Central European History 44 (2011), 3762.

Conference Group for Central European History of the American

Historical Association, 2011
doi:10.1017/S0008938910001172

The Psychological Marshall Plan:

Displacement, Gender, and Human Rights after
World War II
Tara Zahra

N 1940, Howard Kershner, director of European relief for the American

I 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.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 Kershners 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 human-
itarian 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

1
Howard Kershner, American Friends Service Committee in France, December 31, 1940, 3,
American Friends Service Committee Archives, Reel 73, Box 61, folder 55, United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum and Archive (USHMMA).

37
38 TARA ZAHRA

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 uni-
versal human rights.
The tensions between the universalist rhetoric of human rights and the gen-
dered 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, institution-
alizes 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.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 vulner-
ability 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 univer-
sal 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 neuro-
logical condition in Great Britain in the 1860s and 1870s to describe the disturb-
ing 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

2
Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United
Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: A Recent
History of Human Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), chapter 1; Lynn Festa,
Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2006).
 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL MARSHALL PLAN 39
condition afflicting soldiers. Paul Lerner has argued that in Germany, the war pre-
cipitated 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 attrib-
uted traumatic symptoms to the weakness, fear, or laziness of the soldiers
afflicted.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 (Sigmunds daughter) and Dorothy
T. Burlingham, who studied the reactions of Londons 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 childs life may dwindle
down to nothing when weighed against the fact that it has to leave the family
to get them.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 main-
tains. Like its cultural neighbor, victimhood, trauma is often treated as a
psychologicaland moralabsolute. They foreclose the past, telling us what
we will find before we have looked.5
When wartime and postwar humanitarian workers described the separation of
children from their biological parents as a universal recipe for trauma, they bol-
stered 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.6 The baby boom, the expansion of European

3
Paul Lerner, Hysterical Men: War, Psychiatry, and the Politics of Trauma in Germany, 18901930
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 2430; Allen Young, A Harmony of Illusions: Inventing
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).
4
Anna Freud and Dorothy T. Burlingham, War and Children (New York: War Medical Books,
1943), 45.
5
Nicholas Stargardt, Witnesses of War: Childrens Lives under the Nazis (London: Jonathan Cape,
2005), 910, 3702, quotation 9.
6
On the family and the reconstruction, see Robert G. Moeller, Protecting Motherhood: Women and
the Politics of Postwar West Germany (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993); Erica
Carter, How German is She? Postwar West German Reconstruction and the Consuming Woman
40 TARA ZAHRA

welfare states, and the promotion of family values in the name of a return to nor-
mality pervade popular images and scholarly accounts of the postwar era.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. Europes displaced persons (DP) camps and orphanages became
laboratories, where psychologists, social workers, and policy makers tested osten-
sibly 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 reha-
bilitate 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.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 col-
lectivist 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

(Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997); Elizabeth Heineman, What Difference Does a
Husband Make? Women and Marital Status in Nazi and Postwar Germany (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1999); Dagmar Herzog, Sex After Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century
Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Heide Fehrenbach, Race After Hitler:
Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2005); Donna Harsch, Revenge of the Domestic: Women, the Family, and Communism in the German
Democratic Republic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); Elaine Tyler May, Homeward
Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988); Carola Sachse, Der
Hausarbeitstag. Gerechtigkeit und Gleichberechtigung in Ost und West 19391994 (Gttingen: Wallstein,
2002).
7
On the return to normality, see Richard Bessel and Dirk Schumann, eds., Life After Death:
Approaches to a Cultural and Social History of Europe During the 1940s and 1950s (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003).
8
On American psychoanalysis and social work in the 1940s, see Nathan Hale, The Rise and Crisis of
Psychoanalysis in the United States: Freud and the Americans, 19171985 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1995). On British psychoanalysis, see Laura Lee Downs, A Very British Revolution?
Lvacuation des enfants urbains vers les campagnes anglaises, 19391945, Vingtime Sicle 89
(2006): 4760; Denise Riley, War in the Nursery: Theories of the Child and the Mother (London:
Virago, 1983).
 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL MARSHALL PLAN 41
powerful in broader European histories of democratization, human rights, and
internationalism.9
UNRRA and IRO relief workers certainly claimed to represent universalist
and individualist values, which they contrasted with the discredited fascist ideol-
ogies of the past. By focusing on individual psychological rehabilitation, they pro-
fessed to uphold the individual best interests and human rights of their
clients. But a closer look at the pedagogy of rehabilitation in Europes DP
camps suggests that there were no abstract humans in their understanding of
human rights. In practice, UN social workers defined childrens individual
best interests in highly gendered terms. They portrayed the familial collective
as the essential source of childrens identities and agency, and sought to reestablish
traditional gender roles in the name of both individual and social rehabilitation.

