Philipp Ther - The Outsiders

Flight and Refugees in Historical Perspective

The sight that presented itself to the members of the international commission in the refugee camps on the Greek islands and on the mainland was evidently hard to put into words:

On the humanitarian side, imagination cannot encompass the event. Only those can attempt to understand who have seen destitution, misery, disease and death in all their possible forms, and the scale of disaster is so unprecedented as to demand a new vision even from such persons.

A reporter for Foreign Affairs made do with comparisons from the animal kingdom: [The] refugees maintained a fox-like existence in tents, wooden barracks, shelters of twigs, or of turf, even in caves.

In Germany it was too cold for these kinds of accommodations, but a report in the Neue Berliner Zeitung about the Scheunenviertel (the Berlin neighborhood that was home to Jews and other poor immigrants from Eastern Europe) depicted a situation just as desperate:

That boardinghouse is currently home to 120 Jewish refugees from the East. Many of the men arrived straight from Russian POW camps. Their ragged garments were a weird and wonderful hodgepodge of internationalist working class uniforms. In their eyes I saw millennial sorrow. There were women there too. They carried their children on their backs like bundles of dirty washing. Other children, who went scrabbling through a rickety world on crooked legs, gnawed on dry crusts.

In Viennese emergency centers circumstances were not much better; according to contemporary reports, twenty-five refugees on average were housed in a single dwelling, eight to ten people to a room.

The author of this moving report about the Scheunenviertel was the writer Joseph Roth, who himself was forced to take flight several times during his life. His last escape in 1933 and the reasons that made him leave Germany were so unbearable for him that he drank himself to death in his Parisian exile. The two other passages cited above also come from 1923; they recount the misery of Greeks from Asia Minor following the exchange of populations agreed to internationally at the conference of Lausanne. In Europe and its near neighborhood in the Middle East, a genuine refugee crisis was unfolding at that time, in part along the same Mediterranean and Balkan route that the refugees of 2015 would take. The scale of the mass flight nearly a hundred years ago was, however, incomparably greater. In the early 1920s, about seven million people were in flight: nearly three million fleeing the revolution and civil war in Russia, two million fleeing the Greco-Turkish war that erupted in 1919, and more than one and a half million attempting to escape various wars and local conflicts toward the end of the long First World War, a war that did not really come to a close in Eastern and Southeastern Europe until around 1923.

Yet these streams of refugees (metaphors invoking a force of nature became current at the time) were a mere trickle compared with the deluge that followed from National Socialism and the Second World War. In the 1940s at least thirty million people were on the run in Europe, a number that does not even include displaced forced laborers and prisoners of war. Two to three million people wandered the streets of occupied Germany in 1945, along with several hundred thousand each in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, Finland, and the Soviet Union. Old people and children especially were often no match for the hardships they faced.

The humanitarian disasters that followed both world wars did produce at least one positive outcome, however: the international community took up the challenge of refugees. In 1921 the recently established League of Nations, in reaction to the mass flight from the Bolsheviks, appointed the well-known Norwegian naturalist and explorer Fridtjof Nansen as High Commissioner for Russian Refugees.

Later in the 1920s there was a brief pause in this history of massive refugee movements. Owing to an improved economic situation, those who had recently fled their home countries were able to strike roots in their countries of exile. Some countries, like France, even took in refugees willingly in order to compensate for their demographic losses from the war. But as early as 1933, the next mass exodus was under way, at first from Germany. Almost 60,000 people fled the National Socialists, and by the end of the decade they were followed by 370,000 more, most of them Jews. The League of Nations reacted to this new challenge in 1933 with a convention for refugees from Germany, which was followed in 1938 by a similar convention for refugees from Austria. Unlike the situation in the early 1920s, the immediate plight of the refugees was no longer the major problem; instead, it was the reluctance of countries to admit them. At the infamous Conference of vian, all attempts at the admission and international resettlement of Jewish refugees failed. Hundreds of thousands of Jews who were no longer able to flee from Germany and German-annexed Austria in time died in German concentration camps.

After the Second World War, the international community drew far-reaching conclusions from this experience. In 1946, under the umbrella of the United Nations, the International Refugee Organization (IRO) was founded, an institution that initially attended to displaced persons (DPs) in Germany, Austria, Italy, and other countries. Four years later, after tough negotiations, the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) emerged from out of the IRO, and to date this organization has been charged with the welfare of refugee groups all over the world. The British historian Peter Gatrell records the growth of international refugee assistance and the expanded scope of the tasks it has been assigned, though often after serious delays, andto this daywithout adequate financial resources.