Uneconomic Refugees? The 'Hard Core' of Displaced Persons in Postwar Europe

'According to the views of the Western world,' asserted Louise Holborn in her 1956 official history of the International Refugee Organisation, 'men have a fundamental value which outweighs any costs incurred in salvaging them from their status as refugees.' Yet six years after the end of the Second World War, between 100,000 and 200,000 people remained in the Displaced Persons (DPs) camps of Europe, unable to resettle due to their being, in Holborn's own words, 'uneconomic refugees'. These individuals were labelled the 'hard core' of DPs, a group primarily made up of those considered too old, too ill, too disabled, or with families too large for their resettlement to be seen as financially viable. By focusing on this 'hard core', this study seeks to move these people from the margins to the centre of DP history. It will examine how this category developed, how its meaning changed during the period c.1943-1957, and the different ways it was employed to handle such a large and heterogeneous group of people. Finally, it will investigate how the term was used by officials, administrators, and contemporary media, as well as how DPs themselves responded to being labelled 'hard core' cases. The research will focus primarily on their experiences within the camps (rather than in their countries of origin), and as such the timespan of the project begins with the foundation of the UNRRA in 1943, and ends with the closing of the last DP camp, Föhrenwald, in 1957.
Scholarship on Displaced Persons in the aftermath of the Second World War has, after many years of neglect, blossomed within the past decade. However, whilst many of these more recent works make some reference to the hard core, there has almost been a sense that as the body of scholarship has grown, its focus has become narrower and more specific. 'Hard core' is a category often referred to and occasionally examined in this literature, but with this project I plan to step back, and to analyse systematically the category of the 'hard core' itself, looking at its origins and applications. My project will thus make a valuable contribution to the literature, being the first to examine the 'hard core' in this manner.
Work on disability history has also flourished recently, and therefore I am the beneficiary of the cross-section of, and plan to make use of the most up-to-date scholarship across, both areas. However, despite the recent advances in disability studies, both contemporary culture and historical scholarship have often 'privileged' disabled veterans to the exclusion of other postwar disabled groups (Schlund, 2022). This study will provide a different analysis of post-war disability, by focusing on the tens of thousands of sick, elderly, and disabled DPs labelled the 'hard core' because many countries were unwilling to accept them as immigrants. In the scholarship on DPs, these individuals were often relegated to parenthetical remarks, their exclusion from resettlement characterised as unfortunate but inevitable due to the economic needs of war-decimated European countries. Studies blending histories of migration and of disability, which question the pragmatism and inevitability of such restrictive immigration policies, have been written about the United States (e.g. Baynton, 2016), but in Europe, disability's significance to histories of migration is understudied. Ruth Balint's 2021 Destination Elsewhere is one of the few studies to include a thorough investigation of disability and DPs, but centres disability in a single chapter dealing mainly with children, a limiting focus since children, unlike some disabled adults, were not decision-makers. Through a focus on the 'hard core' of all ages, this project will address questions Balint's work leaves open, such as the idea that a visibly disabled DP was less likely to be accepted for resettlement than one with a functional impairment of a similar level.