Child Evacuations in Europe During WWII

Civilian evacuation was a common measure for saving lives during WWII. In the 1920s and 1930s, politicians and civil servants of different European nationalities had planned for evacuations in the case of international military conflict and aerial bombardment.

In many ways, evacuations are huge social welfare programs, for governments must convince people to leave their homes, transfer them to safer areas, and look after their financial, physical, and psychological well-being. Those involved in the evacuations dislike them, because they banish unhappy city-dwellers to rural backwaters, provoke homesick­ness and unease, and turn one segment of the population into the unwelcome long-term “guests” of another. Most unsettlingly, evacuations divide families, sending children and mothers away to the countryside while other family members stay home to work [...] Evacuations balance delicately on the borders between state paternalism, coercion, and public tolerance. (Torrie 2010, p. 1)

In Europe during WWII, millions of children were forced to move from one place to another, both across national borders and within nation-states, as the result either of a planned evacuation based on a perceived danger or of a direct military conflict. Children were transported on trains and boats or, more slowly, on simple carriages or by foot, either with their parents in broader civilian evacuation schemes or in special evacuations designed for children. Many unaccompanied European children, physically rescued from aerial bombardment and military combat, also underwent extreme hardships during the transports as well as when they had arrived at new places.

Child evacuations in four different European countries will be presented below, with two aspects specifically highlighted: the involvement of government and state authorities in the evacuation and how the evacuation schemes reflected specific notions of children.

3.1 Great Britain

When the first intensive aerial bombing of London and other English cities began in September 1939, the British Government had already drawn up plans for a larger evacuation of the population. A specific plan for children had been worked out in cooperation with educational authorities. School teachers were hired to accompany school classes to the reception areas and were expected to stay in the vicinity. During WWII, hundreds of thousands of English schoolchildren were evacuated from the larger cities to the countryside. For example, in the first evacuation wave, roughly 735,000 schoolchildren and 435,000 mothers with younger children were sent to the countryside. At the end of the war, more than 1.5 million children had been evacuated from London. A total of 19,000 British children were also evacu­ated overseas in a scheme organized by the British Government (Parsons 1998, 2010; Welshman 1998, 2010).

In comparison to other countries in Europe, the British evacuation schemes were the most extensive. The British Government was a driving force in the planning and the logistics required a high degree of involvement by local government authorities. The issue of parents' consent to the evacuation of their children was discussed by the involved authorities; the parents were expected to resist and it was important to convince them of the advantages. Schoolteachers’ involvement in the evacuation had to be stressed, as did the plans for schoolchildren to continue their education. The connection to the education authorities implied the involvement of School Medical Service officers, who served by performing medical examinations on the evacuated children, which were deemed important.

The English evacuations were also evaluated by child experts trained in psy­chology and psychiatry. A well-known example is The Cambridge Evacuation Survey: A Wartime Study in Social Welfare and Education (1941) by the psycho­analyst Susan Isaacs, who together with colleagues, among others John Bowlby, studied the evacuated children’s reactions to the situation and the separation from their parents. Anna Freud, together with Dorothy Burlingham, also discussed the effects of war on children’s psychological health in the report War and Children (1941). The English child experts concluded that children were mentally better off with their parents, even in a threatening environment, than being taken away from them (Shapira 2013; Welshman 1998).

Such interest in children’s psychological health and the impact of being sepa­rated from their mothers was special to the English case. The illumination of separation between parents and children, and the psychological effects on children being away from their parents (read “mothers”), was not as apparent in other countries. A nearby example is Scotland and the particular circumstances of the evacuations of Scottish children and mothers from Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Dundee (Stewart and Welshman 2006). The evacuations were planned before WWII and set into practice at its outbreak. The Scottish Government had a clear role, with the departments of both education and health involved at various stages of the planning. In September 1939, approximately 176,000 Scottish people were evacuated, among whom around 60,000 were unaccompanied schoolchildren. The Scottish experience of evacuations and the effects on the postwar organization of social welfare are similar to the English case, but the similarities stop there.

Richard Titmuss, a renowned British researcher in social welfare, argued that the evacuation led to a greater awareness of the negative influence of poverty on children’s health. The experiences of child evacuations actually triggered the development of child social welfare for all children (Titmuss 1950). Titmuss’s research has since then been contested by researchers calling for more complex ways of understanding the relationship between evacuation experiences and the development of a welfare state (Stewart and Welshman 2006). But there is no doubt that the British government played a significant role in the evacuation schemes during the war; the British child evacuations were a state matter.

The evacuations drew on notions of children that were linked to a contemporary child-saving ideology. Children were defined as innocent and vulnerable and in need of special protection. Such child-saving ideology permeated the building of a welfare state, and in England, the dilemma of separating children from their mothers became a special issue, linking the children’s well-being to family rela­tions, while in Scotland the structural dimensions of child welfare came into focus.

3.2 France

In France, evacuations of children were carried out and shaped by the specific circumstances of being occupied by Nazi Germany. France was attacked in 1939, occupied in 1940, and was then under the rule of the Vichy Government until 1945.

The French evacuations have not been surveyed or examined in research to the same extent as, for instance, the British evacuations have been. But it seems as if the French evacuations of children lasted short periods, and the children were usually sent to places in the proximity of family and home (Torrie 2010).

