Naissance d'une nation: les personnes déplacées de l'après-guerre, 1945-1951

Birth of a Nation: Displaced Persons in . the Post-War Period, 1945-1951 When the Second World War came to an end, seven million refugees and displaced persons from Eastern Europe were in Germany and were mainly grouped together in the American and British zones. Despite considerable efforts on the part of the Allies to encourage the refugees to return to their homelands, there were still a million "definitive refugees" in 1947. This article retraces the gradual transformation this heterogeneous mass of (Poles, Jews, Baltic people) into homogeneous people, unified by the name and status of "displaced person". Two organisations were involved in: defining and organising the DPs into an "autonomous people": UNRRA (1943- 1947) and the International Refugee Organisation (1947-1951), mandated by the United Nations. It is mainly through : the unifying practices of the IRO that the refugees became a coherent group. Their uniform techniques of filtering (sorting out "real" refugees from "fake" ones on a case-by-case basis) made it possible to produce, standard corresponding exactly to the selection criteria set up by the Western Allies. The refugee people was also formed by the intense degree of statistical investigation conducted by the IRO. Finally, the DPs shared a common material situation, focused on the extra-territorial world of the "DP camp". The post-war refugees were therefore the subject of selection and aid practices which have since shifted to contemporary administration of political asylum in Europe.