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 chil-
dren or parents between 1945 and 1958. The International Tracing Service, mean-
while, had traced 343,057 children by 1956.10 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 cleans-
ing, 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.11

9
For narratives emphasizing the triumph of individualism in postwar West European politics, see
Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005), 56465; Paul
Lauren, The Evolution of International Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1996); Mark Mazower, The Strange Triumph of Human Rights, 19331950, The Historical
Journal 47, no. 2 (2004): 38688; A. W. Brian Simpson, Human Rights and the End of Empire: Britain
and the Genesis of the European Convention (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 157220. For
an overview of the Stunde Null debate, see Robert G. Moeller, Introduction: Writing the
History of West Germany, in West Germany under Reconstruction: Politics, Culture, and Society in the
Adenauer Era, ed. Robert G. Moeller (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 630.
For a recent reassertion of the Stunde Null argument, see Richard Bessel, Germany 1945: From War
to Peace (New York: Harper, 2009).
10
Der DRK Kindersuchdienst, sein Problem und dessen Erledigung, September 30, 1958,
B 106/24431, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. For ITS numbers, see Louise Holborn, The International
Refugee Organization: A Specialized Agency of the United Nations, its History and its Work (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1956), 502.
11
Policy on Unaccompanied Children, May 27, 1949, 43/AJ/926, Archives nationales, Paris (AN).
42 TARA ZAHRA

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 occu-
pied 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).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 1942.13
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.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

12
Malcolm Proudfoot, European Refugees, 193952: A Study in Forced Population Movement (London:
Faber & Faber, 1957), 159, 228, 259; Bessel, Germany 1945, 256.
13
Heineman, What Difference Does a Husband Make?, 5659.
14
Atina Grossmann, Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control & Abortion Reform,
19201950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 152; Ulrich Herbert, Hitlers Foreign Workers:
Enforced Foreign Labor under the Third Reich, trans. William Templer (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997), 12792; Georg Lilienthal, Der Lebensborn e.V. Ein Instrument nationalsoziali-
stischer Rassenpolitik (Mainz: Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, 1985).
 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL MARSHALL PLAN 43
more than 1.5 million children under the age of fourteen.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 or-
phanages, Hitler Youth camps, and German family members. In addition, an esti-
mated 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.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.17 But the number of Jewish children on German soil quickly mul-
tiplied 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 increas-
ingly 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 UNRRAs assembly centers
and childrens homes.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 Europes
lost children, in particular, spawned anxieties about European families and

15
See Jacques Vernant, The Refugee in the Postwar World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1953), 101, 180.
16
Isabel Heinemann, Rasse, Siedlung, deutsches Blut. Die Rasse und Siedlungshauptamt der SS und die
rassenpolitische Neuordnung Europas (Gttingen: Wallstein, 2003), 508509.
17
Deborah Dwork, Children with a Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1993), 274275.
18
Proudfoot, European Refugees, 267. On the Jewish baby boom, see Atina Grossmann, Jews,
Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2007), 184236. On Zionist youth, see Avinoam Patt, Finding Home and Homeland: Jewish
Youth and Zionism in the Aftermath of the Holocaust (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press,
2009), 98, 211 for numbers.
44 TARA ZAHRA

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.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 Europes
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.20
UNRRA was founded in 1943 in anticipation of the immense task of recon-
structing 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.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.22 French author-
ities also cooperated with UNRRA, but assumed direct responsibility for dis-
placed 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.23

