In 1940, Howard Kershner, director of European relief for the American Friends Service Committee, was stationed in Vichy France, where Quakers were organizing relief for refugees. He had witnessed any number of wartime atrocities in his years of service during the Spanish Civil War, including violence directed at civilians, bombings, starvation, and disease. Now he added a new item to the litany of wartime suffering: “One of the greatest tragedies of all times is the separation of families in Europe today: wives in one country, husbands in another, with no possibility of reunion and often no means of communication; babies who have never seen their fathers; scattered fragments of families not knowing if their loved ones are living or dead, and often without hope of ever seeing them again. There are multitudes of wretched souls for whom it seems the sun of hope has set.”Footnote ¹

The notion that the separation of families represented a wartime tragedy, an abrogation of human rights, and for children, an irreparable form of trauma, attained the aura of transhistorical truth in the second half of the twentieth century. But Kershner's concerns were quite new in 1940. It was only during and after World War II that uniting families came to be a central mission of humanitarian and human-rights activists in Europe. Kershner articulated an emerging perception among child-welfare experts and policy makers that the separation of families represented a humanitarian crisis and a human-rights abuse as severe as bombings, disease, and starvation, and just as threatening to the welfare of both children and European societies at-large.

The discovery of familial separation as the quintessential wartime trauma in the 1940s profoundly shaped understandings of human rights and humanitarianism in postwar Europe and America. It was not coincidental that Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights declared, “The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the state,” and that Article 12 protected families from “arbitrary interference.” Based on an understanding of the Nazi regime (and east European communist regimes) as an assault on family unity and paternal rights, postwar humanitarian workers and child-welfare experts sought to reestablish the sovereignty of families as much as the sovereignty of nations. In the process, they embedded historically specific ideals of family, gender, and child rearing in emerging conceptions of universal human rights.

The tensions between the universalist rhetoric of human rights and the gendered hierarchies that underpinned postwar relief efforts reflected conflicts between a still inchoate notion of human rights and older humanitarian traditions. Historians of human rights such as Samuel Moyn and Lynn Herta have analyzed the hierarchical relationships embedded in humanitarian institutions, particularly in colonial and postcolonial contexts. Humanitarianism, they suggest, institutionalizes an unequal relationship between “the compassionate and the suffering” that contradicts the presumed universalism of human-rights discourses. Mark Mazower has argued that even the founders of the United Nations hoped that the new international body would sustain the global authority of a “civilizing” British Empire. They saw no contradiction between the rhetoric of human rights and the persistence of empire and racial inequality at home or abroad.Footnote ²

Child-savers in twentieth-century Europe did not only consolidate hierarchies between colonial subjects and citizens, but they also institutionalized unequal relationships between men and women, children and adults. Children and women in wartime and postwar Europe were rarely targeted for protection or relief because of their presumed equality, but because of their perceived vulnerability and innocence. In spite of the rhetoric of human rights, they received aid as objects of sentiment and charity rather than as individuals in possession of universal entitlements.

The focus on family reunification after World War II was buttressed by new psychological and psychoanalytic theories, particularly a view of family separation as a form of trauma. The concept of psychic trauma was first defined as a neurological condition in Great Britain in the 1860s and 1870s to describe the disturbing symptoms afflicting early railroad travelers. In the 1880s continental psychiatrists such as Jean-Martin Charcot in France and Hermann Oppenheim in Germany promoted a view of trauma as a psychological or emotional condition akin to hysteria or neurosis. During World War I, the concept of trauma entered military, medical, and government circles and became known as a psychiatric condition afflicting soldiers. Paul Lerner has argued that in Germany, the war precipitated a shift toward a view of trauma as a purely psychological condition, the causes of which were located within the individual. Increasingly, researchers found the source of trauma in the home rather than in the trenches. They attributed traumatic symptoms to the weakness, fear, or laziness of the soldiers afflicted.Footnote ³

World War II took a far greater toll on civilians than the Great War, and the diagnosis of trauma was increasingly applied to children on the home front. Drawing on Freudian theories about the singular importance of emotional relationships within the family, psychoanalysts located the sources of trauma in the nursery as well as the battlefield. Many experts concluded that the separation of children from their mothers was more menacing to young children than the physical violence of war. Anna Freud (Sigmund's daughter) and Dorothy T. Burlingham, who studied the reactions of London's children to evacuation, famously concluded that while evacuated children may have been safer from the threats of bombs, infections, malnourishment, and neglect than those who remained in London, “All of the improvements in the child's life may dwindle down to nothing when weighed against the fact that it has to leave the family to get them.”Footnote ⁴

Since World War II, the term “trauma” has evolved into a loose shorthand for all varieties of psychic disturbance, but it is frequently applied to children, seen as uniquely vulnerable to psychological shock. Nicholas Stargardt has argued that by reflexively depicting children as victims of wartime trauma, historians continue to position them as passive objects, rather than potential agents or subjects of history. Trauma has become an ahistorical label disguised as historical analysis, he maintains. “Like its cultural neighbor, victimhood, trauma is often treated as a psychological—and moral—absolute. They foreclose the past, telling us what we will find before we have looked.”Footnote ⁵

When wartime and postwar humanitarian workers described the separation of children from their biological parents as a universal recipe for trauma, they bolstered the privileged legal and social status of the nuclear family after World War II. Of course, the centrality of the family to postwar reconstruction in Europe is already a familiar tale.Footnote ⁶ The baby boom, the expansion of European welfare states, and the promotion of family values in the name of a “return to normality” pervade popular images and scholarly accounts of the postwar era.Footnote ⁷ Less familiar, however, is the extent to which new forms of expert knowledge about the family developed in the context of massive displacement during and after World War II. Europe's displaced persons (DP) camps and orphanages became laboratories, where psychologists, social workers, and policy makers tested ostensibly universal theories of child development through observations of children uprooted by war and racial persecution.

