Women in child search: a gendered view of post-World War II reconstruction

ABSTRACT

One of the most crucial sections of the International Tracing Service, centralized and established in 1948, was the Child Search Branch (CSB), which had the emotionally and ethically complex task of assisting ‘unaccompanied children’ who were discovered in far larger numbers after 1945 than anyone had expected. This article examines the role of three women relief workers who ran the CSB in the post-war period: Eileen Blackey, Cornelia Heise and Eileen Davidson. Focusing mainly on these exemplary cases, the authors evaluate and centre the women’s leadership and decisions, showing how women who worked for the CSB played roles that subverted the general rule in the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and its successor organization, the International Refugee Organization (IRO), which was that women were directed into ‘feminine’ posts. Women who ran the CSB played senior roles in child search and welfare and the decisions they took had significant and crucial outcomes for children, although gendered assessments of ‘carer’ and ‘feminine’ roles in UNRRA/IRO more widely have thus far hidden their activities as a subject worthy of analysis. This article shows how gender affected the spheres of influence the women carved out as they contributed to post-war reconstruction and humanitarian aid.

KEYWORDS:

• Humanitarianism
• Second World War
• gender
• International Tracing Service
• children
• women
• reconstruction
• UNRRA
• International Refugee Organization
• social work

Perhaps no greater social need was evident in war-torn Europe after the fighting was over than an immediate program for housing, caring for, feeding and understanding the countless thousands of homeless children from the va[n]ished countries. … These children were alone and many believed their parents to be dead when in reality they were alive and grieving for their lost children. Something had to be done for these children who were unprotected, lost, wanderers, who looked endlessly and so often in vain for their mothers, fathers, aunts, or for someone by whom they would be loved and whom they could love.

• –Syma Crane, UNRRA children’s home director, 1951¹

Introduction

According to former relief worker Francesca Wilson, women were especially apt for humanitarian work. They were ‘more than ready for the thousand and one interruptions, make-do-and-mends and improvisations that emergency work involves but which exasperates a capable man’. That said, she then went on to warn of the potential pitfalls of ‘unaccustomed power’ for women field workers: ‘Obscure women in their hometowns, they exact obedience from their subjects once they are the Queens of Distressed Ruritanians.’²

One of the most remarkable of post-war creations, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) was responsible for caring for the approximately seven million displaced persons (DPs) in Europe after 1945. It ran so-called ‘assembly centres’ (also known as DP camps) and acted to repatriate their inhabitants. Within months after May 1945, it had successfully done so for more than six million, leaving a remnant of so-called ‘non-repatriables’, a minority of whom had no homes to go back to – mainly Eastern European Jews – and, the majority, those who refused to be sent back to their homelands, primarily because they were under Soviet occupation – mostly but not only Poles, Ukrainians and Balts. Within UNRRA, one organization was created to assist the DPs and their families to find one another: the Central Tracing Bureau (CTB). This body was created to trace the missing, to help DPs find one another and their relatives abroad, and to assist those same relatives in discovering the fates of their loved ones. As the scale of the task unexpectedly mushroomed, so the CTB, in cooperation with national tracing bureaus and other independent tracing bodies, was gradually centralized and formed into what became, by 1948, the International Tracing Service (ITS). At that point it was run by UNRRA’s successor agency, the International Refugee Organization (IRO). By then, the ITS’s Child Search Branch (CSB) had long been established as one of the most crucial sections of the organization. With its headquarters in Esslingen, near Stuttgart, the CSB faced the mammoth, emotionally and ethically complex task of assisting ‘unaccompanied children’, who were discovered in far larger numbers after 1945 than anyone had expected; repatriating those children or resettling them where no relatives could be found; and helping often distraught parents or other relatives search for missing children.

UNRRA recruited large numbers of employees at very short notice at the end of the war; most were men, especially at senior level, including many ex-servicemen, as Silvia Salvatici has shown.³ By contrast, when one examines the employees of the ITS’s Child Search Branch, what is immediately striking is that so many of them were women. Most of those women – at least those who left accounts of their work, whose files remain in existence, and who are ‘locatable’ within existing archival hierarchies – did not comment on the disproportionate ratio of male-to-female employment in UNRRA or on the reversal of that ratio amongst the child search and child welfare officers in the CSB or in the IRO’s child welfare teams (the CSB was responsible for finding children, and then handed them over to IRO’s child welfare division for repatriation/resettlement). Historians, however, have observed that women in UNRRA ‘were directed away from leadership roles, and towards stereotypically feminine occupations: working with children, nursing or caring in the widest sense of the word’.⁴ The Child Search Branch reveals something different, as the biographies of Eileen Blackey, Eileen Davidson and Cornelia Heise show. Although we do not contest the claim that women were pushed into ‘feminine’ occupations in UNRRA/IRO generally, we show that women often held senior roles in the CSB, meaning that the decisions they took had crucial outcomes for the children involved. We contend that gendered assumptions about ‘carer’ and ‘feminine’ roles have hidden the active leadership roles these women often took on.

Beyond merely showing that women occupied senior positions within the CSB, we also show that there was no consensus amongst these women as to how children should be dealt with or what was considered to be in their best interests. This was especially the case with respect to decisions concerning whether a child of non-German origin should be removed from a German foster home. Being a ‘carer’ did not equate to taking easy options or making decisions that would avoid trauma or upset for children, including for those who had already suffered a great deal during and immediately after the war, as the opening remarks by Syma Crane imply. The women we examine knew this and fulfilled their roles on the basis of strong ethical and professional convictions, often driven by a belief that the national identity of a child was their most important characteristic, and that current circumstances notwithstanding – even if they were comfortable or with loving guardians – children needed to be relocated so as to be with ‘their’ national group.