19
Alice Bailey, The Problems of the Children in the World Today: Essentials of Post War Education
(New York: Lucis, 1946), 910.
20
For statistics, see Thrse Brosse, War-Handicapped Children: Report on the European Situation (Paris:
UNESCO, 1950); Judt, Postwar, 22.
21
Office of Statistics and Operational Reports, Unaccompanied Children in Austria and
Germany, April 29, 1948, 43/AJ/604, AN.
22
Akcja Poszukiwania I Rewindikacja Dzieci w Strefie Sowieckiej, 1947, Folder 30, Delegatura
Polski Czerwony Krzyz na Niemcy, Archiwum Akt Nowych, Warsaw.
23
The U.S. footed approximately seventy-three percent of UNRRAs bill, and the U.K. contrib-
uted around sixteen percent. George Woodbridge, UNRRA: The History of the United Nations Relief
 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL MARSHALL PLAN 45
As Elizabeth Borgwardt and G. Daniel Cohen have argued, UNRRA reflected
Roosevelts 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.24 In particular, social workers
schooled in Americas 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 UNRRAs
humanitarian workers were trained psychoanalysts or psychologists. But psycho-
analytic theories informed their work through a general emphasis on the impor-
tance of early childhood education and maternal attachment to psychological
health.
Relief work opened up new opportunities for womens activism internation-
ally. By 1946, forty-four percent of UNRRAs 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.25
Aleta Brownlee was a typical recruit. Brownlee had received an M.A. from the
University of Chicagos social work school and was working as a consultant for
the U.S. Childrens 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 UNRRAs mission spoke to her ideal-
ism. 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 Rehabilitation Administration (New York: Columbia University Press, 1950), 417, 418; William
Hitchcock, The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe (New York: Free
Press, 2008), 220; Ben Shepard, Becoming Planning Minded: The Theory and Practice of
Relief, 194045, Journal of Contemporary History 43 (July 2008): 411.
24
G. Daniel Cohen, Between Relief and Politics: Refugee Humanitarianism in Occupied
Germany, 194546, Journal of Contemporary History 43 (July 2008): 437; Elizabeth Borgwardt, A
New Deal for the World: Americas Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2005).
25
Francesca Wilson, In the Margins of Chaos: Recollections of Relief Work in and Between Three Wars
(New York: Macmillan, 1945), 304.
46 TARA ZAHRA

and difficulty encountered in my work.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 summers night in Mobile made me realize that there was no safety or
future in my marriage to an alcoholic, abusive husband, she recalled.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 unaccom-
panied children.

Pettiss, Brownlee, and their colleagues were charged with providing relief and
rehabilitation to Europes displaced children. But simply defining a child was
a challenge in the postwar context, since the war had shattered perceived bound-
aries between childhood and adulthood. Adult refugees, for example, were per-
sistently infantilized in the rhetoric of relief workers through the psychoanalytic
concept of regression. A June 1945 manual for UNRRA workers elaborated:
The most characteristic personality change of people under circumstances of
severe emotional strain is regression. By regression we understand falling back
to earlier, more primitive, and, for example, infantile habits. The loss of
cultural decorum is one of the first symptoms one can observe in displaced
persons They wash themselves less, do not look after their own clothes,
they appear more ragged than need be under the circumstances Finally,
their behavior becomes rougher and more childish.
The manual encouraged social workers to view adult refugees in their charge as
hurt children, whose demands become insatiable like a greedy babys.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.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

