Author Biography

David Nasaw is the author of The Patriarch, selected by the New York Times as one of the Ten Best Books of the Year and a 2013 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Biography; Andrew Carnegie, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, the recipient of the New-York Historical Society's American History Book Prize, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and The Chief, which was awarded the Bancroft Prize for History and the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for Non-Fiction. He is a past president of the Society of American Historians, and up until 2019 he served as the Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Professor of History at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Review

 "Nasaw, who has written well-regarded biographies of Andrew Carnegie and William Randolph Hearst, makes clear how much the Allied forces wished that those in the displaced remnant would simply go back to wherever it was they came from. (At one point, Fiorello La Guardia tried to talk the Poles into it.) Nasaw also captures the power of refusing to leave—the decision not to disperse. This isn't to say that the goal of the Last Million was to stay in Germany forever. By not going through one door, they were trying to open others. For the Jews, the main options were, as Rosensaft laid them out, Palestine or some other place that had not been the recent site of genocidal murder, and the central conflict of 'The Last Million' is the fight, in the years following the war, over which it was going to be…A great contribution of Nasaw's book is that it takes the cinematic moment in which American soldiers arrive and pronounce the nightmare over—'Shalom Aleichem, Yidden, ihr zint frei,' a Jewish chaplain from Brooklyn announced when he drove into Buchenwald—as a starting point rather than a closing scene." —The New Yorker

"In The Last Million, Nasaw has done a real service in resurrecting this history . . . Anyone who thinks President Trump's demonization of foreigners is an aberration should read this history." —Washington Post

"David Nasaw devastatingly illustrates in 'The Last Million,' there was widespread reluctance among the victorious Allies to confront the true nature of the Holocaust…"The Last Million" describes in meticulously researched detail what happened to the [displaced persons] who felt—understandably enough—that they could not go back to the lands of their birth." —Wall Street Journal  

"One of the many virtues of 'The Last Million' is the author's ability to make vivid sense of a bewildering moment. He clarifies without oversimplifying…Nasaw demonstrates throughout an especially supple sense of scale. Much of what makes the book so absorbing and ultimately wrenching is his capacity to maneuver with skill between the nitty-grittiest of diplomatic (and congressional, military, personal) details and the so-called Big Picture. In cinematic terms, he's adroit at surveying a vast landscape with a soaring crane shot, then zooming in sharply for a close-up of a single face as it crumples... Nasaw takes pains to avoid facile comparisons between the history he recounts and the current global moment, with its — our — own seas of refugees. As his calmly passionate book makes plain, however, one would need to be willfully covering one's eyes not to see how then bleeds into now." —Adina Hoffman, The New York Times Book Review

"Insightful and eye-opening…Nasaw is a humane writer with a knowledge of his subject that is broad and deep." —Jim Zarroli, NPR.org
 
"Based on an avalanche of research, sweeping, searching, and filled with intimate details, The Last Million tells the enduringly relevant and not well-known story of how political differences between the United States and the United Kingdom, Cold War calculations, ethnic and religious conflicts, and antisemitism trumped humanitarian considerations, 'turning what should have been the primary mission upside down and victimizing those who had suffered the most.'" —Glenn C. Altschuler, The Jerusalem Post
 
"Tells of the last million who had been confined to refugee camps for five years....Through great research, Nasaw helps the reader understand the complexity of permanently relocating refugees to a new country." —Seattle Times

"Nasaw, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, has once again produced an extraordinarily well-researched book that is well worth reading." —Christian Science Monitor

"Nasaw does a masterful job of bringing to light the lasting individual and global consequences of policies and attitudes surrounding the last million… A thought-provoking, highly recommended perspective on a complex and largely overlooked people and period of modern history." —Library Journal, starred review
 
"[Nasaw] provides a characteristically thorough and impressively researched account of the roughly one million displaced persons who found themselves stranded in Germany after the end of the war…While delving into the weeds of political compromise and legislation, Nasaw never loses sight of the hopes and struggles of the people at the center…The Last Million showcases Nasaw's deft handling of complexity—not only the number of global controversies that the Displaced Persons issue fed into, but the morally complex issues of collaboration." —Shelf Awareness

