The Last Million: Europe's Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War

Praise for The Last Million

"In The Last Million, Nasaw has done a real service in resurrecting this history. . . . Anyone who thinks President Trump’s demonization of foreigners is an aberration should read this history."

—The Washington Post

"One of the many virtues of The Last Million is the author’s ability to make vivid sense of a bewildering moment. He clarifies without oversimplifying. . . . Nasaw takes pains to avoid facile comparisons between the history he recounts and the current global moment, with its—our—own seas of refugees. As his calmly passionate book makes plain, however, one would need to be willfully covering one’s eyes not to see how then bleeds into now."

—Adina Hoffman, The New York Times Book Review

"David Nasaw devastatingly illustrates in The Last Million there was widespread reluctance among the victorious Allies to confront the true nature of the Holocaust. . . . The Last Million describes in meticulously researched detail what happened to the [displaced persons] who felt—understandably enough—that they could not go back to the lands of their birth."

—The Wall Street Journal

Insightful and eye-opening . . . Nasaw is a humane writer with a knowledge of his subject that is broad and deep.

—Jim Zarroli, NPR.org

"A great contribution of Nasaw’s book is that it takes the cinematic moment in which American soldiers arrive and pronounce the nightmare over—‘Shalom Aleichem, Yidden, ihr zint frei,’ a Jewish chaplain from Brooklyn announced when he drove into Buchenwald—as a starting point rather than a closing scene."

—The New Yorker

"Based on an avalanche of research, sweeping, searching, and filled with intimate details, The Last Million tells the enduringly relevant and not well-known story of how political differences between the United States and the United Kingdom, Cold War calculations, ethnic and religious conflicts, and antisemitism trumped humanitarian considerations, ‘turning what should have been the primary mission upside down and victimizing those who had suffered the most.’ "

—Glenn C. Altschuler, The Jerusalem Post

Through great research, Nasaw helps the reader understand the complexity of permanently relocating refugees to a new country.

—The Seattle Times

Nasaw, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, has once again produced an extraordinarily well-researched book that is well worth reading.

—The Christian Science Monitor

"In his magisterial new book The Last Million: Europe’s Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War, Nasaw describes what really happened in the years immediately after the war, when the Jewish survivors languished in the displaced persons camps in Germany."

—The Jewish Week

"[A] tour de force of historical reckoning . . . As [The Last Million] so powerfully illustrates, the war in Europe did not end when the fighting stopped: the casualties mounted for years."

—Columbia Magazine

"[A] thoughtful, panoramic study of the people who had no home to return to following World War II . . . The Last Million is not an easy read, filled as it is with pathos and pain, but it provides the framework, through it’s extraordinary sweep of history, to begin understanding one of the most monumental consequences of war: a group of people from whom everything was stolen."

—Jewish Book Council

Breathtaking and powerful, a wholly absorbing read—and perfect for classroom use.

—Dagmar Herzog, author of Unlearning Eugenics

"The Last Million shows how refugee policies are deeply enmeshed in global systems of power. No other text so clearly shows the connections linking the Cold War aftermath of World War II, the question of Palestine, and anti-Semitic immigration policies in the West."

—David Scott FitzGerald, author of Refuge Beyond Reach: How Rich Democracies Repel Asylum Seekers

"The Last Million offers a stunning overview as it also dives into the daily lives and perceptions of Europe’s postwar displaced persons and U.S. immigration policies and prejudices."

—Marion Kaplan, author of Hitler’s Jewish Refugees: Hope and Anxiety in Portugal

"The Last Million is a riveting, deeply researched, deeply humane book about a moment in history whose legacy remains with us today."

—Peter Beinart, author of The Crisis of Zionism

"In his beautifully written and heartbreaking book, Nasaw’s The Last Million evokes the painful plight faced by the million displaced Jews and eastern Europeans looking to start a new life in a new land after World War II."

—Steven J. Ross, author of Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America

"David Nasaw’s The Last Million tells the gripping and very timely story of how the United States confronted the massive refugee problem in the aftermath of World War II."

—Frank Biess, professor of history, University of California, San Diego

"The Last Million is an enduring and important scholarly contribution to a historical reckoning with antisemitism and a dark chapter of nativism in American immigration policy. Especially in view of the suspicions some American politicians have cast on immigrants in recent years, it is also a timely and much-needed reminder that such sentiments have a long and disgraceful history."

—Jeffrey Herf, University of Maryland, College Park

"David Nasaw’s vividly written The Last Million is the most comprehensive history of the fate of the ‘displaced persons’—Jewish Holocaust survivors and refugees from Soviet-occupied territories in eastern Europe—in the years after World War II."

—Jeremy D. Popkin, William T. Bryan Chair of History, University of Kentucky

"The Last Million plunges its readers into the intense national debates over the resettlement of postwar Europe’s refugees—from Holocaust and slave-labor camp survivors to former Nazi collaborators—at the very point in history when Cold War pressures were dramatically reconfiguring the global map of ethnic and political identity."

—Jean-Christophe Agnew, professor emeritus of American Studies and History, Yale University

David Nasaw gives the juxtaposition of Confederate flags and Camp Auschwitz T-shirts on January 6, 2021, its own surprising history–one deeply rooted in the years after World War II, when an unholy alliance of Southern Democrats and cold warriors, soaked with raw anti-Semitism, prevented the U.S. from offering sanctuary to Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. The story is not a pretty one, but it is a page-turner, and an important one for our own moment.

—Linda K. Kerber, author of No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship

A thought-provoking, highly recommended perspective on a complex and largely overlooked people and period of modern history.

—Library Journal (starred review)

[Nasaw] provides a characteristically thorough and impressively researched account of the roughly one million displaced persons who found themselves stranded in Germany after the end of the war. . . . While delving into the weeds of political compromise and legislation, Nasaw never loses sight of the hopes and struggles of the people at the center.

—Shelf Awareness

Nasaw skillfully and movingly relates a multilayered story with implications for contemporary refugee crises. This meticulously researched history is a must-read.

