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Our New German Policy and the DP's:
Why Immediate Resettlement is Imperative
- Abstract
Almost as tragic as the story of the extermination of the Jews, is that of the surviving Jewish remnant. It is a crowning irony that under present conditions the very fact that some European Jews were lucky enough to survive—that the mass murderers did not complete their work—today constitutes a threat to world peace. Because of these “lucky” survivors grave political and social tensions have arisen; because of them blood is being shed every day in the Holy Land; because of them the lives of eight hundred thousand Jews in the Middle and Near East are in immediate danger; because of them the United Nations has reached an impasse; because of them Jewish sentiment here in the United States has become nervous and uncertain. And as for the survivors themselves, they are compelled to go on living in the midst of the people who were the source of all their sufferings and humiliations.
The problem of the survivors has its focal point in the American zones of Germany and Austria. This is where most of the Jewish DP’s are located and where new refugees from the East have gathered. It is also becoming the nerve center of American world policy and the front line of American defense. Germany has ceased to be the unified objective of a single Allied postwar policy, but has broken down into fragmentary and conflicting objectives reflecting the East-West conflict. Germany is no longer our foe in a war not yet concluded, but a potential ally in a war that has not yet begun. The creation of a Western European bloc, and of a West German state to be included in the ERP, means exactly that. Germany is to be transformed from a defeated enemy into the guardian of our European front line. The Jewish survivors in the occupied zone of Western Germany are an obstacle to this development. What makes their situation intolerable is that they are still in acute conflict with the nation which Allied occupation policy wants to make into an ally.
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