Abstract
National Socialism, the Second World War, Stalinism, the expansion of the Soviet Union, and other political crises in Europe led to millions of people fleeing or being abducted in the 1930s and 1940s. The ‘European refugee problem’ led to the establishment of several international organizations. With the founding of the International Refugee Organization (IRO) in 1946, the concept of refugees changed. For the first time, those that had previously been inevitably labelled refugees – whether as groups or individuals – now had to apply for this status. I argue that refugee status was not simply granted or denied by the IRO, but rather negotiated between IRO officers and applicants, often via a protracted, multistage process. These negotiations were based on the applicants’ portrayal of their own personal history and not (only) an objective history itself. However, the question is not only whether people told the ‘truth’ or not; rather, the applicants’ individual ‘negotiation skills’ and individual perceptions of the IRO officers also played a decisive role. Whilst most current research looks at the actions and strategies of ethnic, religious, national, or social groups, I expand this perspective with a focus on individual negotiations of being recognized as a refugee or Displaced Person by the IRO.
Refugees will spend the rest of their lives battling to be believed. Not because they are liars but because they’re forced to make their facts fit narrow conceptions of truth. 1
On 23 February 1950, at an office of the International Refugee Organization (IRO) in Geneva, 31-year-old Yugoslav foundry worker Ciril Precelj met with Dr Kazimierz Niec, a Polish lawyer and member of the IRO Review Board. 2 A little over a year earlier, in late 1948, Precelj had applied to the IRO for help to be formally recognized as a refugee in order not to have to return to Yugoslavia. As a soldier in the Yugoslav army during the Second World War, he had initially been taken prisoner by the Germans. In 1942, he found himself working as a forced labourer in Nazi Germany. When faced with the prospect of being forced to serve in the German army in 1943, he fled to an area of Slovenia still free of German occupation. However, according to his own statements, in 1944, whilst still in Slovenia, he was forced to join the communist partisans, and so again fled, this time joining the opposing Chetniks. As a result of this final move, he probably fought with the Wehrmacht and fascist Italian units against the communists in Yugoslavia. 3 Precelj now shared the fate of hundreds of thousands of others following the Second World War. Repeatedly forced to make decisions simply to stay alive during the war, and as a member of a certain group of people, he had been repeatedly labelled differently by political actors, which meant that his biography could now equally be read as that of a Nazi victim or collaborator.
From 1947 onwards, the British government assigned the MacLean Commission to screen Yugoslavs in the British occupation zone to determine whether they had been victims of National Socialism or had instead supported the fascist enemy. The question was whether these people fell within or beyond the mandate of the IRO. If certified as most likely or definitely providing ‘voluntary assistance to the enemy forces’
4
– ‘grey’ or ‘black’ in the nomenclature of the commission – they lost any chance of support. Precelj had, indeed, been classified as ‘grey’ rather than ‘white’ (and innocent), and hence, towards the end of 1948, the IRO rejected his application, dismissing it as not falling within its mandate.
5
However, in 1950, an IRO official, Kazimierz Niec, granted Precelj's request to revise the original decision. Precelj was duly recognized as a refugee and re-classified as now falling ‘within the mandate of the IRO’. Niec justified his decision as follows: At interview, Petitioner gave the Board the impression of being an intelligent, trustworthy man, whose story, which was partly documented, was plausible and credible. […] [I]n view of Petitioner's coherent story which is in line with the established facts, he is given the benefit of the doubt and accepted within the mandate as a refugee […].
6
This article joins a growing number of studies on the negotiation of refugee status in the context of the refugee policy that emerged at the end of the Second World War. Whilst historical research on the IRO initially focused on the institution, its international politics and diplomacy, 7 the focus has recently increasingly been on those labelled refugees and Displaced Persons (DPs) – that is, those on the receiving end of the politics of the IRO. 8
This broadening of perspective is the result of academic demands to attach greater significance to the human agency of refugees and their negotiation of refugee status and mobility – options that are not simply granted or denied by institutions based on clear and unequivocal norms, but rather are negotiated between the actors involved. Lauren Banko, Katarzyna Nowak, and Peter Gatrell recently ‘propose[d] a refugee-focused approach that explores how such individuals and communities experienced and negotiated displacement and how they engaged in the past with the category of refugee’ 9 , because ‘[r]efugee history is more than various studies of institutions that managed refugees’. 10 This article is part of an effort to better understand this important perspective.
Following this perspective on the negotiation of refugee status, set against the background of the most recent refugee- and DP-focused research into the IRO, I want to combine three arguments that, until now, have not been sufficiently considered. First, regarding the negotiation of refugee status within the framework of the IRO programme, refugees and DPs have recently been gaining more attention. However, the role of IRO officers as negotiating partners has received scant attention compared to the organization itself. Second, with a view to the historical sources available, the question of whether (or not) people told the IRO the ‘truth’ is, be it implicitly or explicitly, often asked. I add a further aspect of the negotiation process to this question of (objective) truth or lies, focussing on individual stories, skills of self-presentation, and correspondent perceptions. Third, research at the IRO repeatedly looks a priori to selected religious, ethnic, national, or social groups that collectively developed strategies to survive and to navigate the post-war refugee regime. However, the establishment of the IRO, as I will argue, marks the moment when a rather group-based concept of refugees (and in this case so-called DPs) was replaced by an individual-based concept – a paradigm shift that remains influential to this day. Looking at the sources presented in the following, I show that people most often negotiated with the IRO as individuals, and not as representatives of groups. Hence, IRO officers perceived these people as individuals and not (only) as members of groups. In these inter-individual negotiations, the social and cultural capital of the individual proved as decisive as general aspects of human behaviour and perception in social settings. Of course, every IRO officer was tied into a network of rules and norms, and that institutional ‘knowledge’ also played a role.