This article historicizes ideals of gender and human rights by tracing the efforts of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA, 1945-47) and the International Refugee Organization (IRO, 1948-51) to rehabilitate displaced and refugee children after World War II. At first glance, this appears to be a familiar story of the triumph of individualism and human rights after World War II. British and American social workers deployed to Europe sought to apply and disseminate the individualist, psychoanalytic, and familialist visions that dominated child welfare in Great Britain and the United States in the 1940s.Footnote ⁸ Recent histories of twentieth-century Europe have typically depicted World War II as a watershed moment in the advancement of liberal, individualist values in western Europe. In response to the Nazi threat, liberal democracy, free markets, consumerism, and human rights allegedly triumphed over the more collectivist values of interwar nationalist and fascist movements. While historians of Germany have challenged this “Stunde Null” narrative, tracing continuities between Nazi and postwar German societies and governments, it remains powerful in broader European histories of democratization, human rights, and internationalism.Footnote ⁹

UNRRA and IRO relief workers certainly claimed to represent universalist and individualist values, which they contrasted with the discredited fascist ideologies of the past. By focusing on individual psychological rehabilitation, they professed to uphold the individual “best interests” and “human rights” of their clients. But a closer look at the pedagogy of rehabilitation in Europe's DP camps suggests that there were no abstract “humans” in their understanding of human rights. In practice, UN social workers defined children's individual “best interests” in highly gendered terms. They portrayed the familial collective as the essential source of children's identities and agency, and sought to reestablish traditional gender roles in the name of both individual and social rehabilitation.

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After World War II, millions of people roamed Europe in search of lost family members. In Germany, Red Cross posters featured endless rows of photos of missing children under the banner “Who Knows Our Parents and Our Origins?” The German Red Cross received more than 300,000 requests to trace missing children or parents between 1945 and 1958. The International Tracing Service, meanwhile, had traced 343,057 children by 1956.Footnote ¹⁰ Reuniting these divided families proved to be more than a challenging logistical problem. So-called unaccompanied children, those separated from their home or homeland through war, ethnic cleansing, forced labor, and murder, held a special grip on the postwar imagination. In the words of Vinita A. Lewis, an officer with the International Refugee Organization in Germany, “The lost identity of individual children is the Social Problem of the day on the continent of Europe. Even if his future destiny lies in a country other than that of his origin, he [the displaced child] is entitled to the basic Human Right of full knowledge of his background and origin.”Footnote ¹¹

The great majority of displaced persons, including children, hailed from eastern Europe. As of September 30, 1945, the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) and Soviet military forces estimated that they had provided assistance to an astounding 13,664,000 displaced persons in occupied Germany and Austria, including 7,270,000 displaced Soviet laborers and POWs; 1,610,000 Poles; 1,807,000 French nationals; 696,000 Italians; 389,000 Yugoslavs; 348,000 Czechs; and 285,000 Hungarians. The one million or so DPs who remained on German soil a year after the liberation were almost entirely east Europeans who could not or would not go home. Out of 773,248 DPs receiving UNRRA assistance in June 1946, more than half were registered as Poles (many from the eastern part of Poland annexed by the U.S.S.R. after the war).Footnote ¹²

The wartime and postwar itineraries of lost children were as varied as those of adult refugees. Many were uprooted as a result of the Nazi system of forced labor. As of August 1944, 7,615, 970 foreign workers and POWs toiled in the Third Reich. The Nazi regime introduced harsh penalties, including death, for illicit sexual relations between foreign laborers and Germans. But foreign workers and Germans lived and worked in close proximity, and the Nazi Sicherheitsdienst (SD, the Nazi intelligence service) estimated that foreign men had fathered at least 20,000 children with German women by 1942.Footnote ¹³ Approximately one-third of foreign workers toiling in wartime Germany were women. After 1943, foreign women who conceived a child in Germany were potentially subject to involuntary abortion and sterilization. Those impregnated by German men were typically allowed to bring the child to term. But if the child was deemed “Germanizable,” he or she was immediately seized for eventual adoption by a German family. Infants considered racially “unworthy” were often condemned to a slow death by neglect and starvation in an institution.Footnote ¹⁴ After the war, many forced laborers and their children remained on German territory in DP camps or in foster care. Liaisons between Germans and foreigners continued, and more children were born and then frequently abandoned in Germany when their parents repatriated or emigrated.

Displaced workers and their children were joined in occupied Germany by some twelve million Germans who were expelled from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and the Baltic States after World War II, including more than 1.5 million children under the age of fourteen.Footnote ¹⁵ Many of the children swept up in the German flight and expulsions from the east were of ambiguous national origins. As the Red Army advanced, tens of thousands of Silesian, Polish-speaking, Czech-speaking, and Slovene-speaking children were evacuated from Eastern Prussia, Silesia, the Protectorate, and Yugoslavia with German orphanages, Hitler Youth camps, and German family members. In addition, an estimated 20,000 to 50,000 east European children, mostly Polish, were deliberately kidnapped for Germanization in Lebensborn homes by the Nazi regime during the war. Nazi officials systematically changed the names of these children and destroyed their birth records.Footnote ¹⁶

Jewish children initially formed one of the smallest groups of displaced youth after the war, since the Nazis had murdered those too young to work. In 1946, Jacques Bloch of the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE), the largest Jewish child-welfare organization in France, estimated that only 175,000 European Jews under the age of sixteen had survived the war out of a prewar population of 1.5 million.Footnote ¹⁷ But the number of Jewish children on German soil quickly multiplied after the war, as some 200,000 Jews fled ongoing anti-Semitism in eastern Europe in a semi-organized underground movement (the “Bricha,” or “flight”) that peaked in the spring and summer of 1946. More than 33,600 Polish youth reached the U.S. Zone of Germany in kibbutzim (collective settlements), 7,000 of whom were unaccompanied by relatives. Jewish babies were also an increasingly common sight on German territory in 1946-47, thanks to the epic birthrate of Jewish displaced persons. In November 1946, there were reportedly 14.1 births per thousand Jewish DPs in occupied Germany, compared to 3.7 births among the German population in Bavaria. By 1946, Jewish children represented a full sixty percent of the unaccompanied children in UNRRA's assembly centers and children's homes.Footnote ¹⁸