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

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

—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

penguin books

THE LAST MILLION

David Nasaw is the author of The Patriarch, selected by the New York Times as one of the 10 Best Books of the Year and a 2013 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Biography; Andrew Carnegie, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, the recipient of the New-York Historical Society’s American History Book Prize, and a 2007 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Biography; and The Chief, which was awarded the Bancroft Prize for History and the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for Nonfiction. He is a past president of the Society of American Historians, and until 2019 he served as the Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Professor of History at the CUNY Graduate Center.

ALSO BY DAVID NASAW

The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy

Andrew Carnegie

The Chief: The Life and Times of William Randolph Hearst

Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements

Children of the City: At Work and at Play

Schooled to Order: A Social History of Public Schooling in the United States

PENGUIN BOOKS

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

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First published in the United States of America by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2020

Published in Penguin Books 2021

Copyright © 2020 by David Nasaw

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

Ebook ISBN 9780698406636

the library of congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

Names: Nasaw, David, author.

Title: The last million : Europe’s displaced persons from World War to Cold War / David Nasaw.

Other titles: Europe’s displaced persons from World War to Cold War

Description: New York : Penguin Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020016888 (print) | LCCN 2020016889 (ebook) | ISBN 9781594206733 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780698406636 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1939–1945—Refugees—Europe. | United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. | International Refugee Organization. | Refugees—Europe—History—20th century. | Refugees—Government policy—Europe—History—20th century. | Jewish refugees—Europe—History—20th century. | Political refugees—Europe—History—20th century. | Jews—Europe—Migrations—History—20th century. | Humanitarianism—History—20th century. | Europe—Emigration and immigration—History—20th century. | World War, 1939–1945—Refugees—United States. | United States—Emigration and immigration—Government policy.

Classification: LCC D809.E85 N37 2020 (print) | LCC D809.E85 (ebook) | DDC 940.53/145—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020016888

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020016889

Cover design: Christopher Brian King

Cover photograph: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Morris and Lala Fishman

Designed by Amanda Dewey

Front matter maps by Jeffrey L. Ward

pid_prh_5.8.0_c0_r0

This book is dedicated to those who, having lived through the most difficult moments any human can endure, affirmed their existence, their joys and suffering, their expectations and hopes, through the acts of writing, speaking, and recalling them for future generations.

CONTENTS

Maps

Introduction: The War’s Living Wreckage

Part One • INTO GERMANY

From Poland, the Baltic Nations, and the Death Camps

1. From Poland and Ukraine: Forced Laborers, 1941–1945

2. From Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Western Ukraine

3. From the Concentration and Death Camps

Part Two • THE PLIGHT OF THE JEWS . . . IS STRIKINGLY DIFFERENT

4. Alone, Abandoned, Determined, the She’erit Hapletah Organizes

5. The Harrison Report

Part Three • THE LAST MILLION IN GERMANY

6. The U.S., the UK, the USSR, and UNRRA

7. Inside the DP Camps

8. The War Department Is Very Anxious

9 U.S. Begins Purge in German Camps. Will Weed Out Nazis, Fascist Sympathizers and Criminals Among Displaced Persons, The New York Times, March 10, 1946

10. The Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry Issues Its Report

11. The Polish Jews Escape into Germany

12. Fiorello La Guardia to the Rescue

Part Four • RESETTLEMENT

13. The Death of UNRRA

14. Send Them Here, Life Magazine, September 23, 1946

15. Fact-Finding in Europe

16. The Best Migrant Types

17. So Difficult of Solution: Jewish Displaced Persons

18. Jewish Immigration Is the Central Issue in Palestine Today

Part Five • AMERICA’S FAIR SHARE

19. A Noxious Mess Which Defies Digestion

20. A Shameful Victory for [the] School of Bigotry

21. Get These People Moving

22. The Utilization of Refugees from the Soviet Union in the U.S. National Interest

23. The Displaced Persons Act of 1950

24. McCarran’s Internal Security Act Restricts the Entry of Communist Subversives

Part Six • THE LAST ACT

25. The Nazis Come In

26. The Gates Open Wide

27. Aftermaths

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Image Credits

Index

INTRODUCTION

The War’s Living Wreckage

The violence of war did not end with the signing of cease-fires, truces, or peace treaties. War bled into postwar and millions of innocents who had never taken up arms continued to suffer long after the soldiers had gone home. Germany was in free fall; chaos reigned; national, regional, and local military, police, and political authorities had abandoned their posts. There was, literally, no one directing traffic, no one policing the streets, no one delivering the mail or picking up the garbage or bringing food to the shops, no one stopping the looting, the rape, the revenge-taking as millions of homeless, ill-clothed, malnourished, disoriented foreigners: Jewish survivors, Polish forced laborers, former Nazi collaborators—all displaced persons—jammed the roadways, the town squares and marketplaces, begging, threatening, desperate.

Wandering Hordes in Reich Alarming: Allies Fear Grave Problems May Arise—Ask Liberated to Stay Where Freed, John MacCormac of the New York Times reported in a front-page story on April 7, 1945.¹ Germany has become history’s greatest hobo jungle since the Dark Ages, New Yorker writer Joel Sayre cabled home on May 2.²

The American and British soldiers moving east into Germany, and the reporters who accompanied them, were transfixed by what Collier’s magazine columnist W. B. Courtney referred to as war’s living wreckage—living, moving, pallid wreckage.

It washed up and down the margins of the autobahn in a dragging tide. It was composed of people of all sizes, ages, races and varieties or garments. A few had bicycles. Some pushed handcarts. The majority, however, rolled baby carriages. The baby carriage is the sorriest joke in Europe today, for you never see a baby in one. . . . Instead they are filled with pots and pans and tools, and all the impediments of nomads. There were shivering maids, and youths in shorts, with legs blue and raw. There were released German soldiers with their army packs and cut branches for walking sticks. You knew the displaced persons by the bulk of their clothing and the magnitude of their bundles. A man wearing two or even three suits, a woman wearing several dresses and a couple of coats and carrying more were not unusual sights. None seemed to want food. Their want lay sadly deeper, and you could not touch it with your pity but could only surmise that it was for country and home and news of loved ones. Having once seen the wandering lost millions of Europe, you could never forget them, even as you could never fully know what thoughts were in their minds or what lumps were in their hearts. In the rain and wind, they were a steamy, abject porridge of human woe.³

—

Barely clothed in ripped and ragged, oversized striped camp uniforms, the Jewish survivors were distinguishable by their pallor, emaciated physiques, shaved heads, lice-infested bodies, and the vacant look in their eyes. You could see them walking down the street, Chaplain Herbert Eskin of the U.S. Army recalled, some of them, with torn shoes, barefooted, with their long coats, the women, and the men with the pajamas, you know, dirty, very short hair looking to talk to someone for aid.⁴

The vast majority of Jewish survivors remained in the camps, too ill to leave on their own. The soldiers who encountered them tell the same stories of initial shock, then disgust, accompanied by alternating waves of pity, anger, and stomach-churning illness, followed by a body- and soul-wearying sadness that would not dissipate, a disillusionment with all things human, an enervating, pervasive disquiet that would remain with them for the rest of their lives.

