This was followed by subsequent small groups, totaling about 100 children annually, that occurred in the early years of operation, and they were taken to foster homes arranged through appeals to congregations and other organizations' members.
Many of these efforts were combined to form the U.S. Committee for the Care of European Children (USCOM) which was registered with the US government and later became part of the National War Fund.
Under the leadership of Andree Salomon, OSE did manage to gather together about 350 such children in three large groups, who travelled to America with the aid of the organizations mentioned.
Before 1938, only small groups were brought into the country by such organizations, because of concern for anti-semitism and social hostility to allowing foreigners to enter the U.S. during the Depression.
The demand on these organizations increased markedly after Kristallnacht on November 9/10, 1938 convinced more European parents that the destruction of Jews was an element of the Nazi agenda.
In the OTC programs under the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (now nearly always contracted to HIAS), German Jewish Children's Aid Society, (GJCA), the Quakers, etc., foster families in the U.S. agreed to care for the children until age twenty-one, see that they were educated, and provided a guarantee that they would not become public charges.
[5][12] Remarkably, a similar small group of about 6-8 unaccompanied Jewish children fled to the United States from Venezuela.
Their parents, in the small Jewish community of Maracaibo in Venezuela, were well aware of Hitler's possible global threat, which included German submarines off the Venezuelan coast.
Before World War II, most were simply assembled by rescue agencies directly from their home towns in Germany and Austria, and then easily escorted to America.
An adult generally would have developed a sense of self and ego, which would provide him or her with a way of attempting to deal with the practical and emotional trauma.
The first very significant trauma occurred at the moment of parting from their parent(s), whether when boarding ship or at an earlier time and event.
In some fortunate instances, the OTC child would grow to totally blend into the foster family, and learn to love them as if they were his own parents and siblings.
The older OTC children fully knew the dangers their left-behind parents faced from the Nazi threat.
And then, at the end of the war, nearly always the OTC child would find out, sooner or later, that his or her parents had been murdered by the Nazis; and there would also have been the prior stress of waiting and hoping, before that final factual discovery.
Some would act out, sometimes so much so that their "foster-parents" decided they had to return the OTC child to the original Organization, such as HIAS, to be placed elsewhere – but then the cycle might repeat.
Their parents had nearly certainly been murdered by the Nazis, when he was still a young child, which he either learned soon after the war ended - or no information was available, and then he could hope that they were still alive, and fear that they were dead.
[23] This was intended to be in recognition of the especial trauma these Kindertransport had suffered as children during their flight from Hitler, but that they had had to flee unaccompanied, and forced to leave their parents behind.
The fact that some unaccompanied children fled from Europe directly to the U.S.A. was first researched by Judith Baumel-Schwartz[6][24] in a doctoral thesis and related book.
However, only in 2000 did Iris Posner[6] have the realization and then implement it, that these children should be considered a significant distinct group of Holocaust Survivors, which should be discussed in the truly public domain.
Within six days the British Government presented an official bill in Parliament which was rapidly passed, which waived all immigration and visa requirements for unaccompanied children, though it left actual arrangements to private relief organizations and individual sponsors.
In 1939, the proposed Wagner–Rogers Bill to admit 20,000 Jewish refugees under the age of 14 to the United States from Nazi Germany, co‑sponsored by Sen. Robert F. Wagner (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Edith Rogers (R-Mass.
The full story of the failure of the Wagner-Rogers bill shows the power of the isolationist forces at that time, which included "an undercurrent of resentment toward Jews".
Furthermore, the State Department had a deliberately obstructionist "Paper Walls" policy in operation to delay or prevent the issuing of any officially permitted visas for all refugees who desired entry to America.
Beginning in July 1943, a new State Department visa application form over four feet long was used, with details required of the refugee and of the two sponsors; and six copies had to be submitted.
Furthermore, from fall 1943, applications from refugees "not in acute danger" could be refused (e.g. people who had reached Spain, Portugal or North Africa).
The American public also resisted the OTC program, because of social hostility to allowing foreigners to enter the U.S. during the Depression, and generally from isolationist and antisemitic forces.
[32] Iris Posner and Leonore Moskowitz created the non-profit research and education organization One Thousand Children, Inc (OTC, Inc.), whose primary purposes are to maintain a connection between the OTC children, to explore this little-known segment of American history, and to create archival materials and depositories.
That effort brought approximately 10,000 similarly defined mainly Jewish children to the United Kingdom, between November 21, 1938, and September 3, 1939.
(Some of the "kinder" from Britain subsequently migrated to America, e.g. the Nobel Prize-winning scientists Arno Penzias and Walter Kohn.)
In contrast, the United States Government did nothing to aid any of the OTC children, and did not waive any quota or immigration requirements.