Refugees From Nazi Germany and the Liberal European States by Frank Caestecker Bob Moore

Author:Frank Caestecker, Bob Moore [Frank Caestecker, Bob Moore]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Social & Cultural Studies, Social Science, Cultural Studies, Emigration & Immigration, History, Germany, Military, World War II
ISBN: 9781845457990
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2010-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

The Search for Child Emigration Opportunities by the German and Austrian Jewish Population

Even though sending unaccompanied children abroad had been part of organised emigration efforts from Germany since 1933, before 1938 very few Jewish parents in Germany were prepared to part company with their children. In the vast majority of cases families emigrated together and to places where other relatives had already settled.9 Thus the number of unaccompanied children who emigrated with the help of Jewish agencies remained rather low during this period. Most of them were sent either to Great Britain (400) or to the United States (500). The numbers emigrating to other countries were miniscule: only 6 to the Netherlands, 3 to Canada and 45 to Australia, and up to November 1938 no children at all had been sent to Switzerland or Belgium.10

It was not until the events of the year 1938 that large numbers of parents were ready to send their children abroad alone. The situation had to be perceived by parents as extremely threatening before family cohesion was abandoned and children were sent into an uncertain future abroad. Bertha Bracey, an English Quaker who travelled to Germany and Austria shortly after Kristallnacht, wrote of her impressions in a report: ‘Since they [the parents] realised how great the need was, and how limited the resources, and the possibilities of reception in other countries, parents pleaded that at least as many children as possible should be brought out.’11 In Austria, antisemitic atrocities set in immediately after the annexation, and the anti-Jewish legislation that had been introduced in Germany over several years was implemented overnight. Jewish parents became eager to enrol their little ones in a child emigration scheme as soon as possible. There was no time for arguing over the pros and cons of staying or leaving the country as there had been for Jews in Germany, where the situation had worsened gradually over years.12 Just a few weeks after the Anschluss, the child emigration department of the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Vienna had already received about 10,000 applications for the Kindertransporte.13 In Germany the run on the child emigration departments of Jewish agencies began only after Kristallnacht.

It was after Kristallnacht that an opportunity to rescue a larger number of children abroad arose with the Kindertransporte to Great Britain. At the end of 1938, the British authorities gave an open-ended commitment to admit children, an offer that depended solely on the financial guarantees to be provided by aid committees. This contrasts very favourably with the small quota granted to refugee aid organisations in Switzerland (300), Belgium (250) and the Netherlands (1,500). Admission of children to other European countries thus took place in far smaller numbers, although the original quota numbers were considerably enlarged during the course of 1939. By September 1939, Belgium had finally accepted close to 1,000 children14 and the Netherlands had taken in nearly 2,000 unaccompanied children (including 1,850 from Germany and 147 from Austria).15 Continental European countries were also confronted with a rising level of illegal immigration over the green frontiers.

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