Save Europe Now

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“Save Europe Now” was a three-year campaign founded in 1945 by the Jewish-British publisher and peace activist Victor Gollancz . Their aim was to make the British public aware of the hunger crisis on the European continent and especially in the British zone of occupation in Germany and to get the British government to take remedial action.

founding

Immediately after the Second World War, under the impression of the reports in the British press about the worsening conditions in the British zone of occupation after the expulsions of German residents in Eastern Europe , Gollancz began passionately and tirelessly in books, magazine articles, letters to the editor and conversations with those in charge of politics to work for the suffering German population.

At the end of 1945 Gollancz and other activists launched the “Save Europe Now” campaign, which successfully called on the British to voluntarily and against the will of the government give part of their strictly rationed food to hungry people on mainland Europe. The reports of the organization later showed that until 1948 dispatched 35,000 parcels were mainly in the British occupation zone where they from the Protestant relief organization , the Caritas , the workers' welfare and the German and Swedish National Red Cross were distributed.

Journey to Germany

In October and November 1946 Gollancz traveled to Germany for six weeks. Two months later his travelogue “The darkest Germany” appeared, in which he a. a. Sharply criticized the British dismantling of German factories as lunacy . The book attracted a lot of attention in Great Britain due to the shocking 144 photos, mostly close-ups of malnourished children and hospital patients with hunger edema , where it had several editions and was also published in the USA.

criticism

Gollancz 'positions on Germany and the “Save Europe Now” campaign were not without controversy. Editorials and letters to the editor in local and national newspapers made it clear that many Britons had no understanding for food parcels to Germany and sympathy for the Germans, because they would have deserved it otherwise: “If we have aid to spare, let it go to those countries whose people were sent to Germany's extermination camps. Not to the relatives of the men - and women - who staffed them. "('Kindness to Germany', Sunday Dispatch, 23 September 1945) Others were of the opinion that the actually ineffective campaign (" a drop in the ocean ") only served to soothe the guilty conscience of a small minority.

Merit

Gollancz's achievement is less for getting British families to send groceries to Germany than for seeing hunger and the displacement of Germans as a moral and humanitarian problem in Britain. He had emphasized time and again that this problem could not be wiped away simply by arguing that the people for whom Auschwitz was responsible deserved nothing better. In contrast, Gollancz and his colleagues focused on the Judeo-Christian values ​​of grace and mercy, which also had to apply to the vanquished.

swell

  • Warwick University : Save Europe Now, 1945; (Papers of Sir Victor Gollancz (1893-1967)); Reference number MSS.157 / 3 / SEN / 3 / 1-46 [1] , open access
  • Victor Gollancz: In Darkest Germany . With an Introduction by Robert M. Hutchins . Hinsdale, Ill .: Regnery 1947. [2] , free download
  • Victor Gollancz: A “mirror page” - for Victor Gollancz . Der Spiegel , No. 43. October 25, 1947 [3]
  • Save Europe Now Letter to the Editor from Henry Carter to the Spectator , October 17, 1947

literature

  • Matthew Frank: The New Morality — Victor Gollancz, Save Europe Now and the German Refugee Crisis, 1945-46 . In: Twentieth Century British History, Vol. 17, Issue 2, January 1, 2006, pp. 230–256, [4]
  • Paul Betts: The Polemics of Pity. British Photographs of Berlin, 1945–1947 , in: Johannes Paulmann (Ed.): Humanitarianism and Media: 1900 to the Present . New York: Berghahn 2018. ISBN 978-1-78533962-2

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Matthew Frank: The New Morality — Victor Gollancz, Save Europe Now and the German Refugee Crisis, 1945-46 . In: Twentieth Century British History, Vol. 17, Issue 2, January 1, 2006, p. 241