The America that welcomed: Armenian DPs from postwar Europe to Los Angeles

2026-03-23 - 16:51

Editor’s note: This is the first in a series titled America at 250: An Armenian American Retrospective, running throughout 2026 in The Armenian Weekly, curated by former Weekly editor Dr. Khatchig Mouradian and dedicated to the 250th anniversary of America’s founding and the history of Armenian American life. The March 2026 magazine issue, also edited by Dr. Mouradian, is dedicated to the same theme. On Jan. 7, 1948, President Harry S. Truman in his State of the Union address said, “Many thousands of displaced persons, still living in camps overseas, should be allowed entry into the United States. I again urge Congress to pass suitable legislation at once so that this Nation may do its share in caring for the homeless and suffering refugees of all faiths. I believe that the admission of these persons will add to the strength and energy of this nation.”1 In the America of 2026, it is hard to comprehend that such a resolve by a president and an attitude toward the plight of refugees was a reality in the not-so-distant past. In May of the same year, 1948, 4,200 miles away from the U.S. Capitol where Truman delivered his plea to the Congress, some 1,500 Soviet Armenian civilians and former POWs stranded at the army barracks (Funkerkaserne) in Bad Cannstatt borough of Stuttgart, Germany, since the end of the war, celebrated the 30th anniversary of the Armenian Republic.2 George Mardikian, the owner of Omar Khayyam’s restaurant in San Francisco, credited with introducing Middle Eastern dishes to America, served as a food supply consultant for the U.S. Army, and as such got to visit the troops for inspections. While traveling through the American bases in Europe in the cold winter of 1947, he was led to Funkerkaserne. Upon discovering his compatriots who looked at him as “one of their own, who spoke their own tongue, who shared their ancestors and their heritage...and had come to them—from America”, with the words “I can solemnly promise you...it is [our] duty to help you, to give you a chance to find homes for yourselves so that you can start building your ojakhs all over again,”3 he vowed to make efforts to rescue the displaced Armenians. Mardikian, who had become close friends with many commanders of the American forces in Europe, along with a San Francisco lawyer Suren Saroyan, founded the American National Committee to Aid Homeless Armenians (ANCHA), which quickly through that very American tradition of a grassroots campaign was able to raise $250,000 from its delegates under the banner, “For liberty and a chance.”4 Since the Immigration Act of 1924 (Johnson-Reed Act) limited the number of immigrants allowed entry into the United States through a national origins quota and provided immigration visas to 2% of the total number of people of each nationality in the United States as of the 1890 national census, ANCHA along with others continuously made the case for amending the law to assist the refugees stranded across Europe. On June 25, 1948, Congress passed and Truman signed the act to authorize for a limited period the admission into the United States of displaced persons (DPs) for permanent residence. In 1950, when an additional revision nearly doubled the number of the displaced who would be allowed to enter the country, President Truman also admitted the “combined efforts of both political parties, supported by groups and organizations broadly representative of all parts of our country” as “a splendid example of the way in which joint action can strengthen and unify our country.”5 The act stated that if admitted into the United States, the newcomers needed to become employed without displacing some other person from employment and not become public charges and will have safe and sanitary housing without displacing some other person from such housing. As a result of the president’s resolve more than 400,000 eligible displaced persons stranded across postwar Germany, Austria, and Italy entered the United States. Now, who were these displaced persons, how did Armenians end up among them, and how did the journey of these Armenians from their confines in war-torn Germany to a community in suburban Los Angeles embody the quintessential American narrative? During the German occupation of eastern Europe, including parts of the Soviet Union, millions of civilians had been forcefully relocated as labor and at the end of the war found themselves stranded and, in many cases, unable to return to their former homes for fear of persecution by the Soviet tribunals. Among this vastness of human movement, there were up to 3,000 Armenians, largely from communities in Ukraine and the Russian Black Sea region that came under German occupation. Greenlit by the act of Congress and facilitated by the efforts of ANCHA, the DPs gradually arrived in America in waves between 1948 and 1952. The newcomers were spread throughout the country in places as distant as New Orleans, Louisiana, and Sanger, California. By the early 1950s, many had reached California, predominantly Los Angeles. They settled in east Los Angeles neighborhoods, home to many other immigrant communities because of its affordability. As the families were able to elevate themselves into the middle class, they also began to gradually move to the suburbs, and the closest one was Montebello. Mariana