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Report (by Flora Tsilaga)
It is only very recently that the issue of relief and rehabilitation in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War has started to spark historical interest to the extent that one can speak of a distinct field of research in the making. In this context, it is with great interest that the inauguration of the Balzan Project on ‘Reconstruction in the Immediate Aftermath of War: a Comparative Study of Europe, 1945–1950’ has been received by academics of the period. Established by Professor Eric Hobsbawm with a prize grant from the Balzan Foundation, the project is jointly directed by David Feldman (Birkbeck) and Mark Mazower (Columbia). After a successful first workshop in October 2005, the second event convened under the auspices of the Balzan project focused on relief and rehabilitation in the immediate aftermath of the war. This one-day event was attended by around thirty-five scholars and comprised two sessions. The first examined broad issues of relief and rehabilitation in post-war Europe, while the second focused on relief operations in specific countries (Germany, Italy and Greece). As revised versions of these papers (with two more added) are due to be published in a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary History, the aim of this report is to outline the main issues and arguments raised in the workshop.
Session I: Relief and Rehabilitation
Ben Shepard (Oxford, ‘Planning for post-war relief, 1941–1945’), opened the day with a vibrant presentation on the Allied planning for post-war relief, disentangling the different preparations prior to VE Day. ‘Rhetorical planning’, he argued, commenced surprisingly early in the war and produced the dominant intellectual construct of the period, that of the ‘displaced person’. In turn, political planners had to reconcile the several conflicting demands of the allied governments in exile, the British blockade, as well as the concerns of the Soviets and the US Congress. Their deliberations resulted in the formation of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), which became the basic instrument for relief provision. Soon after its establishment, Shepard argued, the organization became preoccupied with maintaining a huge bureaucracy rather than with the conduct of actual operations. Overall, he concluded that although the war was not followed by the immense catastrophe predicted, the Allies underestimated the enormity of the displaced persons problem and its effects on the German economy.
Daniel Cohen (Rice, ‘Beyond Relief: managing displacement in the aftermath of World War Two’), convincingly suggested that international relief operations carried out between 1943 and 1947 under the umbrella of UNRRA went beyond their stated goal of civilian ‘rehabilitation’, in that they contributed to the rise of a new internationalism in the aftermath of the Second World War. He argued that although the concept of assistance was narrowly framed as ‘relief and rehabilitation’, western humanitarianism was tied to the broader issues of forced migration and genocide. The case of Jewish refugees was proposed as an example. The fact that UNRRA favoured a group approach for Holocaust survivors and defined Jews as a national collective had huge implications. Cohen further maintained that relief operations were an illustration of the Anglo-Saxon ‘human rights talk’ during the wartime period and showed how Roosevelt's call for ‘freedom from want’ was translated into a new set of basic human rights. In this context, he concluded, post-war humanitarianism was part and parcel of the emergence of the ‘West’ in the context of the Cold War.
Jessica Reinisch (Birkbeck, ‘ "A DP is only a DP only until twenty-four hours after he gets home": UNRRA on international relief and rehabilitation’), placed the issue of relief both in an international and national context. On the basis of new research on UNRRA, she elaborated on a ‘curious contradiction’ inherent in the organization, that between an idealistic and often romantic international outlook and its actual support for national relief and reconstruction agendas. She used the example of Poland, where the government assumed overall responsibility for operations, as exemplary of UNRRA's national frame of reference. She examined operations in the country, and maintained that the concerns of the Polish government were paramount in shaping the nature and content of activities, which also ultimately gave rise to criticism of UNRRA for its political concessions to the Warsaw government. Finally, she argued that UNRRA's work for displaced persons was less shaped by reference to individual human rights and the responsibility of the state to its citizens, than by ideas concerning the rights of sovereign nations and the responsibilities of citizens to their countries.
In his commentary on the session Mark Mazower (Columbia) argued that the early Allied planning for relief should be assessed in continuity with the memory of the Great War and in contrast to the absence of similar planning by the Axis. He asked whether the importance of UNRRA has been overestimated and whether the answer to this question can be found within the organization's own archive. In this context, he urged for an evaluation of its work in light of specific operations and political conditions in the different recipient countries, and measured against the background of the Cold War. On the issue of sovereignty, he suggested that UNRRA's interactions with the many national governments should be examined and its actual power assessed in this light. In concluding, Mazower argued that an evaluation of UNRRA based on statistics, results, outcomes and consequences is urgently needed. Such an evaluation should also look at the issue of continuity between preceding and subsequent relief and welfare efforts – both nationally and internationally – and assess operations outside the European context, in order to grasp UNRRA's global significance.
Session II: Country Studies
Paul Weindling (Oxford Brookes, ‘The politics of post-war relief in Germany under Allied occupation’), argued that due to lack of adequate resources the Allies had to co-operate with a range of assistance organizations, including international agencies associated with the newly established United Nations, bilateral relief schemes from neutral countries as well as religious and welfare organizations. In discussing the work of the Roman Catholic Church in relief provision he suggested that while the Americans tried to maintain the legitimacy of the occupation by keeping the hierarchy of the Vatican and Catholic organizations largely intact, the latter saw that they could gain public support by encouraging German dissent and complaints about the inadequacy of relief. Through a number of case studies, he looked at the tense political relations surrounding relief, and concluded that the actions of the Church at this point should not be seen as uniform and consistent.
Katerina Gardikas (Athens, ‘Relief work and malaria in Greece’), looked at UNRRA's anti-malaria work in post-war Greece. With the disease having taken pandemic proportions in 1942, and despite the efforts of the International Red Cross soon after, malaria constituted one of the country's main health problems. DDT, developed early in WWII as the first of the modern insecticides, was used to combat mosquitoes spreading malaria and other insect-borne human diseases. After briefly describing UNRRA's wider anti-malaria operations, she concentrated on the DDT campaign and argued that although the humanitarian work of UNRRA became entangled in the politics of the Greek civil war, its anti-malaria activities were successful, as the disease was reduced to approximately ten to fifteen per cent of its pre-war level. She concluded by agreeing with the official historian of the organization, George Woodbridge, that ‘this accomplishment alone would justify the UNRRA work in Greece’.
Frank Snowden (Yale, ‘Latina Province, Italy, 1944–1950’) presented a local case study of relief operations. Latina, an Italian region traditionally afflicted by malaria, provided the territory for Mussolini's experiment of building a de novo model fascist society from scratch (de novo). After the Italian surrender, Latina became a terrain of fierce fighting, where the Germans deliberately unleashed a programme of biological warfare, which led to a violent epidemic of malaria. He examined the response of the Allied and Italian authorities to the disease and discussed the role of DDT in its first test as a weapon against malaria.
In his commentary, Christopher Read (Warwick) remarked that Russian historians had bypassed studies on relief work, partly because poverty in the Soviet Union was solved internally rather than through international campaigns and programmes. On the cultural elements of reconstructing Europe, he maintained that the mid 1940s had been a very open moment, but urged that it was important to determine precisely at which point anti-fascism gave way to anticommunism in the West.
Overall, relief and rehabilitation emerged as an innovative topic, full of new possibilities for understanding the immediate post-war period and contextualizing questions of welfare and relief provision. In future the examination of the post-war years will need to go beyond simple reliance on some archive hardly consulted until recently, or the production of unrelated national and regional case studies. Much still needs to be done in order to study the relationship between wartime planning and post-war programmes, to integrate the different European experiences of relief and rehabilitation, to place findings and results in a broader context, and to analyze the conflicting tendencies between international and national forces in existence after 1945. We are only at the threshold of this promising field of research.
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