Since the end of the war, a number of former female UNRRA employees have published memoirs reflecting on their experiences. These include Francesca Wilson, Frances Berkeley Floore, Kanty Cooper, Kathryn Hulme and Evelyn Bark, as well as others such as Gitta Sereny, who did not write extensively about their time with UNRRA, but did comment on it occasionally.⁵ In the post-war years, more female than male authors also wrote about the problem of child search and child care, and it is noticeable that general studies of refugees and DPs tended to be written by men, although these often contained chapters on children too.

This article will not focus extensively on these well-cited studies. Our emphasis is on the ITS child search officers and UNRRA/IRO child welfare officers: who were they? How did they approach their work? What attitudes did they hold towards the children they discovered and what were their aims in trying to help them? In particular, we build on the foundational work of Esther Möller, Johannes Paulmann and Katharina Stornig, in one of the few scholarly contributions to focus on how gender and humanitarianism intersect. They urge scholars, for example, to consider that

we need to go beyond merely adding women as aid workers and beneficiaries to our pictures of the past. We have suggested doing so by questioning the ways that gender and gendered norms, ideologies and structures have functioned in historically situated humanitarian encounters, visions, organizations and strategies.⁶

They also suggest that we should

ask how gender contributed to the social position of aid workers within complex humanitarian encounters that involved not only dealing with the beneficiaries of aid but also acting in a context shaped by other institutions and the larger sphere of national and international politics.⁷

This is a particularly pertinent suggestion, since the women of the CSB had to interact with both men and women in different settings that implied and reinforced hierarchies, such as the IRO head office, local German youth welfare offices (Jugendämte) or the Office of Military Government (OMGUS), where men were in the majority and where men, especially men with military backgrounds, held the most senior positions.⁸ By examining the examples and actions of CSB leaders, we query the extent to which gendered assumptions about humanitarianism, leadership and the ‘femininity of caring professions’ within UNRRA, later the IRO, as well as OMGUS and other institutions, have impacted the assessment of their contributions, both by contemporaries and later in the historiography of reconstruction and humanitarian work in post-war Europe, meaning that the exceptional case of the CSB has been overlooked.

Following a survey of the ways in which existing scholarly literature on humanitarianism in general and UNRRA/IRO in particular engages with gender or perpetuates gendered assumptions about ‘care’ and humanitarian leadership, we then analyse Blackey’s, Heise’s and Davidson’s roles in the CSB, as well as how these were shaped by their backgrounds in social work and humanitarianism, to the extent to which this biographical information is available. Finally, we examine the specific problem of child removal, as illustrating our claims about the roles played by women in the CSB and the ways in which the changing political landscape made the CSB workers consider their positions. Our argument is that gender mattered to the women of the CSB insofar as in that body they overcame the usual constrictions faced by women in their careers in UNRRA. In their roles in the CSB – many of which were senior ones – these women created a space to act and made numerous crucial decisions that changed the fortunes of many thousands of children. The CSB, in other words, proves an exception to the rule that women in UNRRA – and perhaps in humanitarian agencies in general, at this period – were confined to junior roles figured as ‘feminine’.

Locating gender in historiography and the archive

In the historiography of humanitarianism, there have been some studies of individual humanitarians from a gendered perspective, for example, Rebecca Jinks’ analysis of the women from Smith College who intended to help Armenian survivors of the genocide of 1915–16.⁹ But the majority of gendered studies in the history of humanitarianism either focus on the victims, such as Nazan Maksudyan’s study of Armenian refugee children in the wake of the First World War, or Miriam Ticktin’s examination of gender-based sexual violence; or they focus on the gendered approach taken by humanitarians towards those they are seeking to help, as in Katharina Stornig and Katharina Wolf’s examination of the Austrian SOS Children’s Villages, or Francesca Piana’s study of George Montandon; or they remain at a general level, as in Glenda Sluga’s overview (which is not a criticism – essays such as this perform an important historiographical service).¹⁰ Although gender is now a visible component of the history of humanitarianism, its still-marginal status is clear in the fact that it is barely mentioned in important surveys of the field; analysis of the intersections of masculinity and humanitarianism, which will not be addressed here, remain desiderata within the scholarship.¹¹ There remains very little scholarship on gender in UNRRA, with most historians focusing on organizational or other topics; as a result, the assumption prevails that women were directed into ‘caring’ roles and, by overlooking the exceptional case of the CSB, gendered assumptions about the structure of humanitarian organizations have been perpetuated.

In recent years numerous monographs and studies have focused on the search and care for unaccompanied children in post-war Europe.¹² While the multi-pronged efforts by various agencies to trace children and reunite them with their parents or guardians and the significance of such actions for post-war reconstruction have been examined from multiple perspectives, studies have not yet treated these activities through a gendered lens, particularly in terms of those who contributed to children’s relief work. A few previous studies have noted that women made up a significant number of relief staff of UNRRA and within the Child Search Branch specifically, but their roles remain on the periphery.

For example, Tara Zahra has emphasized that, with regard to UNRRA, ‘although women rarely rose to commanding positions in the organization, relief work did open up new opportunities for women’s activism internationally’.¹³ Citing evidence from the aforementioned memoirs of women who worked for UNRRA, she demonstrates that many women who joined its ranks were often motivated by idealism and the promise of adventure, as well as the prospect of taking on greater responsibility and authority as social workers and humanitarian activists.¹⁴ Zahra links the relief workers’ understanding of the psychological impact of the ‘destruction of the private sphere’ to contemporary theories of totalitarianism, which provided a conceptual framework for the impetus behind their cultivation of democratic values and individualism through their relief activities in post-war Europe. Further, she describes the gendered dimensions of the rehabilitation of displaced women and the push to restore traditional gender roles as a perceived remedy to the defeminization of persecuted women.¹⁵ Yet her study does not focus specifically on gendered experiences of relief work itself, but primarily on the women recipients of humanitarian interventions.