26
Aleta Brownlee, Whose Children?, Folder 1, Box 9, Aleta Brownlee Collection, Hoover
Archive (HA), Stanford University.
27
Susan T. Pettiss with Lynne Taylor, After the Shooting Stopped: The Story of an UNRRA Welfare
Worker in Germany, 194547 (Victoria, BC: Trafford, 2004), 8.
28
UNRRA, Psychological Problems of Displaced Persons, June 4, 1945, Cooperation with
Other Relief Organizations, Wiener Library.
29
Ibid., 38.
 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL MARSHALL PLAN 47
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.30 The war itself also seemed
to accelerate the transition from childhood to adulthood. Years of malnourish-
ment 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 inde-
pendent. 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.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 recon-
struction 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 reliefthat is, with the pro-
vision of material needsbut also with rehabilitationthat is, with the ameliora-
tion of psychological suffering and dislocation. For men do not live by bread
alone.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 Hoovers American Relief Administration,
had focused primarily on filling childrens 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.33

30
Diary entry for June 27, 1946, Bergen-Belsen, Papanek Europe Tour, F-13, Ernst Papanek
Collection, International Institute for Social History (hereafter IISH), Amsterdam.
31
Simone M. Jeisler, Rponse lenqute sur les effets psychologiques de la guerre sur les enfants et
jeunes en France, Sauvegarde 8 (February 1947): 12.
32
UNRRA, Psychological Problems, 1.
33
Howard Kerschner, Quaker Service in Modern War (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1950), 156.
48 TARA ZAHRA

After World War II, UNRRA workers did not neglect childrens 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 sat-
isfaction 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].34
In the minds of humanitarian workers, UNRRAs 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--vis the state.35 This did not simply entail restrict-
ing 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 adult-
hood 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.36
A desire to strengthen the individual in postwar Europe stimulated broader
debates about precisely how healthy individuals were constituted. While some re-
formers 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

34
UNRRA, Psychological Problems, 3435.
35
Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europes Twentieth Century (New York: Knopf, 1999), 191.
36
Unitarian Service Committee (USC) Child & Youth Programs, Helen Fogg Child Care Program
Prospectus 1951, 2, bMS-16036-3, Unitarian Service Committee Archive (hereafter USC), Andover
Theological Library (ATL), Cambridge, MA.
 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL MARSHALL PLAN 49
in collective settings.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.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 secu-
rity 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.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 Manns daughter, published an expos
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 aimthe 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 cant belong to anyone else
neither God, nor their families, nor themselves, she wrote.40
After the war anticommunists seized on this rhetoric, linking Nazism and com-
munism through their alleged assault on the private sphere. They reserved their
harshest criticism for policies that encouraged women to work outside the

37
Elizabeth Harvey, Youth and the Welfare State in Weimar Germany (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1994); Edward Ross Dickinson, The Politics of German Child Welfare from the Empire to the
Federal Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); Lisa Kirschenbaum, Small
Comrades: Revolutionizing Childhood in Soviet Russia, 19171932 (New York: Routledge, 2001);
Laura Lee Downs, Childhood in the Promised Land: Working-Class Movements and the Colonies de
Vacances in France, 18801960 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); Dagmar Reese,
Growing up Female in Nazi Germany, trans. William Templer (Ann Arbor, MI: University of
Michigan Press, 2006); Dagmar Reese, ed., Die BDM Generation. Weibliche Jugendliche in Deutschland
und sterreich im Nationalsozialismus (Berlin: Verlag fr Berlin-Brandenburg, 2007); Tara Zahra,
Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 190048
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008).
38
On interwar eugenics in Europe, see Atina Grossmann, Reforming Sex; Paul Weindling and M.
Turda, eds., Blood and Homeland: Eugenics and Racial Nationalism in Central and Southeast Europe,
19001940 (New York: Central European University Press, 2006); Maria Bucur, Eugenics and
Modernization in Interwar Romania (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002); Elisa
Camiscioli, Reproducing the French Race: Immigration, Intimacy, and Embodiment in the Early Twentieth
Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).
39
Todays Children, Tomorrows Hope: The Story of Children in the Occupied Lands (London: United
Nations Information Organization, 1945), 3.
40
Erika Mann, School for Barbarians (New York: Modern Age Books, 1938), 29.
50 TARA ZAHRA

