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

The suffering of The Last Million Eastern Europeans in Germany did not cease on V.E. Day, but continued as World War morphed into Cold War. While the Soviet Union demanded their repatriation, the US and the UK refused to return them to Soviet-dominated homelands. The Last Million, including nearly 250,000 Jewish survivors, would remain in displaced persons camps in Germany for the next three to five years. Nazi collaborators and war criminals, promoting themselves as anti-Communist activists, would eventually gain entry to the US, the UK, and elsewhere, while the Jewish survivors, accused of being Communist sympathizers or agents, were denied access.

David Nasaw was, until January, 2020, the Arthur M. Schlesinger Professor of History at the CUNY Graduate Center. His publications include The Chief (2000), the Bancroft Prize-winning biography of William Randolph Hearst; Andrew Carnegie (2006), a Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of the New-York Historical Society Prize in American History; and, most recently, The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy (2012), a Pulitzer Prize finalist and chosen by the New York Times as one of the best five non-fiction books of the year.

The Washington History Seminar is co-chaired by Eric Arnesen (George Washington University and the National History Center) and Christian Ostermann (Woodrow Wilson Center) and is organized jointly by the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the Woodrow Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year. The seminar thanks its anonymous individual donors and institutional partners (the George Washington University History Department and the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest) for their continued support.