The spectacle of large-scale displacement and destruction in postwar Europe nourished both dystopian fears about the decline of European civilization and utopian hopes for a better future. The sad physical and mental state of Europe's lost children, in particular, spawned anxieties about European families and societies in disarray. In 1946, American freemason Alice Bailey alerted the American public about “those peculiar and wild children of Europe and of China to whom the name ‘wolf children’ has been given. They have known no parental authority; they run in packs like wolves; they lack all moral sense and have no civilized values and know no sexual restrictions; they know no laws save the law of self-preservation.”Footnote ¹⁹

Such words were meant to open the pocketbooks of donors, but also reflected a consensus that World War II had destroyed the family as completely as Europe's train tracks, factories, bridges, and roads. UNESCO (the United Nations' Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization), founded in 1945, estimated that 8 million children in Germany, 6.5 million in the Soviet Union, and 1.3 million children in France remained homeless in 1946. In the summer of 1945, infant mortality was double the prewar rate in France, and nearly four times the prewar rate in Vienna. An estimated 13 million children in Europe had lost one or both parents in the war.Footnote ²⁰

UNRRA was founded in 1943 in anticipation of the immense task of reconstructing liberated Europe. In September 1945, UNRRA and other allied agencies were charged with housing, feeding, clothing, and repatriating more than six million DPs, including at least 20,000 unaccompanied children.Footnote ²¹ In the realm of child welfare, UNRRA was active primarily in the American and British zones. Although the Soviet Union belonged to the UNRRA Central Committee, the organization was barred from operating in the Soviet Zone (and the Soviet Union did not belong to the IRO). The U.S.S.R. was intent on repatriating displaced Soviet children from Germany, but in 1947, a Polish government official noted that the search, identification, and repatriation of other allied children from the Soviet Zone was conducted only “sporadically” and lacked “the character of a planned or organized program.”Footnote ²² French authorities also cooperated with UNRRA, but assumed direct responsibility for displaced children in their zones of occupation. Not only did the United States and the United Kingdom provide eighty-nine percent of the four billion dollars spent by UNRRA, but the bulk of UNRRA personnel were Anglophone. Out of 12,889 UNRRA workers in December 1946, thirty-seven percent were American, and thirty-four percent were British.Footnote ²³

As Elizabeth Borgwardt and G. Daniel Cohen have argued, UNRRA reflected Roosevelt's goal of exporting a “New Deal for the World,” as the ideals and values of New Deal Liberalism were shipped to postwar Europe along with tins of coffee, chocolate, vitamins, and cigarettes.Footnote ²⁴ In particular, social workers schooled in America's expanding federal welfare agencies brought a firm belief in the principles of casework to liberated Europe. This meant focusing on the individual situation, history, circumstances, and needs of each refugee “client.” Child-care workers also came armed with the psychoanalytic theories that informed Anglo-American social work at mid-century. Few of UNRRA's humanitarian workers were trained psychoanalysts or psychologists. But psychoanalytic theories informed their work through a general emphasis on the importance of early childhood education and maternal attachment to psychological health.

Relief work opened up new opportunities for women's activism internationally. By 1946, forty-four percent of UNRRA's employees were women. According to British relief worker Francesca Wilson, who served with Quaker missions after World War I and with UNRRA, women were particularly well suited to humanitarian work. They were “more ready for the thousand and one interruptions, make-do-and-mends and improvisations that emergency work involves but which exasperates a capable man.” She nonetheless warned that all the “unaccustomed power” of women in the field could easily intoxicate relief workers, transforming them into dictators overnight. “Obscure women in their hometowns, they exact obedience from their subjects once they are the Queens of Distressed Ruritanians.”Footnote ²⁵

Aleta Brownlee was a typical recruit. Brownlee had received an M.A. from the University of Chicago's social work school and was working as a consultant for the U.S. Children's Bureau in the western United States when she received a phone call asking if she would be interested in a job overseas. She hesitated at first, as she was a committed pacifist. But UNRRA's mission spoke to her idealism. “The first great international relief organization supported by all the United Nations, engaged in constructive, or at least reconstructive work, seemed to be something new and hopeful … I was to find it so in spite of all the frustration and difficulty encountered in my work.”Footnote ²⁶ Brownlee anticipated that her mission in Europe would last six weeks. Instead, she stayed on five years, serving as the director of the UNRRA/IRO child-welfare teams in Vienna from 1945-51.

UNRRA worker Susan Pettiss was animated by similar idealism, along with a desire to escape a troubled personal life. Pettiss grew up in Alabama, where she had also worked as a social worker for New Deal welfare agencies. She fled to the ruins of Europe to escape the ruins of her marriage. “The dramatic events on a hot summer's night in Mobile made me realize that there was no safety or future in my marriage to an alcoholic, abusive husband,” she recalled.Footnote ²⁷ Pettiss remained in Germany for three years, rising to the position of child-welfare officer in the American Zone, where she supervised the care of Jewish unaccompanied children.