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 Kte Fiedler in
1955.41 The popular press in the United States also reported that the family
had ceased to exist in eastern Europe. In a 1950 article entitled Communisms
Child Hostages that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, Joseph Wechsberg
asserted, Today the children in the peoples 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.42 Within this framework, humanitar-
ian 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 Childrens Center in Prien, Germany, Jean Henshaw of
UNNRA observed, In many instances the insecurity of youth and their compel-
ling need for family and the security of human relationships finds expression in the
wholesome relationships of early marriage.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.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.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

41
Kte Fiedler, Der Ideologische Drill der Jugend in der Sowjetzone, in Die Jugend der Sowjetzone
in Deutschland, ed. Kampfgruppe gegen der Unmenschlichkeit (Berlin: Kampfgruppe gegen der
Unmenschlichkeit, 1955), 36.
42
Joseph Wechsberg, Communisms Child Hostages, Saturday Evening Post, April 1, 1950,
123126.
43
Report on International Childrens Center, Prien, April 28, 1947. S-0437-0012, United Nations
Archive (hereafter UN), New York.
44
Kathryn Hulme, The Wild Place (Boston: Little, Brown, 1953), 124.
45
Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies, 184236.
 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL MARSHALL PLAN 51
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.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, criti-
cizing 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 childrens workers, one invari-
ably encounters the term Anlage, an inherited trait or quality. Laziness, lying,
stealing, and sex misconduct are all readily explained as due to the childs
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 sig-
nificance than the quality of the emotional ties between child and parents.47
Relief workers thus linked psychoanalytic methods to both individualism and
democratization. In 1949, Dr. Clemens Benda, a German migr and Harvard
psychiatrist working with the USC, called for nothing less than a
Psychological Marshall Plan in Germany.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 personalityconscience and guilt, love and hate, rivalry and friendship,
self-esteem and inferiorityare found to be surprisingly constant. Those attri-
butes are hammered out in the experimental workshop of the family.49

46
Holborn, The International Refugee Organization, 501.
47
Gunnar Dybwad, Child Care in Germany, Unitarian Service Committee Pamphlet, 1951,
Printed Matter, 194959, bMs 160364, USC, ATL.
48
Frances Burns, Germans Say War Didnt Upset Their Nerves, but Blood Pressure and Ulcers
Contradict Them, Boston Daily Globe, October 1, 1949, Printed Matter, 194959, bMs 160364,
USC, ATL.
49
UNRRA, Psychological Problems, 2.
52 TARA ZAHRA

Psychoanalytic theories found expression in a wide array of efforts to rehabili-

tate displaced children and youth after the war. Following Anna Freud and
Dorothy Burlingham, Thrse 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.50 UNRRA and the IRO workers translated these principles into prac-
tice 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 com-
munal nurseries.51

While many UNRRA workers jumped on the Freudian bandwagon, not every-
one was convinced that the family represented the salvation of Europe. On the
ground, the familialist visions of UNRRA workers conflicted with the more col-
lectivist 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.52 The emerging conflict
between familialist and collectivist visions for the rehabilitation of Europes chil-
dren 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 childrens homes represented a pre-
cious oasis of security:
The children described by Anna Freud had never experienced situations
in which they could not rely on their parents and find help and shelter with
them. Child refugees from Nazi persecution presented a quite different
picture The refugee children in our homes in France had left
behind them families that in hours of danger had been unable to offer

50
Brosse, War-Handicapped Children, 12, 24.
51
Dorothy Macardle, Children of Europe: A Study of the Childen of Liberated Countries, their Wartime
Experiences, their Reactions, and their Needs (Boston: Beacon Press, 1951), 270.
52
On debates over familist and collectivist solutions for Jewish children and youth, see Daniella
Doron, In the Best Interest of the Child: Family, Youth, and Identity in Postwar France,
19441954 (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 2009).
 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL MARSHALL PLAN 53
them any protection or security. Certainly the separation of these children
from parents in such a tragic situation could not leave them with a sense
of lost security These children felt rather that they had now come to
an environment less terrifying, more capable of managing its problems
and consequently more protecting.53
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.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.55 At a deeper level, these views reflected Papaneks 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 repres-
sions, 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.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 wasnt aware that
the word institution had such an unfortunate connotation in this countryprob-
ably 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.57
In 1943 Papanek conducted extensive research with child refugees from Europe
and attempted to survey their attitudes toward their fresh experiences of displace-
ment. Unsurprisingly, many of these young refugees expressed feelings of home-
sickness and deep anxiety about their families safety. A surprising number,
however, had positive feelings about their experiences of emigration and