This article focuses on the negotiated relationship between people on the run and IRO officers in Europe between 1946 and 1951. This period marks a transitional phase – when the IRO refugee programme ended and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees took over many of its functions. These negotiations in the post-war refugee regime did not only take place between applicants and IRO officers. Numerous lawyers, advocates, denunciators, informal gatekeepers, lobby groups and, of course, members of the selection missions of the receiving countries who were also very active in Europe at that time, all enthusiastically participated in negotiations of recognition and mobility. 11 Such actors, however, are not considered in this article, which instead seeks to examine the discussion of one particular moment within the IRO program, namely, the mandatory negotiations between applicants and IRO officers as an institutionalized prerequisite for recognition or rejection as a refugee or DP.
Beginning in the mid-1930s and gathering pace from the 1940s onwards, German National Socialism, Stalinism and the expansion of Nazi-Germany and the Soviet Union led to massive and ever-increasing forced migration. Throughout Europe, the National Socialists abducted and imprisoned people in concentration and extermination camps. People were deported to Germany and forced to work, whilst Jews became victims of antisemitism and the Holocaust. Soldiers became prisoners of war, and citizens, above all, those from Eastern Europe, fled West to escape the Red Army or became refugees as a direct result of the emergence and dissolution of states throughout Eastern Europe. Additionally, a great number became refugees prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, such as Republican Spaniards who had left the country after their defeat in the Spanish Civil War. 12 Many millions had fled or been forced to migrate. 13 Gerald Daniel Cohen refers to approximately 8,000,000 civilians after the end of the war in Germany who ‘qualified as displaced persons under UNRRA and Allied military directives’. 14 The largest part of this very heterogeneous group came from Eastern Europe, the number increasing daily as people continued to flee the Soviet Union heading West.
From the late 1930s, the ‘European Refugee Problem’ increasingly became the subject of political debate, and political actors soon began to consider possible solutions to the problem (or at least parts of it) at international conferences, such as in 1938 in Évian, or in 1943 in Bermuda. 15 For example, the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees (IGCR) was established as a result of the Évian conference. 16 When, in 1943, it became apparent that the Allies could win the war against Germany and large swathes of German territory were taken in which they now had to take care of liberated Nazi victims and refugees, UNRRA was founded to support the Allied Forces with the registration, care, and accommodation of refugees and DPs, and to prepare for their repatriation. 17 At its founding conference in Atlantic City, the term ‘Displaced Person’ (DP) was first used in the context of the European refugee situation. DP thus quickly became a legal term in addition to refugees via its use first by UNRRA and a little later by the IRO. 18
The aim of the policy implemented by UNRRA was the rapid and often forced repatriation of all refugees and DPs: ‘Speedy and accurate registration of all displaced persons in a certain area [was] one of the most important requirements for carrying out their quick repatriation.’ 19 People were labelled as refugees or DPs in groups often based on criteria such as religion, nationality, citizenship, and ethnicity. If a group was awarded refugee or DP status, this applied to all members of that group or all those who were assigned to it. Identified as part of this group, people in the liberated areas were then housed in camps and they were given, amongst others, medical care and clothing, but they were also controlled by UNRRA to prevent large-scale independent mobility and the spread of diseases. 20 Thus, control, along with aid, was an important driver of UNRRA policy. Being registered as a DP or refugee was not a voluntary decision and repatriation was the inevitable consequence. Stalin had insisted on the unconditional repatriation of all those originally from areas of what was now the Soviet Union – a demand to which Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed at the Yalta Conference in February 1945. 21
Until its dissolution in late 1946, UNRRA supported the military in the repatriation of more than seven million people. However, approximately one and a half million people evaded (forced) repatriation because they feared returning to the places from which they had fled or been abducted. 22 Those in such circumstances either feared persecution or simply could no longer imagine returning to their old lives. The reasons for this were manifold. Those who fled West from Eastern Europe had experienced Stalinist terror since the late 1930s. 23 Some had fled military service whilst others had fought with the Nazis against the Red Army. This is why, in the Soviet Union, all repatriates were also suspected of possibly having been Nazi collaborators and thus show trials, punishment, imprisonment or even murder after repatriation were an ever-present risk. 24 As Nick Baron has shown, such fear of persecution in the case of repatriation was very well founded. 25 Moreover, some countries had ceased to exist and were now part of the Soviet Union and in the devastation and violence of the war, people in their previous Eastern European homeland had often lost everything, from their relatives to their material livelihoods.
Against the wishes of the Soviet Union, which had demanded the further repatriation of now-Soviet citizens, the IRO was founded within the framework of the United Nations in 1946, replacing UNRRA and the IGCR in June 1947. Voluntary repatriation remained possible, but the IRO's main task became the organization and implementation of the resettlement of refugees and DPs. By the time, the IRO was dissolved in 1952, over a million people had been resettled worldwide. 26
The IRO's concepts of ‘refugee’ and ‘DP’ – ideas that had changed fundamentally to those of UNRRA – are pivotal to this article. Whilst previous refugee declarations had declared entire groups to be legitimate refugees on the basis of their nationality or ethnicity, the IRO Constitution took a broader view. 27 Regarding the pre-IRO refugee regime, Arar and FitzGerald recently wrote: ‘The system was based on prima facie grants of refugee status, which is a group-level designation applied to a nationality or ethnicity.’ 28 With the foundation of the IRO, belonging to a certain group no longer led to automatic recognition (or labelling) as a refugee, but rather personal experiences and personal situations, whereby Germans – ‘whether German nationals or members of German minorities in other countries’ 29 – war criminals and Nazi-collaborators were excluded from any assistance by the IRO. All individuals had to apply for this status for themselves: ‘Rather than use prima facie group-level definitions of refugees, [the IRO's] eligibility officers screened individual applicants.’ 30 Personal fear of ethnic, religious, national, or political persecution became the reason for recognition or rejection as a refugee or DP.
