World War 2

Includes letters referencing the work of the Society of Friends in Vienna

The UN have digitised many items from their collections, which include the archives of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. There are many reports on the work of the FRS, FAU, FCRA and AFSC, and correspondence with workers.

Conscientious Objectors of the Second World War

Laure Humbert introduces her research and discusses this question with Jill Geber, Project Archivist at the Friends House Library, London As I embark on this new AHRC-funded project with Bertrand T…

Since 2001, National Holocaust Memorial Day has been commemorated in the UK on January 27 – the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the

The Wiener Library holds many personal accounts of children evacuated from Nazi Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia between December 1938 and September

Following the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, relief workers and medical staff entered the camp to provide emergency...

Chapter 10

The enormous increase, since 1939, of war nurseries and nursery classes has led many novices to try their hands at toy-making in order to help equip these...

Digitized by Google.

45 p. : 23 cm

10, 000 children, the majority of whom were Jewish, were brought to Britain from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland to escape persecution by the Nazis between 1 December 1938 and 1 Septemb…

The following is a repost of a blog post by Rhoda Howard-Hassmann, coeditor with Margaret Walton-Roberts of The Human Right to Citizenship: A Slippery

viii, 199 pages ; 22 cm

Content warning: images of starving children and adults.

x, 62 pages : 28 cm

Since 2006 the Library has been involved in a collaborative microfilming project with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). The Museum, based in Washington DC, is the most comprehensive institu…

THE MISSING CHAPTER: HOW THE BRITISH QUAKERS HELPED TO SAVE THE JEWS OF GERMANY AND AUSTRIA FROM NAZI PERSECUTION by JENNIFER TAYLOR October 2009

For Women’s History Month, we look at the lives of three remarkable women of the 20th  century – Joan Mary Fry, Elizabeth Fox Howard and Francesca Wilson. Each of them in their own way respon…

Yesterday marked the the 70th anniversary of the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Friends Service Council and American Friends Service Committee, representing British and Americans Quakers …

Last week saw the 80th anniversary of the November Pogrom in Germany and Austria, now known as Kristallnacht. This outburst of anti-Semitic violence happened over the night of the 9th/10th of Novem…

In the week that many have been commemorating the start of World War II 80 years ago, we have some news to share about an exciting new project to open access to some of our key collections from tha…

This year there are several anniversaries coming up, but some of the most poignant, and perhaps relevant in today’s world, are the 75th anniversaries of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. …

I joined Friends House Library in January 2020 as Project Archivist.  Over the next 2 years I will be working on a Wellcome Trust Funded project to catalogue the World War Two archives of Friends A…

62 pages ; 19 cm

This thesis details the previously under-acknowledged work of British Quakers with refugees from fascism in the period leading up to the Second World War. This work can be characterised as distinctly Quaker in origin, complex in organisation and grassroots in implementation. The first chapter establishes how interwar British Quakers were able to mobilise existing networks and values of humanitarian intervention to respond rapidly to the European humanitarian crisis presented by fascism. The Spanish Civil War saw the lines between legal social work and illegal resistance become blurred, forcing British Quaker workers to question their own and their country’s official neutrality in the face of fascism. The second chapter draws attention to both the official structures and the unofficial responses of humanitarian workers. Female domestic servants were the largest professional category of refugees from fascism to enter Britain. Their refuge was largely negotiated by other women, which has not been acknowledged. In the third chapter, I focus on intimate histories to approach a gendered analysis of humanitarian intervention. Finally, I argue that the Kindertransport, in which Quaker leadership was essential, represents the culmination of the interwar voluntary tradition and should be seen as the product of a complex, inter-agency effort. I argue that the Quaker work was hugely significant as a humanitarian endeavour in its own right. Beyond this evident and momentous impact, the Quaker work should be seen as a case study for the changing role of both voluntarism and humanitarianism between the wars. This dissertation illustrates the ways in which the interwar period saw both the professionalization of the humanitarian sector, and an increasing recognition that governments had to support private charities in their humanitarian responses to international crises.