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Pettiss, Brownlee, and their colleagues were charged with providing relief and rehabilitation to Europe's displaced children. But simply defining a “child” was a challenge in the postwar context, since the war had shattered perceived boundaries between childhood and adulthood. Adult refugees, for example, were persistently infantilized in the rhetoric of relief workers through the psychoanalytic concept of regression. A June 1945 manual for UNRRA workers elaborated:

The manual encouraged social workers to view adult refugees in their charge as “hurt children,” whose “demands become insatiable like a greedy baby's.”Footnote ²⁸ UNRRA workers were to guide these childlike DPs toward adult self-sufficiency by assuming the role of loving but strict parents, fulfilling refugees' perceived “need for a strong parental authority.”Footnote ²⁹

At the same time that humanitarian agencies and experts labeled adult refugees “hurt children,” they feared that actual children veered disturbingly toward adult behavior. Technically, UNRRA and IRO considered anyone under the age of seventeen to be a child. But many displaced children and youth had learned to lie systematically about their ages for the sake of survival. Austrian psychologist Ernst Papanek noted with frustration in 1946 that he could “never know how old a person really is … they ‘adjust’ age to purpose.”Footnote ³⁰ The war itself also seemed to accelerate the transition from childhood to adulthood. Years of malnourishment robbed refugee children of inches and pounds, and many appeared younger than their age. Most had missed years of schooling. But to social workers, surviving Jewish youth, in particular, often seemed disturbingly independent. French psychologist Simone Jeisler concluded in 1947, “Precocious maturity, already favored on ethnic grounds, is particularly developed by the lives of adventure they have led. Their heavy responsibilities, each holding the lives of others in his hands … do not encourage them to sit on the school bench and play innocent games once liberation arrives.”Footnote ³¹

Faced with these unchildlike children, UNRRA workers did not simply understand their mission in terms of preventing starvation and disease, though these were formidable tasks. In a shift from earlier relief efforts, post-WWII humanitarian workers saw themselves as agents of individual psychological reconstruction and rehabilitation. In June 1945, UNRRA published a report on the “Psychological Problems of Displaced Persons,” which declared, “The United Nations Administration is concerned not only with relief—that is, with the provision of material needs—but also with rehabilitation—that is, with the amelioration of psychological suffering and dislocation. For men do not live by bread alone.”Footnote ³²

This focus on psychological rehabilitation marked an important shift from earlier humanitarian efforts in Europe. The relief organizations that had mobilized to provide aid to European children during and after World War I, such as the International Red Cross, the American Friends Service Committee, the Save the Children Fund, and Herbert Hoover's American Relief Administration, had focused primarily on filling children's stomachs and providing clothing and shelter. During the Spanish Civil War, Howard Kershner even refused offers of assistance from American psychologists. A child guidance expert would not “have found much use for her talents” in Spain, he maintained. “The problems we faced were elemental. Refugee children had been living on sand, in fields, abandoned buildings, in whatever shelter could be found for them. When the struggle is to get food, clothing, and warmth enough to keep life going, the immediate problem is not one for psychological solution.”Footnote ³³

After World War II, UNRRA workers did not neglect children's material needs, but they effaced distinctions between body and mind, linking physical and psychological rehabilitation. The 1945 UNRRA report thus emphasized that feeding refugees could not be seen simply in terms of providing calories. “Food is the primal token of security. In childhood, the most potent source of reassurance that we are loved, lovable, and worthwhile, is regular and friendly satisfaction of our hunger by familiar food and drink,” UNRRA experts advised. “Hunger for security of food is only stilled after a long period of regular physical satisfaction, for the psychological consequences of starvation usually heal more slowly than the physical [consequences].”Footnote ³⁴

In the minds of humanitarian workers, UNRRA's focus on psychological rehabilitation was tightly linked to its broader individualist and democratizing ethos. Mark Mazower has observed that in postwar western Europe, “The struggle against Hitler had revealed the importance of human and civil rights. In the legal and political sphere, in other words, the trend was to reassert the primacy of the individual vis-à-vis the state.”Footnote ³⁵ This did not simply entail restricting the rights of the state to infringe upon civil liberties, however. In the realm of education and child welfare, it occasioned a campaign to mold individuals capable of standing up to the state. The Unitarian Service Committee (USC), a human-rights organization founded in 1940 in affiliation with the American Unitarian Association, even launched a “Mental Health Program” in postwar Germany, aimed explicitly at cultivating individualism among youth. Helen Fogg, who directed the program, explained, “Children and young people growing to adulthood in Germany … are, for the most part … growing up in the grip of the very attitudes and patterns, the human and psychological climate, which was a factor as powerful as the economic and political factors in the rise of a totalitarian leader. This climate currently discourages faith in the individual which is the strength of self-government.”Footnote ³⁶

A desire to strengthen the individual in postwar Europe stimulated broader debates about precisely how healthy individuals were constituted. While some reformers stressed free markets and others looked to constitutional and legal reform, many relief workers and child-welfare experts turned specifically to the family as the locus of individual identity. This focus on the family also represented a shift in emphasis from interwar pedagogical methods. In the wake of World War I in Europe, fears about juvenile delinquency, social crisis, and the breakdown of the family had inspired utopian pedagogical experiments, most of which took place in collective settings.Footnote ³⁷ Nationalist priorities also dominated social policy in interwar Europe, as politicians and social welfare experts across the continent sought to increase the quantity and racial “quality” of children through biopolitics and eugenics, and to mobilize youth in new mass political movements.Footnote ³⁸ After World War II, however, many humanitarian and political activists linked interwar practices of collective education with totalitarianism, championing education in the family in the name of democratization, individualism, and human rights.

