Georgine Gerhard (18 August 1886 - 21 December 1971) was a Swiss school teacher and administrator who was forced by hearing loss to take early retirement.
She grew up in a spacious house with a large garden in the Gellert Quarter, a prosperous part of the city on the left bank (south side) of the river.
[2] Between 1918 and 1928 she served as a member of the executive committee of the national "Schweizerischer Verband für Frauenstimmrecht" ("Swiss League for Women's Voting Rights" / SVF).
[8] It was as a representative of the SVF that she became a regular delegate to conferences of what was then the "International Woman Suffrage Alliance" (IWSA), which over the years involved trips to Paris, Berlin and Prague.
[1] Between the wars she was, in addition, a member of the Commission on Family Allowances set up by the "Bund Schweizerischer Frauenvereine" ("League of Swiss Women's Associations" / "Alliance de sociétés féminines suisses" / BSF/ASF).
She was also a member of the Families Protection Commission set up by the "Schweizerische Gemeinnützige Gesellschaft" ("Swiss Mutual Support Society" / "Société suisse d'utilité publique" / SGG/SSUP).
[1][2] During the 1930s, with democracy in retreat to the south and to the north, Georgine Gerhard became president of the Basel branch of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (" Internationale Frauenliga für Frieden und Freiheit" / IFFF).
[1] In 1933 Georgine Gerhard was a co-founder member of the Swiss section of the "Comité d'aide aux enfants des émigrés allemands, Schweizersektion", an organisation created to protect the interests of the children of political and/or race-based exiles from, in the first instance, Hitler's Germany.
She served as president of the BHEK / SHEK, working closely with Nettie Sutro-Katzenstein, an exiled Jewish scholar originally from Munich, who sat alongside her as a fellow member of the executive committee.
By the time war broke out in 1939 an increasingly structured pattern had been established whereby the children were looked after in Switzerland for between 6 and 12 weeks before moving on to another safe country.
[12] A particular case in point came in the aftermath of the "November pogrom" in 1938, when Gerhard and Sutro-Katzenstein succeeded in obtaining a special permit in respect of 300 Jewish children from Frankfurt, Konstanz and one or two other towns in southern Germany near the Swiss border at Basel, the so-called "300-Kinder-Aktion".
Georgine Gerhard's initial reaction was to run to the press and have the responsible officials and politicians shamed, but in the end the cooler counsels of her SHEK colleagues prevailed, and the necessary negotiations with the various authorities involved were concluded "behind the scenes".
Early in 1940 the SHEK joined up with the "Schweizerischen Arbeitsgemeinschaft für kriegsgeschädigte Kinder" (SAK) which had grown up out of the need to look after children orphaned by the Spanish Civil War.
In 1942 the resulting combination was rebranded as the "Kinderhilfe des Schweizerischen Roten Kreuzes" ("Swiss Red Cross Child Support") organisation.
[2] In 1961 Georgine Gerhard accepted an Honorary Doctorate in Medicine ("Dr. honoris causa"), conferred in recognition of her commitment and work on behalf of refugees.