The Long Road Home: The Aftermath of the Second World War
by Ben Shephard

* Surprisingly early in the Second World War – long before an Allied victory was assured – people began to plan for its aftermath. 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 when the conflict was over. They 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. They had to create the state of Israel, alter the whole basis of their immigration policy and let thousands of war criminals go free.* This book offers a radical reassessment of the aftermath of World War II. Unlike most recent writing about the 1940s, it assesses the events and personalities of that decade in terms of contemporary standards and values. In particular, it shows that the tragic consequences of war were understood not in terms of genocide, but of displacement – of millions of people deprived of their homes and often forced to work for the Germans.

Reviews

Ben Shephard’s account of his demanding and important subject is a triumph, his has unearthed new and moving testimony by former DPs and has burrowed into official and personal papers without ever letting his deep scholarship get in the way of the riveting story he has to tell…With a sureness of touch he interweaves the personal stories of those who were involved in the allied relief effort at all levels …For anyone who is curious about the coalition of interests and beliefs which slide across this particularly American see-saw, reading Shepherd’s brilliant book is a must
Nicholas Stargardt (History Today)

It's amazing, a really fine achievement and has a wonderful balance between argument and narration, where the individual stories draw the reader in to the moral and emotional complexities, while the sense of structure and proportion gives it a very strong sense of being in safe hands
Nick Stargardt, author of 'Witnesses of War' 

Shephard does not seek to draw pat lessons or modern conclusions from any of this. He is content to tell us what happened next, in detail, and often vividly…a riveting and often entirely fresh story, shrewdly assembled, very well told.
Peter Preston (Guardian Review)