Their first task was the burial of the dead and the triage of the living. Thousands of corpses littered the ground, or were stacked in sheds or uncovered graves. Among the living were those known within the camps as the Muselmänner,* the unworldly, ghostly walking dead, too ill, too weak, too hurting to be moved, who had to be bathed and fed in their barracks until they were strong enough to be removed on stretchers to hospital facilities. Those afflicted with or dying of typhus were quarantined and left to perish. Those who were ambulatory were moved to assembly centers to be patched together again and repatriated, as soon as possible.

On April 11, Buchenwald was liberated by the inmates, hours before the arrival of the American army, but after the Germans had evacuated some twenty-eight thousand prisoners, a third of whom had died in sealed railroad cars or on arrival at their new camps or while trying to escape. On entering the camp, American soldiers from the 6th Armored Division of the Third Army found twenty thousand inmates, four thousand of whom were Jews.⁵

Chaplain Herschel Schacter of Brooklyn, the youngest of ten children of Polish Jewish émigrés, commandeered a jeep and drove to Buchenwald the day it was liberated.

As we approached the area, the first thing that struck was these huge gates. . . . I walked through. . . . I could see the huge smoke stacks and I rushed in that direction. . . . There were piles of human bodies stacked like cordwood, waiting to be shoveled into the crematorium. . . . I couldn’t tarry very long there, and moved on looking for living Jews. . . . I was peering into the faces of some people who were walking around and I had no way of knowing who was a Jew and who wasn’t, and I finally stopped one little guy who looked to me to be a Jew and I just asked him in Yiddish . . . whether there are any Jews here and he said of course and he quickly led me to . . . a small compound in this huge camp that was wholly reserved only for Jews. It was by far the most dilapidated and run down area. . . . There were in the first barrack a few hundred people who were obviously too weak, too sick, too bewildered to get out of the barracks. . . . They were just lying there looking out at me half dazed, half crazed, more dead than alive. I didn’t know what to say, what to do. All I did was call out in a loud Yiddish Shalom Aleichem Yidden, ihr zint frei. I was under the impression that many of the people there were not even aware of what had happened. . . . I went from barracks to barracks, and in each one repeated the Shalom Aleichem and explained that I am an American, that I am a rabbi, and that we have come to help them, and that the war is over, and of course I spoke in Yiddish, and they clearly understood and got the message and I was everywhere surrounded by people who looked at me and touched me to see if it was real, if I was alive.⁶

Liberation for most of the Jewish survivors arrived with the American and British soldiers who entered the gates, calling out in foreign languages they did not understand that they were free. For others, it came when their German guards stripped off their uniforms, put on civilian clothes, and fled. The first thing I saw was the guards starting to get on their trucks or run away on foot, Henry Aizenman recalled a half century later of his escape from the Wöbbelin concentration camp. With a group of other inmates, he ran toward the armory, grabbed the rifles left behind, and chased after the guards. Henry didn’t know how to shoot a rifle, but the others did. And then we were free.⁷

For the thousands of survivors whom the Germans had moved from camp to camp in the last weeks of the war to prevent their being discovered and freed by the Allied armies, liberation came on the roads, in the forests, on boxcars, in train stations, wherever they happened to be when the SS or the Hitler Youth or the overage members of the Volkssturm or the local volunteers who were guarding them disappeared.

—

Allied soldiers set up checkpoints and roadblocks at major intersections and on the main thoroughfares, gathered the endless streams of the lost and homeless, boarded them onto trucks, and transported them to assembly centers where they could be sorted out: the German soldiers hiding among them dispatched to POW camps; Nazi officers and officials and high-level collaborators to prisons to be held and then tried for their crimes; Allied POWs, slave laborers, political prisoners, and concentration camp survivors to assembly centers to be fed, clothed, shaved, sheltered, deloused, separated by nationality, and treated for typhus, tuberculosis, and venereal disease to prevent the infection of civilian populations.

The Allied bombing raids had wreaked such damage in the cities that there were few large structures intact to provide shelter for the displaced. Former military barracks, dormitories for forced laborers, airplane hangars, waiting rooms in railway stations, windowless warehouses, storage sheds, garages, apartment complexes, emptied hotels and resorts, monasteries and churches, government offices and schools, abandoned factories, and, in a few cases, entire city neighborhoods were cleared, cleansed, and converted. Roofs, walls, and plumbing were repaired, fences erected, latrines dug, military guardposts established on the perimeter, food, drugs, sanitary supplies trucked in.

The movement of multitudes of displaced persons into the assembly centers was, for the millions of forced laborers and prisoners of war from Western Europe, Italy, and the Soviet Union, the first step in their journey homeward. Trucks, air convoys, trains, all available means of transportation were requisitioned to remove them from Germany. Days after the German surrender, Albert A. Hutler, chief of the U.S. Army’s Displaced Persons Office in Mannheim, was informed that road blocks have been thrown on all the roads in our area with the purpose of picking up all people circulating. Ten 10-ton trucks would every two hours pick up the displaced and deliver them to the assembly center for processing. Three thousand would be sent home by train every day. We will use 2 trains one ready for loading at 8 AM, and another ready at 1:30. Each train will carry 1500 passengers.⁸

The largest number of displaced persons in the American and British zones of occupation were the Soviet POWs and forced laborers, more than two million of them. The Soviets wanted them repatriated—and immediately. Their nation was devastated and they required every body and soul to be returned home to rebuild it.