A particular understanding of Nazism as an assault on childhood and family life animated reconstruction efforts. In 1945, the United Nations proclaimed that World War II had been a “war against children,” elaborating, “Against the security in the family, against their education and general welfare, against their very lives, the Fascists directed a deliberate campaign of destruction that has nothing to do with the incidental.”Footnote ³⁹ The notion that the Nazi regime spelled the demise of the family and of the private sphere emerged even before the war began. In 1938, Erika Mann, Thomas Mann's daughter, published an exposé of educational methods in Nazi Germany entitled School for Barbarians, in which she defined the evil of Nazism in terms of an attack on the family. “The break-up of the family is no by-product of the Nazi dictatorship, but part of the job that the regime had to do if it meant to reach its aim—the conquest of the world. If the world is to go to the Nazis, the German people must first belong to them. And for that to be true, they can't belong to anyone else—neither God, nor their families, nor themselves,” she wrote.Footnote ⁴⁰

After the war anticommunists seized on this rhetoric, linking Nazism and communism through their alleged assault on the private sphere. They reserved their harshest criticism for policies that encouraged women to work outside the home. In East Germany, women were allegedly required to send their children to state-run nursery schools to ensure “the undisturbed indoctrination of the child with the communist worldview,” argued anticommunist Käte Fiedler in 1955.Footnote ⁴¹ The popular press in the United States also reported that the family had ceased to exist in eastern Europe. In a 1950 article entitled “Communism's Child Hostages” that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, Joseph Wechsberg asserted, “Today the children in the people's democracies in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe are being turned into unthinking robots … It is the same pattern which the Nazis introduced successfully when they began to take the children away from their families. Once again there are millions of parents in Eastern Europe who have to look on, in despair and helplessness, as their own children are taken away from them.”Footnote ⁴² Within this framework, humanitarian workers in postwar Germany depicted strengthening the family as an antidote to the threat of fascism and communism alike in postwar Europe.

The scramble for a “return to normality” through family life was not simply imposed from above by politicians, social scientists, and humanitarian activists, however. Many DPs themselves looked to marriage, the family, and child rearing to reconstruct their emotional lives after the war. Reporting on displaced youth at the International Children's Center in Prien, Germany, Jean Henshaw of UNNRA observed, “In many instances the insecurity of youth and their compelling need for family and the security of human relationships finds expression in the wholesome relationships of early marriage.”Footnote ⁴³ In the DP camp at Wildflecken in Germany, UNRRA worker Kathryn Hulme was exasperated by the astonishing fertility of Polish refugees. “Like our DPs, we lived on hope, but unlike them, we had something more to do than sit around and produce babies at such a fruitful pace that soon the per capita birth rate of DP-land would exceed that of any other country except perhaps China,” she quipped.Footnote ⁴⁴ Atina Grossmann has suggested that the postwar Jewish baby boom represented a form of personal agency in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Bearing children on German territory, in German hospitals, she argues, may have constituted a gendered form of revenge.Footnote ⁴⁵

In an expression of their familialist and individualist values, United Nations' social workers pledged to uphold the “best interests of the child” as the guiding principle of child welfare. These interests were officially determined according to six criteria, including “the existence or absence of wholesome relationship between the child and its parents, foster parents, or other persons; the likelihood that the child would secure an adequate education; the physical and moral welfare of the child; the legal and economic protection of the child in relation to rights of citizenship; the wishes of a child,” and finally, “the desires of a natural parent, foster parent, or other near relative by consanguinity.” But the guidelines provided no explicit criteria for weighing these measures of well-being against one another when they conflicted.Footnote ⁴⁶

The “best interests” paradigm was itself intended to represent a break with Nazi practices of social work. Focusing on the interests of individual children implied the rejection of other possible criteria for making social welfare decisions, such as the goal of creating a master race. It also reflected a commitment to environmental determinism. The Unitarian Service Committee (USC), for example, promoted their “mental health approach” to social work as an antidote to Nazi racism, criticizing the ongoing influence of hereditary theories of delinquency among German social workers. Gunnar Dybwad explained in a 1951 USC pamphlet, “In reading German case records or talking with children's workers, one invariably encounters the term Anlage, an inherited trait or quality. Laziness, lying, stealing, and sex misconduct are all readily explained as due to the child's Anlage. With such overemphasis on biological factors there is a corresponding underemphasis on emotional values and interpersonal relationships. Criminality on the part of an uncle seems to be to the German social worker of greater significance than the quality of the emotional ties between child and parents.”Footnote ⁴⁷

Relief workers thus linked psychoanalytic methods to both individualism and democratization. In 1949, Dr. Clemens Benda, a German émigré and Harvard psychiatrist working with the USC, called for nothing less than a “Psychological Marshall Plan” in Germany.Footnote ⁴⁸ UN experts explicitly stressed the universalist assumptions at the heart of psychoanalytic principles, insisting that their methods transcended divisions of class, nation, race, language, and culture. “National groups differ in the stress they lay on various strivings or failings,” explained UNRRA psychologists in 1945. “Nevertheless, the main attributes of human personality—conscience and guilt, love and hate, rivalry and friendship, self-esteem and inferiority—are found to be surprisingly constant. Those attributes are hammered out in the experimental workshop of the family.”Footnote ⁴⁹

Psychoanalytic theories found expression in a wide array of efforts to rehabilitate displaced children and youth after the war. Following Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham, Thérèse Brosse of UNESCO argued in 1946, “It is not the actual events of war, such as bombardment and military operations, which have affected these children emotionally, with their love of adventure and their interest in destruction and movement … What does affect a child is the influence of events on emotional ties in the family … and above all, the sudden loss of mother.”Footnote ⁵⁰ UNRRA and the IRO workers translated these principles into practice not only through their efforts to reunite families, but also by privileging foster care and family placement over collective placement for refugee children. Journalist Dorothy Macardle reported that UNRRA experts “are very generally in accord with Dr. Anna Freud in the conclusion she has expressed repeatedly; that for little children even a mediocre family home is better than the best of communal nurseries.”Footnote ⁵¹