53
Ernst Papanek, The Child as Refugee: My Experiences with Fugitive Children in Europe, The
Nervous Child 2, no. 4 (1943): 302, Folder Ernst Papanek, Papanek Collection, IISH.
54
Ernst Papanek, The Montmorency Period of the Child-Care Program of the OSE, in Fight for
the Health of the Jewish People (50 Years of OSE) (New York: OSE, 1968), 119. For an earlier version of
the essay, see Ernst Papanek, Jewish Youth in a World of Persecution and War, unpublished essay,
1945, Folder D13, Ernst Papanek Collection, IISH.
55
Papanek, The Child as Refugee, 307.
56
Ernst Papanek, Contributions of Individual Psychology to Social Work, American Journal of
Individual Psychology 11, no. 2 (1955): 146.
57
Ernst Papanek, with Edward Linn, Out of the Fire (New York: Morrow, 1975), 221222.
54 TARA ZAHRA

collective education.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 Hitlers 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!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 Childrens
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.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.61
Many east European DP activists and representatives of Jewish agencies mean-
while insisted that refugee children were actually better off in separate camps or
childrens 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 childrens 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

58
Marion Kaplan confirms that many children and teenagers in Nazi Germany pressured their entire
families to emigrate. When that failed, some begged to be allowed to go alone. Marion Kaplan,
Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press,
1998), 116118.
59
Papanek, The Child as Refugee, 302.
60
Deborah Portnoy, The Adolescent Immigrant, The Jewish Social Service Quarterly 25 (December
1948): 269.
61
Irene Epstein, five years old, born in France, Folder 563, RG 249, YIVO, Center for Jewish
History (CJH), New York; Portnoy, The Adolescent Immigrant. Diane Wolf has found that
Jewish children united with surviving relatives in postwar Holland also often faced a more difficult
adjustment than children placed with foster parents or in homes. See Diane Wolf, Beyond Anne
Frank: Hidden Children and Postwar Families in Holland (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
2007). For more on the experiences of Jewish refugee children in the U.S., see Beth B. Cohen,
Case Closed: Holocaust Survivors in Postwar America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
2007).
 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL MARSHALL PLAN 55
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.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.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
UNRRAs 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 childrens education and placement. Like Cohen, many Jewish relief
workers insisted that displaced children were better off in childrens 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 childrens life, and that everything
should be done to keep families together.64 In response to the Yugoslav com-
plaint, 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.65
But gradually, faced with Jewish children who had no families to return to,
many UNRRA workers themselves became convinced of the need for collectiv-
ist 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.66 As Avinoam

62
Complaint of Yugsolav Leaders, November 14, 1945, S-0437-0016, UN.
63
Jewish Children, Memo from Ruth Cohen, February 22, 1947, S-0437-0015, UN.
64
Minutes of Jewish Child Care Committee Meeting, March 13, 1947, S-0437-0012, UN.
65
Complaint from Yugoslav Leaders re the Unsatisfactory Surroundings of 1,000 Yugoslav Children
in Assembly Centers, December 11, 1945, S-0437-0016, UN.
66
Edith Feuereisen, March 9, 1946, Folder 564, RG 249, YIVO, CJH.
56 TARA ZAHRA

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 rehabil-
itative 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.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 1948.68
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.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 con-
viction that womens wartime experiences in camps, ghettos, and barracks were
not simply dehumanizingthey were profoundly defeminizing.70 To some
observers, womens experiences represented gender-specific forms of trauma.
Others saw womens 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

