08

In the wake of the Iraq War, it has become axiomatic that the aftermath of a war should be planned for. This article disentangles the different strands woven into Allied planning for 'postwar relief' in the early 1940s. The rhetorical planners – great and good people such as Leonard Woolf and veterans of relief work – feared that the humanitarian aftermath of the second world war would be even worse than that of the first. The political planners had to reconcile many conflicting forces: the need to keep allied governments in exile happy, the British blockade, the interests of the Russians, and the concerns of the United States Congress. The new instrument they produced, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, struggled to establish itself under the weak leadership of Governor Herbert Lehman. In practice, therefore, military planning mattered most. Allied armies discovered, in Italy in 1943-44, the necessity in modern warfare of feeding, fumigating and rehousing civilians and, in the process, developed expertise in new medical technologies such as DDT, nutrition, and penicillin, which prevented the expected epidemics. But the reluctance of the military to 'do welfare' or to engage in rehabilitation also became apparent. The main achievement of the long planning process was in creating the dominant mental construct of postwar relief, that of the 'displaced person', on which the hierarchy of assessment of refugees' needs was based, and new institutional mechanisms of doubtful effectiveness. Planning, some contemporaries concluded, did not in itself guarantee success.

British Humanitarian Assistance: Wartime Planning and Postwar Realities

Steinert, J.-D. — 2008-07-08

The organisation of post-war relief is the first step in post-war reconstruction. The needs of the countries ravaged by the war will be immense and can be met only by international cooperative action on a very large scale. After the last war, there was considerable delay in organising relief; the scale on which it could be granted was very inadequate; and the financial conditions on which relief was available hampered the subsequent restoration of world economic relations. It is very desirable that plans should be prepared beforehand to provide relief after this war on an adequate scale and on a basis which will promote international recovery. . . . Voluntary organisations should be coordinated and linked up with these Relief Missions.1

Between Relief and Politics: Refugee Humanitarianism in Occupied Germany 1945--1946

Cohen, G. D. — 2008-07-08

In this article, I argue that international relief operations carried out between 1943 and 1947 under the umbrella of UNRRA went beyond their stated goal of civilian 'rehabilitation': relief efforts also contributed to the rise of a new internationalism in the aftermath of the second world war. I start my discussion with a comparison between relief operations in Europe after the first and second world wars. In contrast to 1918, humanitarian efforts in 1945 pertained to displaced persons and refugees found outside their countries of origin: an unprecedented instance of mass displacement on the European continent. Although narrowly framed in 1943 in terms of 'Relief and Rehabilitation', Western humanitarianism was tied to the broader issues of forced migration and genocide. In a second section I examine how relief operations can be seen as an illustration of the Anglo-Saxon 'human rights talk' during the wartime period. UNRRA and private welfare organizations fed, housed and clothed refugees at a time when Roosevelt's call for 'freedom from want' was translated into a new set of basic human rights. Western humanitarianism was implementing on the ground some of the general principles proclaimed by the 'human rights revolution' of the 1940s. In a third section I focus on some of the political aspects of relief operations. I discuss the place of Jewish refugees in humanitarian politics and argue that relief operations did much to recognize Jewish Holocaust survivors as a specific national entity, with important consequences for their access to self-determination. I also show how relief efforts rapidly evolved into a commitment to protect political asylum: in this way, postwar humanitarianism was part and parcel of the emergence of the 'West' in the context of the Cold War.

`We Shall Rebuild Anew a Powerful Nation': UNRRA, Internationalism and National Reconstruction in Poland

Reinisch, J. — 2008-07-08

This article evaluates UNRRA as one of the first international agencies established during the war to manage the transition from war to peace and to provide liberated countries with essential relief. It argues that this organization was a forum for debates on questions not only of internationalism, but also of the future of the nation-state, national reconstruction, national sovereignty, patriotism and citizens' relationships to their states. Moreover, the article explores this chapter of international history at the national level, by asking how the problem of Polish reconstruction after 1945 was framed, discussed and understood by UNRRA's diplomats and relief workers in Poland and in the DP camps. Problems of Polish sovereignty and reconstruction were interpreted differently in different sections of UNRRA, as a pragmatic interpretation of civic usefulness and patriotic responsibilities coexisted with an ethnological understanding of Polish cultural traditions, shared land and ancestry. But even as these different interpretations came into conflict, both models continued to be grounded in a world view which saw nation-states as unavoidable constituents of the international order, and international organizations as having to bind nations together without abolishing them.