Like UNRRA, the IRO followed on from previous international and national refugee policy efforts but had specific features and a new global context that allow it to be characterized as an important step in the development of the modern international refugee regime. 31 The application procedures were individualized and the IRO programme took place within the framework of the newly founded United Nations. Thus, in a new, ideologically novel and future-oriented global context, which in turn had grown out of the experiences of the previous war, 32 the IRO can be regarded as one of the predecessor organizations of the UNHCR. 33 Indeed, some of the political protagonists of the IRO saw themselves as architects of a future global refugee and migration policy, 34 and the resettlement project combined with the principle of non-refoulment stood as precursors to the later so-called ‘durable solution’. 35
The IRO Constitution defined victims of National Socialism or Allied states who had fled the country of their nationality or former residence as ‘refugees’, as well as Spanish republicans and people who were already considered refugees before the Second World War because of racial, religious, nationalist, or political persecution. This extended to those who had left the country of their nationality or former permanent residence, and who could not avail themselves of the protection of the governments of these countries. This third group encompassed Eastern Europeans who had fled West for fear of persecution in the Soviet Union and whose repatriation to the Soviet Union was no longer supported. For the IRO, the term ‘Displaced Persons’ applied, on the one hand, to people who had been displaced by Nazi Germany, such as former forced labourers, and, on the other hand, to people who had been actively displaced or deported for racial, religious, or political reasons. 36
The benefits of recognition by the IRO were manifold. Although people could have taken their destiny into their own hands and applied independently for entry visas for certain countries or for a right to stay in their current place of residence, the IRO offered a recognized status, care and shelter, political protection, and a variety of training programs (from language training to vocational training). The IRO also had treaties with host countries and of course the infrastructure for migration. Finally, the organization paid for services and transportation. Due to the new guarantee of non-refoulement and the chance of resettlement, many people who had previously tried to evade registration by UNRRA now applied to the IRO. 37
Applications could be made as an individual or as a family group. Applicants were required to prove their personal eligibility: ‘The individualized, personal aspect of the refugee concept developed and was constructed over the course of later decades.’ 38 The IRO now checked every single application carefully. The introduction of a revised ‘Operational Manual’ introduced by the IRO in 1951 expresses the complex relationship between group-based categories and the focus on the eligibility of individuals. Regarding the question of the recognition criteria, the manual states: ‘These criteria relate to categories and groups of persons, but each application for assistance is dealt with on the basis of the facts in the individual case.’ 39 The selection criteria were, therefore, determined based on a group concept, but each individual now needed to prove that his or her fate and experiences corresponded to these group concepts. To be eligible, applicants had to negotiate their status and mobility options with IRO officers in one of the many IRO offices in Austria, Germany, or Italy, often several times over the course of weeks, months or sometimes years. Applicants had first to fill out an IRO ‘Application for Assistance’ form – the so-called CM/1 form. This initial application form enquired extensively about the personal background, experiences, fears, and future wishes of applicants. Once completed, the CM/1 form constituted the basis of a personal interview with an Eligibility Officer who subsequently decided the applicants’ eligibility for a refugee or DP status. Often decisions were not made immediately because some evidence was initially required, which was usually difficult to provide. In some instances, applicants ‘tried their luck’, presenting themselves to a second IRO office after being rejected at the first.
If applications were approved, a major hurdle was cleared for the refugees, their protection, housing, food and medical care were granted, but the wait for the hoped-for resettlement to finally be able to start a new life could still drag on for a substantial time. Until then, most of these people were accommodated in the so-called DP camps, which had previously been maintained by UNRRA and in which many people, therefore, had lived for a long time already. 40 These places afforded protection, but at the same time, those staying there could not lead the fully free life they had hoped for. The IRO even had vocational training programs. Certain professional groups found it harder to be chosen by receiving states. Those trained in agriculture or manual trades found it easier than, for example, academics, or the unskilled. Of course, the camps were also places in which people learnt from each other how to get through future screening processes of the IRO or the receiving countries. 41
It was assumed that refugee status was now granted or denied to applicants on the basis of clearly established norms and rules. Indeed, as a provisional order of the IRO's Preparatory Commission stated in 1947, the Eligibility Officers should ‘know the criteria of eligibility, be able to explain the reasons for ineligibility […]. The staff must accept people without criticising the individual for statements or actions about which there might be a question, but on the other hand recognise that all people who are refugees or who have been displaced are not eligible for assistance from IRO, and therefore the eligibility of each family must be determined on the individual situation.’ 42 In other words, the officers were expected to be able to assess the claims of the applicants without passing judgment or expressing any form of prejudice. Furthermore, it was implicitly assumed that the officers were able to assess recent history long before valid historical interpretations appeared. As Cohen notes, this difficulty of permanently supplementing and correcting knowledge of recent European history and a continual examination of individual fates that had been ignored in initial definitions of eligibility was expressed, for example, in the development of the IRO's ‘Manual for Eligibility Officers’. Between 1948 and 1950, an initially thin booklet became a 160-page book containing more and more historical information and examples of how specific applications had been dealt with. 43 In the meantime, the history of persecution continued to grow. The Prague Coup of February 1948 is a good case in point here, as an event that again triggered escapes and had an impact on the work of the IRO. 44
Knowing that decisions were fallible, the IRO also set up a Review Board to act as a higher authority for objections. The Review Board, based in the IRO Headquarters in Geneva, was created by the IRO as a semi-judicial body to which rejected applicants could appeal should their applications have been rejected by the Eligibility Officers. 45 Such applicants turned to the board with the so-called ‘Petition for Review’ forms, which took the form of written justifications, evidence, or testimonies. 46 Board members examined and discussed appeals, if necessary, asking for additional information in some instances. 47 Depositions from advocates acting for a given application would also be considered in some instances. Final decisions were recorded in ‘Decision of the Review Board’ forms, which now represent an important source and inform my argument below.
