An original insight into how occupation officials and relief workers controlled and cared for Displaced Persons in the French zone.

Laure Humbert explores how humanitarian aid in occupied Germany was influenced by French politics of national recovery and Cold War rivalries. She examines the everyday encounters between French officials, members of new international organizations, relief workers, defeated Germans and Displaced Persons, who remained in the territory of the French zone prior to their repatriation or emigration. By rendering relief workers and Displaced Persons visible, she sheds lights on their role in shaping relief practices and addresses the neglected issue of the gendering of rehabilitation. In doing so, Humbert highlights different cultures of rehabilitation, in part rooted in pre-war ideas about 'overcoming' poverty and war-induced injuries and, crucially, she unearths the active and bottom-up nature of the restoration of France's prestige. Not only were relief workers concerned about the image of France circulating in DP camps, but they also drew DP artists into the orbit of French cultural diplomacy in Germany.

This is the story of American assistance to both unoccupied France and Vichy, and to Northwest Africa from 1942 though 1945. The decisions that led to the economic aid program, and the problems encountered by all the parties involved are analyzed, as are the longer-range results of the American aid.

An original insight into how occupation officials and relief workers controlled and cared for Displaced Persons in the French zone.

Essay from the year 2018 in the subject History - Miscellaneous, grade: 7,0, Utrecht University (Geesteswetenschappen), course: European Imperialism in the Middle East, language: English, abstract: France, the cradle of enlightenment, has the historical reputation of being a nation that fought in the vanguard for liberty, equality and justice. For many scholars France is one of the few European powers of the nineteenth century, if not the only one, that would provide humanitarian and political aid to several minorities that suffered under a dictatorial power in the time after the French Revolution. Perhaps the most known example is the French support for the American revolutionaries who fought for their own enlightened ideology against their British overlords. But ideology cannot be the only reason France would act as benefactor of several minorities.