`For the Love of Christ': Strategies of International Catholic Relief and the Allied Occupation of Germany, 1945--1948

Weindling, P. — 2008-07-08

The end of the second world war saw the Allied occupation authorities faced by substantial problems of malnutrition, refugees and crime. The military and Allied occupation authorities lacked the resources to resolve these problems, and had to rely on a range of external assistance organizations to cope with malnutrition and the refugee problem. Assistance came from a complicated array of organizations, including international agencies associated with the new United Nations, bilateral assistance from neutral countries, and religious and welfare organizations. While the Allies would have been happier working with organizations that they could exert leverage on, for example, the Red Cross, such was the enormity of the problems that they had to admit a broad range of relief organizations. This article will consider the politics of assistance, as organizations steered a course between the Allied authorities, local Germans and Displaced Persons. In the case of the Roman Catholic Church, the Americans recognized that to maintain the legitimacy of the occupation, it was politic to keep the Vatican and Catholic organizations sympathetically. On the other hand, the Church saw that it could gain support by supporting German dissent and complaints about the inadequacy of provision. I will consider the tense political relations surrounding relief through a number of such case studies.

Relief Work and Malaria in Greece, 1943--1947

Gardikas, K. — 2008-07-08

During the German occupation, Greece suffered a serious malaria epidemic, and the progress in malaria control achieved by the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) mission to Greece in the 1930s was wiped out. At the same time, however, medical relief was channelled into the country through a relaxation of the Allied blockade. While the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) inherited the wartime local relief distribution networks, malaria control measures required a return of the RF scientists within the organizational and logistical framework provided by UNRRA's Medical Division. They introduced dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT) spraying on a nationwide scale, revolutionizing malaria control and the idea of disease eradication, and created UNRRA's largest DDT malaria programme. As the Greek civil war unfolded, the fight against malaria acquired a dynamic which immunized it from the political issues of the postwar international scene. In the Greek case, the RF's influence on malaria control by means of DDT moved smoothly from UNRRA to the World Health Organization (WHO) framework.

Latina Province, 1944--1950

Snowden, F. — 2008-07-08

The province of Latina in Italy provides an exceptional case in the history of postwar problems involving refugees, evacuees, and displaced persons. Famous until the 1930s as a largely uninhabited malarial swamp, the province was drained, reclaimed, and settled by Mussolini's regime. This was a massive and complex intervention that had propaganda, public health, and eugenic purposes as the swamps of the Pontine Marshes were transformed into a showcase of the new society the fascists intended to construct. Mussolini's foreign policy objectives, however, were incompatible with the goal of public health, and by 1944 the new province became a battlefield between the Allies and the retreating German army. The result was extreme environmental devastation and the unleashing of a major epidemic of malaria that intensified the sufferings of the recently settled civilian population that found itself homeless, hungry, and seriously ill as the war ended. This article examines the strategies employed by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), the Rockefeller Foundation, and the returning Italian authorities to deal with this complex emergency. Part of the interest of Latina province in this period is that it became the site for the earliest use of DDT to control a major epidemic of malaria, and an important precedent for the worldwide eradication effort of the World Health Organization. It is useful, therefore, to examine the grounds for the success of the antimalarial effort in Latina, which was in fact multifaceted. In addition, the paper addresses the political purposes that motivated the UNRRA relief effort as the Allies sought to prevent the threat of social unrest and revolution as well as to combat hunger, unemployment, homelessness and disease.

`The Mountain Laboured and Brought Forth a Mouse': UNRRA's Operations in the Cyclades Islands, c.1945--46

Tsilaga, F. — 2008-07-08

Like many a recently liberated country with the experience of starvation and hardship vivid in its people's physical state, Greece emerged in the immediate aftermath of the second world war in great need of assistance, facing a wrecked economy and drained resources. Relief provision became the responsibility of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), an international relief organization established in late 1943 with the purpose of furnishing essential supplies and services to war-devastated states. For over two years (April 1945-June 1947), Greece received goods worth approximately $350 million, as much as its pre-war commercial imports, and almost 12 per cent of total UNRRA assistance. This article traces the provision of UNRRA aid in the micro-context of the Cyclades, a famine-stricken group of some 25 Aegean islands. Drawing on UNRRA's mostly undisclosed archive, it examines the implementation of welfare policies and the conversion of general plans to particular actions to disclose the interplay between relief strategies and the development of the local economy.

Abstracts

2008-07-08