Not by Bread Alone? UNRRA and the Displaced Persons in Gutach

Abstract

On 18 April 1946, an official reporter from the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) filmed the life of the Team UNRRA 572 stationed in Gutach, a small village in the Black Forest, in the French occupation zone of Germany.¹ There, French director Pierre Durand had organised a small transit camp, a mess, a medical service and a small school for nearly seven hundred ‘Displaced Persons’ (DPs). Some of these DPs lived in the small camp of Gutach, while others were housed in requisitioned hotels and inns, scattered in 17 villages in the surrounding area.² Most of them were Polish and eastern European nationals, displaced by war and by the Nazi policies of population, labour and persecution. According to the UNRRA reporter’s self-congratulatory story, these former victims of the Nazi regime were now living healthily and harmoniously, thanks to the United Nations. ‘The state of health in the Center of Gutach gives every satisfaction. How could it be otherwise in such admirable surroundings?’³ Not only were they adequately housed and fed — ‘The team cooking is — it appears — excellent’ — but they were also appropriately educated and entertained. Young DP men were offered courses in mechanics, young DP women were employed in UNRRA’s sewing workshop and young pupils learned to garden under the supervision of their Polish teacher.