Both the Eligibility Officers and the Review Board members were what Michael Lipsky has characterized as ‘street-level bureaucrats’ – negotiating bureaucratic rules directly with those such rules addressed. The magnitude of the task at hand imposed an immense workload on many Eligibility Officers. Indeed, as Cohen states, some officers were required to interview more than one thousand applicants per month. 48 This, as Lipsky points out, certainly exposed them to high levels of stress, which in turn led to decision-making based on simplifications and subjective knowledge of the applicants. 49 Against this background, as I will argue below, the applicants’ individual stories and negotiation skills as well as the officers’ impressions and perceptions were often as important as norms and an objective knowledge of the recent past. Whilst established norms remained the basis for decisions, since such norms possessed significant room for personal interpretation, individual stories and perceptions were a decisive factor that should not be neglected today if we are to formulate a rounded interpretation of the emergence of the modern global refugee regime.
Two sets of historical sources are well suited for gaining a better understanding of the negotiation of refugee status between applicants and IRO Officers. The first is the (previously mentioned) ‘Application for Assistance’ questionnaires of the IRO – the so-called CM/1 (Care and Maintenance) forms. 50 To make clear the extent to which they had been a victim of National Socialism in the past or feared persecution now, applicants had to provide a wide range of personal information: religion, nationality, and marital status, as well as document their personal history and activities over the past decade. Finally, applicants needed to formulate how and where they imagined their future life might play out. For their part, the IRO officers often entered comments and impressions into the forms and finally provided the document with a stamp that recorded the approval or rejection status of the applicant. 51 As a basis for interpreting the applications, the Eligibility Officers used the IRO Constitution, as well as several institutional orders and the previously mentioned Manual for Eligibility Officers, which contained information about the fate of certain groups of people during National Socialism and of the Second World War, and thus provided background information for the decision-making process. IRO officers desired very specific answers to certain questions. For example, the ‘correct’ answer desired by the IRO for not wanting to be repatriated was ‘fear of persecution’. 52
The second set of sources, again from the IRO, documenting the negotiation of refugee status, are several hundred complete case files belonging to the Review Board. The fact that the explicitly negotiated nature of this process can be clearly read from these files requires no further justification; indeed, the negotiation was the explicit purpose of this procedure. 53
These Review Board files have, thus far, received little attention and have only been analysed in any depth by Ruth Balint in her recently published landmark study Destination Elsewhere, the aim of which partly corresponds to that of the present article. Balint also emphasizes the value of individual stories, from which she in turn draws conclusions about groups such as women or children – for example, that single women often had a harder time dealing with the IRO officers than men. 54 Besides Balint, Gerald Daniel Cohen also used these files to shed light on the eligibility process. 55
More recently, the CM/1 forms have attracted increased attention. As in this article, the narrative character of the forms has come to the fore. First, the forms were examined with an explicit view on certain groups of applicants and on their collective strategies. For example, the collective strategies of Jewish Holocaust survivors towards the IRO have been studied. 56 Similar attention has been drawn to the question of whether Hungarian–Jewish DPs, Kalmyk DPs, or even ‘ethnic Germans’ acted strategically, making collectively invented statements in order to increase their chances of receiving support – whether they learned collectively within their groups to tell the ‘right’ stories. 57 Indeed, this research clearly shows that collective stories were becoming more and more alike and thus more likely to meet the requirements of the IRO. Whilst I agree with these findings, I also ask that a broader view is taken – one that includes individual negotiations and the skill of those engaged in them, and the role played by the subjective impressions of the IRO officers themselves. 58 Ari Joskowic's studies revealing the anti-Romani prejudices held by IRO officers, and Churyumova and Holland's study, recognizing Eligibility Officers as individuals with their own agency, point in the same direction as my argument below. 59
Second, studies looked at the strategies people developed to tell their biographies according to the selection criteria of the IRO.
60
The explicit or implicit question that often resonates in these studies is the question of ‘truth’, albeit in a rather objectivistic sense.
61
The question that resonates with the stories of the applicants to the IRO – sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly – is whether they were telling the ‘truth’. Against this background, Erik Schulte attributed little value to historical scholarship based on such sources: Since the applicants’ self-reports are sometimes difficult to verify – with the aim of receiving IRO support – the reports do not always provide correct information […] [a]n approach to the course of individual lives understood in the classic sense of historiography only makes sense in exceptional cases – namely when other types of sources such as biographies are also available or can be obtained from other archives.
62
My argument is not that these approaches are wrong. However, with a different understanding of stories and their purpose, and a different perspective on what the applicants’ stories and the interviews with Eligibility Officers or the Review Board's lawyers were about, a perspective that goes beyond the question of objective truth-value and the conscious group strategies used to influence the IRO can be offered which focuses more on the aspect of everyday interpersonal interaction in the ‘street-level bureaucracy’ of the IRO.