Rubchak in “God made me a Lithuanian” has used the following when talking about Lithuanian DPs who settled in America in a similar fashion, but the description of the community and its practices testifies true to the Armenian DP experience too, in that in a way there were the “two halves of a single identity – a timeless, unalterable” Armenian self and “its complementary American half in the mind frame of a people with a powerful sense of the identity of their own and for the future generations.”6 The displaced persons were fast becoming Armenian Americans and, mere decades after their displacement, were putting in the foundations of a diasporan community in Los Angeles. In 1965, the first Armenian elementary school in the United States, Mesrobian, was established by the efforts of the community members. The school, which now also includes a kindergarten, a middle school, and a high school, was where many children and grandchildren of the DPs born in America went to school. Soon after the school, the community, whose elder generation included many survivors of the Armenian Genocide, had an initiative to mark the 50th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide and the result was the first monument erected on public land in America commemorating the victims, done not as a private community initiative but by lobbying the state and local authorities through the halls of government to bring it to fruition as a civic initiative in suburban Los Angeles. In addition, by establishing the local branches of every existing diasporan organization, including the Montebello Dro Chapter of the ARF, the Nairy Chapter of the Armenian Relief Society, the San Gabriel Valley Chapter of the ANCA and the Vahan Cardashian Chapter of the AYF, the former DPs stayed connected with the larger Armenian community of Los Angeles. In 1997, the Los Angeles Times wrote about the 50th anniversary reunion of the DPs who plan to meet again, for their memories—though saddened by war and upheaval — are mostly fond thoughts of the Funkerkaserne Camp, and the opportunity to come to America.7 In 2014, Jack Hadjinian, a descendant of DPs, was elected as the first Armenian American mayor of Montebello, a full circle moment for a group, who had been very involved in politics when it came to Armenian affairs such as supporting the election of George Deukmejian, the first Armenian American candidate into the governorship of California in 1983 and, after decades of nurturing a community, seeing one of their own, a product of the school they built and the organizations they established to ascend to leadership of the city they had called home. In 2018, 70 years since the first group boarded the USS General Muir and other ships at the start of their journey and new life in America, once again the community members got together and reflected on their past, which is underdocumented and understudied, largely staying alive in their oral tradition of those who had gone through the perils of displacement. Through the Displaced Persons Documentation Project, an oral history initiative, the USC Dornsife Institute of Armenian Studies has gathered interviews with people who had been inhabitants of the displaced persons camps in Germany. Currently there are 40 interviews in the collection. The average age of the interviewees was eighty-six with the youngest 71 and the oldest 97 at the time of the interview. The first interview was conducted in February 2018. This article was in part informed by the accounts of those interviewees, accounts which when catalogued and archived will preserve the history of the Armenia displaced persons and serve as a primary source for those scholars who will fill the gaps in histories of World War II and the toll it took on the millions it displaced. The power of oral history is in numbers where repetitive traits from individual accounts reinforce one another as scaffolding and draw out the collective narrative, in the case of the Armenian DPs, close to nine decades of it, which is not just some niche diasporan story confined to the bounds of Armenian studies, but rather a clear part of Los Angeles and of America’s history. 1 Harry S. Truman, “Annual Message to the Congress on the State of the Union,” January 7, 1948, The American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/annual-message-the-congress-the-state-the-union-6. 2 The documentary footage, shot by Karapet (Carpo) Dilanian, an 18eighteen-year-old resident of Funkerkaserne at the time, exists and is occasionally shown during the gatherings and the reunions of the DPs. Recent illness has left Mr. Dilanian unable to talk which prevented me from recording his oral history and accessing his archives. The footage of the 1948 celebration is accessible on Youtube: https://youtu.be/ga27JbrFpnY 8:45-10:20. 3 George M. Mardikian. , Song of America. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1956), 270. 4 Ibid. 5 Harry S. Truman, “Statement by the President upon Signing Bill Amending the Displaced Persons Act,” June 16, 1950, Public Papers of Harry S. Truman (Harry S. Truman Library & Museum). 6 Rubchak, Marian J. “God Made Me a Lithuanian: Nationalist Ideology and the Constructions of a North American Diaspora.” Diaspora 2, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 117–129. 7 Michael Krikorian. “A Reunion of the Displaced.” Los Angeles Times, 15 September, 1997.