The first French child evacuations began in 1939, with thousands of children sent away from the areas attacked by German troops. In the spring of 1940, another wave of evacuations took place and subsequently “again and again” throughout the war and the German occupation. The French evacuations of children were not seen as an extraordinary situation by most French working-class families, who were more exposed to evacuations, living near the industrial targets of Allied bombings. Moreover, child evacuations as a phenomenon coincided with a French cultural and social tradition of sending working-class children to summer camps (colonies de vacances) (Downs 2002). Evacuations did not seem to challenge family traditions or norms regarding child-parent relations (Dodd 2009; Downs 2005).

In the French case, the state was involved, but it was a state apparatus developed under occupation of the German Nazi regime.

Compared to Great Britain, French child evacuations received little attention in later historical research on France during the war, and the French welfare policy development has not been particularly influenced by the evacuation experiences. Laura Lee Downs (2005) argues that the French approach to child evacuation, and the link to the cultural tradition of sending children to camps during the summer, reflects a certain view of children: “Only by leaving home and learning to cope in the company of others, does the child become both self-sufficient and a properly social being” (Downs 2005, p. 58). A notion of children’s need of independence and autonomy is reflected in the French evacuations, including a trust in collective education as a self-evident part of child socialization.

3.3 Germany

The evacuation of civilians was planned for in Nazi-ruled Germany, but such plans were politically “sensitive” for the government. A call for evacuations would risk sending a message of danger to the population, which contradicted ideological images of the victorious German people. Evacuations were nonetheless carried out, but not under the auspices of the state. German children were evacuated from the areas at risk of British bombing in the early 1940s in the so-called Kinderland- verschikung (Stargardt 2005; Torrie 2010), in which the Nazi Government had handed over the evacuation logistics to the Hitler Youth organization. Like France, Germany had a long tradition of sending working-class children to summer camps outside the bigger cities. The evacuations drew on such experiences when German children were moved to institutions or foster families in parts of Germany that were deemed safe. Parents were pressured to send their children away, while also being informed that there was no cause for concern regarding the war front.

However, the German evacuations of children were explicitly racialized and discriminatory. In the selection of evacuee children, Jewish and Romani children, children with handicaps, and other groups which were defined as not worthy by the Nazi regime were deselected (Parsons 2010; Stargardt 2005). The Kinderland- verschikung were carried out as a political project: this was a means to raise loyal Nazi citizens. Many of the evacuated children were brought to institutions where they were raised under specific Nazi ideology. The notion of children in the German evacuations was as the nation’s children and in this sense the future of the nation (Torrie 2010; Stargardt 2005).

A very different kind of evacuation of children took place a few years before the outbreak of WWII, with transports of Jewish children through Germany. The Kindertransporte of approximately 18,000 unaccompanied Jewish children from Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Austria to England was organized to save children from the threats of the German Nazi politics (Kaplan 1998; Zhara 2011). The efforts to save Jewish children were planned and carried out by NGOs but the Kindertransporte was also marked by strong parent involvement. The decision to save their children by sending them away was made against the backdrop of the ongoing limiting of Jewish people's rights as citizens. Also, an increasing number of acts of terror and destruction had been directed at Jewish communities.

Governments were involved in the negotiations of travel and residence permits, but not as a responsible actor in the planning and implementation. Children were seen as vulnerable and definitely at risk, and the transports were motivated as a way of saving them from the increasingly dangerous situation. The Kindertransporte was an effect of the Nazi politics and was stopped by the Nazi Government at the start of WWII.

3.4 The Soviet Union

In the Soviet Union of the 1930s, the industrialization of cities and the collectiv­ization of agriculture were based on large-scale population displacements. In the book To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War (2009), Rebecca Manley describes how the population politics became increasingly severe under Stalin, for instance the forbidding of individuals to move freely within the country without official authorization. In this particular historical context, evacuation appeared as a new political term with new meanings attached to it. The term evacuee replaced refugee and Manley argues that it “reflected a radical rethinking of the premise underpinning state policy. In effect, it constituted a rejection of the very principle of choice” (Manley 2009, p. 8). The evacuation activities increased during WWII. In 1941 Soviet officials estimated that roughly ten million people had been evacuated, a number that continued to rise during the war. The administration and registration of the evacuees were poor, and the lists of people arriving at the reception areas were incomplete. Families were split up, and family members disappeared (Manley 2009).

Children accounted for approximately 40% of the evacuees and unaccompanied children and orphans were particularly exposed. The Soviet state had ambitions to provide food and clothing to orphans, but the poor material conditions and the extensive corruption hindered such measures. Many orphans remained in the meager environments of children's homes, while others set off and lived in the streets (Manley 2009).

Generally, Stalin's evacuation politics during WWII did not take children into specific consideration. When evacuees were selected, their ability to contribute to the frontline was the main criteria; only able-bodied adults remained on the frontline to defend the border and the nation. Families were split up because the “primary allegiance of Soviet citizens was owed not to their families but to the state” (Manley 2009, p. 20).

To conclude, evacuations of children in Europe during WWII were carried out under very different circumstances and were motivated differently in different settings, depending on nation-state context, political ruling, social and cultural norms, and the ongoing war. In most cases NGOs were involved, while the role of the state in the evacuations differed, as did the degree of coercion in the implementation of evacuation plans. The rhetorical motivations were manifold, complex, and contradictory, but a recurrent underlying theme was that evacuation was defined as a humanitarian endeavor to rescue children from the effects of war and aerial bombing. And children who were evacuated were construed as vulner­able figures who needed to be saved from the dangers of war.

Against this backdrop, the evacuation of Finnish war children was carried out, defined as a voluntary humanitarian project. In Sweden the main driving force were NGOs, while in Finland the evacuation schemes were governed by the state. However, the Swedish Government was explicitly involved in the evacuation scheme of sick Finnish war children.

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