The Allies had agreed at Yalta to give priority to the repatriation of Soviet POWs and civilians. Within days, never more than a week or two after their delivery to the assembly centers, they were loaded into trucks, cargo planes, and railcars for the trip east through Germany into the Soviet zone of occupation and then homeward. Because there was not enough rolling stock, only women, children, and the infirm rode the trains. Everyone else had to walk to the Soviet border where the Soviets had constructed their reception centers. Russian displacees, wrote W. B. Courtney, as they surge cheering across to the Red Army, are greeted with a day-long bedlam of speeches, bands, flags, placards, slogans and a myriad of loudspeakers that blare recordings of Russian folk music. And then you watch them trudge past this jolly barricade and disappear into the enigma and the great silence of the East, and you wonder how they will fare and if the back of the zone is as hospitable as its bosom.⁹

Those who were able to walk on their own did not wait for the transports. Singly, but most often in groups of five, ten, twenty, or more, the Polish Jewish survivors, who numbered in the thousands, and the French, Belgian, and Dutch POWs and forced laborers, who numbered in the millions, made their way home. They stowed away on railway cars; they hitched rides on military transports, hay wagons, motorized or horse-drawn carts, and lorries; they stole or borrowed bicycles, motorcycles, cars, jeeps, rowboats. They walked, limped, stumbled forward, begging for food and drink or robbing it, taking shelter when night came in bombed-out shells of buildings and warehouses, in barns and haylofts, in abandoned army barracks, in public parks and marketplaces.

Henriette Roosenburg, a Dutch resister freed from her prison in Waldheim, Germany, scrounged for rags with which to sew a Dutch flag that she and her fellow Hollanders hoped would draw to them other countrymen with whom they could begin the journey home. Dragging a child’s wagon and a disabled pram filled with their belongings, Roosenburg and her newly freed friends traveled on foot and by wagon, rowboat, and ferry to Halle, where they were put on a plane to Brussels and then home.¹⁰

August St. André, a French prisoner of war, profiled by Life magazine on May 14, 1945, had spent the war as a forced laborer in a porcelain factory, four hundred miles from his home in France. Liberated, he strapped his suitcase to a bicycle, rode to the nearest rail station, boarded a freight car for France, and hitchhiked the rest of the way to his home near the Belgian border.¹¹

—

Despite the logistical problems—the lack of rolling stock, trucks, and cargo planes, the bombed-out roads and bridges, shortages of food and fuel, and the exhaustion of the troops who, having fought and won the war, now had to transport millions of civilians home—the repatriation campaign succeeded beyond expectations. By October 1, 1945, more than 2 million Soviets, 1.5 million Frenchmen, 586,000 Italians, 274,000 Dutch citizens, almost 300,000 Belgians and Luxembourgians, more than 200,000 Yugoslavs, 135,000 Czechs, 94,000 Poles, and tens of thousands of other European displaced persons, or DPs, had been sent home.¹²

There remained left behind in Germany more than a million displaced persons warehoused in camps, overseen by the occupying militaries and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Authority (UNRRA), which had been organized in 1943 to oversee wartime recovery and the repatriation of the displaced.

The Last Million is the story of these displaced Eastern Europeans who, when the shooting stopped, refused to go home or had no homes to return to. It is the story of their confinement in refugee camps for up to five years after the war ended.*

The Polish Catholics who comprised the largest group of displaced persons had come to Germany during the war, the vast majority deported against their will as forced laborers to replace soldiers sent to the eastern front. They had homes and families to go back to and a government that welcomed their return, but hundreds of thousands preferred to remain in refugee camps in Germany. Caught up in the postwar conflict between East and West, they had been warned—and heeded those warnings—not to return to a Poland devastated by war, threatened by civil war, no longer independent but under Soviet domination, its eastern provinces ripped away and annexed by the USSR.

The Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and some of the western Ukrainians had, unlike the Poles, departed their homelands voluntarily in the final year of the war, in flight from the advancing Red Army. Large numbers of them had collaborated with the Nazi occupiers; some had participated in the slaughter of their Jewish neighbors; a significant number had fought in German uniforms as part of Waffen-SS units.* Even the innocent among them whose collaboration had entailed nothing more than working in a post office under German superiors feared that should they return they would be charged with treason or war crimes. They preferred to remain in the relative safety of the displaced persons camps in Germany until their nations were liberated from the Soviets or they could start their lives anew somewhere else.

A much smaller number of Jewish survivors of concentration, labor, and death camps had entered Germany in the last months of the war. As the Red Army moved westward, German officials, fearful lest the world discover the full extent of Nazi atrocities, had loaded them into boxcars or death-marched them into Germany to work them to death in the underground munitions factories that Hitler believed were going to produce the miracle weapons that would win the war for the Third Reich. Those still alive when the war ended had no families, no homes, no loved ones to return to. Their ultimate destination, they hoped, would be a Jewish homeland in Palestine or with family members in the United States, but for now they had no choice but to remain in the displaced persons camps in Germany, where they were fed, sheltered, and protected by the American and British militaries, and where they enjoyed a measure of security they had not known since the war began. They were a small minority of the Last Million, numbering under thirty thousand, until in 1946 they would be joined in the displaced persons camps in Germany by the Polish Jews who had escaped death by fleeing across the border into the Soviet Union.

The camps in which the Last Million would spend the next three to five years were conceived as temporary facilities, but converted by the displaced persons into island communities, divided by nationality, with their own police forces, administrative committees, churches, schools, theaters, newspapers, and medical services. Food, supplies, and security were provided by the military; special assistance and support by accredited religious and ethnic voluntary organizations; administrative oversight by UNRRA. Black market operations connected insiders with German civilians outside and brought into the camps luxuries and necessities not otherwise available.

The Last Million were able to exert some control over their daily lives in the camps, but not over their futures. Those who were willing to return home would be assisted in doing so. But those who had no intention of going home again or had no homes to return to were marooned, with neither the resources nor permission nor the documents they needed to leave the camps and Germany and resettle elsewhere.

Their fate was in the hands of the Allies, who remained sharply divided over what to do with them. The Americans and the British were agreed that the Eastern Europeans whose lands had been occupied or annexed by the Soviets had the right to refuse or delay repatriation, if that was what they chose, and the international community had the responsibility of caring for them until they decided to go home again or a place was found for them to resettle.

