THE LAST MILLION

Historian Nasaw, known for biographies of industrial moguls, turns his attentive gaze on the period immediately following the end of World War II in Europe.

When the Third Reich finally collapsed in May 1945, millions of displaced persons, including forced laborers and prisoners of war, were stranded in the ruins of Germany. Not all were blameless victims, notes the author. Many, especially from the Baltic states, were anti-communists who had willingly joined the Waffen-SS and thrown themselves into the killing of Jews, Roma, and other “undesirable” people. This masterful book centers on “displaced Eastern Europeans who, when the shooting stopped, refused to go home or had no homes to return to.” Some were Polish Catholics who had been forced to work in German factories but had no wish to return to a homeland occupied by Soviet troops. A small minority, fewer than 30,000, were Jewish survivors of the Shoah who tried to repatriate themselves to Germany only to find that they were not wanted and so moved on, eventually, to Israel and the U.S. And those Eastern European Nazis? Australia took in many of them, favoring white, Protestant Latvians and Estonians who were volubly anti-communist; as Nasaw writes, Australia resettled more refugees than any other nation, though only 4.5% were Jews. Britain favored Polish soldiers who had fought under British command as well as “a thousand single young female Latvian, Lithuanian, and Estonian displaced persons [who] were recruited to work in understaffed tuberculosis sanitaria.” Canada screened rigorously for evidence of Nazi collaboration and admitted more Jews than other Commonwealth nations, while the U.S. overlooked wrongdoing almost entirely. One of Nasaw’s many intriguing cases in point is a Romanian Iron Guard leader who became a faux preacher and “was invited by Richard Nixon to deliver the opening prayer at the convening of the 1955 Senate session.” Deported to Portugal in the early 1980s, he died a free man.

A searching, vigorously written history of an unsettled time too little known to American readers.