Sharif Gemie,Fiona Reid and Laure Humbert,with Louise Ingram,Outcast Europe: Refugees and Relief Workers in an Era of Total War,1936–1948

Reviewed by: Peter Gatrell, University of Manchester, UK

The aim of this book is to reconsider the complex journeys undertaken by European refugees and the relationships between refugees and relief workers. The case studies are the Spanish Civil War, the French refugee crisis in 1940, and the Displaced Persons (DPs) who were brought to Germany as forced labourers and who became the objects of Allied attention in 1945. Part 1 provides a short account of the exodus of Spanish refugees to France in 1936–39, and reminds us how they cultivated an image of republican virtue and determination in the face of French disquiet and suspicion that translated into police surveillance and incarceration in camps. To describe the retirada as ‘largely spontaneous’ (54) might be regarded as rather glib, and readers may feel that this topic was better served by the fascinating article that Gemie published in 2006 in the International Review of Social History. There is no discussion of the refugees who ventured further than France or of those who stayed behind in Spain, nor do the authors engage with ideas of ‘home’ and ‘homeland’. The authors look at the planned evacuation of French cities in 1939–40, affecting perhaps three million people; they note that the bureaucratic term ‘evacuees’ soon gave way to the usage ‘refugees’ and draw attention to the reluctance of local mayors to furnish assistance. Descriptions of their departure typically mentioned the anguished decisions about what to take and what to leave behind.

There is some vivid material here and in the following chapter, which discusses the internal displacement of French refugees in 1940 and argues convincingly that contemporary characterizations of ‘panic’ were wide of the mark. The French authorities are not absolved from accusations of failure to organize the movement of civilians. Refugees kept in contact with family members and petitioned officials about their plight. The authors explain how refugees negotiated repatriation in late 1940, and how others struggled to get out of France via Portugal. The material sheds light on the humiliation that many repatriated refugees endured. France is described as ‘a type of laboratory for a variety of refugee experiences’ (133), but the authors do not elaborate. An illuminating coda discusses the expulsions from Alsace-Lorraine orchestrated by the German army in 1940.

The second part of the book is given over to European DPs. Most of the focus is on the role of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency, and the authors now seek to place relief workers centre stage. UNRRA emerges in the official account as an organization characterized (as Jan Masaryk put it) by ‘practical efficiency with great ideals’ (142); relief workers shared something of this technocratic approach, but they also regarded participation in UNRRA as an adventure and a time of self-discovery. More might have been done to elaborate the meanings attached at the time to ‘rehabilitation’, and to explore the implications of UNRRA’s global reach, the ‘cosmopolitanism’ of which evidently did not appeal to its European Director. This section of the book concludes with a discussion of expressions of national sentiment in the DP camps, particularly in relation to Poles and Jews and their post-war trajectories. The authors conclude with the puzzling remark that refugees (not just in these case studies) ‘inherently’ questioned the nation-state (255).

The research effort here is impressive. Yet I cannot give an unqualified welcome to this book. The footnotes, which take up one-sixth of the entire text, list in great detail the primary sources that the authors have consulted but give little indication of the rich literature that now exists on these topics. More importantly, the text itself is free of any attempt to discuss issues raised in the historiography. One would hardly know that in recent years there have been significant contributions by Vicky Caron, Greg Burgess, Valerie Holman, Mark Wyman, Anna Holian, Jessica Reinisch, Silvia Salvatici, Daniel Cohen, Ben Shephard, and many others. Typically, the authors deploy the word ‘useful’ when they casually mention the work of a handful of scholars. Particularly egregious is the failure to acknowledge Johannes-Dieter Steinert’s excellent book on the Quakers and humanitarian relief efforts, and Hanna Diamond’s path-breaking study of the refugee crisis in France in 1940 warrants barely a nod in the morass of notes. This lack of engagement with the historiography (the same can be said of their treatment of the literature in refugee studies) is ungenerous and unnecessary, because by drawing attention to issues of refugee authorship and agency the authors of this book make an important point. To strive for originality does not mean that one has to draw a veil over other scholarship.