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While many UNRRA workers jumped on the Freudian bandwagon, not everyone was convinced that the family represented the salvation of Europe. On the ground, the familialist visions of UNRRA workers conflicted with the more collectivist visions of continental European policy makers and pedagogues. Familialist solutions posed particular problems for Jewish children who had neither families nor physical homes to return to.Footnote ⁵² The emerging conflict between familialist and collectivist visions for the rehabilitation of Europe's children was perhaps most forcefully articulated in the work and writings of Ernst Papanek, a prominent Austrian socialist and Adlerian psychologist. During the war, Papanek directed homes for Jewish refugee children for the OSE. After the war he also led USC efforts on behalf of displaced children in Europe. While Anna Freud typically portrayed the separation of children from their mothers as a universal recipe for psychological dysfunction, Papanek countered that for Jewish refugees, the collectivity of children's homes represented a precious oasis of security:

Papanek was convinced that because Jewish children had been persecuted as members of a group, they required a therapeutic community of their peers to recover from their wartime experiences. “Group treatment is always indicated where mass neurosis has been created by a trauma suffered by many in common with many,” he insisted.Footnote ⁵⁴ “It will not be sufficient to place the refugee child in a nice, decent, family home. More than any other child, he must gain anew the feeling that he is accepted, that he is a member of a group.”Footnote ⁵⁵ At a deeper level, these views reflected Papanek's training as an Adlerian psychologist. In contrast to the Freudian view of society as an authority “whose authority we fear and for which we have undertaken so many repressions,” Papanek explained, the Adlerian school held that “only the community can make a human being out of an organism… . What kind of human being one becomes is not biologically predestined.”Footnote ⁵⁶

Papanek fled to the United States in 1940. In New York, he discovered that his communitarian orientation clashed with the psychoanalytic approach favored by American social workers. Papanek recalled a 1942 lecture at the New York School of Social Work where he was savagely attacked. “I wasn't aware that the word institution had such an unfortunate connotation in this country—probably because it brought to mind the word institutionalization, a word which had no counterpart in Europe. ‘This is not the American way!’ they shouted at me. In America, children were sent to institutions only as a punishment or because of a conspicuous inability to cope with life on the outside … The home is the only sacred institution in America. I should have understood that.”Footnote ⁵⁷

In 1943 Papanek conducted extensive research with child refugees from Europe and attempted to survey their attitudes toward their fresh experiences of displacement. Unsurprisingly, many of these young refugees expressed feelings of homesickness and deep anxiety about their families' safety. A surprising number, however, had positive feelings about their experiences of emigration and collective education.Footnote ⁵⁸ In response to the question “how did you feel when you left your home country?,” one sixteen-year-old Austrian boy wrote, “I felt curious as to what the rest of the world was like. I was rather glad that we had to leave, because I thought were it not for Hitler's invasion, I would never have been able to see the world.” Others praised their experiences in OSE homes. An eleven-year-old Austrian girl explained, “What I like is that no differences are made between the one or the other. Everybody rises at the same time in the morning, everybody eats the same food; whether one is rich or poor, that is the same. And I love to be among other children.” An eighteen-year-old German simply insisted, “Every child should be in an institution for some period!”Footnote ⁵⁹

American social workers meanwhile reported frustration with European refugee youth who resisted their “individualist” approach to child welfare. In 1948, Deborah Portnoy, a field representative with European Jewish Children's Aid (EJCA), an American agency that sponsored refugee youth from Europe, remarked, “The case worker tries to individualize but the European adolescents react as a group. They still retain their ‘herd’ psychology.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Through trial and error, the EJCA gradually concluded that refugee children placed with family members in the U.S. often experienced a more difficult adjustment than those placed in group homes. By 1948, EJCA noted that a full one-third to one-half of placements with relatives in the U.S. failed.Footnote ⁶¹

Many east European DP activists and representatives of Jewish agencies meanwhile insisted that refugee children were actually better off in separate camps or children's homes than with their parents in refugee camps. In Munich in 1945, Yugoslav leaders demanded that 1,000 displaced children in the American Zone of Germany be removed from their parents in DP camps and placed in special children's homes. “These children have to live in big common rooms, not only with their parents, but also with strangers, in promiscuous company where couples are living in concubinage, where drinking and playing cards are the order of the day, as well as depravation, black market activities, and eternal quarrels … The only means of protecting our youth against such a future consists in creating a camp, reserved for them, where they could be educated physically, morally, and intellectually,” they insisted.Footnote ⁶² In early 1947, meanwhile, Ruth Cohen, representing the Jewish Agency for Palestine (JAFP), urged UNRRA officials to reconsider their policy of reuniting Jewish children with their parents in DP camps “because reuniting a child … with his parents or relatives … means sending that child into what we know at home as slum conditions.”Footnote ⁶³

Conflicts over the relative merits of collective versus family placement for Jewish refugee children erupted in a heated debate at a 1947 meeting of the UNRRA's Jewish Child Care Committee in Heidelberg. Although UNRRA and IRO provided resources for the care of Jewish displaced children and orphans, Jewish agencies such as the American Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) and the Jewish Agency for Palestine were accorded a great deal of authority over the children's education and placement. Like Cohen, many Jewish relief workers insisted that displaced children were better off in children's homes or in kibbutzim headed toward Palestine than with their relatives. A representative of the JDC argued at the meeting, “The group leaders give the children the kind of security they need and are much better for the children than a disturbed mother and father in a DP camp.” UNRRA officers were initially unsympathetic to such arguments. With respect to Jewish children, Cornelia Heise from UNRRA countered, “The general thinking in child welfare is that the family is one of the most important values in the children's life, and that everything should be done to keep families together.”Footnote ⁶⁴ In response to the Yugoslav complaint, UNNRA Child Welfare Officer Eileen Davidson admonished parents to take more personal responsibility for their children: “Yugoslav parents … should themselves accept the responsibility of bringing about a better atmosphere for their children … a spirit of self-help must exist within the community.”Footnote ⁶⁵

