A masterwork from acclaimed historian David Nasaw, The Last Million tells the gripping yet until now largely hidden story of postwar displacement and statelessness. He speaks with political commentator Peter Beinart.

In May 1945, German forces surrendered to the Allied powers, putting an end to World War II in Europe. But the aftershocks of global military conflict did not cease with the German capitulation. Millions of lost and homeless concentration camp survivors, POWs, slave laborers, political prisoners, and Nazi collaborators in flight from the Red Army overwhelmed Germany, a nation in ruins. British and American soldiers gathered the malnourished and desperate refugees and attempted to repatriate them. But after exhaustive efforts, there remained more than a million displaced persons left behind in Germany: Jews, Poles, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and other Eastern Europeans who refused to go home or had no homes to return to.

The Last Million will be published on September 15 by Penguin Press. To pre-order/purchase a copy, please visit: https://bookshop.org/books/the-last-million-europe-s-displaced-persons-from-world-war-to-cold-war/9781594206733

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.

Peter Beinart is Professor of Journalism and Political Science at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. He is also a Contributor to The Atlantic, an Editor-at-large for Jewish Currents, and a CNN Political Commentator. His first book, The Good Fight, was published by HarperCollins in 2006.  His second book, The Icarus Syndrome, was published by HarperCollins in 2010. His third, The Crisis of Zionism, was published by Times Books in 2012. Beinart has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the Boston Globe, the Atlantic, Newsweek and Slate.

Tuesday, September 17, 2020  |  6:00 – 7:00 PM

https://www.crowdcast.io/e/david-nasaw-on-the-last

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