To some extent, Ben Shephard also dealt with the role of women in the sphere of post-Second World War humanitarian response, particularly with regard to the care of children.¹⁶ His analysis implied the outlines of the ‘male’/‘female’ dichotomy between the military authority and the UNRRA/IRO in occupied Germany, but ultimately, his treatment of the gendered aspects of relief work in this area is limited. Shephard did configure the outlines of the gendered experience of post-war reconstruction more broadly, identifying the military with the ‘male-dominated’ environment in Germany. By characterizing the military and the welfare programme in this way, his assertion rests on assumptions about the priorities of the female-figured caring professions versus the male-figured military, perpetuating paternalistic rhetoric to describe their work.¹⁷ With regard to the activities of the women of the Child Search Branch activities specifically, Shephard provides some nuance, describing the efforts of American social worker Eileen Blackey, who led the Child Search programme, to negotiate the removal of non-German children who were being fostered by German parents in order to return them to their biological parents and/or countries of origin. Yet Shephard fails to present the military’s obstruction of their activities, particularly within the context of de-Nazification, with any complexity. Shephard reduces Blackey’s and Davidson’s views on the removal of children to simplistically presented cases where they allegedly viewed children as being ‘hastily and happily repolonised’, when a closer examination of their efforts reveals the complexities of their motivation and decisions, as we discuss later.¹⁸

We single out Shephard’s work from the historiography because his approach typifies a ‘popular’ approach that perpetuates gendered narratives of humanitarianism, in contrast to that offered in more scholarly accounts. Silvia Salvatici, for example, notes the ways in which the gendered dimension of UNRRA’s work was built in from the outset, with a clear divide between employees who were recruited from the military and those with social work backgrounds, although she does not echo the very problem she is trying to explain, in the way that Shephard does.

Finally, while the literature outlines the broader aspects of gender and relief work, analysis of the contributions and agency of the women of the Child Search Branch within this frame is challenging not least because of the difficulties in ‘finding’ the women, in particular their decision-making process and motivations, in the archive. Considerable work has been done in the last decades to unravel and analyse power structures inherent in archives, which have been subjected to both scrutiny and theorization.¹⁹ As argued by scholars of humanitarianism, nursing and social work, particularly those who use feminist framing of this history, archives are products of their own time ‘which means that for much of history, certain voices – e.g. of women and children – within these official sources are missing or lacking’.²⁰ Here we examine the contributions and biographies of Eileen Blackey and Eileen Davidson, who in some ways are more visible in the archive than Cornelia Heise, though there are still tantalizing gaps.

Humanitarian careers

Gemie, Reid and Humbert note that

UNRRA can be seen as offering women a certain empowerment, real but limited … . While women’s posts were usually classified as nurses, deputy directors and other auxiliary posts, their actual duties frequently provided leadership and supervisory opportunities … . There were some serious limitations to their status.

The proof of these limitations is found not only in their mobility through the UNRRA hierarchy and pay grade status, but also that they were ‘made to feel different from men’.²¹ In this section, we show how the careers of Eileen Blackey, Eileen Davidson and Cornelia Heise back up these observations, but also point to different experiences in the CSB from other sections of UNRRA.

The names of the women who ran the CSB and evidence of their work can be traced to some extent in institutional archives of post-war relief successor institutions, such as the United Nations and the International Tracing Service archive (now the Arolsen Archives). But these often reveal only the contours of their ‘official’ lives, rather than their reflections, motivations for decisions and actions, or experiences of humanitarian work. In addition to the memoirs cited earlier, some of their experiences have been recorded in personal papers and ego-documents, many of which were never intended for public consumption and which were collected by Holocaust-related archival institutions; in the case of UNRRA child care officer Vinita Lewis, they were collected by the Amistad Research Center, a repository that specializes in the ethnic and racial history of the United States and the African Diaspora.²² This is particularly true of women who rose to prominence in their respective fields, such as Blackey, whose papers are held by the University of Minnesota and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. But not all of the women gained significant professional status after the war, and it is their actions that can be made visible only obliquely and by inference from the existing, patchy record.

The situation with respect to sources is made more complicated by virtue of the fact that the creation of UNRRA considerably reshaped the frameworks within which humanitarian aid was delivered; as Gerard Cohen has argued, in 1945 charitable organizations became subservient to occupying armies and international relief agencies.²³ Thus, many women who expected to work independently or autonomously are to be found in the archives of large international organizations, where they are primarily the objects of personnel files, organizational documents and the like. Turning to the biographies of the women we examine here, the Australian social worker Mary Eileen Davidson (known as Eileen Davidson, 1909–2007), UNRRA’s Child Welfare Officer in the US Zone of Occupation, was trained in both the United States and Britain and went from working as the deputy director of rehabilitation for the Red Cross in 1942 to working for UNRRA and the IRO from 1945 to 1948. She was a pioneer in internationalizing Australian social work after the war and went on to help establish social work training in Thailand, as well as take on leadership roles in Catholic and other social welfare agencies in Australia.²⁴ Cornelia Heise (1901–88), the daughter of a Moravian minister from Germany, lived for most of her life in Wisconsin. She attended the University of Wisconsin and, by 1935, was working as a social worker in Madison. In late December 1944, she arrived in Liverpool en route to Europe, where she worked for UNRRA as a social worker for four years, becoming the head of the consolidated child search and tracing section and child care section in 1947.²⁵