"A richly detailed account of what happened to the one million Holocaust survivors, former slave laborers, and POWs who found themselves in Germany at the end of WWII . . . Nasaw skillfully and movingly relates a multilayered story with implications for contemporary refugee crises. This meticulously researched history is a must-read." —Publishers Weekly, starred review

"[M]asterful...A searching, vigorously written history of an unsettled time too little known to American readers." —Kirkus Reviews, starred review

Review Quote

"Nasaw, who has written well-regarded biographies of Andrew Carnegie and William Randolph Hearst, makes clear how much the Allied forces wished that those in the displaced remnant would simply go back to wherever it was they came from. (At one point, Fiorello La Guardia tried to talk the Poles into it.) Nasaw also captures the power of refusing to leave--the decision not to disperse. This isn''t to say that the goal of the Last Million was to stay in Germany forever. By not going through one door, they were trying to open others. For the Jews, the main options were, as Rosensaft laid them out, Palestine or some other place that had not been the recent site of genocidal murder, and the central conflict of ''The Last Million'' is the fight, in the years following the war, over which it was going to be...A great contribution of Nasaw''s book is that it takes the cinematic moment in which American soldiers arrive and pronounce the nightmare over--'' Shalom Aleichem, Yidden, ihr zint frei, '' a Jewish chaplain from Brooklyn announced when he drove into Buchenwald--as a starting point rather than a closing scene." --The New Yorker "In The Last Million , Nasaw has done a real service in resurrecting this history . . . Anyone who thinks President Trump''s demonization of foreigners is an aberration should read this history." --Washington Post "David Nasaw devastatingly illustrates in ''The Last Million,'' there was widespread reluctance among the victorious Allies to confront the true nature of the Holocaust..."The Last Million" describes in meticulously researched detail what happened to the [displaced persons] who felt--understandably enough--that they could not go back to the lands of their birth." -- Wall Street Journal "One of the many virtues of ''The Last Million'' is the author''s ability to make vivid sense of a bewildering moment. He clarifies without oversimplifying...Nasaw demonstrates throughout an especially supple sense of scale. Much of what makes the book so absorbing and ultimately wrenching is his capacity to maneuver with skill between the nitty-grittiest of diplomatic (and congressional, military, personal) details and the so-called Big Picture. In cinematic terms, he''s adroit at surveying a vast landscape with a soaring crane shot, then zooming in sharply for a close-up of a single face as it crumples... Nasaw takes pains to avoid facile comparisons between the history he recounts and the current global moment, with its -- our -- own seas of refugees. As his calmly passionate book makes plain, however, one would need to be willfully covering one''s eyes not to see how then bleeds into now." -- Adina Hoffman, The New York Times Book Review "Insightful and eye-opening...Nasaw is a humane writer with a knowledge of his subject that is broad and deep." -- Jim Zarroli, NPR.org "Based on an avalanche of research, sweeping, searching, and filled with intimate details, The Last Million tells the enduringly relevant and not well-known story of how political differences between the United States and the United Kingdom, Cold War calculations, ethnic and religious conflicts, and antisemitism trumped humanitarian considerations, ''turning what should have been the primary mission upside down and victimizing those who had suffered the most.''" -- Glenn C. Altschuler, The Jerusalem Post "Tells of the last million who had been confined to refugee camps for five years....Through great research, Nasaw helps the reader understand the complexity of permanently relocating refugees to a new country." -- Seattle Times "Nasaw, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, has once again produced an extraordinarily well-researched book that is well worth reading." -- Christian Science Monitor "Nasaw does a masterful job of bringing to light the lasting individual and global consequences of policies and attitudes surrounding the last million... A thought-provoking, highly recommended perspective on a complex and largely overlooked people and period of modern history." -- Library Journal , starred review "[Nasaw] provides a characteristically thorough and impressively researched account of the roughly one million displaced persons who found themselves stranded in Germany after the end of the war...While delving into the weeds of political compromise and legislation, Nasaw never loses sight of the hopes and struggles of the people at the center... The Last Million showcases Nasaw''s deft handling of complexity -- not only the number of global controversies that the Displaced Persons issue fed into, but the morally complex issues of collaboration." -- Shelf Awareness "A richly detailed account of what happened to the one million Holocaust survivors, former slave laborers, and POWs who found themselves in Germany at the end of WWII . . . Nasaw skillfully and movingly relates a multilayered story with implications for contemporary refugee crises. This meticulously researched history is a must-read." -- Publishers Weekly , starred review "[M]asterful...A searching, vigorously written history of an unsettled time too little known to American readers." -- Kirkus Reviews, starred review