According to Charles Tilly, individual stories in general share common characteristics: In order to be told at all, they must reproduce otherwise complex social processes in a simplified and coherent way. Omissions are inherent in every story. Furthermore, stories inevitably organize what has happened in such a way that it can be morally judged. People usually relativize or justify their own actions in cases of doubt, not only as a calculated strategy but also for psychological reasons. Finally, stories are dependent on the environment in which they are (re)told. 65 Applicants in IRO offices did not necessarily tell their stories there as they did elsewhere – such as to friends, others in the same DP camp, to a priest or even to another IRO Officer – if they had the impression of being misunderstood in the first place. Therefore, a story necessarily represents such a profound shortening of subjectively experienced reality that it is unsurprising that people often repeat the same story with a different focus and/or outcome. Following the work of Maurice Halbwachs, it should also be noted that the memory of what happened in the past and what that meant also changes over time through collective memory. In talking to each other, people constantly gain certainty about the past, its meaning and their experiences, which means that memories constantly change. 66 Certainly, some applicants deliberately lied to the IRO, but very often contradictions in the stories can be explained simply by the fact that not every story is always a full confession, that stories always contain omissions, and that awareness of what has been experienced is often much more diffuse than assumed. Finally, in the words of Lynn Hunt, we need to understand that stories are always connected to a goal: ‘humans look for a logic in their stories that is related to their own goals’. 67
Of course, it is not possible to reconstruct why people told their stories in a certain way, and it is too late to ask these people directly. Nonetheless, we know that the stories applicants told in the offices of the IRO or to the Review Board served a clear purpose: applicants wanted to use their stories to gain access to the refugee regime. Of course, many applicants had also prepared themselves for their interviews and hence had thought about the stories to be told, as ‘getting them “right” often meant the difference between international protection and destitution’. 68 In her partly autobiographic book, Dina Nayeri also points out the importance of such stories as the basis for negotiating refugee status and mobility, not with a view to the past but with a view to the present of the modern refugee regime. According to Nayeri, people who apply for asylum or refugee status today are always aware of the importance of the stories they tell: ‘He [in this case an Iranian refugee] knew that his greatest challenge wasn’t the mountains or the sea or corrupt smugglers or hours of tedium and worry. It was the likelihood that the gatekeepers to safety wouldn’t believe.’ 69 Even if the IRO programme took place at a different time and represents a different context, the logic described by Nayeri is generally valid and can also be applied to the negotiations between IRO officers and applicants in the 1940s. In the context of this article, Nayeri's argument can be summed up by noting that lying was (and is) not the only issue; the often justified fear of being misunderstood also played a significant role.
Many examples from the available sources prove that applicants did not normally act to deceive, but rather believed in their need for help and in their eligibility. Although, as Kim Salomon states, word quickly got around that ‘fear of persecution’ was the ‘right’ answer in order not to be repatriated, it is not the case that all applicants told their stories in an accordingly obviously strategic manner because of this knowledge. 70 In her CM/1 application in November 1948, Bozena Judova, seeking not to be repatriated, but to be resettled to Venezuela instead, stated that she felt lonely in Czechoslovakia and wanted to go to her relatives in Venezuela – a reason that, according to the IRO constitution, did not entitle her to support from the organization. 71 For Judova, however, this was undoubtedly such an important reason that she believed Eligibility Officers would have little choice but to accept it.
The IRO constitution also clearly excluded help for ‘ethnic Germans’ or former soldiers who had fought with, or worked for, the Germans. In their application of March 1949, the Weber family nevertheless truthfully stated that they were Germans, but lived in Yugoslavia, had fled from there for fear of persecution by the communists, and could only imagine a future in the United States. 72 Fear of persecution, the ‘magic’ formula, was also the reason Josif Kostic named in his application from June 1948 – a fear that was indeed credible. At the same time, however, he also truthfully stated that from 1941 onwards he had been a minister in the puppet government under Milan Nedić in Wehrmacht-occupied Serbia, which is why both the responsible Eligibility Officer and later the Review Board excluded him from the mandate of the IRO on grounds of being a collaborator. 73 It is impossible to know why so many people told the IRO stories that today, with full knowledge of the IRO's decision-making processes, could at best be described as ‘clumsy’. Yet, in those same sources, it is also possible to find far more surprisingly inelegant, even naive-looking answers than obvious lies.
It is important here to reiterate that, when the negotiation of refugee status took place within the framework of the IRO programme, there was not the same clarity about the recent past as there is today – knowledge that has subsequently come to light due to the work of tens of thousands of historians. 74 In the case of Josif Kostic, for example, the Review Board did not simply write in its two-page decision that Kostic was a ‘quisling’ (collaborator) but explained in quite some detail what, to the knowledge and assessment of the Review Board, had happened in Serbia in the early 1940s and why Board members evaluated this, at the time relatively obscure and quite unknown history the way they did. In 1948, the Board members simply could not refer to any historical work on the subject and therefore had to perform their own makeshift historical evaluation. This collective not-yet-understanding of history can also explain why Kostic, despite acknowledging his participation in a quisling puppet government, and without lying about it, honestly considered himself eligible: from his point of view, he had, in good faith, acted against the communists, not for the National Socialists, and now he justifiably felt threatened in communist Yugoslavia. It, therefore, becomes clear that the negotiation of refugee status was always also a negotiation about what had happened in Europe in the recent past.
