The Last Million
Europe's Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War
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Narrated by:
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Malcolm Hillgartner
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By:
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David Nasaw
About this listen
From best-selling author David Nasaw, a sweeping new history of the one million refugees left behind in Germany after WWII.
In May of 1945, German forces surrendered to the Allied powers, effectively putting an end to World War II in Europe. But the aftershocks of global military conflict did not cease with the German capitulation. Millions of lost and homeless concentration camp survivors, POWs, slave laborers, political prisoners, and Nazi collaborators in flight from the Red Army overwhelmed Germany, a nation in ruins. British and American soldiers gathered the malnourished and desperate refugees and attempted to repatriate them. But after exhaustive efforts, there remained more than a million displaced persons left behind in Germany: Jews, Poles, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and other Eastern Europeans who refused to go home or had no homes to which to return. The Last Million would spend the next three to five years in displaced persons camps, temporary homelands in exile divided by nationality, with their own police forces, churches and synagogues, schools, newspapers, theaters, and infirmaries. The international community could not agree on the fate of the Last Million, and after a year of debate and inaction, the International Refugee Organization was created to resettle them in lands suffering from postwar labor shortages. But no nations were willing to accept the 200,000 to 250,000 Jewish men, women, and children who remained trapped in Germany.
In 1948, the United States, among the last countries to accept refugees for resettlement, finally passed a displaced-persons bill. With Cold War fears supplanting memories of World War II atrocities, the bill granted the vast majority of visas to those who were reliably anti-Communist, including thousands of former Nazi collaborators and war criminals, while severely limiting the entry of Jews, who were suspected of being Communist sympathizers or agents because they had been recent residents of Soviet-dominated Poland. Only after the controversial partition of Palestine and Israel's declaration of independence were the remaining Jewish survivors able to leave their displaced-persons camps in Germany.
A masterwork from acclaimed historian David Nasaw, The Last Million tells the gripping yet until now largely hidden story of postwar displacement and statelessness. By 1952, the Last Million were scattered around the world. As they crossed from their broken past into an unknowable future, they carried with them their wounds, their fears, their hope, and their secrets. Here for the first time, Nasaw illuminates their incredible history and, with profound contemporary resonance, shows us that it is our history as well.
©2020 David Nasaw (P)2020 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“Nasaw does a masterful job of bringing to light the lasting individual and global consequences of policies and attitudes surrounding the last million... A thought-provoking, highly recommended perspective on a complex and largely overlooked people and period of modern history.” (Library Journal, starred review)
“A richly detailed account of what happened to the one million Holocaust survivors, former slave laborers, and POWs who found themselves in Germany at the end of WWII ... 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)
"[M]asterful...A searching, vigorously written history of an unsettled time too little known to American readers." (Kirkus Reviews, starred review)
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- How Ordinary People Became Nazis
- By: Robert Gellately
- Narrated by: Paul Heitsch
- Length: 15 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Understanding Adolf Hitler's ideology provides insights into the mental world of an extremist politics that, over the course of the Third Reich, developed explosive energies culminating in the Second World War and the Holocaust. Too often the theories underlying National Socialism or Nazism are dismissed as an irrational hodgepodge of ideas. Yet that ideology drove Hitler's quest for power in 1933, colored everything in the Third Reich, and transformed him, however briefly, into the most powerful leader in the world.
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Fascinating listen
- By Amy Neff on 12-15-22
By: Robert Gellately
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Hitler's Hangman
- The Life of Heydrich
- By: Robert Gerwarth
- Narrated by: Napoleon Ryan
- Length: 16 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Reinhard Heydrich is widely recognized as one of the great iconic villains of the 20th century, an appalling figure even within the context of the Nazi leadership. Chief of the Nazi Criminal Police, the SS Security Service, and the Gestapo, ruthless overlord of Nazi-occupied Bohemia and Moravia, and leading planner of the "Final Solution," Heydrich played a central role in Hitler's Germany.
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A different perspective on the Third Reich
- By Robyn on 11-18-16
By: Robert Gerwarth
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1946
- The Making of the Modern World
- By: Victor Sebestyen
- Narrated by: Derek Perkins
- Length: 12 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1946, Victor Sebestyen creates a taut, panoramic narrative and takes us to meetings that changed the world: to Berlin in July 1945, when Truman tells Stalin that we have successfully tested the bomb; to Ye'nan, China, in January 1946, when General George Marshall tells the Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong that Americans won't send troops to China, assuring that the Communists will attain power.
