British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia
[2][3] The BCRC aided political refugees, especially Social Democrats and communists, as well as Jews and their families, who fled Nazi Germany or the regions it annexed during 1938 (Austria, in March, and the Sudetenland, in October).
[4] The BCRC was initially funded by public donations and appeals following the Munich Agreement in September 1938 and ensuing German occupation of the Sudetenland.
In January 1939 the British government gave four million pounds sterling to Czechoslovakia for assistance to refugees and their resettlement in other countries.
Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party's accession to power in Germany in 1933 led to the flight of 4,000 refugees, mostly communists or Jews, to Czechoslovakia.
[11] Two of the most important financial and political supporters of the BCRC were the News Observer newspaper fund and the British Labour Party.
"This network connected Boston-based Unitarians, London-based socialists, and Prague-based Jewish social workers in a complex web of interfaith refugee assistance.
The most threatened refugees were believed by the BCRC to be leftist German men, especially those from the Sudetenland who were in danger of being imprisoned or deported.
[18] Many of the refugees exited Czechoslovakia and journeyed to Britain on forged or false documents supplied them by Warriner and her associates.
[19] The working environment for the BCRC worsened after the Germans invaded most of what remained of Czechoslovakia on 15 March 1939 and established a puppet state.
[20][21] Beatrice Wellington, a Canadian Quaker, arrived in Czechoslovakia in fall 1938 and quickly became known for her ability to acquire false documents for endangered refugees.
Almost daily, she turned up at the office of Gestapo official Karl Bömelburg requesting -- and in many cases receiving -- exit permits for the women and children on her list of vulnerable refugees.
She was described as the only person who could help the "dangerous" refugee cases: "Czech democrats, political leaders, Jews, Catholics and Socialists."
[26][27][28] The most storied activity of the BCRC was the kindertransport: the evacuation of 669 refugee children out of Czechoslovakia and their resettlement with British families in the United Kingdom.
The parents agreed to be separated from their children because they could not obtain exit permits from Czechoslovakia or permission to be resettled in Britain or other countries.
It was Trevor Chadwick, a British schoolteacher, and Czech politician Anonine Sum, who asserted that Jewishness was the characteristic that most endangered children, whatever their place of origin.
Chadwick left Czechoslovakia quickly in early June 1939, probably to avoid arrest by the Gestapo for forging identification papers for the children.
[40][41] The American Consul-General in Prague, Irving N. Linnell, kept (against regulations) Waitstill Sharp's operating funds in his office safe to protect them from German confiscation.
A later accounting attributed humanitarian organizations with facilitating the emigration of 12,000 refugees from Czechoslovakia to the United Kingdom in 1938 until the end of 1939.
Many of the Czechs who had taken refuge in several different European countries were not admitted to Britain until after the beginning of World War II on 1 September 1939 and the demise of the BCRC.
