[1] The World Youth Congress Movement was founded in 1936 as a result of the First World Youth Congress, organized by the International Federation of League of Nations Societies in Geneva from August 31 to September 6, 1936, and involving 700 delegates with representatives of Christian, students’, women's, youth and political organizations from 36 countries, including Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, France, Irish Free State, Netherlands, the Soviet Union, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, and Yugoslavia and delegates from provisional committees in Australia, China, New Zealand, Palestine, Romania, and Switzerland.
While the WYCM maintained a relationship with the International Federation of League of Nations Societies, it was autonomous and not under the IFLNS's auspices.
[4] The WYCM faced divisions after its 1938 congress as the European situation deteriorated in the lead-up to World War II.
On 31 August 1939, one day before the German Invasion of Poland and the start of the Second World War, the WYCM's International Council issued an emergency resolution reaffirming its support for the Vassar Peace Pact, denouncing “the policy of delivering entire peoples over to the aggressor nations,” and calling upon youth to unite against military aggression.
[5][6] Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Shields-Collins and other Communists reversed their position about the war to see it as an anti-fascist struggle.
[7] The 1936 World Youth Congress passed resolutions supporting internationalism and calling for strengthening the League of Nations as a tool for world security and for preventing war, against protectionism, for improved treatment of colonies and against war and called on delegates to promote peace and internationalism in their own countries.