However, looking instead at the officers of the IRO, it becomes equally clear that in most instances the stories of the applicants were the focus of attention, with rather less detective emphasis on what had happened in recent history. As Balint observes, this pressure stemmed from ‘the sheer number of assessments and interviews that agents were required to conduct each day, the fact that in many cases hard evidence was scant, forcing IRO officers to rely on personal intuition’. 75 The IRO staff, the Eligibility Officers, the members of the Review Board, and the political leadership of the organization knew that stories were the basis of the negotiation process for approval or rejection, rather than objective history. Similarly, the stories of the applicants were not understood as testimonies, but rather as credible reasons those working for the IRO should believe them. The IRO did not only exist to collect confessions but to solve the ‘European Refugee Problem’ in a very practical way, day by day, whilst under significant time pressure. The reasons for denials or acknowledgments entered into the forms by Eligibility Officers or members of the Review Board rarely followed the logic of ‘we have hereby proved what happened in the past’, but usually very explicitly followed the logic of a rather feeling-based ‘we believe you, or we do not believe you’.
‘Appl.'s story seems to be plausible enough’, wrote an Eligibility Officer in September 1949 as justification for his recognition of Ondrej Hurtis as falling ‘within the mandate of the IRO’ under his CM/1 form. 76 One of the most common justifications for recognition by the members of the Review Board, who argued more legally, was ‘benefit of the doubt’. They did not state that they had discovered what had happened in the past, but rather that they either had no doubts about the stories of the applicants who were rejected in the first instance or simply could not prove that they were not entitled to help. ‘Petitioner has satisfied the Board […] he must on balance, be given the benefit of the doubt’, were the words used by Board members Henry Trémeaud, Edward Kennedy, D. L. Price, and Vladimir Temnomeroff when they justified their decision to reverse Jiri Kautsky's previous rejection in March 1950. 77
Of course, the members of the Review Board did not refer to the applicants’ stories only in the context of positive outcomes; such stories were also the explicit reason for rejections. ‘[H]e has failed to convince the Board of the truthfulness of his story’ wrote the Board's Chairman, the Belgian lawyer Marcel de Baer, under his rejection of Anton Karpenko's application in July 1948. De Baer believed that Karpenko had indeed worked in a factory producing munitions for the Germans in 1942/1943, as an eyewitness had reported, although here testimony stood against testimony. 78 What was important, as De Baer's statement makes clear, was not the objective truth content of a story, but rather convincing the officials of the IRO of a story's validity. There is a subtle yet very important difference between the two: the first instance looks to the inner logics of the negotiation of refugee status in the context of the refugee regime of the post-war period, and the second – to return to Schulte's doubts about the value of the sources mentioned above – to what historians should look for in such sources today. If these were never made to depict ‘reality’ in an objectivistic sense, they can hardly be blamed today for not doing so.
Whilst the stories of the applicants were the basis for their negotiations, they were not the only factor influencing whether an individual was recognized or rejected as a refugee or DP. Accepting the existence of the group strategies already identified, in the European offices of the IRO, groups were not seen arguing with an institution that measured their requests against clear norms or rules. Rather, two or more individuals faced each other and negotiated. That said, strategies learnt by the applicants in groups, and certain ideas or prejudices held by the IRO officers about certain groups and their histories, certainly influenced the decision-making process. 79 However, since individuals sat face to face and negotiated with one another, other factors of interpersonal communication also played a significant role, as is reflected in the sources. This should not be neglected, not least as it was the IRO's paradigm shift from the previous group-based refugee concept to one more focussed on the individual that led to this inter-personal negotiation situation in the first place.
Although the European post-war situation, the misery and hopes of those displaced, and the pioneering project of the IRO represent exceptional historical situations, the basic rules of human interaction remained valid. Their influence on the decision-making processes of the IRO was immense. Two aspects are of crucial importance here, both of which can be seen repeatedly in the sources.
First, in Bourdieu's terms, individual applicants possessed vastly different levels of cultural and social capital, as the group of applicants was extremely heterogeneous, ranging from farmers without school education to university professors – from ‘people persons’ and the well-connected to loners. 80 In the various offices of the IRO, there were certainly structurally and institutionally unequal parties negotiating with each other, if only because one party had something to give that the other party urgently needed. 81 However, in each face-to-face negotiation, the parties who faced each other did so in a completely different and profoundly unequal sense: some were simply better able to negotiate than others because of their cultural capital, whilst others could fall back on the help of personal social networks unavailable to others. The example of Ciril Precelj used earlier can already serve as an illustration of the importance of cultural capital. Precelj gave Review Board member Niec such an intelligent impression that he even emphasized it in his report. The comments written by IRO members in the negotiation documents often refer explicitly to the intelligence (or otherwise) of the applicants – in other words, to their cultural capital. 82 When Miroslav Meca applied for IRO assistance in October 1948, the Eligibility Officer wrote on his CM/1 form: ‘not [a] very intelligent man’. 83 Yet this statement is far more than simply a derogatory anecdote: it should have had no place in an official report if the norms and rules of eligibility set out in the IRO constitution had been the sole criteria for the assessment of the applicants.
Yet even in cases in which high cultural capital is not explicitly addressed, sources often reveal its presence. Here, clear differences between individuals within a given shared category emerge, which are collectively seen to have less chance of making it into the resettlement programme of the IRO. Elderly people, for example, were one such category who found it more difficult to be resettled, since the host countries preferred to take in young, employable people.
84
Perceived higher individual cultural capital could very well make a clear difference in this regard. For example, Boris Lisowecky, a 55-year-old man from Kyiv, knew that he and his 61-year-old wife, Aleksandra, no longer fitted the criteria of most receiving countries, which were looking for people in their 20s and 30s. However, a comparatively high level of cultural capital helped him and his wife escape the fate of other older people, who the IRO and the Allies counted as part of the so-called ‘hard core’ and who did not make it out of Germany at end of the IRO programme.
