Kinder Transport

Kindertransport (Taken from Wikipedia) is the name given to the rescue mission that took place nine months prior to the outbreak of World War II. The United Kingdom took in nearly 10,000 predominantly Jewish children from Nazi Germany, and the occupied territories of Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and the Free City of Danzig. The children were placed in British foster homes, hostels, and farms.

On 15 November 1938, 5 days after "Kristallnacht", a delegation of British Jewish leaders appealed in person to the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Neville Chamberlain. Among other measures, they requested that the British government permit the temporary admission of Jewish children who would later re-emigrate. The Jewish community promised to pay guarantees for the refugee children.

The British Cabinet debated the issue the next day and subsequently decided that the nation would accept unaccompanied children ranging from infants to teenagers up to the age of 17. No limit to the number of refugees was ever publicly announced. Initially the Jewish refugee agencies saw 5,000 as a realistic target, but after the British Colonial Office turned down a Jewish Agency request to admit 10,000 children to Palestine this number was adopted informally. The RCM ran out of money at the end of August 1939 and decided it could not take more children, but the declaration of war occurred a few days later.

The rescue operation is, in general, considered a success as most of the rescued children survived the war. A small percentage were reunited with parents who had either spent the war in hiding or survived the Nazi camps. The majority of children, however, lost home and family forever. The end of the war brought confirmation of the worst: their parents were dead. In the years since the children had left the European mainland, the Nazis and their collaborators had killed nearly six million European Jews, including nearly 1.5 million children.

A similar but much less formal effort, which has come to be known as the "One Thousand Children", transported a smaller number of mostly unaccompanied Jewish children to the United States between November 1934 and May 1945. But the Wagner-Rogers Bill to admit 20,000 Jewish refugees under the age of 14 to the United States from Nazi Germany, co-sponsored by Sen. Robert F. Wagner (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Edith Rogers (R-Mass.), failed to get Congressional approval in February 1939.