The American social worker Eileen Blackey (1902–79) rose to some prominence, making her biography easier to uncover. Like Davidson, she too incorporated international methodologies in her social work career. The daughter of Irish immigrants, Eileen Blackey was recruited by UNRRA in 1944 to direct its Child Search and Repatriation efforts. According to her correspondence with friends, she refused roles that were limited to staff training, as she wanted to be directly involved assisting people who had been impacted by the war.²⁶ She was involved in negotiations to move Jewish children from Belsen to England, and then on to Palestine.²⁷ Blackey then headed up social work training for the American Veterans Administration, followed by five years in Israel to develop a school of social work at Hebrew University after earning her doctorate at Case Western. Her last full-time occupation was to revive the School of Social Welfare at UCLA. Her extensive education and diverse experiences clearly shaped her sense of authority, and she later reflected that:

It is important to realize that there is a difference between leadership roles and leadership. Roles may be functionally defined as being of leadership level complexity, but leadership in the meaning of the lives of these pioneers was not defined or bounded by function. Rather it was an expression of the spirit and, to name two very old fashioned virtues, a manifestation of faith and courage. Faith was conviction and commitment; courage was the willingness to risk oneself in a cause.²⁸

These risks included being subjected to petty officialdom in ways that affected male colleagues differently. In August 1947, Eileen Davidson was arrested by a military policeman for ‘delinquency’. That is to say, she was ‘out of uniform’ with no identification, and Davidson was reprimanded and told either to wear full uniform or civvies.²⁹ Cornelia Heise was also reported for ‘delinquency’ for driving her car without a Stuttgart Military Post registration on its windshield in September 1948, which prompted a handwritten, somewhat mocking, reply from Heise: ‘Yes, sir! Warning noted. For some strange reason, perhaps absence on a field trip, I never encountered the notices anywhere, and confidently produced to the [NCO?] who stopped me all papers except the right one.’³⁰ Although men were also subjected to this sort of petty intervention, when one bears in mind that the military was a male space and that military aims took precedence over humanitarian ones, one senses in the sources a puerile vindictiveness directed at women like Davidson and Heise, first for their gender, and second because although UNRRA employees were expected to be in uniform, they were not regarded as ‘proper’ members of the military and were therefore seen as subservient. As women, they were much more obviously civilian than their male counterparts, which exacerbated the extensive logistical challenges they faced in carrying out their work.³¹

Another example of this gendered framing by male leaders comes from the end of the period of the CSB’s autonomous existence, when it was moved to Arolsen and incorporated into ITS. When A. J. Wittamer, the deputy director of ITS, was asked to write a reference for the Social Work Vocational Bureau for Cornelia Heise after her resignation, he wrote that she was ‘very capable of leading a fairly large Organization [sic] provided she has someone with her to do the routine work and to keep her informed at all times of the rules and regulations which govern the Organization’. He then went on:

Miss Heise could be called a fighter as she often took the bull by the horns in any discussion and sometimes with disastrous results. I am certain that she would do very well in any Organization having a very simple set of rules and that she would lead her personnel relentlessly obtaining perhaps a greater amount of work out of this personnel than a less active person would obtain.³²

In spite of the dismissive assessment of Heise’s work and gendered vindictiveness, one only has to consider the careers of such women to see that the service they rendered UNRRA was by no means inconsiderable. As one of Blackey’s admiring colleagues remarked on her return to Poland long after her work there:

There is no way of knowing how many tragically hurt children were directed into the best possible life for them because of your UNRRA job, Blackey. They can’t thank you, but on their behalf your admiring co-workers can tonight.

Blackey and Davidson, like many of their female colleagues, were graduates of social work and nursing programmes that began to be formalized in the interwar period, especially in the UK, Australia and United States. The first such public health nursing programmes, run by the League of Red Cross Societies, started in 1919 at Bedford College in London, the oldest higher education institution for women in the UK and one of the two predecessor institutions of today’s Royal Holloway, University of London.³³ Such programmes were naturally figured as ‘feminine’ and caring; the women who took them entered professions, especially overseas humanitarian work, which was on the one hand professionalized but on the other hand regarded with some suspicion by military and other ‘male’ authorities.³⁴ Nowhere is this clash between professional social work and military ‘necessity’ or a supposedly hard-nosed realpolitik clearer than in the disputes over child removal that were central to the CSB’s work in post-war Germany. On the one hand, the women appear radical in their career choices and their challenge to military authority; on the other, their work often justified decisions which bolstered normative notions of the family and the nation.

Child removal: complicating ‘care’ and ‘women’s work’

In her recent book on unaccompanied children in the US Zone of Occupied Germany after the Second World War, Lynne Taylor describes how the politics of removing children shifted as the Cold War unfolded and gave rise to competing views, not only between the IRO’s Child Search Branch (CSB) and the other agencies involved, especially the military authorities in the shape of the US Office of Military Government (OMGUS), but also between case workers within the CSB. Taylor writes that ‘[t]he divisions were becoming overt, multiple, and complex in nature’, and that despite having the same training in social work, case workers sometimes too diametrically opposed positions on child removal:

Those in the field generally seemed particularly sensitive to the child’s emotional state and needs, rendering them sympathetic to any child who fought its own removal from a foster family of whom it had grown fond, and to the often very real grief of the foster family, losing a child with whom they had established a close and loving bond. When the alternative for the child seemed less hospitable or less supportive than the existing foster arrangement, removal seemed cruel.³⁵