85
Lisowecky, a lawyer and writer by profession, was well informed and now wrote a letter directly to the ‘General Secretary’
86
of the IRO: ‘We are not young, and we suffered a great deal at the hands of the Nazis’, he stated, continuing: Conditions here are not good, but we realise how difficult it must be to look after so many displaced persons, and we are grateful to the Americans for what they are doing for us. But we refugees from the east are living in perpetual terror of Bolshevism, and we know that the Germans hate us and grudge us every bit of bread we eat. We hope that the IRO will be able to help us to emigrate to Paraguay, which is so far the only country to accept old people as colonists, and does not impose such high medical standards as other countries. Please send instructions to IRO Amberg to pay our passage to Paraguay as soon as possible, and send us notification that you have done so, along with a copy of these instructions. The latter is essential, as without it we will not be able to obtain an exit-permit from the American military authorities.
87
Next to cultural capital, the importance of social capital is also made clear in many sources. ‘The Full Board, having examined Petitioner's case’, Board member Price wrote in the decision letter of Adrijan Janc's case in March 1950, ‘is of the opinion that in view of his story and the excellent testimonials in his behalf he qualifies as a genuine refugee with valid objections to repatriation’.
89
Additionally, if applicants had the right social networks and thus could draw on the right advocates, this could make all the difference, for example, in the case of Aleksander Lajos, who addressed the Review Board several times between 1948 and 1950. His initial application for recognition as a refugee was rejected. His sister was one person in his social network who wrote to the Board, saying they were misjudging the case. A man named Lloyd Hatch from Minnesota also wrote two letters addressed directly to Board member Edward Kennedy, requesting recognition for Lajos, his wife and their two children. Kennedy forwarded the letters to his superior, De Baer, and wrote: These two letters which I am sending to you I feel should be answered as expeditiously as possible. I do not know how the gentleman got my name, but I think the answer should more properly come from you. Here is a well-spring of goodwill which I do not think we ought to ignore by default.
90
Another important aspect of the interpersonal encounters between applicants and members of the IRO are general social-psychological aspects of human behaviour in social settings, as addressed by Erving Goffman in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.
92
Goffman's findings can be applied to applicants and the impression they made personally, verbally and non-verbally on IRO officers in their role as gatekeepers. Indeed, appearance and personal impressions could make a huge difference, as the sources often clearly show. Yet such factors can also be applied to the IRO officers themselves as each harboured different knowledge, feelings of kindnesses (or otherwise), prejudices, and experiences – even their mood throughout the day was apt to change and thus played a role. Again, it must be emphasized that looking at the IRO as if it were just a univocal institution that implemented its own rules one-to-one, fails to grasp the true picture. The IRO comprised many different individuals: [W]hen an individual appears before others his actions will influence the definition of the situation which they come to have. Sometimes the individual will act in a thoroughly calculating manner, expressing himself in a given way solely in order to give the kind of impression to others that is likely to evoke from them a specific response he is concerned to obtain. Sometimes the individual will be calculating in his activity but be relatively unaware that this is the case.
93
All these elements of human behaviour in social settings played a major role in the negotiation of refugee status and mobility in the post-war refugee regime. Indeed, the importance of presenting oneself ‘correctly’ and being properly perceived has already been mentioned in some of the sources cited. Although these were often primarily verbal or visual impressions, some are also written in the sources. 95 In the CM/1 form of Erzébet Patta from July 1948, the Eligibility Officer noted: ‘Impression: Looks trustworthy.’ 96 The fact that the Eligibility Officer chose this wording proves that it was perfectly acceptable not only to use rules and norms but also entirely subjective impressions as a basis for decision-making. Had that not been the case, the impression would certainly still have existed, but the officer would probably have chosen not to record it in an official document.
There are many such examples of the above. In the case of Jüri Estam, the lawyer and Review Board Chairman Marcel de Baer – an anti-fascist with significant experience in international criminal and human rights law – justified his recognition of the previously rejected Jüri Estam in January 1949 thus: ‘In view of the fine impression he makes, and because his SS membership appears to be doubtful, petitioner should be given the benefit of the doubt.’ 97 Jüri Estam was now evaluated, at least partially based on the ‘fine impression’ he made. Again, if this wholly subjective comment had not been important to De Baer, or if it had been deemed inappropriate for an entry on an official form, De Baer probably would not have made it.
The perception Board member Kennedy formulated of Maria Cedro, however, was completely different. Obviously annoyed, and with little sympathy for Cedro, he was explicitly unwilling to believe unprovable parts of her story. Kennedy wrote to his colleagues: She was evasive and it was clear that when her carefully briefed story had been penetrated that she made the allegations concerning the failings of the IRO staff. […] I do not believe in the existence of the letter she described and the notion of the Polish Police being interested in a single peasant girl, who was taken from her country at the age of 16 is stretching credulity. However, as it was my case originally it is referred back to the FULL BOARD.
98
As we have seen, the board could be quite cold-hearted, but sometimes they even forgave presumed lies because of their subjective impressions. Franciszek Hewjak from Ukraine had been accepted as a recognized refugee in a Belgian miners’ programme. In connection with this, he had committed himself to carry out this work for a certain period. After seven months, before his contract expired, he returned to Germany as the work was too physically demanding for him. As a result, the IRO declared him no longer eligible. With the help of advice from historian L. Michael Hacking, the IRO's official Chief-Historian, the Board even convicted Hewjak of lying. Hewjak had stated that there were signs in the DP camp saying that the Belgian mining programme could be abandoned after three months; however, the signs did not exist. De Baer, Kennedy, Price, Trémeaud, and Temnomeroff nevertheless evidently sympathized (or perhaps simply felt sorry for Hewjak). ‘However’, they wrote in their decision letter, ‘the fact that Petitioner is illiterate and may not have understood the purport of his contract is accepted as conferring on him the benefit of the doubt and his appeal is upheld’. 100
In summary, it can be said that both the degree of social and cultural capital of each individual demonstrably played a major role in the negotiation of refugee status. Conscious and unconscious individual behaviour, negotiation skills, and perceptions in the social setting of the post-war refugee regime played a similarly important role.
