Frederick Leith-Ross

Sir Frederick William Leith-Ross, GCMG, KCB (4 February 1887[1][2][3] – 22 August 1968) was a Scottish economist who was chief adviser to the UK government from 1932 to 1945.

Following a speech of Prime Minister Winston Churchill to the British Parliament on 20 August 1940 that rhetorically raised the prospect of Britain bringing the German and Austrian peoples "food, freedom, and peace" upon the defeat of the Nazi regime in Europe, Leith-Ross was appointed to head an ad hoc governmental committee to address the question of how surpluses could be raised to deliver on such a pledge.

[9] Leith-Ross's committee laid the groundwork for what eventually became the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), founded in November 1943.

As deputy under the UNRRA's first director-general, the American Herbert Lehman, Leith-Ross contributed to the difficult work of organizing and staffing the new international agency,[10] which, in the end, received the mandate not of feeding German civilians but, rather, of fulfilling basic needs of the millions of people displaced from their homelands as a consequence of the war, who needed assistance to be repatriated or to otherwise re-establish their lives in the postwar period.

The term displaced persons, which came into parlance at that time, and shaped the understanding of the postwar landscape, may have even originated in Leith-Ross's committee and the report it produced.