The Soviets and the Eastern bloc of nations where the DPs had formerly lived demanded that they be repatriated. Only the Jews and Spanish Republicans were, they argued, truly displaced; the others had homes to return to and nations ready to welcome them. Those who sought refuge in the camps were, they insisted, refusing repatriation because they preferred being fed by the western Allies and UNRRA to working to rebuild their shattered nations, or, worse yet, because they feared punishment as quislings, Nazi collaborators, or war criminals should they return home. Fearful that the Americans and the British, their former allies, were under the protective cover of UNRRA warehousing anti-Communist, anti-Soviet dissidents to later deploy in counterrevolutionary propaganda or military campaigns not dissimilar to the ones they had launched after the Russian Revolution, the Soviet bloc nations demanded that the camps be closed and the displaced persons sent home or left to fend for themselves without Allied or UNRRA assistance.

After a year of fruitless and increasingly acrimonious debate and the obstinate refusal of the Last Million to go home, the Americans and the British concluded that, repatriation having failed, they would have to resettle the displaced persons in new homes and homelands outside Germany. UNRRA would be replaced by the International Refugee Organization (IRO), whose mandate would be resettlement, not repatriation. The Soviet bloc nations tried, without success, to block the establishment of the new organization, then refused to join or contribute to its financial support.

The IRO would succeed in removing the Last Million from the camps by marketing them as the solution to labor shortages aggravated by the recent war. Britain, France, Belgium, and then Canada, Australia, and the nations of South America and the Caribbean were encouraged to send recruiting teams to the camps to select displaced persons to fill their particular labor needs. The first choices of the recruiters were the Latvians and Estonians because they were white, Protestant, healthier than the forced laborers and concentration camp survivors, reliably anti-Communist, and with a reputation for being disciplined and diligent. Next were the Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and Polish DPs. Ignored or intentionally discounted in the recruiting nations’ eagerness to gain a cheap labor force was the fact that a not insignificant proportion of the Baltic and some of the Ukrainian DPs had collaborated with the Nazi occupiers or fought alongside them.

The IRO member nations that accepted for resettlement hundreds of thousands of Protestant, Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox Eastern Europeans refused to do the same for the 200,000 to 250,000 Jewish displaced persons, who remained trapped in the camps in Germany, the land of their murderers, awaiting the opening by the British of the gates to Palestine or the offer of visas to the United States, Canada, or Australia. With no legal route out of the camps, thousands left clandestinely for ports from which they could sail to and enter Palestine.

From the moment he assumed office in April 1945, President Truman had believed that in order to remove the Last Million from Germany, he would have to pressure the British to open Palestine to Jewish immigration. Only when it became clear that the British were not going to do so did he recommend that Congress consider passing emergency legislation to admit America’s fair share of Europe’s refugees, including significant numbers of Jewish survivors.

The United States was among the last nations to welcome the Last Million for resettlement, save those whom the CIA and State Department deemed useful for clandestine Cold War campaigns at home and abroad. Though the White House; the State Department; Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant churches and voluntary organizations; distinguished citizens; and prominent politicians from both sides of the aisle supported legislation that would permit some of the displaced persons to enter the country, the pushback from midwestern Republicans and southern Democrats stalled, then transfigured the displaced persons bill introduced in Congress into something quite different from what Truman and its proponents had envisioned. The major obstacle, though never articulated as such, was the admission of the Jewish DPs, some 150,000 to 200,000 of whom had entered the camps from Poland in 1946 after surviving the war in the USSR. The opponents of DP legislation, trading in timeworn Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy theories, suggested that those who had lived in the Soviet Union or Soviet-dominated Poland and been liberated by the Red Army were more than likely to be Communist sympathizers or clandestine operatives and, for that reason alone, should be barred from entering the United States.

Congress procrastinated, investigated, debated endlessly, as Cold War fears supplanted memories of Second World War atrocities. The displaced persons bill that was finally passed in June 1948, three years after the German surrender, was blatantly, frighteningly discriminatory. It granted visas only to those who were reliably anti-Communist and excluded the Polish Jews who were not. Forty percent of the visas were reserved for displaced persons whose homelands had been annexed by a foreign power—that is, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and western Ukrainians, those DP populations with the largest number of collaborators, war criminals, and quislings among them. Ninety percent of the Jewish DPs from Poland who had entered Germany after December 22, 1945, were declared ineligible for admission under the legislation.

With Congress opposing the entrance of large numbers of Jewish DPs to the United States and no other nation willing to accept them, the president had only one option available to him: to relocate them to Palestine. The alternative was to compel the Jewish survivors to remain on German soil, under German law and police powers, in the nation whose leaders had attempted and nearly succeeded in exterminating them. Overriding State Department concerns, President Truman supported the UN resolution for the partition of Palestine and then recognized the independence of Israel.

With the vast majority of the Jewish displaced persons on their way to an independent Israel and the United States having opened its doors, the Last Million were, some of them after five years in the camps, removed from Germany and scattered throughout the nations of the earth. That among them were thousands who had collaborated with the Nazi occupation forces, served in German-organized and -commanded Waffen-SS units, and/or committed war crimes would not be publicly revealed for another three decades.

Part One

INTO GERMANY

From Poland, the Baltic Nations, and the Death Camps

1.

FROM POLAND AND UKRAINE: FORCED LABORERS, 1941–1945

We Were Only Allowed to Work, Nothing Else

Adolf Hitler’s ambitions were enormous. To attain them he would have to redraw the map of Europe, murder millions, displace millions, and import onto German soil as forced and slave laborers millions more. There were, simply put, not nearly enough Aryans inside Germany to raise and harvest the crops, work in the factories and munitions plants, support the infrastructure, and feed and supply the armies that would bring into being Hitler’s new world order.

