Adelaide Livingstone

Adelaide Livingstone (born January 19, 1881 in Fall River as Adelaide Stickney , † 1970 ) was a British political activist. She became known as a leading figure in the British Post World War I War Graves Commission and as a leading British pacifist in the 1930s.

Life and activity

Adelaide Strickney was from Boston. As a Quaker she came to Europe during the First World War as part of the Quaker Aid to provide support to the residents of war-occupied areas and prisoners of war on all sides.

She married the British officer William Henry Darley Livingstone in London on May 14, 1915 , which automatically made her a British citizen. Soon after, she was recruited by the British Department of War to work in prisoner-of-war services: She eventually became honorary secretary of the Committee headed by Robert Younger for the supervision of the treatment of British prisoners of war by the enemy ( Secretary of the Government Committee on the Treatment by the Enemy of British Prisoners of War ). She was the first woman to take on such a position on a government commission in Great Britain.

In 1917 she took part in negotiations by German and British representatives in The Hague , in which arrangements were made on the reciprocal treatment of prisoners of war and the exchange of (mostly war-disabled) prisoners.

After World War I, Livingstone became head of the British Grave Commission, tasked with clarifying the fate of missing British military personnel and members of the armies of the Commonwealth of War, as well as the identity of "unknown soldiers" who had died . For this purpose, she made numerous trips to Belgium, France and the German Reich to visit military cemeteries, to supervise research work there, or to exchange information with the government agencies of these countries.

In the years 1934 and 1935 Livingstone was entrusted with the management of the organization - since April 11, 1934 with the rank of secretary of the National Referendum Committee - the so-called Peace Ballot, a private initiative supported by pacifist organizations The aim was to determine the attitudes of the British people towards the League of Nations and the question of disarmament or the ideas of collective security embodied by the League of Nations by distributing large-scale questionnaires to the population asking them to provide information on their attitude towards them To score points in order to demonstrate to the political leadership the willingness of the population for peace in a data-based manner and to prove it, in order to induce them to pursue a policy aimed at maintaining peace. In the survey carried out in the first half of 1935, a total of 11.6 million Britons (38% of the country's adult population) submitted questionnaires, with large majorities in each case declaring that they would remain in the League of Nations, for an all-round reduction in the armaments of all great powers on the basis of international ones Treaties, for international treaties that banned the manufacture and sale of weapons for private use, as well as the international outlawing of aggressor states. Livingstone, who also wrote the official report on the campaign, has been considered a leading pacifist in the country since then at the latest.

Livingstone was classified as an enemy of the state by the police officers of National Socialist Germany: In the spring of 1940 she was placed on the special wanted list by the Reich Security Main Office , a directory of people who, in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British island by the Wehrmacht, would be followed by special commandos of the occupying forces SS should be located and arrested with special priority.

Fonts

• The Peace Ballot. The Official History , 1935. Al

literature

• Who Was Who, 1961-1970 , Vol VI, London 1972.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Entry on Livingstone on the special wanted list GB (reproduced on the website of the Imperial War Museum). .