The IRO marked an important change in the refugee regime of the twentieth century. Whereas people were previously predominantly collectively declared refugees or DPs because of group membership, the focus was now on individuals and their personal entitlement to help, independent of real or imagined group memberships. Suddenly, everyone was ‘on their own’ and people acted accordingly. The IRO officers and the members of the Review Board fulfilled their responsibility to assess people individually, even if they did so in a manner different than that assumed, and not only by checking whether an application objectively complied with the norms and rules. This meant that officers wielded significant responsibility and power. Similar to Jannis Panagiotidis’ findings on the recognition of Jewish immigrants in Germany after the Second World War, 101 the question was not only ‘who was a refugee or a DP?’, but at the same time ‘who defined on a case-by-case basis who was a refugee or a DP’. What Panagiotidis termed the ‘praxeology of the migration regime’ concerning screening processes in the co-ethnic migrant recognition after the Second World War also characterized a praxeology of the eligibility process in the IRO system, which can be seen as an ‘interplay between the actions of individuals-bureaucrats, lawyers, and experts but also, and crucially, migrants [in this case of violence-induced mobility] – who act[ed] within the institutional structures […]. In a circular process of reflexive structuration, these structures […] shape[d] individual action, while these very actions simultaneously reproduce[d] and alter[ed] the structure of the regime.’ 102
The direct negotiation of refugee status in the first instance became an inter-personal negotiation between applicants and those working for the IRO. In the second instance, as mentioned in the introduction, many other actors were also involved. Millions of personal stories with which people (re)told their own histories, gave them meaning, made sense of them, justified them, and explained how and why they got there, became the basis of these inter-personal negotiations. For their part, the officers of the IRO, as the gatekeepers of the refugee regime, made their decisions based, not only on objective knowledge about recent history and unequivocal selection criteria but also on those millions of individual stories, linked irrevocably to individual goals.
Looking at different groups of people can be useful when examining the emerging refugee regime following the Second World War, as well as when analysing the regime that has emerged since then and the negotiation of refugee status and mobility in all other contexts. However, looking at groups and, in part, also the construction of such groups, must not lead to a loss of vision regarding the individual stories in the negotiation process. As argued above, people did not negotiate their status and migration options primarily as members (and certainly not as representatives) of religious, ethnic, national, or social groups. Rather, they did so as individuals, as spouses, fathers, mothers, daughters, sons, sisters, brothers, or friends. If we look too closely at group dynamics, we miss numerous central facets of the negotiation of refugee status and mobility. Their stories were not those of collectives but rather reflected the injustice they felt and experienced personally, and of their hopes for their own futures.
In two respects, this proposed broadening of perspectives applies, not only to those people who applied for recognition as refugees or DPs but also to IRO employees. Far too often in science, politics and society, it is implied that organizations are made up of people who think, feel, and do the same things. However, the experienced, distanced lawyer and Review Board chairman Marcel de Baer was not the same as his more impatient colleague Edward Kennedy. Yet both were unlike General Walter A. Wood, Chief of the US Office of the IRO, all three bore no resemblance to the compassionate DP camp director Kathryn Hulme, and the four of them differed fundamentally from J. Donald Kingsley, the Director General of the IRO. IRO staff interpreted the same tasks and rules slightly differently. Some were looking for liars, others liked people, some were strict, others generous, some confident, others insecure, some wanted to work quickly, others thoroughly – all of them certainly had prejudices, but certainly not the same prejudices. They had all lived through the war themselves and had personal experiences, but those experiences were not the same. These myriad differences emerge, despite our looking at only a handful of the players in the theatre of the post-war refugee regime. 103
Second, in repeated negotiations, the Eligibility Officers and Review Board members chose not to look at groups, but rather, at people. In contrast to the organizations that came before them, instead of treating all those of a certain ethnic, religious, or national group the same, the IRO responded more to the individuals who confronted them – as was their mandate. The members of the Board did not see Franciszek Hewjak primarily as one of a large group of Ukrainians, but felt sorry for him personally, as a person, because he could not read and write and therefore had difficulty understanding the rules. They even turned a blind eye to a lie, which they did not do in other cases. Board member Niec chose not to judge Ciril Precelj as a Yugoslav, but as he (also) perceived him personally: as an intelligent and trustworthy man. Board member Price did not read Milutin Kuzmanovic primarily as a Serb, but instead attributed an impression of ‘honesty and integrity’. Finally, some of the Review Board files also make it clear that the Board members often disagreed amongst themselves about the assessment of individual cases. 104 The reality was simply more complicated, and ‘the presentation of self’ and the perceptions of others were often far more important than group perceptions and written rules. 105 In some cases, because of these perceptions, applicants were forgiven, even when discovered lying, whilst others were afforded no leeway at all, even though they were allegedly telling the truth. Frequently – and the post-war refugee regime is no exception – the line, for example, between fear of persecution and economic motives was simply far too narrow and ambiguous to represent a true, objective, and sole basis for decision-making. 106
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author thanks Sebastian Bondzio, Peter Gatrell, Lukas Hennies, Annika Heyen, Sebastian Much, Christoph Rass and Jessica Wehner for their helpful comments on the manuscript or previous drafts, as well as the participants of the conference Labeling and the Management of Displacement held in Osnabrück in October 2021, and the three anonymous reviewers whose substantial and thoughtful comments have been of great help to me.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) [grant number 428259414]. I thank the DFG for the generous support.