But gradually, faced with Jewish children who had no families to return to, many UNRRA workers themselves became convinced of the need for collectivist and Zionist solutions. On the one hand, social workers encountered Jewish youth who themselves passionately wished to emigrate to Palestine. Louise Pinsky wrote of the 500 Jewish children she cared for in Germany in 1946, “The children are all Zionists and all, without exception, wish and hope to get to Palestine … Although not with parents, the children do get affection from the group. They live a collective life which they intend to pursue in Palestine. They work, and they love it. It is not at all like an institution.”Footnote ⁶⁶ As Avinoam Patt has shown, American authorities also came to support the education of youth in kibbutzim and hakhsharot (agricultural training farms) for pragmatic reasons. Removing Jewish youth to training farms freed up space in overcrowded DP camps. But kibbutzim and training farms also seemed to serve a valuable rehabilitative function. Jack Whiting, UNRRA zone director, thus insisted that farm labor represented a potential antidote to a perceived epidemic of “petty thieving, black marketeering, loose morals, etc.” among DP youth.Footnote ⁶⁷

*  *  *

Privately, many UNRRA and IRO child-care workers also harbored doubts about the restorative value of the family for refugee youth. Hence, at the same time that they idealized the family as the key to postwar rehabilitation, relief workers were skeptical about the ability of actual displaced parents (especially mothers) to care for their children. “In the life of distress they [female DPs] have led in the past few years, maternal instinct has suffered a serious decline,” lamented IRO Child Care Officer Yvonne de Jong in June of 1948.Footnote ⁶⁸ “Isolated cases are met within which the infant has been put to death; more in which gross neglect, e.g., by starvation, has taken place, and considerably more in which the child has been abandoned or the mother has expressed the wish to divest herself of responsibility for him,” warned another 1946 report.Footnote ⁶⁹

Concerns about the maternal capabilities of DP women inspired gendered rehabilitation programs that focused specifically on cultivating domesticity among refugee girls and women. These programs reflected the widespread conviction that women's wartime experiences in camps, ghettos, and barracks were not simply dehumanizing—they were profoundly defeminizing.Footnote ⁷⁰ To some observers, women's experiences represented gender-specific forms of trauma. Others saw women's alleged defeminization in wartime camps and barracks as a threatening source of social disorder. In either case, however, the treatment entailed “restoring” gender distinctions in the name of individual and social rehabilitation.

Social workers often cited the lamentable hygienic conditions and absence of privacy in wartime ghettos, camps, and labor barracks as particularly degrading to women. French and Belgian officials were especially concerned about the moral and sexual virtue of female workers, and they circulated sensational reports of alleged orgies with Russian men and babies tossed into trash cans. “There are dirty women in the barracks … they sleep in their dresses, never wash, and the reason is that there are no towels, no soap, and no hot water in the camp; the bathrooms are shared with Russian men, and morale is very low,” reported one factory worker. After the war, a French social worker in Berlin despaired, “Maternal instinct among some of these creatures is completely dead … The sale of children to the Germans is a frequent practice, and according to the latest information, a child is worth 700 marks.”Footnote ⁷¹

Inside the Jewish ghetto of Terezín during the war, Edith Ornstein, a German-Jewish woman who managed the conscription of female labor, delivered a 1944 lecture in which she analyzed the responses of middle-class Jewish women to ghetto life and forced labor. Based on her observations, Ornstein derived broader conclusions about women's response to trauma and the desirability of female employment outside the home. In Terezín, women were initially separated from their male family members, causing depression, apathy, and “hysterical outbursts,” she recalled. Many women “let themselves go” physically and emotionally in their despair. But those who preserved some semblance of family life and maintained a feminine appearance fared better than others, she reported. “It seemed as if the majority of women lost all interest in life … These conditions were unbearable for all of us. It was necessary to shake women out of their lethargy… . we attempted, as much as possible, to take care of our appearances, and through our example to show that even under these living conditions, one should not lose their bearings.”

While suggesting that women cultivate their femininity as a survival strategy, Ornstein viewed the conscription of female labor in the ghetto as a positive experiment. Forced labor was a harsh shock to many of the middle-class women interned in the ghetto who were accustomed to living as “small queens” in their own households, she observed. Most, however, gradually adapted to the discipline of camp labor. Working outside the home, she argued, actually rendered the women in the ghetto “more self-conscious, more secure, and more independent.” She speculated, in conclusion, “Has their femininity thereby been damaged? That will be for future social orders to decide.”Footnote ⁷²

As early as 1944, international activists generally agreed that displaced women would require gendered forms of rehabilitation to redress their wartime experiences. Within UNRRA, a special working group formed to plan for the distinct needs of repatriated women and girls. This group linked the refeminization of former camp inmates and forced laborers to a broader struggle for democratization. “In some important respects it will provide an opportunity to demonstrate the contrast with Nazi philosophy which has not held women in high esteem,” the report elaborated. Female rehabilitation was to begin with housework. “In arrangements for housing, for the preparation and serving of food, and for occupational activities it may be possible to find many useful outlets for women's domestic interests which will have an important rehabilitative effect.” Displaced women were also to be rehabilitated from wartime trauma through the distribution of sewing equipment and makeup and the provision of private sleeping quarters and toilets:

UNRRA implemented a similar regime of gendered rehabilitation in IRO children's camps after the war. In June 1946, officials with the USC toured UNRRA child-welfare centers and suggested that UNRRA bring social workers into the camps to stimulate “the often repressed and perverted instincts of motherhood and family life” among refugee youth.Footnote ⁷⁴ In 1948, IRO Child Care Officer Vinita Lewis introduced home economics courses at the Aglasterhausen Children's Camp in Germany, where she diagnosed an alarming lack of domestic skills among refugee girls:

These rehabilitation programs reflected the sharply gendered dimensions of humanitarian and human-rights activism after World War II, as well as the gendered limits of postwar “individualism.” At the same time that child-welfare activists invested the family with utopian potential to renew European societies, they condemned actual DP families as dystopian sites of dysfunction. Within this framework, restoring psychological stability to individual girls—and political stability to war-torn Europe—required anchoring women firmly in the home.