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An education. Somber, detailed, many-faceted
- By Philo on 08-20-16
By: Victor Sebestyen
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Ben-Gurion
- A Political Life
- By: Shimon Peres, David Landau
- Narrated by: Michael Prichard
- Length: 7 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Shimon Peres was in his early 20s when he first met David Ben-Gurion. Although the state that Ben-Gurion would lead through war and peace had not yet declared its precarious independence, the "Old Man", as he was called even then, was already a mythic figure. Peres, who came of age in the cabinets of Ben-Gurion, is uniquely placed to evoke this figure of stirring contradictions - a prophetic visionary and a canny pragmatist who early grasped the necessity of compromise for national survival.
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Great Perfomance, Less than Stellar Story
- By Alexander on 01-02-12
By: Shimon Peres, and others
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Watching Darkness Fall
- FDR, His Ambassadors, and the Rise of Adolf Hitler
- By: David McKean
- Narrated by: Tom Perkins
- Length: 13 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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As German tanks rolled toward Paris in late May 1940, the US Ambassador to France, William Bullitt, was determined to stay put, holed up in the Chateau St. Firmin in Chantilly, his country residence. Bullitt told the president that he would neither evacuate the embassy nor his chateau. As German forces closed in on the French capital, Bullitt wrote the president, "In case I should get blown up before I see you again, I want you to know that it has been marvelous to work for you."
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Interesting book
- By Rodney on 05-29-24
By: David McKean
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The Berlin Wall
- By: Frederick Taylor
- Narrated by: Daniel Philpott
- Length: 19 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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The appearance of a hastily constructed barbed wire entanglement through the heart of Berlin during the night of 12-13 August 1961 was both dramatic and unexpected. Within days, it had started to metamorphose into a structure that would come to symbolise the brutal insanity of the Cold War: the Berlin Wall. A city of almost four million was cut ruthlessly in two, unleashing a potentially catastrophic East-West crisis and plunging the entire world for the first time into the fear of imminent missile-borne apocalypse.
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TEAR. DOWN. THIS. WALL
- By Simone on 05-23-13
By: Frederick Taylor
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Stalin, Volume I
- Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928
- By: Stephen Kotkin
- Narrated by: Paul Hecht
- Length: 38 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Volume One of Stalin begins and ends in January 1928 as Stalin boards a train bound for Siberia, about to embark upon the greatest gamble of his political life. He is now the ruler of the largest country in the world, but a poor and backward one, far behind the great capitalist countries in industrial and military power, encircled on all sides. In Siberia, Stalin conceives of the largest program of social reengineering ever attempted.
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Excellent Book But First Time Listener Beware
- By Nostromo on 03-23-15
By: Stephen Kotkin
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The Third Reich
- A History of Nazi Germany
- By: Thomas Childers
- Narrated by: David de Vries
- Length: 26 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany, Thomas Childers shows how the young Hitler became passionately political and anti-Semitic as he lived on the margins of society. Fueled by outrage at the punitive terms imposed on Germany by the Versailles Treaty, he found his voice and drew a loyal following.
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Superb and important history
- By Tad Davis on 10-18-20
By: Thomas Childers
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The Quiet Americans
- Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War - a Tragedy in Three Acts
- By: Scott Anderson
- Narrated by: Robertson Dean, Scott Anderson
- Length: 22 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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At the end of World War II, the United States was considered the victor over tyranny and a champion of freedom. But it was clear—to some—that the Soviet Union was already seeking to expand and foment revolution around the world, and the American government’s strategy in response relied on the secret efforts of a newly formed CIA. Chronicling their fascinating lives, Scott Anderson follows the exploits of four spies. Despite their ambitions, time and again their efforts went awry, thwarted by ham-fisted politicking and ideological rigidity at the highest levels of the government.
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A Tragedy for One
- By Amazon Customer on 09-23-20
By: Scott Anderson
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Why?
- Explaining the Holocaust
- By: Peter Hayes
- Narrated by: Don Hagen
- Length: 13 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Despite the outpouring of books, movies, museums, memorials, and courses devoted to the Holocaust, a coherent explanation of why such ghastly carnage erupted from the heart of civilized Europe in the 20th century still seems elusive even 70 years later. Numerous theories have sprouted in an attempt to console ourselves and to point the blame in emotionally satisfying directions - yet none of them are fully convincing.
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Outstanding book! A must read
- By Pierre on 11-13-21
By: Peter Hayes
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Che Guevara
- A Revolutionary Life
- By: Jon Lee Anderson
- Narrated by: Armando Durán
- Length: 36 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Che Guevara was a dashing rebel whose epic dream was to end poverty and injustice in Latin America and the developing world through armed revolution. Jon Lee Anderson traces Che's extraordinary life from his comfortable Argentine upbringing to the battlefields of the Cuban revolution, from the halls of power in Castro's government to his failed campaign in the Congo and his assassination in the Bolivian jungle.
