This chapter traces how France’s own divisive experiences of ‘deportation’ and returns shape how DP camps were made and managed in the French zone. It makes three arguments. First, it highlights diverse cultures of encampment in the zone. Relatively large numbers of DPs lived in smaller camps and private lodgings in the zone. Discussions about the ‘curative’ effects of small dwellings for DPs amongst field workers were interconnected with broader debates about the effects of camp life in France. Second, this chapter traces significant difference in culture between French UNRRA officials, who believed in French cultural superiority and understood relief as a vehicle for restoring French prestige, and the attitudes of the majority of relief workers on the ground, who brought in more varied perspectives on relief work, which in turn changed as their interactions with DPs evolved. Third, this chapter shows that DP spaces created unique intimate interactions and frictions between French volunteers, international relief workers and DPs from various ethnicities, classes and generations. These relationships were influenced by the structure of occupation. Relief workers possessed a variety of material advantages over the local population and DPs: a minority used these to buy entertainment or goods on the black market, or engage in ‘illicit’ liaisons with DPs.

Despite historians’ rediscovery of the ‘DP story’ since the late 1980s, the French zone has remained understudied, for France was a second-rank occupying force, one whose zone and DP population was significantly smaller, and its wider political influence more limited than those of its Western Allies. And yet, the French zone offers an ideal site in which to trace how relief approaches and practices were coloured by domestic concerns, with France facing specific material constraints resulting in part from its experiences of Nazi occupation. Contributing to a recent expansion of scholarly literature that focuses on Allied administration of DPs, this book unearths how discussions about how best to serve the interests of DPs resonated with broader national debates about the immediate past and the fate of France after Vichy. It argues that humanitarian aid became a component of French efforts at restoring France’s international prestige against the backdrop of increasing anxieties about its international standing. It also reveals the fragmentation of visions for relief work within international organisations, beyond their claims to the embodiment of a ‘new humanitarianism’.

The period from the spring of 1947 to the end of 1951 witnessed the development of several schemes for the recruitment of the ‘worthiest’ DPs in France. The selection of DPs was influenced both by the domestic dynamics of French politics of national recovery and the external agendas of the IRO, which provided funding and shaped the ways the recruitment took place in the field. Originally, conceived as a plan to attract single workers, the scope of the French recruitment scheme was enlarged in 1948 to encompass DP families. The ideal DP family remained, however, healthy, patriarchal and nuclear. Recruiters and medical doctors drew heavily on assumed norms of patriarchal breadwinner and obligation. They wanted to avoid the recruitment of those who could be considered as a ‘burden’ for France. In categorising able and less abled bodies, they often implicitly resorted to moralist, eugenicist and hygienist considerations. In recruiting DP workers and families, French recruiters were not solely interested in attracting productive DP and assimilable migrants. Rather, French occupation officials were also concerned about the image of France abroad. The issue of France’s unpopularity was particularly salient, in a context when French officials strove to restore France’s prestige.

This chapter examines the politically charged meanings and contested readings of repatriation and screening in the French zone, challenging historical presumptions about French insensitivity and ‘pro-Soviet’ policies, supposedly exemplified by the handing over of Baltic and Ukrainian DPs in the autumn of 1945. It demonstrates that French positions changed in Paris (and in the zone) before the adoption of the UN landmark resolution of 12 February 1946, which officially recognized all DPs’ right to asylum. In doing so, it illuminates the vicissitudes of repatriation, repatriation incentives being highly contingent on changing international circumstances, institutional rivalries and local realities. While the chapter recognises the importance of diplomats and national politicians in formulating repatriation policies, it also reveals how repatriation and screening crucially depended on how French administrators re-interpreted and implemented these instructions in the zone.

This chapter demonstrates that French official employment and vocational policies were a product of the specific interplay between various economic considerations and cultural influences, from nineteenth century socialist utopias and the French ‘civilizing mission’ to the ideology of the National Revolution and the post-1945 rhetoric of production. It illuminates how employment conditions crucially depended on where DPs lived, for whom they worked and their nationality and gender. Significant efforts were made to help a number of DPs acquire the means to learn a trade, but employment discourses often reaffirmed a hierarchical taxonomy in which productivity and desirability were explicitly linked to ethnic and gender differences. This chapter thereby contends that employment policies were deeply implicated in the mixed record of the zone: the emphasis on DP employment at times made possible the development of DPs’ own initiatives and their sense of responsibility, in enabling them to run independent workshops and giving them the opportunity to live in private accommodation. In this sense, it contributed to normalizing DPs’ living conditions. At the same time, actual implementation of employment policies often revealed disturbing indications of brutality, unjustifiable in their cruelty and arbitrariness, as a number of DP strikes testifies.

By examining the forgotten history of refugee relief in the French zone, this book reveals that ‘caring’ for DPs became a political and moral project, overseen by the French state, international organisations, and occupation authorities. It demonstrates that French practices towards DPs were deeply implicated in the mixed record of the French zone: DP camps were both sites of violent discipline, but also spaces of valuable educational opportunities and exchange across cultures. Not only were French occupation officials and relief workers concerned about the image of France circulating in DP camps, but they also drew a number of DP artists into the orbit of French cultural diplomacy in Germany. For French occupiers and relief workers, exhibiting French cultural richness and selling the ‘French way of life’ was considered as a tool to express and project French political power. Fundamentally, this book nuances the view that the Second World War was a radically ‘modernising’ and ‘internationalising’ moment in the history of humanitarianism. French approaches to relief work were underpinned by gendered assumptions, racial prejudices and the received wisdom of the superiority of certain ethnic groups over others.

This chapter demonstrates that French arguments over the transfer of DPs to France sit at the juncture of several critical debates about post-war politics of migration and France’s diplomatic strategies in the context of the nascent Cold War. In the aftermath of the Second World War, DPs constituted an enticing demographic opportunity to replenish a French population denuded by two world wars and a declining birth rate. And yet the question of DP emigration defied consensus in France. Communist decision-makers and their ideological fellow-travellers on the French left were strongly opposed to the recruitment of what they regarded as fascist DPs and ‘war collaborators’. Beneath the surface of what was ostensibly a political and ideological opposition to the entry of allegedly ‘anti-communist’ DPs lay a labyrinth of economic fears, a traditional protectionist reflex, as well as a raft of moral and cultural concerns about their ‘assimilability’ and ‘desirability’. Thus despite the early high hopes attached to the transfer of fit and industrious DPs to France, it was not until April 1947 that a coordinated and significant recruitment scheme was launched by French authorities. Crucially, this chapter reveals that the selection of DPs triggered extensive controversies about how far DPs could or should be assimilated into the nation state and about the presumed superiority or inferiority of various categories of DPs and refugees.