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The American Friends Service Committee
The American Friends Service Committee, an organization formed by the Religious Society of Friends (also known as the Quakers), was the largest non-Jewish American organization assisting refugees escaping Nazi persecution. The AFSC worked in French internment camps, hid Jewish children, and assisted thousands of Jewish and non-Jewish refugees with immigration and resettlement to the United States.
There were only an estimated 112,000 Quakers in the United States in 1930, or less than one-tenth of one percent of the overall population -- but Quakers had always been active in social movements and when confronted with Nazi persecution of Jews, took action.
The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) had been created in 1917 to address the tremendous humanitarian need during World War I. At its peak between 1920 and 1924, the AFSC provided meals for around a million European children a day. Funding for some of this work came from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which continued to support the AFSC's work throughout the 1930s and 1940s.
After the violent anti-Jewish Kristallnacht pogroms of November 9–10, 1938, the AFSC expanded its work and established a Refugee Division to assist individuals and families in need. While Quaker relief efforts continued, the AFSC also began helping people flee Nazi Europe, communicate with loved ones, and adjust to life in the United States.
The AFSC formed the center of a network of refugee aid agencies in Europe and fielded hundreds of requests every month from individuals seeking to escape Nazism. In practice, the AFSC primarily worked with "non-Aryan Christians" (those considered "racially Jewish" by the Nuremberg Laws but who did not consider themselves Jewish by religion) and those in mixed marriages between Jews and non-Jews.
One of those refugees was Tom Doeppner, an 18-year-old who escaped from Germany into the Netherlands and asked the Quakers to help him immigrate to the United States. The AFSC worked to get Doeppner admitted to McPherson College, a small Christian college in Kansas. McPherson was one of more than 200 colleges that actively recruited refugees, with students raising funds to pay for scholarships. Doeppner struggled to obtain a US visa as a student, since he technically did not have a country to return to after graduation. The Quakers helped him secure a visa and paid for his passage to the United States. After college, Doeppner enlisted in the US Army in 1944.
By the time the Refugee Division ceased operations in the early 1950s, AFSC staff had opened more than 22,000 case files for individuals and families, responding with immigration and settlement assistance, financial help, or just a sympathetic ear. They had aided people seeking affidavits to come to the United States -- a critical step in the process -- by locating American citizens willing to sponsor them. Within the United States, they helped newly arrived refugees learn English and prepare for their new lives. The AFSC also played a key role in helping hundreds of children, including Jewish refugees and the children of Spanish Republicans, come to the United States under the care of the US Committee for the Care of European Children in 1941–42.
For their relief efforts, their work with refugees, and for their overall promotion of peace, the American Friends Service Committee and their British counterparts, the Friends Service Council, were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1947. |