Kindertransport - Organisation and Management

Organisation and Management

Within a very short time, the Movement for the Care of Children from Germany, later known as the Refugee Children's Movement (RCM), sent representatives to Germany and Austria to establish the systems for choosing, organising, and transporting the children. The World Jewish Relief Fund (formerly the Central British Fund) was also involved.

On 25 November, British citizens heard an appeal for foster homes on the BBC Home Service radio station from Viscount Samuel. Soon there were 500 offers, and RCM volunteers started visiting possible foster homes and reporting on conditions. They did not insist that prospective homes for Jewish children should be Jewish homes. Nor did they probe too carefully into the motives and character of the families: it was sufficient for the houses to look clean and the families to seem respectable.

In Germany, a network of organisers was established, and these volunteers worked around the clock to make priority lists of those most imperilled: teenagers who were in concentration camps or in danger of arrest, Polish children or teenagers threatened with deportation, children in Jewish orphanages, children whose parents were too impoverished to keep them, or children with a parent in a concentration camp. Once the children were identified or grouped by list, their guardians or parents were issued a travel date and departure details. They could only take a small sealed suitcase with no valuables and only ten marks or less in money. Some children had nothing but a manilla tag with a number on the front and their name on the back, others were issued with a numbered identity card with photo: "This document of identity is issued with the approval of His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom to young persons to be admitted to the United Kingdom for educational purposes under the care of the Inter-Aid Committee for children. / This Document requires no Visa. / Personal Particulars. / (Name; Sex; Date of Birth; Place; Full Names and Address of Parents)"

The first party of nearly 200 children arrived in Harwich on 2 December, three weeks after Kristallnacht. In the following nine months, 10,000 unaccompanied, mainly Jewish, children travelled to England. Initially the children came mainly from Germany and Austria (now part of the Greater Reich). In March 1939, after the German army invaded Czechoslovakia, transports from Prague were hastily organised. In February and August 1939 trains from Poland were arranged. Transports out of Nazi-occupied Europe continued until the declaration of war 1 September 1939. During the war years many Kinder served in the British armed forces, the nursing professions, in food production and in war related industries. Several thousand remained in Britain when the war ended, and as adults made considerable contributions to Britain's services, industries, commerce, education, science and the arts, for the defence, welfare and development of their country of adoption. No fewer than four Kinder were Nobel Prize winners; two of whom had gone from Britain to America.