THE LONG ROAD HOME: The Aftermath of the Second World War
Author of A WAR OF NERVES (‘this detailed study of psychiatric
casualties in war will surely become the standard work’ – Anthony Storr,
The Times; ‘Utterly absorbing study of the century-long relationship between
psychiatry and the military’ – Richard Overy, Literary Review; ‘a bold,
harrowing, provocative, fiercely intelligent work’ – Scotland on Sunday)
Ben Shephard offers a radical reassessment of the aftermath of World
War Two.
Surprisingly early in the Second World War – long before an Allied victory
was assured – people began to plan for what would follow. They were
haunted by memories of what happened a generation before – when the
millions of soldiers killed on the battlefields of the Great War had been
eclipsed by the millions more civilians carried off by disease and starvation
in its aftermath – and were determined that this time around the ceasefire
would not be followed by a civilian disaster.
Confronted by an entire continent starving and uprooted, and with the help
of a new UN body to aid the populations of Europe and Asia, Allied planners
did not single out victims of the Nazi death camps for particular attention,
but devised strategies to help all ‘displaced persons’ – as they had become
known by 1943.
Most of the fifteen million foreign labourers in Germany were speedily
repatriated. But a million and a half people – Jews, Poles, Ukrainians,
Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians and Yugoslavs – refused to go home. It took
the Allies seven years to resolve this problem. In so doing they altered
the whole basis of their immigration policy, created the state of Israel and
let thousands of war criminals go free.
THE LONG ROAD HOME is a ground-breaking account of the aftermath of
war and the creation of a new world order.
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