Evacuee Children During World War II

Some say that World War Two was the first "total war," in that long-range bombing of Allied and Axis cities brought the distant battlefied home to the citizenry. Parents sought a safe haven for their children, while staying at home themselves to work in war industries or civil defense. Both British and German Mormons evacuated their children to the countryside, a particularly painful separation for people whose religion stressed family continuity. Although much as been written about the evacuation of English children from London, less has appeared about young Germans sent off to live with grandparents or in government-sponsored schools in the hinterlands. One German Mormon, a young child when the bombers hit his hometown of Hanover, found himself in small-town in Austria, where he attended a Nazi-run school for evacuated children.