The Cold War of Pictures: Framing Returning Prisoners of War in Austria’s Illustrated Press

This chapter looks into the POW camps and interrogation rooms created by the Chinese and North Korean militaries. From inside the interrogation room, the story of decolonization on the Korean peninsula in the mid-twentieth century did not stop at the question of liberation for the Korean people. The chapter asks what decolonization meant for American prisoners of war. Under the specter of “Oriental” brainwashing, the American prisoner of war became a cipher for American unease about how the fast-moving backdrop of capitalism, the Cold War, and a decolonizing globe was challenging the seemingly assured coherence of the American individual self.

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The Prisoner of War

The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War ◽

10.23943/princeton/9780691166223.003.0003 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 79-122

Keyword(s):

Cold War ◽

United Nations ◽

Prisoners Of War ◽

Washington Dc ◽

Prisoner Of War ◽

Political Subject ◽

Geneva Conventions ◽

Policies And Programs ◽

Psychological Operations ◽

The Cold War

This chapter moves between the policymakers in Washington, DC, and the prisoners of war in the United Nations Command (UNC) camp on Koje Island. It considers the stakes for both the policymakers and the prisoners of war in rendering the prisoner of war from a bureaucratic category of warfare into a political subject on the Cold War decolonizing stage. The UNC Camp 1 on Koje Island would eventually hold over 170,000 prisoners of war behind its barbed wire fences. It would become “the largest POW camp ever run in accordance with the Geneva Conventions.” On April 4, 1951, President Harry Truman issued an executive directive for the creation of the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB) “for the formulation and promulgation, as guidance to the departments and agencies responsible for psychological operations, of over-all national psychological objectives, policies and programs, and for the coordination and evaluation of the national psychological effort.”

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Managing Displaced Populations: The Friedland Transit Camp, Refugees, and Resettlement in Cold War Germany

Central European History ◽

10.1017/s0008938920000138 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 53 (2) ◽

pp. 335-352

Author(s):

Derek Holmgren

Keyword(s):

Cold War ◽

Humanitarian Aid ◽

Prisoners Of War ◽

State Control ◽

Charitable Organizations ◽

Displaced Populations ◽

German States ◽

Resident Populations ◽

The Cold War

ABSTRACTThis article examines the resettlement of displaced populations in both postwar German states from 1945 to 1955. Specifically, it investigates who were the displaced populations circulating between the occupation zones, and what methods the German civil governments and occupying military authorities used to aid and resettle them. Through a case study of the Friedland refugee transit camp, this article argues for an expansive understanding of the term “refugee” to include more groups, ranging from Displaced Persons and German expellees to returning prisoners of war and civil internees. It further contends that transit camps were the linchpin in a system to render humanitarian aid, bring refugee movement under state control, and resettle the displaced. Analysis of camp operations and resident populations reveals the state as humanitarian actor in addition to international and charitable organizations, while also complicating the Cold War mythology of Friedland as the “Gateway to Freedom.”

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