In February 1933, Hitler promised that for the next 4–5 years the main principle must be: everything for the armed forces. For the next two years, German rearmament proceeded in secret. Then, in March 1935, Hitler declared that despite the restrictions imposed by the Treaty of Versailles, Germany planned to construct an air force, reinstitute conscription, and expand the existing army to 550,000 men.¹

By the mid-1930s, the effects of the remilitarization and rearmament were felt throughout the country. As German farm laborers entered the armed forces or moved away from the land, attracted by the promise of higher wages in rapidly and perpetually expanding war industries, labor shortages threatened agricultural production. To alleviate these shortages, Hitler seeded the land with non-Aryan, seasonal foreign workers recruited from among the "Untermenschen" of Eastern Europe. By 1936–37, a quarter of the agricultural workforce was foreign-born, by 1938–39 it was 43 percent, by 1940, after the invasion and occupation of Poland, 60 percent.²

The largest number of foreign workers came from Poland. They included, after 1939, prisoners of war who, despite international law, were stripped of their ex-combatant status, recategorized as civilian workers and assigned to German farms, and young civilians, many of them attracted by the promise of generous paychecks, plentiful food (certainly more than was available at home), and, for some, the chance to be near loved ones who had been deported to Germany as POWs.

With few, if any, German men left behind to supervise their labor, the foreign laborers were watched over by women, young boys, and elderly men. To prevent any social or, worse yet, sexual relations between subhuman Poles and Aryans, fraternization was not simply condemned, but criminalized in a series of decrees issued in March 1940. The Poles were required to wear yellow badges with a purple border and the letter P on their clothing. They were housed in separate facilities, barred from restaurants, public spaces, and public transport, and forbidden to attend church with Germans. Polish men, but not women, engaging in sexual relations with Aryans were subject to death by hanging. One reason for these endless restrictions, historian Mark Mazower has written, was that, especially in the countryside, regulations were often ignored. The friendly relations that existed between Poles and Germans in the villages and on isolated farms worried the authorities, and they called for renewed vigilance and regimentation.³ We were only allowed to work, nothing else, recalled Nina Mursina, a Polish forced laborer who had spent the war years in Germany.

We were not fed like human beings—our provisions were poor and low in calories. We worked with potatoes but were not allowed to fry any on the fire for ourselves. If the guards smelled the smoke they set fierce dogs on us. Everything was forbidden. In 1944 I was 19 years old. At that age you’re already dreaming about love. The German women employed with us came to work with make-up on, they had done their hair in front of the mirror. And we, as Untermenschen, wore dreadful rags and wooden clogs that clattered when we walked.⁴

It did not take long for news to travel east of the conditions the Polish workers were encountering in Germany. As the number of volunteers decreased, the Nazis responded with threats, intimidation, violence, and kidnapping. All Poles between the ages of fourteen and twenty-five living in the area of the General Government, that part of Poland that had not been annexed to the Reich but was occupied and ruled by German officials, were conscripted into mandatory labor service. Those, girls in particular, who could not demonstrate that they were regularly and gainfully employed were designated for immediate transport to Germany. Young men and women who refused would be severely punished; parents who encouraged or tolerated such refusal would be punished as well, their lands and/or farm animals taken from them.

Hitler had anticipated that the German military would quickly defeat the Red Army and he could bring the millions of soldiers in the east home again. But not only did the German armies fail to bring the war to a speedy and triumphant conclusion, they suffered horrendous losses on the eastern front. To replace soldiers killed or incapacitated, the draft age was lowered and exemptions ended for large numbers of men employed in the armaments industry. These initiatives generated more soldiers for the front, which was the primary objective, but they also robbed the home front of laborers at a time when the industrial workforce had to be expanded to produce the tanks, guns, ammunition, and combat aircraft needed in the east.⁵

Hitler had long resisted bringing Soviet civilians or POWs to Germany as forced laborers or making use of them in any other way. He regarded Russian and Ukrainian peasants and soldiers as subhuman beasts and their officers and political commissars as savage, fanatic Jewish Bolsheviks. As losses on the eastern front and an overall shortage of manpower made it impossible to fight a war in the east and maintain control over the newly occupied areas, he would have no choice, however, but to employ them as prison and death camp guards in the occupied territories and as forced laborers in the Third Reich.

In the autumn of 1941, the Germans began recruitment in the POW camps in southern Ukraine for volunteers to be trained as guards in the SS camp in the Polish town of Trawniki. Selection was based on German roots, non-Russian nationality, hatred of the Bolsheviks, and state of health. Among those selected were Ivan Demjanjuk, Feodor Fedorenko, and Jakiw Palij, who would later enter the United States as displaced persons.

At Trawniki, the former POWs and Ukrainian volunteers learned German marching songs and received a crash course in rudimentary Command German. . . . Trawniki also maintained a slave labor camp of Jews, which provided the guards an opportunity to practice their training techniques of herding, guarding, and shooting on live subjects. After two or three months of preparation, the Trawniki trainees, now rehabilitated, armed, and with SS blood-type tattoos under their left armpits, were assigned to one of several labor or death camps in Poland.⁶

On October 31, 1941, with the labor shortages in the east and on the home front growing more dire by the day, Hitler bowed to the inevitable and authorized the use of Soviet POWs inside Germany. Those 5 percent of the Soviet POWs healthy enough to make the journey and be put to work in the Third Reich—three million had already been starved to death—were deported to Germany.⁷

Fritz Sauckel, newly appointed as general plenipotentiary for labor mobilization, was also authorized to recruit Ukrainians for work in Germany. As in Poland, Sauckel and the Nazis tried at first to entice volunteers to relocate on short-term labor contracts. "The propaganda for labor in the Reich appeared mainly in newspapers; leaflets; brochures; large, brightly colored posters; and an itinerant exhibition. . . . At workplaces and before feature film showings, Come to Lovely Germany was shown, a film that portrayed young people laughing and singing all the way to a German farmer’s warm welcome. Ukrainians who migrated to Germany were told that they would earn a good wage and receive free housing and medical care. . . . Dependent relatives in Ukraine would receive financial support as well. Moreover, the workers would learn skills that would later secure them good jobs back home. Because of all these benefits, the workers would be happy." As importantly, they would be doing their patriotic duty as Ukrainians by contributing to the war against Bolshevism.⁸

Though the campaign met with early success, if only because of near-starvation food shortages, by mid-1942, as news trickled back to Ukraine by hand-delivered letters and the testimony of escapees and returnees that the so-called guest laborers were worked harder and paid less than Germans; fed poorly; housed in leaky, overcrowded barracks; forced to wear humiliating OST badges; and prohibited from fraternizing or socializing with Germans or from visiting theaters, movie houses, restaurants, and other public establishments, the number of volunteers declined to near zero.