The question of removal is a significant point in the history of child search and welfare efforts where one can more fully understand and appreciate the influence and actions of the women of the CSB within gendered strictures, since their work involved high-level negotiations, diplomacy and lobbying with military occupation authorities (USFET [United States Forces European Theater of Operations], OMGUS, EUCOM [United States European Command]), local military governments, the State youth office (Landesjugendamt), German and other national welfare agencies (especially Central and Eastern European), as well as through various back channels of the US State Department. Moreover, removal became a point of considerable contention outside and within the branch and highlights the role women played in post-war reconstruction. Our aim here with these examples, however, is not to present a history of child removal procedures or to ‘introduce’ the influence of women in the record, but to show how gendered roles and perceptions impacted the ways in which the CSB operated, or, better, to show how these issues were considered in retrospect by those involved in them.

In 1972, Eileen Blackey gave a speech in which she set out UNRRA’s origins and mission in Europe and explained in particular the work of its Displaced Persons Mission’s Child Search and Repatriation team (not yet the CSB), of which she was director. Her main focus in the speech was on ‘the significance of children for the most fiendish purposes one can conceive of’, that is to say, for Hitler’s ‘simply fantastic blueprint worked out for the subjugation of the world – not only of Europe’.³⁶ And her key point was the change that came over Allied policy, from working with the soldiers who had fought their way into Germany who understood UNRRA’s mission to find, rehabilitate and repatriate the millions of displaced civilian survivors in Germany, to the military government’s focus on the rehabilitation of Germany: ‘It was a very interesting shift in your public social policy on an international level and what it did to the services of UNRRA who were there still dedicated to the recovery and rehabilitation of the people who were victims.’³⁷ The consequences for children were significant: with the military government’s view that ‘we must put Germany back on her feet’ prevailing,

the UNRRA people who were working in Germany began to feel, began to get some resistance from some of the military government people to give up some of these children or to provide the kind of resources that were needed in various ways to push forward the whole displaced persons mission.³⁸

Blackey did not mention in this talk that she had been sent on several occasions to Berlin in order to try and negotiate with the military authorities, to no avail.³⁹ This conflict between the child searchers’ instinct that it was in the children’s best interests to be removed and resettled on the one hand and the military government’s digging in and refusing to give permission to remove children in the interests of preserving good relations with the Germans on the other, would only worsen with the passage of time, until child search operations were wound down altogether as of 1950 – at which point many non-German children ended up remaining in Germany, much to the chagrin of the CSB.

Blackey’s speech provides a summary of how the child search teams were created, who made them up and how they operated. She explains that their work was a kind of detective work, that clues about the whereabouts of children would lead to other children, and that their interviewing of groups of discovered children would also involve methods designed to tease out of the children information about their prehistory before coming to Germany. A particularly illustrative case of different interview approaches and pressures on child removal, one in which the women’s leadership roles becomes evident, can be seen in the case of the Lotte (Miroslawa) Suchert, born in 1932, who was found living in foster care near Heidelberg after a search was launched by the Section for Vindication of Polish Children in Lodz in 1948.⁴⁰ After her parents had died, she was taken from Poland in 1942 as part of the Lebensborn programme to be ‘re-germanized’, and was found living with a German foster family. Her identity was established through an investigation, which included a terse and fairly aggressive interview carried out by Field Tracing Officer Lt. Henryk Cyran, who described the process of interrogation as his ‘special method of interview’.⁴¹ In internal correspondence, Davidson (on behalf of Heise) wrote that she was ‘literally horrified at Mr Cyran’s method of approach in interviewing a young, defenceless girl’, which resulted in raising her fear and anxiety. The case prompted a review of interviewing techniques with Cyran, and was presumably used as an example for training delivery, as Heise retained hard copies of the case file in her private papers collection.⁴² The IRO concluded that

much as we deplore the basis on which Lotte’s foster home placement seems to have been made (following a deliberate, planned germanization program which has resulted in her very complete assimilation) we cannot see where the girl’s interests and welfare will be served by uprooting her at present … . Unfortunately she has lost all interest or ties with her home country, and in her present environment there is little possibility that they will be revived. The Jugendamt is also to be condemned for its passive attitude in carrying out a policy with which it denies having any affiliation.⁴³

Not long after this assessment, Suchert’s case was marked as closed.

What we see is that the assumption that women such as Blackey were directed into ‘caring’ professions because of gendered presuppositions about women’s work are only partly correct. Blackey’s, Heise’s and Davidson’s jobs involved far more than caring for children, confirming Martín-Moruno’s claim that

unlike nursing, the work of women humanitarians was organized around a wider notion of care, the moral dimensions of which were intimately connected to the vulnerability of affected populations, as well as to the compassion felt as a kind of moral imperative when regarding their pain.⁴⁴

For example, Blackey recounts how, on a trip to Warsaw to liaise with the Polish Red Cross in an attempt to identify children in post-war Germany believed to be Polish, she helped the staff to discover the relevant records. Insisting that they look through the basement of a building occupied by the Nazis, which appeared to be full of rubbish, Blackey and her Polish colleagues discovered 5000 filing cards providing all the necessary information: photographs of the children along with their real names, their parents’ names, where they had lived in Poland and their weight, hair and eye colour (vital statistics for the Nazis).⁴⁵ Using photostat copies she made in Warsaw, Blackey’s team in Germany was immediately able to identify 800 children – and this from being ‘pushy’, from being insistent in a capacity that was quite outside what is usually conjured up by the idea of the ‘caring professions’.

