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Passport issued to Gertrud Gerda Levy, who left Germany in August 1939 on a Children's Transport (Kindertransport) to Great Britain. Berlin, Germany, August 23, 1939. See more photographs |
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KINDERTRANSPORT, 1938-1940 |
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Kindertransport (Children's Transport) was the informal name of a rescue effort which brought thousands of refugee Jewish children to Great Britain from Nazi Germany between 1938 and 1940. The British government eased immigration restrictions for certain categories of Jewish refugees after the Nazis staged a violent attack on Jews in Germany during the November 1938 Kristallnacht ("Night of Broken Glass") pogrom. The British Committee for the Jews of Germany, in cooperation with the Movement for the Care of Children from Germany, persuaded the British government to permit an unspecified number of children under the age of 17 to enter Great Britain from Germany and German-occupied territories (Austria and the Czech lands). Private citizens or organizations had to guarantee to pay for each child's care, education, and eventual emigration from Britain. In return for this guarantee, the British government agreed to permit unaccompanied refugee children to enter the country on simple travel visas. Parents or guardians could not accompany the children. A few infants tended by other children were included in the program. |
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The first children's transport arrived in Harwich, Great Britain, on December 2, 1938, bringing about 200 children from a Jewish orphanage in Berlin. The last transport from Germany left in September 1939, just before World War II began. The last transport from the Netherlands left on May 14, 1940, the day that country surrendered to Germany. Most of the transports left by train from Berlin, Vienna, Prague, and other major cities in central Europe. The trains traveled to ports in Belgium and the Netherlands, from where the children sailed to Harwich. At least one of the early transports left from the port of Hamburg in Germany. Some of the children from Czechoslovakia were flown by plane directly to Britain. In all, the rescue operation brought about 9,000-10,000 children, some 7,500 of them Jewish, from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland to Britain. However, hundreds of children from the children's transports were trapped in Belgium and the Netherlands by the German invasion. After the children's transports arrived in Harwich, those children with sponsors went to London to meet their foster families. Those children without sponsors were housed in a summer camp in Dovercourt Bay and in other facilities until individual families agreed to care for them or until hostels could be organized to care for larger groups of children. Many organizations and individuals participated in the rescue operation. Inside Britain, the Movement for the Care of Children from Germany coordinated the rescue effort. Jews, Quakers, and Christians of many denominations worked together to bring refugee children to Britain. About half of the children lived with foster families. The others stayed in hostels and on farms throughout Britain. |
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Jewish organizations inside the Greater German Reich--specifically the Reich Representation of German Jews headquartered in Berlin (and after early 1939, its successor organization the Reich Association of Jews in Germany) and the Jewish Community Organization (Kultusgemeinde) in Vienna--organized the transports. They generally favored children whose emigration was urgent because their parents were in concentration camps or were no longer able to support them. They also gave priority to homeless children and orphans. |
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In 1940, British authorities interned as enemy aliens about 1,000 children from the children's transport program on the Isle of Man and in other internment camps in Canada and Australia. Despite their classification as enemy aliens, some of the boys from the children's transport program later joined the British army and fought in the war against Germany. After the war, many children from the children's transport program became citizens of Great Britain, or emigrated to Israel, the United States, Canada, and Australia. Most of these children would never again see their parents, who were murdered during the Holocaust. |
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