Excerpt from Book

INTRODUCTION The War''s "Living Wreckage" T he violence of war did not end with the signing of cease- fires, truces, or peace treaties. War bled into postwar and mil- lions of innocents who had never taken up arms continued to suffer long after the soldiers had gone home. Germany was in free fall; chaos reigned; national, regional, and local military, police, and political authorities had abandoned their posts. There was, literally, no one directing traffic, no one policing the streets, no one delivering the mail or picking up the garbage or bringing food to the shops, no one stopping the looting, the rape, the revenge-taking as millions of homeless, ill-clothed, malnourished, disoriented foreigners: Jewish sur- vivors, Polish forced laborers, former Nazi collaborators--all displaced persons--jammed the roadways, the town squares and marketplaces, begging, threatening, desperate. "Wandering Hordes in Reich Alarming: Allies Fear Grave Prob- lems May Arise--Ask Liberated to Stay Where Freed," John MacCor- mac of the New York Times reported in a front-page story on April 7, 1945.1 "Germany has become history''s greatest hobo jungle since the Dark Ages," New Yorker writer Joel Sayre cabled home on May 2.2 The American and British soldiers moving east into Germany, and the reporters who accompanied them, were transfixed by what Collier''s magazine columnist W. B. Courtney referred to as war''s "living wreckage--living, moving, pallid wreckage." It washed up and down the margins of the autobahn in a dragging tide. It was composed of people of all sizes, ages, races and varieties or garments. A few had bicycles. Some pushed handcarts. The majority, however, rolled baby carriages. The baby carriage is the sorriest joke in Europe today, for you never see a baby in one Instead they are filled with pots and pans and tools, and all the impediments of nomads. There were shiv- ering maids, and youths in shorts, with legs blue and raw. There were released German soldiers with their army packs and cut branches for walking sticks. You knew the displaced persons by the bulk of their clothing and the magnitude of their bundles. A man wearing two or even three suits, a woman wearing several dresses and a couple of coats and carrying more were not un- usual sights. None seemed to want food. Their want lay sadly deeper, and you could not touch it with your pity but could only surmise that it was for country and home and news of loved ones. Having once seen the wandering lost millions of Europe, you could never forget them, even as you could never fully know what thoughts were in their minds or what lumps were in their hearts. In the rain and wind, they were a steamy, abject porridge of human woe. Barely clothed in ripped and ragged, oversized striped camp uni- forms, the Jewish survivors were distinguishable by their pallor, emaci- ated physiques, shaved heads, lice-infested bodies, and the vacant look in their eyes. "You could see them walking down the street," Chaplain Her- bert Eskin of the U.S. Army recalled, "some of them, with torn shoes, barefooted, with their long coats, the women, and the men with the paja- mas, you know, dirty, very short hair looking to talk to someone for aid."4 The vast majority of Jewish survivors remained in the camps, too ill to leave on their own. The soldiers who encountered them tell the same stories of initial shock, then disgust, accompanied by alternating waves of pity, anger, and stomach-churning illness, followed by a body- and soul-wearying sadness that would not dissipate, a disillusionment with all things human, an enervating, pervasive disquiet that would remain with them for the rest of their lives. Their first task was the burial of the dead and the triage of the liv- ing. Thousands of corpses littered the ground, or were stacked in sheds or uncovered graves. Among the living were those known within the camps as the Muselm

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