Nowhere was this need to be assertive more obvious than with respect to the question of the removal of children from foster homes who came from places that were now under Soviet control, especially the Baltic States. In 1972, Blackey was still clear that the ethical stance taken by the CSB was correct:

So more and more the allies began to be anti-Soviet and more and more they began to say these children should not go back behind the Iron Curtain. And UNRRA was in the position of saying you cannot dictate this to us. Even if these are so-called Communist countries, these children have families there. Even if they don’t have families, their government has a claim on them as nationals and this is international law and just because you don’t like these people doesn’t mean that you can decide what you are going to do with their people.⁴⁶

She then recounts her difficult encounters with Col. Abbott from OMGUS, a man she describes as ‘in a position where he had infinite control over the destiny and the lives of people’ and who was ‘the most punitive person I think I’ve ever met’.⁴⁷ She explains how she turned to US businessman Ira Hirschmann, Fiorello La Guardia’s right-hand man and author of The Embers Still Burn, a book which Blackey describes as ‘terrible’ because of its ad hominem attacks, and how Hirschmann and Blackey tried to overturn OMGUS directives to prevent children in foster homes from being removed.⁴⁸ This was all work which involved the sort of power play and negotiating skill which is typically associated with the diplomacy of the occupation and is figured as ‘male’. It is at any rate a long way from the sort of work that is called to mind by the concept of ‘caring’, thus expanding the influence enjoyed by the caring professions in the humanitarian context. The reality of the CSB’s work was that, as well as locating and identifying children, intense and complex negotiations between it and numerous other bodies – national Red Cross societies, youth welfare offices and OMGUS, for example – were all part of the daily fight to assist unaccompanied children. But because the military authorities are figured as ‘male’ and because this sort of diplomatic activity is not seen as properly belonging to the ‘female’ sphere of ‘caring’ humanitarian work, such work is often simply not seen.⁴⁹ Male CSB workers, such as Knut Okkenhaug or Herbert Meyer, also faced struggles with these different bodies; they did not, however, in their reports, describe anything that could be interpreted as gender-based discrimination.⁵⁰

Their work may have taken these women way beyond the remit of what is conjured up by ‘women’s work’ or the ‘caring professions’, but there is no doubt that what motivated the women who worked for the CSB was care of a very deep sort: care that the Nazis’ criminal policies be subjected to some sort of counteraction and rectification. In her description of the child search process written around the time that searching in the field was being brought to an end, Blackey ended on a note of exasperation that expediency and indifference had overtaken ethical commitment:

These children become more and more German with each passing day. They are hard to find and hard to identify. Resistance by the Germans and by Military Government authorities to giving them up is steadily increasing. But most tragic of all is the fact that IRO, the only friend which these children have at court, has had to reduce its staff drastically and consequently the search for children is limited now to those whose parents are alive and asking for them. This is the result of a diminishing interest on the part of the world in its financial and moral obligations toward the victims of Nazi aggression. Unless the search for children can be continued on a scale which will get the job done thoroughly and quickly, another ‘lost battalion’ will take its place in the annals of history.⁵¹

Similarly, when she handed in her notice in April 1948, by which point she was deputy chief of the Child Search/Tracing Section of ITS, Eileen Davidson was forthright about how the CSB’s ethically rigorous position was being undermined by the IRO. She first noted that ‘countless time-consuming reorganizations, budget-cutting, fund-paring activities’ over the previous 12 months had resulted in ‘stultifying and paralysing a programme which, in its heyday, succeeded in sending 900 children back to Poland and lesser number of Czech, Yugoslav, French, Dutch and Belgian children to their home countries’. She then explained why ‘the problem of the displaced unaccompanied child in Europe’ needed to be seen as distinct from ‘DP operations’ in general and from the ITS’s main activities. Child search and tracing, she argued,

has socio-legal implications which neither agency is prepared to explore. It has need for highly qualified criminal investigators and child welfare specialists which neither agency is prepared to employ. Its very existence depends on the mobility of its staff, the transport for which neither agency can begin to touch.

Unsurprisingly, Davidson ended by noting that ‘[w]ith the present approach, I am in fundamental disagreement.’⁵² Davidson had shortly before handing in this letter of resignation become very well known within child search circles for her position paper, ‘Removal from German Families of Allied Children: Reasons Why This is to the Best Interest of the Child’, in which she argued unequivocally that no matter how pleasant their circumstances now, children of non-German origin would always be second-class citizens and had the ‘right to their own heritage’.⁵³ Her resignation was the logical conclusion of her argument.

Her stance was picked up with even more venom by Hirschmann. In his attack, he took Blackey’s words and used them for a violent anti-IRO tirade:

Even now, only a small percentage of the lost children have been found. Thousands are still in Germany. If PCIRO has neither the funds nor the inclination to search out these children, it should be forthright enough to say so. The countries concerned should be enabled to set up their own search teams. It must not be forgotten that the Nazi plan was to place non-German children in German families ‘politically reliable and qualified to educate a child’ – to place them with those staunch Nazis who could be counted on to inculcate National Socialistic teachings. Here these children remain, with PCIRO compounding the Nazi crime.⁵⁴

Hirschmann misidentified the culprit. The PCIRO was only as useful as its funders (the Western Allies) permitted it to be: if its budget were cut, there was little it could do about it. But the point made so forcefully by Hirschmann was an echo of the sentiment widely shared by members of the UNRRA and IRO child search teams: leaving displaced children behind in Germany constituted a victory for Nazi evil. His words were easy to disregard because they were so hyperbolic.