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Encompassing and Fair Look at an Historical Man
- By Matt on 08-10-11
By: Jon Lee Anderson
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The Bhutto Dynasty
- The Struggle for Power in Pakistan
- By: Owen Bennett-Jones
- Narrated by: Michael Page
- Length: 13 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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A major new investigation into the Bhutto family, examining their influence in Pakistan from the colonial era to the present day.
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Excellent coverage of the dynasty
- By Junaid Qurashi on 04-26-21
What listeners say about The Last Million
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Cathleen Miller
- 04-22-21
An Important History that Resonates Today
This history is so important that I wish everyone would know and understand the insights provided by David Nasaw. The book helped me reflect on the way our recent history shaped struggles and problems today. Today is born in our recent past.
The book is long, but it is full of primary sources, quotes and detailed research of records and political action as well as comments from those leaders who were positioned in power around the world.
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- anonymous
- 02-07-21
Well worth read to those interested in history.
I thoroughly enjoyed listening to this book. It appears to be well researched and written. It amazed me that after all the suffering the Jews went through in Europe that no country really wanted them. And many countries willingly took in former Nazi collaborators and murderers without really looking into their past thoroughly or just turning a blind eye. Other DP’s were taken advantage of with low paying jobs and back breaking work in their new host countries.
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- Michasel J. Ellman
- 03-30-21
Detailed But Riveting
This is a highly riveting but extremely detailed account of the last million refugees left in Europe. The details make you anxious to know what happens next. We follow the twists and turns leading to the immigration of most Jews to Israel; and we see how thousands of war criminals were able to immigrate to other countries leaving their criminal pasts behind them. The narrator added to the enjoyment of the book.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Linda R.
- 01-30-22
Incredible perspective on the postwar era
My father was a Jewish survivor of forced labor who ended up in Feldafing for several years after the murder of virtually his entire family. He ultimately was able to emigrate to the US in 1948. This book gave me an understanding I never had of part of his life he rarely spoke about. I can’t express what this means to me. Mr. Nasaw thank you for writing this book and preserving this important history for us
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- ray spruill
- 11-11-20
The Truth Never Dies
A sad yet vital part of world history that has been often denied, manipulated or rewritten. Here it’s told in an accurate, strait forward account, that many nations attempted to cover up, overlook or just ignore.
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- Neil Stedman
- 06-20-24
Reflections on 'The Last Million': A Unique Perspective on Post-WWII Displacement
I have been interested in World War II history since high school, which has been over 30 years. Most of the books I have read focus on the buildup to the war or the events during the war itself. However, "The Last Million" by David Nasaw stands out as the first book I’ve encountered that provides an in-depth story of the displaced persons left in Europe after the war.
While I am not an academic, making it challenging to process all the detailed information, the book's consistent theme was clear: the distinction between who was wanted and who was not. This was a significant aspect of the displaced persons' struggle to find new homes. Nasaw's detailed account highlights the political, social, and humanitarian complexities involved in resettling these millions of individuals.
Additionally, the book draws a parallel to modern-day immigration issues, showing that the dilemmas and debates surrounding displaced persons and refugees remain relevant today. "The Last Million" not only enriched my understanding of post-World War II history but also offered insights into the ongoing global challenges of displacement and resettlement.
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- david fazio
- 02-09-21
Must read for those who study the WW's in Europe
this is hard story to get your head around but one that must be understood. Nothing was or is black and white. 4 stars because Ford lost the 76 election not 72. You wonder about other editing errors.
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2 people found this helpful
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- David
- 12-27-20
Somber Aftermath
The Last Million is a mostly disheartening history of the treatment of the million or so displaced persons in Europe after World War II. The Jewish DPs wanted to leave Europe, hoping to reach Israel or any other country outside Europe that would take them. The non-Jewish DPs wanted to go anywhere but their homelands, where they were afraid of imprisonment (or worse) as Nazi collaborators (or worse). David Nasaw brings this little-known time to life, moving from the background of the DP situation to the populating of the DP camps to the ethnic conflicts that resulted in delays in resettlement. A good portion of the book tells of the political fights in the US, where Catholic, Protestant and Jewish groups lobbied for increased immigration of their people while key conservatives in Congress worked to keep out those they feared might be Communists. While the story is disturbing, the history is lively, insightful and compelling. I am glad I listened.
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1 person found this helpful