Internal displacements due to conflict are a common yet understudied phenomenon. We
explore the political consequences of exposure to internally displaced in host communities us-
ing the case of the forced evacuation of Alsatians to the French interior at the start of WWII.
For identification, we leverage the fact that communes that were to receive evacuees from the
front zone, a strip of land between the Maginot Line and the French-German border, received
a larger-than-expected number of evacuees relative to others. Increased exposure to Alsatian
evacuees led to greater support for left-of-center parties after WWII. This effect is mainly driven
by a transitory drop in turnout among center-right voters. We hypothesize that this political ap-
athy may be due to exposure to the costs of Nazi aggression leading voters to avoid supporting
parties that may be linked to a collaborationist past. Consistent with this explanation, we find
a negative effect of exposure to evacuees on the relative number of collaborators during WWII
and a more substantial impact on parties with closer ties to collaboration.