Conclusion

What is striking about the work done by the women in the CSB is that, although they did not shy away from confronting the authorities when they tried to slow down or even prevent removals of children from Germany, they remained diplomatic and measured in their words, at least in public. Not the least of the ironies of looking at the CSB’s work through a gendered lens is that even if that work far exceeded what the CSB’s employers thought was appropriate for women, it was also scuppered to a large extent by men who thought they knew better and who seem to have painted the CSB women as taking an ‘emotional’ stance vis-à-vis the children, as opposed to their own ‘realist’ position which reluctantly concluded that in the interests of geopolitical stability, some displaced children would just have to stay in Germany. In fact, as opposed to Hirschmann’s furious response, the women of the CSB were not emotionally but ethically driven; their stance was clear and unequivocal from the start. If it conflicted with the Western Allies’ putative Cold War interests, that, they believed, was insufficient reason to abandon children, widely seen at that moment in time as the basis of the nation. In its own way, this was also a Cold War position, but it was also one which sought to cut through the new enmity between East and West and offers a glimpse of the sort of Cold War exchange which later historians would recognize as providing the basis for an undermining of the conflict.⁵⁵

Despite the obstruction from the military authorities, the search and ‘re-establishment’ activities continued up until 1952, with approximately 40,000 children receiving UNRRA and IRO assistance. Taylor writes that ‘in light of the formidable challenges faced by these child search and welfare workers from the beginning, it is truly remarkable that they achieved all that they did.’⁵⁶ We concur and agree too that the CSB achieved what it did in the light of all the problems that are well known: lack of resources, shortage of personnel, lack of funds, insufficient cooperation from the German authorities. It is also clear that the CSB’s accomplishments came despite the heavily gendered expectations that were placed on it, which meant that the largely female staff had to overcome additional forms of resistance when compared with their male colleagues in the military establishment – not least of which was the prejudice that the CSB’s work was ‘caring’ work, whereas in fact the roles held by women such as Blackey were complex and involved high-ranking executive decisions as well as leadership. The CSB’s work was just one component in the broader phenomenon of post-Second World War reconstruction and humanitarian aid. But, as a particularly fraught situation that helps test the usefulness of gendered analysis of humanitarian post-Second World War reconstruction, it stands out as an unusual and exemplary area where women took on leadership positions and where their decision-making played a crucial role in the lives of the children they were tracing and trying to help. UNRRA and the IRO provided opportunities for women to engage in humanitarian aid missions in a new way. Although subject to the ultimate control of the military authorities, which regarded their operations with a mixture of patrician concern and gendered assumptions about ‘caring’, we learn from these women’s biographies and contributions that the CSB’s work was vital in responding to the evils of Nazism. Child search and child removal were politically and emotionally complex operations. That they were also gendered operations makes the CSB’s achievements all the more impressive.

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the organisers and participants of The Red Cross Movement, Voluntary Organisations and Reconstruction in Western Europe in the 20^th Century symposium (2021); Humanitarian Mobilization in Central and Eastern Europe during the Twentieth Century workshop (2021); and Lessons and Legacies XVI conference (2021); as well as Rebecca Jinks and others who have read, commented on and improved this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christine Schmidt

Christine Schmidt is Head of Research and Deputy Director of the Wiener Holocaust Library, London. Her publications have focused on the history of the International Tracing Service, post-war search and collecting initiatives, the Nazi concentration camp system and comparative studies of collaboration and resistance in France and Hungary. She is currently writing a social history and archival biography of a collection of survivor accounts recorded by the Wiener Library and led by Eva Reichmann in the 1950s. Her article, ‘“Privilege” and Trauma: Sieg Maandag’s Climb Upwards’ appeared in American Imago 80, no. 1 (2023).

Dan Stone

Dan Stone is Professor of Modern History and Director of the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author or editor of 20 books, including most recently: The Holocaust: An Unfinished History (Penguin, 2023) and Fate Unknown: Tracing the Missing after World War II and the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2023). He is also co-editor, with Mark Roseman, of volume 1 of the Cambridge History of the Holocaust (Cambridge University Press, 2024).

Notes

1. Syma Klok, “Evaluation of an Institution for Children,” June 5, 1951, Syma Crane Papers, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), 1997.A.0373_001_011_0003, 1. The authors thank Rebecca Jinks for her very helpful comments on an earlier version of this article, as well as the two reviewers for ERH.

2. Wilson quoted in Zahra, “Psychological Marshall Plan,” 45. See also Ross, “‘Giggling Adolescents’ to Refugees.”

3. By 1946, 44% of UNRRA’s 12,889 employees were women. Zahra, “Psychological Marshall Plan,” 45; and Shephard, Long Road Home, 306. See also Salvatici, “Fighters without Guns”; Salvatici, “Professionals of Humanitarianism”; and Reinisch, “‘Auntie UNRRA’ at the Crossroads.”

4. Gemie et al., Outcast Europe, 180. For feminist concepts of care and ethics, see, inter alia, Gilligan, In a Different Voice; Noddings, Caring; and Held, The Ethics of Care.

5. Wilson, Aftermath; Floore, The Bread of the Oppressed; Cooper, The Uprooted; Bark, No Time to Kill; Hulme, The Wild Place; Pettiss and Taylor, After the Shooting Stopped; Sereny, “Stolen Children”; and Sereny, German Trauma.

6. Möller, Paulmann, and Stornig, “Gender Histories of Humanitarianism,” 283.

7. Ibid., 290.

8. See Salvatici, “Fighters without Guns.”

9. See Jinks, “‘Making Good’ in the Near East”; and see also Jinks “Marks Hard to Erase.”

10. Maksudyan, “The Orphan Nation”; Ticktin, “The Gendered Human of Humanitarianism”; Stornig and Wolf, “Parenthood as Aid”; Piana, “The Dangers of ‘Going Native’”; and Sluga, “Gender, Peace and the New International Politics.”

