Anna Holian's book on the arrival and dispersal of millions of displaced persons (DPs) in the American zone of defeated Germany might be called an intellectual-political history of this short-lived phenomenon. At the end of the war in May 1945, there were about eleven million DPs, eight million of whom were in Germany. Most wanted to return home and did that within a few months, so by September 1945, 1.2 million remained in Germany. This remnant was much more difficult for the postwar authorities to deal with. Most had lived in Poland, the Baltic countries, or the Soviet Union, and were politically opposed to Soviet communism. They were then joined by a new stream of Jews from Poland who were fleeing the violent Christian reaction to the return of their Jewish neighbors from the Holocaust.

Within a few years, the various kinds of eastern European DPs did leave Germany. By 1950 there were fewer than 200,000 left. In 1951 the category of displaced person disappeared, as the new West German government took authority over what were now called “homeless foreigners.”

Certainly the DPs themselves felt these years as endless, without recognized legal status, living on others' sufferance, and wondering about the future. The category of displaced person had been invented at the end of the war by the Allies as deserving of welfare, but without political rights. During these years, which the DPs spent mainly in camps, they burst out of this straitjacket. They developed explicit political agendas for themselves and for lands beyond German borders, and demanded the right to voice them openly. Holian uses their politics to tell us more than we knew about their self-image as people without a state to call their own. By looking at where these groups came from, Holian reveals the continuities and shifts in their perceptions of their place in the new postwar world.

Holian describes the wide gulf between the attitudes and desires of Jewish Holocaust survivors and of eastern European Christians, mostly from Poland, Russia, and Ukraine. Her book is mainly the story of how these partly national, partly religious self-made classes of DPs asserted themselves, gained the ability to form their own committees to voice various forms of common interest, and ultimately competed for the attention of the U.S. occupation administration.

Holian points out the obvious, but nevertheless significant fact that DPs did not unite around their shared experiences of persecution and their agreement that they did not want to repatriate. Instead, historically grounded mutual distrust split them apart. The unbridgeable chasm between Jewish and Christian DPs gradually became obvious, as DPs won some ability to govern themselves. Holian argues with great success that “The meanings that displaced persons assigned to their wartime experiences and the hopes they harbored for the future often followed the outlines of preexisting political ideologies” (p. 269).

These two groups saw each other across the chasm of the Holocaust. Jewish survivors recognized many eastern Europeans, especially Lithuanians and Ukrainians, but also Poles, as collaborators with the Nazis in their persecution. Many, but not all, non-Jewish DPs carried prewar antisemitism into postwar attitudes and political practice.

Holian uses the dichotomy announced in the title to characterize these two groups' irreconcilable historical understandings. The few survivors among eastern Europe's millions of Jews had been saved from the final murderous spasms of National Socialism by Soviet Communist armies. Some of their relatives had themselves survived by escaping into the Soviet Union. Jewish former Soviet citizens had no trouble recognizing the failings of Stalinist communism, which included a healthy dose of official antisemitism. But that was not their primary concern, because Jewish DPs in Germany did not want to go back east; they looked west to the United States and south to Palestine. Most Jewish DP leaders were strong Zionists.

The overriding goal of non-Jewish DPs was to avoid being sent back into their Soviet-dominated homelands. This openly anticommunist goal allowed the most extreme right-wing voices among the Poles, Ukrainians, and Russians to dominate committees: they were “dominated by the far right, especially authoritarian nationalists with a history of antisemitism and collaboration” (p. 120).

These two broad groups of DPs had differing attitudes toward history, described differing camp experiences during the war, faced different handling by U.S. authorities, voiced different political goals for Europe, and had differing success in gaining restitution for what they had lost. Holian effectively uses a wide variety of writings by DPs to elucidate their emerging political and nationalist identities. She intimates that leaders of all these groups were more politically unified than the mass of DPs, but the evidence is scanty.

The American military zone offered the most scope for the assertion that DPs deserved and needed representation of their interests. Jews had the earliest success, formulated in the report of Earl Harrison to President Truman in August 1945 that Jews represented a special category of victim. Soon the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee was put in charge of separate camps for Jews, and material conditions improved for all DPs.

Among the eastern Europeans, nationalist antagonisms made cooperation difficult, and the three national groups created their own committees. Ukrainians and Poles were long-standing territorial enemies. They were both made homeless by the encroaching power of the Soviet Union, but Poland remained an independent country, while Ukraine had never existed as a modern nation.

The U.S. government took a much more expansive view of the plight of the Jewish DPs than the developing German regional governments and the new national government in 1949 did. Holian effectively uses the efforts by German politicians and bureaucrats to exclude DPs from receiving Wiedergutmachung to demonstrate persistent German postwar unwillingness to face their responsibility for what National Socialism did to Europe, including creating the DP problem. American policies in the growing Cold War with the Soviet Union allowed West Germany to refocus on anticommunism and end significant public efforts at antifascism.

There are some attempts here that get well outside the particulars of these DP stories to make grander theoretical statements. But abstract discussions in the introduction about the assertion of human rights against the power of the state, the transnational concept of modern global identity, and the possible rewriting of postwar German history by including DPs are not carried further.