The Germans resorted to coercion, as they had in Poland. Village elders and mayors in the countryside and officials in labor offices were given weekly quotas of recruits to fill. For those selected for labor in Germany, there was no way out other than to escape into the forests to join the partisans. Few took this route, knowing full well that if they failed to appear at the station on the day and time they were instructed to, their houses and workplaces would be raided, their families harassed, in extreme cases their villages burned.

Paul Raab was the Nazi official in the Wassilkow* territory in Ukraine charged with overseeing the filling of the district quota of workers to be delivered to Germany. Through most of 1942, as he reported to his superior, propaganda alone had been sufficient to convince Ukrainians to report for labor service. When persuasion failed, which he claimed happened only very rarely, force was employed to compel compliance. In August 1942, after a prominent family had refused to supply one of its sons for labor duty, he notified his superior that he had decided to take measures to show the increasingly rebellious Ukrainian youth that our orders have to be followed. I ordered the burning down of the houses of the fugitives. The result was, that in the future, people obeyed willingly, orders concerning labor obligations. . . . This hard punishment was accepted by the population with satisfaction.⁹

Large numbers of Ukrainian girls and women were deported to Germany after Sauckel in September 1942 authorized their employment as domestic servants. Consulted on the matter, Hitler brushed aside possible racial objections: many women in the Ukraine, he declared, were of German descent anyway, and if they were blonde and blue eyed, they could be Germanized after a suitable period of service in the Reich. Sauckel’s decree duly required that the women, who were to be between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five, should look as much like German women as possible.¹⁰

Julia Bresinuk, who lived in the village of Novaa Salow in eastern Ukraine, was sixteen when the Germans arrived. A short time afterward, a man on horseback rode through the village. He was like a town crier, and he was announcing that the Germans were recruiting workers to go to Germany to work there to help in the war effort. I think this news was in the paper too. Julia’s older brother, Ivan, begged their father to let him and his twenty-seven-year-old unmarried sister, Helen, volunteer. The money we can make, Papa . . . in six months, we’d make more than I get paid in three years at town hall! Julia’s father was reluctant—he trusted the Germans even less than he did the Soviets—but he gave in to his older children’s request. When the day came for Ivan and Helen’s departure, Julia walked with her mother and father to the town hall. A lot of villagers had volunteered. They were after the wages Germany had promised. There were eight or ten big work wagons filled with hay for the people to sit on, the wagons would take them to the train station some thirty miles away. So many villagers left for Germany that summer that, come fall, the high school was closed so that the students could fill in for the workers who had been taken away.

Julia, along with everyone else in the village, anxiously awaited news from family members in Germany. They received none, nor did her brother or sister or any of the other volunteers return after their promised six-month tours had ended. The silence was worrying at first, then ominous. People stopped volunteering, Julia remembered. The winter of 1942–43 had been a difficult one, in Ukraine and throughout the Soviet Union. Word filtered back to the village that the Russians were driving the Germans back out of Russia. The Nazis needed more people to work their war factories back in Germany and started drafting people. No more mention of money or a short six month stay.

In the early summer of 1943, more than a year after Julia’s brother and sister had left for Germany, a Brigadier, one of the nicer ones . . . came to the house. He told Papa that shootsmen [Ukrainian auxiliary policemen working for the German occupation] were killing people who refused to go to Germany, and that I would have to go. I had to report to the train station. . . . Transportation would be supplied from the town hall. I had to leave in three days!

Julia tried to escape into the forest with her mother. She was discovered by one of the shootsmen. He knew me, my brother and my parents, but I somehow knew he would not hesitate the shoot me. The shootsmen were caught up in the Nazi madness; killing was simply part of his ‘job.’ Julia was not shot, but taken to the railway station and put on a train for Germany. There were a lot of parents along the tracks, pushing and shoving and bumping into one another, trying to get a last look at their children.

After an extended journey in railway boxcars, trucks, and by foot, Julia was processed in a labor exchange in Weimar and assigned to Apolda, about twelve miles away, where she would spend the rest of the war living in a barracks with other guest workers and operating a lathe in a nearby factory.¹¹

Tadeusz Piotrowski and his mother, brothers, and sister, who lived in that portion of Ukraine which had been incorporated into the new Polish nation after the Great War, surrendered to the SS for forced labor to avoid the marauding bands of Ukrainian nationalists intent on clearing western Ukraine of ethnic Poles. They were transported to Essen, an industrial city on the western edge of Germany. We were taken to a nearby heavily guarded collection camp consisting of plain wooden barracks surrounded by a high barbed-wired fence, disinfected with DDT, given new work shoes, and inspected by officials of the Foreign Workers’ Camp Administration. The ablest from among our ranks [were handed over] to the waiting industrial police for factory work. If they were chosen for the Krupp works . . . they received Krupp blankets stamped with three interlocking wheels and the firm’s blue, yellow-striped prison uniforms. The next ablest were handed over to the waiting farmers for agricultural labor. Then, Germans who needed domestic help claimed whomever they wanted. Finally, those who were left (and we were among these)—the old and the young, the infirm and the feeble, the lame, and even the blind—were told to wait.

Tadeusz and his family were assigned living quarters in a classroom with six other families.

All together, about 300 people occupied the former schoolhouse, the Ukrainians in one wing, the Poles in the other. . . . My mother worked as a cleaning woman in the local police station. . . . My sister, Anna, worked in the disinfecting lavatories where new recruits were brought daily to be deloused with DDT. . . . Franek and Janek [his older brothers], who were still children themselves, worked on construction (mixing cement, assisting bricklayers, for instance), within a ten-kilometer radius of the schoolhouse. Since no transportation was provided, they had to walk both to and from the assigned work in summer and in winter.

Displaced persons are disinfected with the chemical DDT in Lüneburg, Germany, May 1945.