67
Patt, Finding Home and Homeland, 6667; 16162, quotation, 162.
68
Yvonne de Jong, Quels sont les principaux problmes concernant les enfants rfugis?, 43/AJ/
599, AN.
69
Current Problems Relating to Children in the German Field of Operations, April 1946, 5, S-401-
3-10, UN.
70
For more on gendered experiences of the Holocaust and displacement during World War II and
after, see Grossmann, Germans, Jews, and Allies; Gisela Bock, ed., Genozid und Geschlecht. Jdische Frauen
im nationalsozialistischen Lagersystem (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2005); Katherine R. Jolluck, The
Nations Pain and Womens Shame: Polish Women and Wartime Violence, in Gender & War in
Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe, ed. Nancy M. Wingfield and Maria Bucur (Bloomington, IN:
University of Indiana Press, 2006), 193219.
 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL MARSHALL PLAN 57
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 bath-
rooms 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.71
Inside the Jewish ghetto of Terezn 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 womens response to trauma and the desirability of
female employment outside the home. In Terezn, women were initially sepa-
rated 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 fem-
ininity thereby been damaged? That will be for future social orders to decide.72
As early as 1944, international activists generally agreed that displaced women
would require gendered forms of rehabilitation to redress their wartime

71
Rapport sur lactivit sociale du Gau Berlin vis vis des femmes franaises enceintes, September
25, 1947, Folder PDR 5/10, Archives des Affaires trangres, Bureau des Archives de lOccupation
franaise en Allemagne et en Autriche, Colmar, France; Pieter Lagrou, Patriotic Memory and National
Recovery in Western Europe, 194561 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 14456.
72
Edith Ornstein, Die arbeitende Frau in Theresienstadt, Lecture, 1944, 46, 12, inventarn c islo
159, Terezn Collection, Jewish Museum in Prague.
58 TARA ZAHRA

experiences. Within UNRRA, a special working group formed to plan for the
distinct needs of repatriated women and girls. This group linked the refeminiza-
tion of former camp inmates and forced laborers to a broader struggle for democ-
ratization. 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 womens 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:
The womens quarters in assembly centers should provide as much individ-
ual and group privacy as facilities permit, with every incentive to stimulate
personal cleanliness and interest in personal appearance A simple work-
room with facilities for sewing, mending, and pressing, and even primitive
facilities for hairdressing would be greatly appreciated by the women and
girls and would be of distinct value to those who are depressed or worried
about the future.73
UNRRA implemented a similar regime of gendered rehabilitation in IRO
childrens 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.74 In 1948, IRO Child
Care Officer Vinita Lewis introduced home economics courses at the
Aglasterhausen Childrens Camp in Germany, where she diagnosed an alarming
lack of domestic skills among refugee girls:
They have no opportunity to learn to give any attention to anyone but
themselves. They compensate for this by developing friendships with
other girls of their age. That is very good if it can be redirected to
develop between two persons of the opposite sex, because later it forms a
good basis for a compatible marriage relationship Few of the girls have
had opportunity for education in homemaking The girls do not know
how to scrub floors and wash pounds and pounds of clothing When
the girls go out from Aglasterhausen they will be thrown together with
people in communities who expect them to have accomplishments
similar to those of other girls and young women. They will not be

73
Progress Report of the Working Party on Special Needs of Women and Girls, 811, 9/F/3292,
AN.
74
Unitarian Service Committee, Report on Visits to Child Welfare Centers of UNRRA in
Germany, June 1946, 5, File F-13, Papanek Collection, IISH.
 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL MARSHALL PLAN 59
excused for having lived in DP camps and in Child Care Centers during the
war years.75
These rehabilitation programs reflected the sharply gendered dimensions of
humanitarian and human-rights activism after World War II, as well as the gen-
dered limits of postwar individualism. At the same time that child-welfare activ-
ists 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 girlsand political
stability to war-torn Europerequired 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 wars end, Morals and
mores, the relation between the sexes, the rights and duties of the individual in
normal societyall 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 thou-
sands of years have resumed their bestial form in these youngsters.76 Throughout
postwar Europe, pedagogical activists worried that children had been deeply cor-
rupted 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.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.
There was no limit to their gluttony, and since for a time they were quite
unable to shed the reactions to the habits of the camp, they pocketed
remains of food, in such quantities they could not possibly eat Their
impatience takes every conceivable form; they are above all demanding;
they feel that they have suffered and worked enough. Hitlerism has
almost succeeded in uprooting from their souls the natural optimism of
the young and that innate confidence that is the natural attribute of
childhood.78