Anxieties about displaced girls' maternal instincts also reflected a broader moral panic about the effects of displacement on youth, and by extension, on European civilization. Ernst Papanek speculated shortly after the war's end, “Morals and mores, the relation between the sexes, the rights and duties of the individual in normal society—all these will have to be learned from the beginning by children and young people who have grown accustomed to an utterly abnormal life under terror and fear. Drives that human society has sublimated in the course of thousands of years have resumed their bestial form in these youngsters.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Throughout postwar Europe, pedagogical activists worried that children had been deeply corrupted by the topsy-turvy moral universe of the battlefield, the home front, the black market, and the concentration camp. Many expressed a deep pessimism about the possibility for psychological (as opposed to physical) recovery for European children and youth.Footnote ⁷⁷

Jewish children and adolescents, in particular, were widely reported to be deeply suspicious of all authority. The Jewish youth returning from Buchenwald appeared to be in good physical condition after lavish feeding by their American liberators, but deep psychological scars marked their souls, reported Robert Job from the OSE.

Jean Henshaw of UNNRA echoed these observations in more critical terms. “Poor work attitudes, cheating, lack of respect for personal property of others, acquisitiveness, occasional forgery and deceit, extremes of aggressiveness and shyness, and abnormal sex behavior often mark their conduct,” she concluded after a visit to Jewish children in the International Children's Center at Prien in 1947.Footnote ⁷⁹

Several American and British social workers ultimately blamed the failure of individual refugee children to regain their bearings on the children themselves. They used such cases to affirm the validity of universalist, psychoanalytic principles of personality development. In this view, all refugees had suffered during the war. But some did not recover psychologically. Child-welfare experts cited early childhood experiences to explain cases of failed rehabilitation. In 1948, Marcel Kovarsky, executive director of the Jewish Child Welfare Association in St. Louis, reported his frustrating experiences with Anna, a seventeen-year-old Czech-Jewish concentration camp survivor. Anna's inability to adapt to life in St. Louis, Kovarsky argued, was not the product of her traumatic experiences in concentration camps, but rather of her pampered early childhood.

Anna, in short, was more a victim of bad parenting than of Hitler. Robert Collis, an Irish pediatrician who cared for 500 children liberated from the Belsen concentration camp, drew similar conclusions. He observed “the most unexpected difference in reaction between individual children who had undergone … the same mental trauma and loss of security” and looked to children's early experiences of maternal attachment to explain these differences. “It has been said that a child who has experienced an unsatisfactory sucking at the breast, perhaps associated with an unhappy weaning, may show in later life symptoms usually associated with loss of security and rejection, while a child satisfactorily breast-fed and happily weaned will show characteristics of self-reliance and poise,” he explained. “I got the impression from the study of many of these children that the factor of their early home life had a very important influence upon their reactions later, when their parents were killed, their homes destroyed, and they themselves exposed to horror in its most extreme form.”Footnote ⁸¹

Activism around displaced and refugee children ultimately became a forum for more fundamental debates about the nature of trauma, the psychological consequences of separating children from parents, the value of familial versus collective education, and the nature of human development. After World War II, Hannah Arendt famously observed that the refugee camps of interwar Europe had exposed the limits of the universal ideal of “human rights.” She concluded that such rights were nothing but empty promises to displaced persons who lacked national citizenship. “The conception of human rights, based upon the assumed existence of human beings as such, broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships—except that they were still human,” she maintained.Footnote ⁸² Humanitarian and human-rights activists responded to the perceived failures of the interwar system of minority protection after World War II by promoting new ideals of individual human rights and liberal democracy in Europe. UNRRA and IRO social workers, in particular, advanced an individualist vision of psychological rehabilitation, deploying psychoanalytic methods in the name of a radical break with the fascist past.

But Arendt's insight applied to the postwar world of the DP camp and the orphanage as well as to the interwar refugee camp. The allocation of “human rights” in postwar Europe was not only dependent on national citizenship, moreover, but also on hierarchies of gender and age. UNRRA and IRO social workers in particular understood the “individual” in gendered, age-specific, and ethnic terms. They could not imagine healthy psychological development outside the social context of the family, which they saw as the essential source of children's agency and identity. The reunification of families divided by war was therefore at the very heart of postwar humanitarian work in Europe. Humanitarian workers sought to return both “lost children” and women to the family after World War II in the name of individual psychological rehabilitation and the reconstruction of European democracies. In the process, they institutionalized a deeply gendered vision of humanitarianism and human rights: one in which the family, rather than the individual, was the privileged subject and object of human-rights activism.

At first glance, this turn toward psychological rehabilitation seems to represent a more ambitious, individualist, and holistic vision of humanitarian relief. But the psychological turn also presaged a conservative and at times defeatist ethic among humanitarian workers. Above all, work with displaced children hardened a conviction that emotional deprivation within the family was more harmful to children's well-being than social dislocation outside the family. The 1940s were therefore not simply the apex of “high modernism” in Europe, of wild and dangerous government schemes to engineer human populations and societies.Footnote ⁸³ The postwar years also marked the beginning of a radical retreat from interventionist social policies in the name of parental rights and children's psychological welfare. When humanitarian workers began to define their mission in psychological terms and to insist that children's well-being could only be served in their family of origins, they affirmed a colonialist conceit: that the “trauma” of crossing class boundaries, lines of kinship, or cultural frontiers was so great that children were best off consigned to the milieu into which they were born. If the worst threat to a child was familial separation, “rescuing” a child from poverty, violence, war, or political persecution had become a highly perilous venture.