Tadeusz, who was not yet six years old, was not given a work assignment, but spent the day with his mother as she cleaned the local police station. Our daily regimen began at 4:30 A.M. with rising. Work started promptly at 5:00 A.M. and ended at 6:00 P.M. without any breaks.¹²

By the summer of 1943, when Tadeusz and his family arrived in Essen, there were already 6.5 million foreign workers in Germany, almost 5 million of them civilians, the remainder POWs. By the fall of 1944, there were nearly 8 million foreign workers, more than 20 percent of the total workforce.¹³

Their experiences as forced or slave laborers were as varied as the nations they had been deported from. Tadeusz Piotrowski remembered years later that in the swirl of POWs, guest workers, and concentration camp inmates, where every non-German suffered from malnutrition, disease, and exposure, there were three general rules. . . . (1) The Jews were to be treated in the worst possible way; (2) the Russians in the next worst possible way; and (3) the people from the East were to be treated worse than the people from the West.

Rations for Eastern Europeans were half those given to Western Europeans, barely enough to keep workers alive and productive; overcrowding in the barracks and dormitories endemic; sanitation and hygienic conditions abysmal; clothing, blankets, and shoes in short supply and, when worn out, seldom replaced; vermin, disease, malnutrition, and corporal punishment a constant threat.¹⁴

The Germans exploited the foreign workers until the very end of the war. In March 1945, as the American army advanced into German territory, the Germans relocated Tadeusz and his family with thousands of others, vast numbers of them slave laborers in the Krupp factories, from Essen to the city of Meiningen in central Germany. Their train was bombed several times. Having escaped death . . . terrified, worn out, and hungry, we finally arrived at Meiningen. . . . The wooden barracks into which we were dumped were packed with people in varying stages of decay. Tadeusz recalled, Unbelievable as it may sound, even as people were starving and dying like flies everywhere, Germans would come looking for workers. His brothers volunteered for work. To stay put meant certain death; perhaps they could find something in the city of Meiningen to prolong their life. They found a parcel of food stamps that kept them alive until May 1945, when the Americans arrived.¹⁵

2.

FROM LATVIA, LITHUANIA, ESTONIA, AND WESTERN UKRAINE

In Flight from the Red Army

The citizens of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania had enjoyed a brief moment of independence after World War I, only to lose it, first to the Soviets, then to the Germans.

The Soviet-German nonaggression pact signed by Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop in August 1939 contained a secret protocol granting the Soviet Union an exclusive sphere of influence over Finland, Estonia, Latvia and that part of western Ukraine, or Galicia, that had been incorporated into the new Polish state under the Treaty of Riga of March 1921. In September, Stalin demanded that the Soviet sphere of influence be extended to include Lithuania. Hitler agreed. Stalin in return granted Germany a larger portion of the former Polish state and the right to repatriate ethnic Germans residing in the Baltic nations. The Soviets then annexed western Ukraine and compelled the Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian governments to sign mutual assistance pacts and agree to the establishment of Soviet military bases. When Finland refused Soviet demands to cede Finnish territory to the USSR, it was invaded by the Red Army.

On October 7, 1939, the Germans, in need of Aryans to settle the territories seized from Poland and incorporated in the Reich, formally invited the Baltic Volksdeutsche* to return to their true homeland. Convinced that they would live better, richer lives, tens of thousands of Baltic Germans left the homes they had inhabited for up to seven generations to be resettled in lands the Third Reich had annexed from Poland. In early 1941, thousands more, including many who claimed to be ethnic German but were not, departed from Lithuania. Those who could prove their Aryan ancestry were offered German citizenship.¹

In mid-June 1940, as German armies ripped through Western Europe, from Norway to the Low Countries into France, the Red Army marched into and occupied Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Puppet governments were formed and bogus elections held for new parliaments that, at their first meetings, proclaimed the three countries to be soviet socialist republics and voted to send delegations to Moscow to apply for annexation to the USSR. . . . Sovietization proceeded apace in all domains of life in each country. . . . Large industrial enterprises were nationalized, as were banks and all land. . . . Educational institutions were placed under new leadership . . . Newspapers were closed or subjected to strictest censorship. . . . By the end of 1940, all major and minor institutions, if not closed, had been purged of their former ‘bourgeois’ leadership.²

It is difficult to underestimate the selective brutality of the new Soviet regimes against their perceived enemies: the clergy, intellectuals, artists, large landowners, shopkeepers, manufacturers, professionals, former members of the military, and government officials. That brutality reached the breaking point in the spring of 1941. Stalin believed he could avoid a German invasion and war, at least for the time being, but that it was necessary nonetheless to assure that there were no anti-Soviet or pro-German pockets of resistance and no subversive elements in the Baltic states.

In mid-June 1941, Soviet officers rounded up, packed into railroad cars, and deported tens of thousands of Latvians, Estonians, and Lithuanians whom NKVD (the Soviet Secret State Police) officers suspected of harboring anti-Soviet or bourgeois tendencies. The deportations, Romuald Misiunas and Rein Taagepera have written, served as a massive shock to the citizens of the Baltic republics, which no doubt had been the intention. Now it was no longer select individuals whose disappearance without a trace could be explained by some system of logic, but large groups representing various sections of the population. No one knew how the lists had been drawn up or whether this was the first of many deportations to come or who among one’s neighbors, family, and friends had assisted the NKVD in identifying enemies of the regime and directing Soviet officers to their homes.³

On June 22, 1941, a week and a day after the deportations, three million German soldiers, thousands of trucks and tanks, and six hundred thousand horses pulling heavy artillery and supply wagons invaded the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa, preceded by an overwhelming and overwhelmingly successful air campaign that virtually destroyed the Soviet air force. Within a matter of weeks, German forces occupied the Baltic nations and much of western Ukraine.

The Wehrmacht, on its trajectory eastward toward Leningrad, did not leave behind sufficient soldiers, military officers, security police, SS, or intelligence officers to police and administer the newly conquered territories. With a large number of Baltic Volksdeutsche already relocated, the German occupiers had to employ local non-Aryans to execute their orders. Within the racial hierarchy constructed by Nazis, the Baltic peoples were afforded pride of place and more self-rule (or the semblance thereof) than the Poles, the Ukrainians, or other conquered eastern peoples. In each of the Baltic nations, Directorates or Self-Administrations were established, though as historian Valdis O. Lumans has written with special reference to Latvia, these entities had no power to initiate any measures. . . . In essence the Self-Administration amounted to no more than an administrative organ created to facilitate the German occupation and execute what the Germans wished.⁴

In western Ukraine, which had been annexed by the Soviets after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Germans