75
Vinita Lewis, Field Visit to Aglasterhausen Children, September 8, 1948, 56, 43/AJ/599, AN.
76
Ernst Papanek, They are not Expendable: The Homeless and Refugee Children in Germany,
The Social Science Review 20, no. 3 (September 1946): 312.
77
For French debates on wartime juvenile delinquency, see Sarah Fishman, The Battle for Children:
World War II, Youth Crime, and Juvenile Justice in Twentieth-Century France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2002).
78
Robert Job, Our Pupils in France, OSE Mail, no. 4 (August 1949): 5355, 43/AJ/1268, AN.
60 TARA ZAHRA

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 Childrens Center at Prien in
1947.79
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 prin-
ciples 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. Annas 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.
As a child Anna was indulged by her parents, who, according to her own
account, granted her every whim She always had a special interest in
food and after her liberation ate so heavily that her weight rose to 160
pounds. We were inclined to accept this as the normal reaction to a concen-
tration camp until we observed her gleeful expression as she described the
wonderful fruits and vegetables that she ate right off the farm as a child.
As we review her life story we see that Annas ability to gain her ends by
making people feel sorry for her antedates by many years her experience
as a refugee. We recognize that in essence she is an emotionally immature
and intellectually inadequate girl who continues to look for someone
who will treat her like a young child as her parents did. The resemblance
is much closer to the maladjusted youngster whom agencies see in their
daily practice than it is to our mental picture of the strong, self-reliant survi-
vor of Nazi barbarism, but it is true nonetheless.80
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 under-
gone the same mental trauma and loss of security and looked to childrens
early experiences of maternal attachment to explain these differences. It has
been said that a child who has experienced an unsatisfactory sucking at the

79
Report on International Childrens Center, Prien, April 28, 1947, S-0437-0012, UN.
80
Marcel Kovarsky, Case Work with Refugee Children, The Jewish Social Service Quarterly 24,
no. 4 (June 1948): 402407.
 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL MARSHALL PLAN 61
breast, perhaps associated with an unhappy weaning, may show in later life symp-
toms usually associated with loss of security and rejection, while a child satisfac-
torily 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 influ-
ence upon their reactions later, when their parents were killed, their homes
destroyed, and they themselves exposed to horror in its most extreme form.81
Activism around displaced and refugee children ultimately became a forum for
more fundamental debates about the nature of trauma, the psychological conse-
quences 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 citi-
zenship. The conception of human rights, based upon the assumed existence of
human beings as such, broke down at the very moment when those who pro-
fessed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had
indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationshipsexcept that they were
still human, she maintained.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 psy-
choanalytic methods in the name of a radical break with the fascist past.
But Arendts 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, more-
over, 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 childrens
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

81
Robert Collis, The Lost and Found: The Story of Eva and Laszlo, Two Children of War-Torn Europe
(New York: Womens Press, 1953), 5.
82
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian Books, 1951), 299.
62 TARA ZAHRA

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 con-
viction that emotional deprivation within the family was more harmful to chil-
drens 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.83
The postwar years also marked the beginning of a radical retreat from interven-
tionist social policies in the name of parental rights and childrens psychological
welfare. When humanitarian workers began to define their mission in psycho-
logical terms and to insist that childrens 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.

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

83
On high modernism, see James C. Scott, Seeing Like the State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the
Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); Amir Weiner, ed.,
Landscaping the Human Garden: Twentieth-Century Population Management in Comparative Perspective
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); Eric D. Weitz, From the Vienna to the Paris
System: International Politics and the Entangled Histories of Human Rights, Forced Deportations,
and Civilizing Missions, American Historical Review 113 (December 2008): 13131343.
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