11. Hilton et al., “History and Humanitarianism.”

12. Taylor, In the Children’s Best Interests; Zahra, Lost Children; Balint, “Children Left Behind”; Urban, “Unaccompanied Children”; Burgard, “Navigating a Limited ‘World of Possibilities’”; Höschler, Home(less); Cohen, “The Children’s Voice”; Buser, “Displaced Children 1945”; Steinert, Deportation und Zwangsarbeit; and Steinert, Holocaust und Zwangsarbeit.

13. Zahra, Lost Children, 93.

14. G. D. Cohen makes a similar argument; see “Between Relief and Politics,” 437–49.

15. Zahra, Lost Children, 109–17. See also Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies.

16. Shephard, Long Road Home.

17. Ibid., 306.

18. Ibid., 318–22.

19. See, inter alia, Derrida and Prenowitz, “Archive Fever”; and Trouillot, Silencing the Past.

20. Skehill, “Women in the History of Social Work,” 23. She describes the form of ‘recovery history’ that has been needed in order to recognize and research the role played by important women in social work developments.

21. Gemie et al., Outcast Europe, 181.

22. Lewis deserves a separate study since, as a Black woman who did not work for the CSB, the specific nature and trajectory of her career in China and for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the United States after her time in Germany raises issues that there is not space to tackle here.

23. Cohen, “Between Relief and Politics,” 439.

24. Lee, “Mary Eileen Davidson”; and Gleeson, “Some New Perspectives on Early Australian Social Work.”

25. “Wisconsin State Census, 1905.” Department of State. State Historical Society, Madison; “Cornelia D. Heise,” Find a Grave, http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi; The National Archives and Records Administration; Washington, DC; “Cornelia D. Heise,” Wisconsin Historical Society; Madison, Wisconsin; Wisconsin Death Records, 1979–1997; Passenger and Crew Lists of Vessels Arriving at and Departing from Ogdensburg, New York, 5/27/1948 – 11/28/1972; Microfilm Serial or NAID: T715, 1897–1957.

26. Minton, “Eileen Blackey,” 141.

27. Blackey, “The Child Search Experience – World War II,” 20, a tape transcription of a lecture given to students in the School of Social Work, c.1972, 4. USHMM, Eileen Blackey Collection, Box 1.

28. Kendall, “Eileen Blackey: Pathfinder for the Profession.”

29. Headquarters, Stuttgart Military Post, US Army, to Commanding Officer, PCIRO, Ludwigsburg APO 154, US Army, 25 August 1947. Arolsen Archives, ITS Archive, Davidson Papers, S107.

30. ITS Personnel Files, Heise, 23.

31. Enloe, “Agency, Power, and the Armed Forces.”

32. A. J. Wittamer to M. Thudicum, 8 June 1949, ITS Personnel Files, Heise, 57.

33. Oppenheimer, “Nurses of the League.”

34. See Jacoby, “Caring about Caring Labor.”

35. Taylor, In the Children’s Best Interests, 161. For a case study in how the Cold War reshaped the policy of child removal, see Stone, “The Politics of Removing Children.”

36. Blackey, “The Child Search Experience – World War II.” This document is the verbatim transcript of the talk, which was based on a text entitled ‘Nazi Crimes against Children’ (in the same collection), which, although undated, appears from internal evidence to have been written many years earlier (c.1950).

37. Blackey, “The Child Search Experience – World War II,” 6.

38. Ibid.

39. Taylor, In the Children’s Best Interests, 173, 184–5, 191–4.

40. Miroslawa Suchert (or Suchert Lotte), ITS Child Search Case file ITS WHL 84528495–84528598.

41. Memo Lt Henry Cyran to T/S Div Director Esslingen, 27 February 1948. ITS WHL 84528521.

42. Cornelia Heise Papers, US Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives, 2020.362.1.

43. R. Dworkin to D. Garson, Director IRO Area 2, 1 May 1950, ITS WHL 84528586/1–3.

44. Martin-Moruno et al., “Feminist Perspectives,” 5.

45. Blackey, “The Child Search Experience – World War II,” 19–20.

46. Ibid., 30–1.

47. Ibid., 31.

48. See Hirschmann, The Embers Still Burn, ch. 18. Blackey notes that she wrote this chapter and indeed much of it is lifted word for word from her ‘Nazi Crimes against Children,’ so one might surmise that she wrote this piece for Hirschmann to use. Hirschmann does refer to her in the chapter as one of the key protagonists in the search for children.

49. See Oldfield, “It is Usually She”; and Storr, Excluded from the Record.

50. See for example, Stone, “The Politics of Removing Children.”

51. Blackey, “Nazi Crimes against Children,” 32.

52. Eileen Davidson to the Director, International Tracing Service, 1 April 1948; Davidson Papers, 113–14.

53. Davidson, “Removal from German Families of Allied Children: Reasons Why This is to the Best Interest of the Child,” ITS Digital Archive, Wiener Holocaust Library, London, 6.1.2/82486419_1/_2. For discussion, see Stone, “The Politics of Removing Children”; Stone, “The Greatest Detective Story in History”; and Zahra, Lost Children, 131–2.

54. Hirschmann, The Embers Still Burn, 260–1. PCIRO = Preparatory Commission for the International Refugee Organization, the body set up to prepare the IRO for full operations in the summer of 1947, with IRO operating as such from 1948.

55. Stone, “Cold War Ideas.”

56. Taylor, In the Children’s Best Interests, 279.